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The Farmers Alliance, Knights, and Ulp Participated in Forming the People's Party. Formed in 1891, the Arkansas Branch Had

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The Farmers Alliance, Knights, and Ulp Participated in Forming the People's Party. Formed in 1891, the Arkansas Branch Had 276 / LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL 83 The Farmers Alliance, Knights, and reality was more complicated than doc- ulp participated in forming the People’s trinal arguments. He also deals with vot- Party. Formed in 1891, the Arkansas er suppression and violence against newly branch had a weak following if only be- elected officials and Blacks. He explains cause disenfranchisement was already that the term Great Upheaval entailed law. Established third-party leaders were the railway uprising of 1877 as well as active through the decade, though. To strikes of the mid-1880s and 1894. Hild the list of Populist grievances, they added substantiates his arguments with census opposition to convict leasing and the re- records, papers of contemporary labour cently-passed Election Law. The national leaders, and meeting minutes. The text is crisis triggered in May 1893 came as no supplemented with primary documents surprise in Arkansas. Since the beginning and a map. of the decade, crop prices were falling While Hild’s institutional emphasis and tension between farm workers and perhaps cannot be helped given a pos- land-owners was rising (a strike by cot- sible dearth of resources in which to ton pickers in Lee County, assisted by the reconstruct the daily lives of common Colored Farmers Alliance, was swiftly labourers, a few words of criticism are and violently crushed). Coal miners and in order. Hild does not directly address railway workers dominated most strikes how the Civil War affected perceptions in the 1890s. Governor William Fishback Arkansas workers had of each other. Was sent militia units to Little Rock and Fort the turbulent relationship between craft Smith, a furniture manufacturing centre. unionists and industrial workers in other Meanwhile, President Grover Cleveland regions of the country a defining issue in sent federal marshals to the state. Arkansas’ working-class revolt? On bal- Despite “frustrations and failures,” ance, Hild’s monograph lends to a deeper there would be important impacts on understanding of the radical tradition subsequent state reforms and subal- among working people in Arkansas. It tern movements. (127) United Mine must also be remembered that this “tra- Workers’ locals became active in the dition” arose in the not-too-distant past. 1890s. The Arkansas Socialist Party and Anthony Newkirk a few Industrial Workers of the World Philander Smith College locals were suppressed during World War I. The destruction of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union in the Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: 1919 Elaine Massacre notwithstand- The New Deal and the Limits of American ing, Black Arkansans carried on prac- Politics (Princeton: Princeton University tices of resistance from the 19th century. Press 2016) The Socialist-oriented Southern Tenant Farmers Union was formed in 1934. Jefferson Cowie has always published Hild has consulted salient historiogra- books with persistent influence. His ear- phy for Arkansas’s Gilded Age. It comple- lier efforts, Capital Moves (New York: ments a new essay collection on themes New Press, 2001) and Stayin’ Alive (New in southern labour history (Matthew Hild York: New Press, 2011), offered incisive and Keri Leigh Merritt, eds. Reconsidering commentary on the systemic inequities Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and of 20th-century capitalism and chal- Power [Gainesville: University Press of lenges to working-class solidarity. At first Florida, 2018]). Addressing conflicts glance, The Great Exception: The New about electoral politics, Hild notes that Deal and the Limits of American Politics LABOUR / LE TRAVAIL, ISSUE 83 (2019), ISSN 0700-3862 REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS / 277 appears ambitious for such a succinct which may not have transformed the discussion of the significant reforms nation as much as suspend disbelief in and regulations enacted in the Great statist solutions. The Great Exception Depression under Franklin Roosevelt. carefully reconstructs the confluence of The passage of the National Labor political and social forces, from southern Relations Act (Wagner Act) in 1935 has Dixiecrats to moderate Republicans, that become a pivot for intense scholarly de- advanced the New Deal. The persistent bates on the role of the state in supporting irritants of immigration and religious working-class aspirations with opinions moralism were abated temporarily. diverging from championing the nlra From this understanding, realizing as the touchstone of legislative reform this precisely balanced fulcrum would to denunciations that it was merely a later totter appears inevitable. The lon- scheme to entice working-class demobi- gitudinal perspective does suggest the lization. Interpretations aside, the New New Deal is framed by two gilded-age Deal era represents the solitary effec- barriers. History makes clear reforms are tive period of progressive reform centred not ratchet-like unidirectional but sub- on the economic security of American ject to destructive counterattack. Here, working people. The obvious racial and the narrative might have benefitted from gendered limitations of the 1930s–1970s the injection of more on the gathering interregnum notwithstanding, these in- formation of anti-progressive forces that terventions had tangible benefits for both would introduce not only the tremen- unionized and unorganized citizens. dously destructive Taft-Hartley Act by Nostalgia for a revitalized version of the 1947, sidetrack Harry Truman’s Fair Deal New Deal has long preoccupied many postwar initiative, but also start to refor- progressives and has only intensified mulate a broad coalition of their own to with the further transgressions of neolib- roll back economic and political reforms. eralism, a rising nativist hostility towards Without question, the New Deal’s liberal immigrants, and the prospect of a US consensus had intrinsic instability, but Supreme Court more rigidly reactionary it took decades of conservative fracking than that which obstructed the 1930s-era to split apart the constituent elements. Democrats. In a tersely-written analysis In our times, a list of regressive alpha- Cowie argues persuasively that there will bet agencies, including: alec (American be no contemporary New Deal variant as Legislative Exchange Council), afp the cold-fusion of political and economic (Americans for Prosperity), the Olin forces that came together for fdr will not Foundation, Mackinac Center, Cato be repeated. So, what may we learn of this Institute, all channel dark money from “exceptional,” and “aberrant,” period be- donors resolutely determined to elimi- tween 1935 and 1973 that might instruct nate all traces of the New Deal. Further, a more realistic strategy for our times? the book could add more of Franklin It is useful, once again, to be provided Roosevelt, the man, as it was the presi- with detailed evidence that the New Deal dent’s dynamism and sheer force of per- was broadly successful in ameliorat- sonality that propelled the message of ing economic inequality from the Great this ambitious agenda. While fdr had Depression well into the late-20th cen- many detractors, few leaders could have tury. The positive role of the state was marshalled the necessary political sup- dramatically in evidence with the 1933 port for such an interventionist plat- inauguration of the fdr Democrats as form. This was another key element of the ensuing flurry of “alphabet agencies” the “extraordinary” moment. Neither the MCInnIS 278 / LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL 83 charisma of John F. Kennedy, the back- enact legislative measures. The Obama room arm-twisting of Lyndon Johnson, Administration’s failure to deliver on the nor the affable intellectualism of Barack Employee Free Choice Act “card-check” Obama could yield similar results. initiative was symptomatic of diminished Despite the propensity of the progres- political will to resurrect any neo-New sive left to inflict self-wounds, Cowie re- Deal coalition. As Thomas Frank has jects arguments that the Cold War, civil aptly stated, Democrats have long ago rights, anti-Vietnam activism, gender or turned away from working-class projects. sexual-identity equality undermined the The Great Exception concludes with New Deal coalition. Rather, it was the a variation of the “what is to be done?” bedrock ideologies of strident individual- question. New forms of revitalization are ism and anti-statist traditions that rallied necessary for organized labour. After a to re-focus on anti-immigrant xenopho- phase of understandable reticence about bia, unconstrained racism, and resur- invoking strike action, unions have gent religion that rent asunder Franklin sprung ideological into action, even if Roosevelt’s political project. Scholars goaded by the rank-and-file. If “damn of American history will hardly be sur- the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” is not prised at these conclusions; however, The official dictum, the recent actions of red- Great Exception sets out these issues with state teachers should remind us of how admirable clarity. the New Deal first came about. Rather While Jeff Cowie and colleague Nick than a bestowment from patrician politi- Salvatore presented initial iterations of cians seeking to salvage capitalism from The Great Exception years prior to this the turmoil of the Great Depression, 2016 publication, events of the Trump concerted labour militancy, coupled presidency have reinforced the validity with broad community support, lever- of their analyses. With each passing year aged the partial reforms represented in the book seems ever more prescient.
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