Building the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union
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REVOLT IN THE FIELDS: BUILDING THE SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS’ UNION IN THE OLD SOUTHWEST By MATTHEW F. SIMMONS A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2019 © 2019 Matthew F. Simmons To my spouse, Vivian ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to thank his dissertation chair, Dr. Paul Ortiz, for his unflagging support and always timely advice throughout the course of this project. I also extend a special thank you to the other members of my dissertation committee: Dr. William Link, Dr. Matthew Jacobs, and Dr. Sharon Austin. Dr. Michael Honey deserves special recognition for his willingness to serve as an off-campus, external member of the dissertation committee. I am grateful to my parents for teaching me the value of education early in life and providing constant support and encouragement. Finally, I offer an especially large thank to my wonderful wife Vivian, whose willingness to assist me in any way possible insured the timely completion of this project. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1 DEVIL’S BREW: RACE, LABOR, AND THE DREAM OF LANDED INDEPENDENCE ..................................................................................................... 8 2 HARDEST PLACE IN THE STATES: POWER AND POSITION IN THE ARKANSAS DELTA ................................................................................................ 19 3 ALWAYS SOMEBODY WILLING TO TAKE THE CHANCE: RADICAL TRADITIONS IN THE OLD SOUTHWEST ............................................................. 71 4 I WOUDN’T STAND FOR IT: THE ROLE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS UNION ............................................... 126 5 GROWING A MOVEMENT: FUNDRAISING, PUBLICITY, AND STRATEGY ...... 181 6 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD: THE CHANGING NATURE OF COMMERICAL AGRICULTURE IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH ............................. 221 7 ESSAY ON SOURCES ......................................................................................... 238 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 256 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 267 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy REVOLT IN THE FIELDS: BUILDING THE SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS’ UNION IN THE OLD SOUTHWEST By Matthew F. Simmons May 2019 Chair: Paul Ortiz Major: History In 1933 the Roosevelt Administration passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) to buttress a failing agricultural industry during the Great Depression. In the rural South the AAA had the effect of stabilizing commodity prices, in particular cotton, but it also had the deleterious effect of empowering large landowners and further impoverishing landless black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Realizing that the only way to achieve economic justice was to organize, black and white landless farmers in the Arkansas Delta formed the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) in 1934. Within a few short years the STFU grew beyond Arkansas to the surrounding Old Southwest eventually numbering upwards of 30,000 members as more and more rural workers joined seeking to reclaim a measure of control over their lives. My dissertation explores how this social movement developed, examining the factors that allowed it grow as quickly as it did, and highlighting the ways in which poor farmers leveraged limited resources in pursuit of their goals of economic justice and participatory democracy. I argue that this rural insurgency was built on generations of separate black and white radical organizing which coalesced within the STFU, weaving together once separate strands of insurgent tradition. In contrast to most earlier studies of the STFU, 6 this dissertation also centers black women’s leadership in the union. Without the work of black women at the grassroots level occupying key positions in the union the tremendous growth and success of the union would not have been possible. The rise and fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union raise important questions about the role of capital and the state in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across the globe in creating anti-democratic agricultural policies that fail to take into account the diverse perspectives, values, and insights of workers. 7 CHAPTER 1 DEVIL’S BREW: RACE, LABOR, AND THE DREAM OF LANDED INDEPENDENCE This dissertation explores the rise of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union during the mid-1930s in the Arkansas Delta. The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union developed in response to New Deal agricultural policy designed to ameliorate a crisis of overproduction, but which resulted in the impoverishment of poor farmers. It was in the Delta that working-class whites and African Americans grew cotton by renting small acreages from large landowners. As different classes of renters, these tenant farmers and sharecroppers received the lowest return on their labor in the nation. Overproduction, resulting from a surfeit of land being farmed, coupled with advances in technology drove those wages even lower.1 Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was one element of the larger New Deal which aimed to decrease unemployment and stabilize the economy, calling for acreage reductions in exchange for government farm subsidies.This policy even received support from northern liberals without the background in agriculture or the foreknowledge to understand how this program would play out in the cotton fields. Theoretically tenant farmers and sharecroppers were to share in the agricultural subsidies and landowners were to maintain the same number of workers on their plantations. Instead, large landowners found ways of coercing their employees into handing over their rightful share of the subsidies and evicted those whom they felt were no longer needed. These subsidies also allowed plantation owners 1 David Eugene Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (Urbana: The University of Illinois, 1965), 1-18; Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 3-16. 8 to further mechanize cotton agriculture, which accelerated this process of displacement. In short, New Deal agricultural policy in the South benefitted a rural southern oligarchy at the expense of the poorest members of southern society—black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers. These men and women formed the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in response to the injustices precipitated by the Agricultural Adjustment Act.2 Existing studies of the STFU often explain it as a response of hard-pressed landless farmers to New Deal agricultural policies that devastated sharecroppers and tenant farmers.3 While there is much truth in these existing analyses of the relationship of the union to the New Deal, they oftentimes fail to see the union as one link in a much longer chain of southern rural radicalism which preceded the Great Depression by decades. Equally important, I argue that while the STFU lost in the short term it did lay the groundwork for later generations of radicals and their involvement in new organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to thrive and continue the fight for social justice. Many of the earliest studies of the union were part of a general move towards a “history from below” in the 1960s and 1970s, yet still focused on the upper echelons of the union leadership: white men such as H.L. Mitchell and J.R. Butler. In contrast, my research is oriented towards local leaders, particularly black women, who provided the backbone of the union and the ways in which they carved out social space to take on these leadership roles despite the limitations placed on them by society based on their gender and race. In addition, this dissertation strives to achieve a 2 Conrad, 19-36; Grubbs, 17-39. 3 In particular this was the approach taken in the earliest studies of the union in the 1960s and 1970s by historians such as Conrad and Grubbs. 9 more accurate understanding of the spatial and regional aspects of unionism. Many studies of the union, while emphasizing its location in the geographic South, fail to distinguish the Old South from the newly developed rural Southwest of the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. This distinction is incredibly important in understanding how local power dynamics impacted the union’s growth. Finally, while some studies of the union have crafted a narrative which encompasses both the real physical strife taking place in the Arkansas Delta and surrounding area as well as the political strife taking place in Washington D.C., very little systematic attention has been given to the outside supporters of the union in the North, an ad hoc coalition of progressive Christians, socialists and liberals, and college students. In many ways this coalition anticipated the kinds of alliances civil rights activists would cultivate thirty years later. My methodological approach is intimately tied to