Planters and Plantation Culture in Louisiana's Northeast Delta, from the First World War Through The
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2006 Once proud princes: planters and plantation culture in Louisiana's northeast Delta, from the First World War through the Great Depression James Matthew Reonas Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Reonas, James Matthew, "Once proud princes: planters and plantation culture in Louisiana's northeast Delta, from the First World War through the Great Depression" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 579. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/579 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. ONCE PROUD PRINCES: PLANTERS AND PLANTATION CULTURE IN LOUISIANA’S NORTHEAST DELTA, FROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR THROUGH THE GREAT DEPRESSION A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by James Matthew Reonas B.A., University of Mississippi, 1997 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2000 December 2006 For my daughter, Madeleine Ann ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has extended over a long time, and I wish to thank everyone along the way who has helped in some fashion or another. A number of archival staffs aided in the research, including those with the Louisiana Room of the State Library in Baton Rouge and the Special Collections Departments at LSU, Tulane, Louisiana Tech, and Northwestern State. They all did professional work. I especially appreciate the great enthusiasm for my project shown by Mary Linn Wernet in Natchitoches, who aided me in a very fruitful investigation into the little used Senator John H. Overton papers. My fellow graduate students in the Department of History here at LSU-Ben Cloyd, Court Carney, and Rand Dotson-no doubt delayed this project with their assorted diversions but I had an enjoyable time with them nonetheless and they offered some unique views on life and the historical process. Among the faculty members, Professor John Rodrigue had a critical interest in my ideas, which I appreciated, and we always talked Louisiana. Professor Chuck Shindo, who advised this dissertation, always felt confident in my direction and let me find my own way. That means a great deal to me. Above all, my wife and family remained ever constant and gave me the space and support I needed to complete this work. iii PREFACE This study emerged from an earlier paper on the northeast Louisiana Delta that I completed my first year of graduate school. That work, a bit presumptive in retrospect, looked at the impact of agricultural modernization and desegregation in the region during the decades after the Second World War. Although I set this project aside for some time afterwards, the Delta still proved to be an intriguing subject of conversation, with both my father-in-law, a native of West Carroll Parish, and family friends who lived on Lake Bruin near St. Joseph. Eventually, I returned to the Delta and its rich, complex history for a dissertation topic, picking up the tale at an earlier time in the wake of the First World War, as the old plantation order gave way to the modern era. I am not the first person to find the Delta alluring. Writers and scholars always have been drawn to the intense emotions and bitter experiences of plantation life, although much of this prolific outpouring has focused on the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, with relatively little written on the older cotton region down river in Louisiana. This is not to say that the Louisiana Delta has been shunned; indeed, due to its close ties to Natchez, the region has its own literary and scholarly traditions. In the 1930s, WPA writers and sentimental novelists like Stark Young chronicled the history of the city and its environs in romantic prose. Later that decade, sociologists appeared in the Delta to record life on the changing plantations, just as Allison Davis and Burleigh Gardner, with a research team, began work on Deep South, their seminal study of Natchez society. Other iv examinations, such as Ron Davis’ Good and Faithful Labor and Michael Wayne’s The Reshaping of Plantation Society, incorporated research from the Delta into larger studies on the Natchez district, and Jack Davis, in Race Against Time, brought Davis and Gardner’s work up to date. But, largely, the Louisiana Delta has remained only a sidelight to the real story of Natchez itself, and rarely has this story come past the nineteenth century. When I began work on this dissertation, I wanted to chronicle the collapse an older plantation society and, from its shambles, the emergence of the modern Delta. I envisioned a comprehensive study of the period from 1900 to 1940 but soon narrowed my range down to what I considered the crucial decades of the 1920s and 1930s. In doing so, I also focused very tightly upon Tensas Parish as a research model. Located about midway between Vicksburg and Natchez, on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River, Tensas Parish, as well or better than any of the other riverfront parishes, epitomized the rural Delta culture that I wanted to examine. In addition, the source material for Tensas appeared to be more abundant and accessible, including an excellent run of the local newspaper, which became the backbone of my work, and a number of fine manuscript collections. These, along with WPA monographs, sociological studies, regional and parish histories, and personal memoirs, allowed me to create a convincing picture of Tensas Parish, and by extension, the rest of the Delta, during the inter-war years. The primary characters in this study were members of the white planter elite, many of whom had roots reaching back deep into the antebellum period. Because these people dominated the political and economic affairs of Tensas Parish and the Delta, their reactions to the events and movements of the 1920s and 1930s proved the easiest to trace v and their story provided the best cohesive narrative. I do not feel that I have ignored, however, the mass of the Delta’s inhabitants, the black tenants and sharecroppers who made up 70 to 80 percent of the population, or the hill country whites that moved into the area in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather, I have chosen to relate these groups to the planters’ world instead of placing the planters within theirs. A number of recent works chronicle explicitly the struggle of African- Americans in the Louisiana Delta, including Greta De Jong’s A Different Day and John Henry Scott’s gripping memoir, Witness to the Truth, adding to a strong general literature on Delta regions that also includes Nan Woodruff’s American Congo and Jeannie Whayne’s A New Plantation South. Sadly, no substantial analysis exists on the lives of the white migrants who made a stand in the Delta and shaped its economic and social direction afterwards. This dissertation, then, will add to the understanding of all these diverse cultures that occupied the same physical space and time but often on very different planes. I divided the study into four parts that follow a rough chronology from the First World War through the Depression, although at times earlier thematic material necessitated introduction at a later point to provide better continuity. Overall, I think it still reads well. Due to the geographical complexity of the Delta, I have included a number of maps that illustrate major natural or man-made features such as rivers, bayous, towns, and roadways. To complement the narrative, at the end of the work I also have attached a biographical dictionary that offers background on key figures as well as a compilation of relevant statistical information gleaned from a variety of sources. It is hoped that these items will prove beneficial in navigating an essentially local story. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iii PREFACE . iv ABSTRACT . viii INTRODUCTION . 1 PART ONE: THE PLANTATION WORLD IN FLUX . 8 CHAPTER ONE: WAR AND ITS COSTS . 9 CHAPTER TWO: THE STRUGGLE FOR ORGANIZATION . 33 PART TWO: THE NEW ERA IN COTTON COUNTRY . 56 CHAPTER THREE: SOCIETY DISARRAYED . 57 CHAPTER FOUR: STRANGERS IN THE LAND . 97 PART THREE: THE PLANTER CLASS IN CRISIS . 131 CHAPTER FIVE: FLOOD AND DEPRESSION . 132 CHAPTER SIX: THE NEW DEAL IN THE DELTA . 164 PART FOUR: DEFEAT AND TRIUMPH IN THE NEW ORDER . 188 CHAPTER SEVEN: THE CHALLENGE OF LONGISM . 189 CHAPTER EIGHT: THE FLOODWAY FIGHT . 219 EPILOGUE . 245 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 251 APPENDIX A: BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION . 262 APPENDIX B: SELECTED PLANTER KINSHIP NETWORKS . 271 APPENDIX C: STATISTICAL TABLES . 274 VITA . 279 vii ABSTRACT The Delta country of northeast Louisiana is a richly productive alluvial region stretching south from the Arkansas line to the confluence of the Red and Mississippi Rivers below Natchez. As the source of great cotton fortunes made during antebellum times, it reflected the Old South ideal and, for several decades after the end of the Civil War, remained firmly grounded in this old plantation culture. The economic depression of the 1890s and the coming of the boll weevil in the early 1900s, however, signaled a gradual decline that turned into full-blown dissolution in the years following the First World War. Old families, both black and white, were swept aside or moved away, new people arrived, lands changed hands, and revolutions in organization and authority eroded the bonds of people connected by the intensity of shared experience through time.