blindpig
01-29-2015, 10:30 AM
Compromised Utopias: The Defeat of the Rural Poor in the New Deal South
SHAKE IN YOUR BOOTS, YOU LANDLORD DOGS!
The day of final reckoning is near.
The farming masses, white and black,
Will smash your rotting seat of power
From “To Those Who Fell” by Communist organizer, Clyde Johnson
“The tragedy of the Southern liberals and the Southern Communists is that a potential for great achievement was squandered”-Robert F. Hall
The New Deal, as a victory by compromise, finds a place in history surrounded by diffidence on the part of those who would admire it. The triumphant gains, as well as the lost possibilities, of the 1930s and 40s, haunts the U.S. liberal/leftist imagination to this day. Such can be seen to be clearly the case when examining a sample of historical accounts covering the struggle of rural labor in the 1930s South: Against the Grain by Anthony Dunbar, Rural Worlds Lost by Jack Kirby, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty by Paul Mertz, and Hammer and Hoe by Robin Kelly. All these books were written between the late 70s and the early 90s. They were written as the radicalism of the 60s that had sought to overcome the boundaries of the New Deal was waning away, and a neoliberal conservative consensus was rising which sought to bury both the 60s and New Deal as deviations from the “true America”. Thus, for the progressive intellectuals involved in producing these books, there is an apologetic as well as explanatory purpose at work. The brief appearance of the sharecropper as a national historical actor is made to serve as an admirable example for the less than heroic present, and perhaps provide guidance for how to overcome the contemporary political stalemate. But at the end of all their investigations stands the worrisome suggestion that the answer to the question of why the sharecroppers lost lies in their own ideology.
The sharecropper movements were brutally repressed by the infamous forces of landed power, red baiting, and white racism. But scandalously, they were also undeniably smothered by the policies of one of the most liberal administrations in U.S. history, in the course of pursuing the, ostensibly, progressive goal of economic modernization. The federal government under FDR rushed to find a solution for the depressed rural economy, but for the rural poor, the cure was worse than the disease. The priority of the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Agency) was to save the planter class by restoring the value of their property, and this would require the decrease of production and acreage. In effect, they gave landowner’s an economic incentive to get rid of tenants. Even the most conventionally liberal of the historians examined, Mertz and Kirby, both agree that the New Deal could, and should have, done more for displaced farmers. As Mertz explains, the lack of concern for farmers created displaced, immiserated populations living in hard pockets of poverty in the countryside and the inner cities of the nation. This noxious legacy of the New Deal continues to shadow present day America though it is hidden by the fact that many of its distant victims no longer live in the South, and are lost amid the general prosperity of post-war American.
Rout by the ancien regime is a clear cut matter, but how to narrate a defeat inflicted by forces which were supposed to be on the same side as the common man? All the authors feel uneasy about this part of the story. So the question is deflect to the sharecropper movements themselves, and authors look for a contingent or necessary reason for their lack of success. Perhaps it was a fluke, the unhappy result of avoidable tactical decisions by one faction or the other; such is the answer that Dunbar and Kelly lean towards. Perhaps the defeat of the Southern poor was the tragic, but inevitable, working out of historical development. This is the line of thought that Mertz and Kirby tend toward. What comes out, sometimes despite the historians of the period, is a different diagnosis, which goes beyond the voluntarism of the first, or the economic determinism of the latter. Undoubtedly, there were heavy material limitations for radical politics in that era, not the least of which was the repressive forces of the ruling class. But harsh material circumstances alone are not sufficient to explain the failure of a transformative project to take root, or else the national and social revolution that created modern China would have been impossible, though it faced far more daunting limitations of poverty and hostility. Rather, what possibilities existed were misinterpreted, and then carried down to path to defeat by the same people who intended to be most faithful to the dream of a second American revolution. And no potential futures in the world can be achieved, not matter how favorable the general circumstances, without an organization that truly wills them to be. Nor was it simply bad choices arising from groups with essentially sound political beliefs. Better strategies would not have overcome the deeper rot. The Southern radical movements were undone by their inability to creatively transcend the hegemonic ideologies of the United States regarding working class identity, race, democracy, and the imperialist state. This tragedy of the American left is repeated by its historians, who struggle to then fit these movements within the confine of a narrative of progress that frustrated revolution in the first place. They bury even further what they are trying to honor.
Yeomen Farmers, or Proletarians?
The rural poor of the South, particularly from the cotton producing regions, were one of the most exploited and impoverished laboring classes in the country before WWII. They were a negation of the all the values America thought it stood it for. Instead of ownership and self reliance, they were governed by landlord oppression and were chained down by debt peonage. Within a culture that prided itself on care for the household, they were known for their shabby and unhealthy lifestyle. In an epoch of science and enlightenment, the sharecroppers and tenants remained illiterate and proudly unreconstructed in religion. In a country that believed itself to be a model of opportunity here was a population that had suffered decreasing opportunity as cotton prices fell and land ownership became more concentrated since the 1870s. Women were worn down by the double burden of backbreaking work in fields and being expected to care for the domestic needs of their family. Generations had tied themselves to a cotton monoculture made increasingly unviable by the multiplications of centers of productions within the world system. Malnutrition was everywhere, as people subsisted on a thin and un-nutritious diet that still cost them most of their wages. The earth underneath was eroding away from overuse, but they had no reason to care, when the earth they worked upon was not their own. Here also was the spectacle of black servitude continued by other means, as descendents of the slaves worked the land in debt bondage, surrounded by the latent threat of racist violence.
On top of all this was the Great Depression, which leading to even more hunger, sickness, and despair. The US government propped up flailing rural elite, who were threatened with bankruptcy due to the collapse of prices. This decline, left to its own devices, perhaps would have led to the breakdown of large estates and the expansion of small ownership. Instead, the big landowners were strengthened with price controls and generous subsidies. They were given money for reducing acreage use which in affect meant that they were being encouraged to get rid of their tenants. And all the while, landlord terrorism remained always ready to rush in when economic compulsion was insufficient. The sharecroppers were trapped in a great reorganization of economic life, in which old and new apparatuses of power conspired against them. The work of the AAA’s clean cut bureaucrats and the KKK’s assassins converged on the same purpose, the expropriation of the rural poor from the land. Among these desperate people, American radials saw a class that constituted a weak link in the American system of inequality and racism.
But how to classify theses share croppers, who neither fit the mold of small property owners or members of the urban working class? More importantly, what was the ultimate goal of organizing the sharecroppers: Was it to establish all of them on their own plots of land, or was it the creation of a new rural proletariat? Related to this was the debate about whether or not collectivization was the right alternative to be proposed as an alternative to the New Deal.
Leftists were faced with the ironic situation that the rural farmers who were marked out for inevitable abolishment by orthodox socialist thought were the ones most open to being transformed into agents of revolutionary change. Karl Marx had treated the country side as a seat of reaction and passivity. For him, its inhabitants could not be a revolutionary force against capitalism by themselves. While the Russian Revolution, with the prominent role of the peasants in its victory, had somewhat broken this prejudice among intellectuals and political militants, the urban working class was still viewed as key. And this would lead the farmers and their leadership to repeatedly to look for aid from the rising trade unions of the city. But despite much talk, little was gained from this alliance.
Socialists and Communists alike in the 1930s looked to the USSR as an example for finding a non-capitalist solution for the management of the land, and from thence to figure out the ultimate position of the South’s poor farmers in the national economy. Yet the Bolsheviks had confronted the agrarian problem after the peasantry had already successfully revolted against the decaying gentry. During the first decade of their rule, they could discuss the question of whether to encourage limited rural capitalism or to go through with full collectivization, since they were the ones in power, and the great magnates and landlords were already defeated. But in the US, these elites were still there, propped up by the money of the state and local gangs of enforcers. So radicals had to discuss the same perplexing question as their Russian counterparts did, but without any control of the situation, and with time rapidly running out. They could only react defensively at any point of struggle they could find, without any chance to develop a consistent vision of their own regarding the future of the rural laborers.
Most Southern Radicals, notably the Socialist influenced Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) aimed to create a new class of small farmers, a model citizen for Jeffersonian republic. But this ran into the problem of how to consistently resist capitalist agriculture if the principle of private property was to be respected. The STFU condemned the Democrat’s Bankhead Bill, which proposed the government purchase land that could be then given out on a long-term loan basis. They charged that not only was the Bill’s program underfunded, but that it would constitute a huge gift to landlords with excess land of poor quality to sell. For both of these reasons, not enough land would be bought to adequately help the afflicted population. But to these criticisms, a Senator Hugo Black, a supporter of the bill astutely responded: “How else can a [tenant farmer] get land? We have [private] ownership of land in this country and unless we…socialize all the land, there is no earthly chance for a tenant to get land except by buying it….from those who own it”. The “New Homestead Law” proposed by the STFU would have fallen into the same problem, for it proposed the government buy virtually all land in the country before leasing it out to family farms and co-ops. Tellingly, (and not mentioned by Dunbar, who is the author most sympathetic to the union), it dropped its more radical solution in favor endorsing the passage of a (revised) Bankhead Act. The difference between the STFU and the New Deal Establishment was narrower than the former would have admitted.
To ensure every sharecropper could become a more or less traditional small farmer would have required a massive violation of property rights and vigorous top down action by the state. Neither of which was very attractive to the STFU, whose leadership, in the last instance, distrusted the power of the central government, which subverted the “proper” state of individual independence. It was how they distinguished themselves from the “reds”. As their organization fell apart in 1939, they sought refuge in the paternalism of private charity, which they considered far more preferable to the “paternalism” of the state. The STFU was reduced to asking for food aid for their members from the President’s wife, but it could console itself by the thought it was never tempted by collectivism. The failed attempt by these more moderate voices of the left to “redeem” the tenant farmers in the name of a nostalgic image of traditional America would instead lead to the elimination of the sharecropper as a class. Instead of ushering in a flourishing republic of small farmers, the era of agribusiness was born.
The much smaller Communist faction grasped the other horn of this dilemma, with similar mixed results. While trying to respect the sharecropper’s spontaneous demand for land redistribution, they ultimately aimed at the collectivization of the land. But without state power or the establishment of their own liberated zones in the black belt, they could not hope to implement any land program at all. So they increasingly moved to the position that their business was to organize the expropriated sharecroppers as wage labor, following the conventions of trade unions in urban industry. First they wanted to create two different organizations, one for the new rural proletariat, the other for the remaining sharecroppers, and later they all but gave up on the latter. This changed the struggle from one contesting the ownership of the land in America, to a less radical one demanding better treatment within the existing structures of ownership. This made the fight in the countryside fit a more recognizable trade unionist pattern that the party had always been more comfortable with anyway. The blue collar worker, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), felt was the way of the future. And in this, they coincided with the ultimate judgments of the New Deal liberals, who viewed the mass expropriation of the sharecroppers as a necessary historic evil in the creation of a modern economy. Thus even the most radical political force in the rural South had the same urban-centered vision of the future American laboring classes as the ruling class they opposed.
Appeasing the White Working Class
The most exploited of the exploited in the South were the African American sharecroppers, concentrated in the so called “black belt”. This was a long stretch of the land running from Virginia to Louisiana where a majority of the population was African American. Originally named for its rich, dark soil, not its demographics, this sub-region had used a large numbers of slaves in cotton production, and many of these slaves remained after emancipation as sharecroppers. They were the most prone to answer the call for radical solutions to their problems. They had the least to lose, and the most, potentially, to gain from an overturning of the present system.
Overall, 66% of the U.S. sharecropper population was white, as were the majority of those heading the most significant rural movements. But the most responsive and steadfast rank and file were disproportionally black. Notably, they made up the overwhelming majority of the Communist SCU (Share Croppers Union). And even the more moderate STFU had a membership that was 70% black by 1937. This enthusiastic participation was ultimately not reciprocated by the leadership of the radical movements. To varying degrees, they were more concerned with maintaining good relation with the racist white majority than advancing black emancipation.
This was most egregiously the case in the STFU. The union earnestly tried to promote civil rights, sometimes to the point of confronting the violence of local reactionaries. Yet its leaders remained distrustful and fearful about the existence of any distinctly black political consciousness that was not subsumed under immediate economic demands or long term integrationist goals. Minster and influential STFU organizer Howard Kester spoke for many at the union when he wrote in 1931 letter, with bold letters: “IT IS NOT THE ECONOMICS OF COMMUNISM THAT FRIGHTENS THE WHITE SOUTHNER; IT IS THE RACIALISM OF COMMUNISM THAT FRIGHTENS HIM”. The occasion for this outburst? That fact that the young defendants of the Scottsboro trial chose to be represented by lawyers from the Communist party’s International Labor Defense, instead of the more mainstream NAACP. In addition, the CPUSA, itself predominantly black in its Alabama branch, was vigorously defending the boys in the sphere of public opinion. While sympathetic to the Scottsboro boys, Kester thought the CPUSA “extreme” advocacy for black people was racially divisive and scaring away sympathetic white people. The spectacle of organized blacks with little to bind them to normal white authority was frightening even for a relatively progressive man like Kester. This distrust of African American power would continue throughout the decade, alienating many within the union.
This attitude was particularly toxic as the STFU membership became majority black. When one of the original founders, H.L Mitchell, was challenged (unsuccessfully) by a black man for president of the union, he interpreted this as the beginning of communist subversion of the party by his old friend Claude Williams. A familiar pattern of racial paranoia and hatred of communists came increasingly to the foreground of these proudly “Socialist” leaders, breeding distrust among the non-white rank and file. As black organizer Reverend McKinney observed regarding the STFU: “We [blacks] are just manufacturing some new masters who have always wanted to get the opportunity to handle the Negro” Later, in 1939, McKinney led a break with the original STFU, saying that it leadership had “made the Negro their goat”, and aligned his faction with the relatively more radical Congress of Industrial Relations (CIO) affiliated farm union.
The CPUSA, while originally stronger on the question of black empowerment, would also fall short of it original promises. The Communists saw African Americans as an oppressed nation, potentially separable from the United States as a whole. The black working class, they believed, were distinct from the white working class labor aristocracy that was maintained by redistributed imperialist profits. “Self Determination for the Black Belt” was an official part of the Communist Party’s program. However, they did not pursue with much focus the objective of full political emancipation for African Americans, and soon it became buried under the patriotic propaganda of the Popular Front, which aimed to flatter the sensibilities of white Southerners. Instead of winning over more whites, this opportunistic move led to the Party losing many loyal black rank and file cadres, while Southern whites remained hostile or indifferent.
Among all Southern radicals, there was constant emphasis on unity between black and white workers. While in many cases this was a sincere sentiment, it often was used as a cudgel against black agency. Expression of a distinctly black political identity, or even efforts by blacks to take control of the unions they held a majority in, were labeled as “racialism”, a deformation of the proper color-blind proletarian politics. The union of the black and white worker in effect amounted to the black worker remaining the subordinate (and most hardworking) partner in the building of a new world that would remain essentially Euro-American. The American Left preferred to downplay the role of race in America in favor of narratives of meritocratic advancement and the essential innocence of ordinary whites in the power structure. This bleaching of the labor movements had an international dimension as well. The blacks of the United States were a living link to the wider political awakening of the Third World, but this connection was not built upon in the mobilization of the rural South. Doing so would have required a more radical attack on US power than the Socialists would have agreed to, or a more confrontational line than the Communists would have found politically expedient.
The blind spots of the movement at the time are reflected in their later chroniclers. Even the most radical of the historians examined (Kelly, Dunbar) do not recognize the extant of a distinctively black political consciousness in the South of this period. Blacks are instead subsumed into the alleged generic working class as whole, and their political aims are treated as essentially integrationist. Blacks in the 1930s South simply wanted to become full Americans within the society that had oppressed them. Civil Rights and economic gains are made the sum total of their aspirations. What this ignores is the sheer extant, let alone the existence, of black nationalist politics in the region, represented the by the Garveyite movement. Before the Communists or the STFU had come, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement League (UNIA) had found a following among rural blacks, who appropriated for their own the message of black identity. Self-determination for African Americans was not an alien idea introduced by the dogmatists of the CPUSA, as Dunbar and Kelly insinuate, but a widely circulated idea in the Southern black community prior to the 30s. But one would not get this by reading the texts in question: Dunbar does not mention Garvey’s movement at all, while Kelly mentions it only twice, to emphasize that it was not much of a force below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Missing also in the accounts examined, all written in the aftermath of the 60s, is the radical legacy of the Southern black émigrés to urban areas. The wave militancy in the 60 and 70s can be seen as the last flowering of the 30s legacy, as the sons and daughters of former sharecroppers formed organizations like the League of Black Revolutionary Workers or the Black Panthers. Tragically, these movements were even more isolated than their predecessors. The black radials of the 30s operated in a regions where substantial, territorial contiguous block of it had a black majorities, a strong basis for a movement. But in this time before the great depopulation of the black belt, the radical organizations that operated within Southern black communities were controlled by whites. Ironically, when black nationalist organizations became a national fore, there was no coherent homeland to fight for, only a series of dispersed urban centers that could be easily contained by state power.
Trust in the System
All of major factions of the rural movement rallied at various times against the “Swivel Chair Liberalism” represented by FDR’s administration, which spoke so much of the common man, yet enforced polices that were turning hundred of thousands into landless paupers. There was widely held skepticism among the Southern radicals about any remedy proceeding from Washington, so much so that Mertz makes them share the blame for the delay of the of allegedly “progressive” legislation aimed at farmers in 1935. But despite the rhetoric it was to the federal government that these movements ultimately appealed for change. The power that was committed to pushing forward the programs destroying the Southern farmer was the one they, in the last instance, expected to achieve a veritable social revolution in the American countryside.
The STFU was caught in this reformist bind from its founding, when it had started simply demanding the US government to enforce the existing laws favoring sharecroppers. And even when the STFU began to make larger demand for the division of the land into the famer co-ops, it continued to view the problem of the sharecropper as one that awaited a decisive intervention on the part of the state. This remained the case even as, following the 1935 purge of progressives within the AAA, the chances of receiving a positive hearing from Washington faded.
The Communists initially tried to avoid this path of trusting in the cooperation of the state, but in the end, they embraced it with perhaps even greater enthusiasm. In the first part of the decade, when the Party focused mainly on Alabama’s black sharecroppers, had organized supporters in an underground manner, and encouraged the creation of armed self defense patrols to ward off police and landlord gangs. The incommensurability of the revolution with present status-quo was kept in the foreground, and the sharecroppers were taught to ultimately rely on themselves to end their oppression. But with the implementation of the Popular Front strategy in 1935, the Party moved away from underground, quasi-guerrilla tactics to the ways of civil society, in order to appeal to a more middle class liberal audience (particularly whites). As the Tenth National Convention of the CPUSA put it, “participation of an awakening Southern intellectual group” was essential. At the same Convention, the CPUSA affirmed the importance on the role of the black middle class, the same black middle class that had often openly opposed the extension of the franchise to their less well off brethren. But above all, this meant rapprochement with the white, progressively inclined bourgeoisie who were looking to break the monopoly of the Southern Democratic old guard. The party thus resigned itself to being a tool within an inter-elite power play.
The Party leadership became convinced of the (potentially) progressive nature of the Democratic Party and began to believe that more or less covertly joining in and influencing New Deal politics in the region would, in the long run, accomplish their goals. Regional focus shifted to pursuing formal liberties in the comparatively safer context of the urban center, which substituted for the far more dangerous struggle for concrete political and economic liberty in the countryside. Voter registration in particular was emphasized, while the movement to win land for the sharecroppers and black self-determination faded away. The ballot box became a black hole for the Party’s energies.
All these movements gravitated inevitably towards supplicating Washington assistance, and the court of national opinion to be kinder to the working class and to protect them from local violence. In the end, they won some short term sympathy, and made the plight of the sharecropper a part of the national dialogue. But neither of their real demands was fulfilled. The FDR administration required the support of the planter elites in control of the Democratic Party in the South, and thus was not interested in paying the political cost of reorganizing the region in a progressive manner. The rural left lost its momentum, and allowed itself to be outflanked and co-opted by the mainstream liberal consensus that was slowly destroying its conditions of existence
Better Dead than Red
A large factor in the demise of the rural movements was the adherence to a stultifying anticommunism by some it main players, particularly the STFU. This increased later in the 30s , as the national economy stabilized and respectable progressive opinion distanced itself from the alleged “totalitarianism” of the USSR. This undermined the possibilities for larger leftist alliances, as the Socialists and liberals shunned their Communist counterparts.
Perhaps ironically, this anticommunism was not a response to the rising radicalism of the communists themselves, who for their part were almost pathetically plaintive for a truce. Southern Communists, like the CPUSA in general, by the mid 1930s was looking for some sort of alliance with more moderate forces. In this, they were following the new line of the Comintern, known as the “Popular Front”, which called for its all communist parties to seek out alliance with the broader left against the rising forces of fascism (fascism in the American context being understood as white chauvinism and New Deal-rejectionist). This new strategy also coincided with their own desire to achieve quicker results on the ground than their half decade of underground work in the region had so far accomplished. To this end, they would even liquidate the virtually entirely black SCU of Alabama in 1936 for the sake of merging within a more respectable organization. Popular Frontism was sometimes fruitful, as the so called Democratic Front’s fights for voting rights, showed, but in the case of the rural battles, it led to disaster. For the Communist desire for a shared agrarian organization was met with delay, than outright hostility, from the other side.
The STFU leadership wanted an American countryside of small private farmers living in co-ops, not collectivization. Nor would they countenance revolution from below to achieve this aim. The STFU did not see the sharecroppers fight as a class struggle that would have to culminate in the complete overthrow of present society. Nor did they view, as the Communists did, the U.S. government as a hostile entity, joined at the hip with the landlord. This meant they put the sharecroppers fight squarely inside the confines of the U.S. political status quo, as opposed to projecting it as a struggle with truly revolutionary implications. In fact, they sometimes viewed themselves as acting as a break on the social upheaval that the “reds” were instigating. This meant that they were more than ready to attack potential allies of the left, not out of convenience, but out of principle.
The STFU board was open to the idea of alliance with the SCU, but its most powerful leaders like H.L Mitchell and J.R Butler successfully worked to sabotage this step. They did not view Communists as comrades, but as barbarous, Un-American”, foreign agents. Mitchell compared CPUSA organizer Donald Henderson to a throwback from the religious fanaticism of the 17thcentury: “Two to three centuries ago, such people as Henderson would have been off hunting witches, and it to be regretted that they are now engaged in attempting to organize farm laborers”.
Thus, the STFU declined to combine with the SCU in 1935. Then they refused to participate in a general cotton picker’s strike later that year, instead holding their own, ultimately weakening the effectiveness of both strikes. Later in the decade they would throw accusation of covert communist affiliation against respected leaders of their own organization, like Claude Williams. They joined the far right in labeling the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) as a Trojan horse for the CPUSA, and called for the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to investigate. More decisively for the future of their organization, they refused to co-operate with CIO because of the presence of Communists in its midst. When the Missouri Highway Demonstration of1939 occurred, the sharecroppers lacked effective leadership as the CIO and the STFU were hamstrung by their feud. After the Missouri demonstration ended in utter defeat, the STFU ceased to exist as an effective union, while the CIO lost interest in the increasingly doomed tenant farmers of the South.
This would all seem to indicate that Dunbar is right in saying that lack of left unity was one of the chief errors of rural movements. But this would seem indicate that lack of unity was the fault of all the factions, when in fact it was the most conservative of the sharecropper’s organizations, the STFU, which was responsible for continuously rejected the possibility of a broader coalition. The fixation by that union’s leadership on avoiding even the most informal alliance with communism led them to sacrifice creating an effective mass movement in favor of one that was toothless against the New Deal liberal establishment.
Nationhood and Imperialism
The situation of the poor Southern farmer, in his abject poverty and servitude represent a profoundly alien reality to what was considered “normal” in the United States. Most radical and liberals agreed tenant farming was an un-American phenomenon that needed to be eradicated. But hardly any would have dared raise the possibility that America as a whole would need to be abolished if the sharecropper would succeed. The toilers would be made to confirm to national ideology, as opposed to national ideology being made to confirm to the consciousnesses of the toiler. Even the most internationalist of the factions, the Communists, was eager to emphasize their patriotic credentials. Class identity was drowned out in a trans-class “American” identity. The ability of to see the United States as a privileged part of global division of labor was to be repressed in order to enable agitating for one’s own share of the plunder. In the case of blacks, there consciousness as a part of a long struggling people scattered throughout out the planet was to be shunned in favor of consciousness as members, or at least members to be, of the American political body. Integration with Washington would require shunning potential bonds with the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. The goals of the oppressed were defined as becoming full fledged imperial citizens, not as allies of the growing global resistance to empire.
The Popular Front period, followed by the great “antifascist” struggle of World War II, further blunted the rejection of the empire, as the US shifted in radical representation from being an exploiter nation to a courageous participant in the anti-fascist struggle. The Communists were ironically the most eager to do this, as they were committed to upholding the interests of the USSR. There had been brief return to the vocal anti-imperialism of the Third Period days in the period when the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (1939-1941) was in effect. But when the “homeland of socialism” was invaded by Germany, this was changed to cheering America as a democratic partner in the heroic struggle against Nazi aggression. While understandable at the time, this campaign of boosterism for the US would weaken their ability to criticize US foreign policy latter on, when the onset of the Cold War would make international war in the name of “Democracy” a permanent feature of American life.
Some socialists and radicals of no party affiliation became conscientious objectors. But even their gestures were often marked by expressions militarism. Howard Kester, for instance, was a conscientious objector, but he led the FSC’s (Fellow Southern Churchmen’s) call for creating an integrated volunteer combat division The preachers of the STFU turned their skills to mobilizing the masses against Hitler instead of the landlords or the AAA. The worthy cause of fighting fascism became the alibi for the assimilation of Southern radical discourse as a more or less loyal voice for US imperialism and militarism.
The End of the Movement
By the time the U.S entered WWII, the SCU was finished, and the STFU was all but dead. The tide of consolidation and mechanization went on, now wholly unimpeded. With no hope that any rural movement could reverse the tide of expropriation, many famers took refuge in the cities, becoming an unskilled reserve army for industry, if they were lucky. Even by 1940, it was already finished. The flight of the poor from the countryside destroyed communities, draining those habitats in which radical movement could flourish. The CIO were all the Communists had congregated moved the focus of its activities westward to the farm laborers of California, while the STFU gave up trying to organize sharecroppers, and instead focused on lining farmers up with war time jobs in the cities The militants and prophets destroyed, albeit with no little regret, the environment that had created them and which they had dedicated so many years of their life in trying to defend. And many of these men left disillusioned with revolution and trade unionism, moving on to civil society activism or conventional political careers to pursue what remained of their ideals.
The federal government’s meager support for a new social order in the South also waned. Amid a rising backlash against the New Deal, the meager aid Washington appropriated for supporting co-ops and rehabilitation disappeared. Any co-ops that existed were quietly shut down. The notion of saving the rural South for its farmers was replaced with official encouragement for immigration out of the region. American progressives had wanted to remake American society, starting with its most backward region, but ultimately they colluded in the destruction of the one class whose grievances had dramatically pointed beyond the status quo.
The onset of the McCarthyite era was just a mild a mop up job of the Southern left that had already been hollowed out from the inside. Compared to the assassinations, torture, and beatings suffered by rural activists in the 30s, it was a pinprick. Notably, most of the people called up before the Committee on Un-American activities no longer subscribed to their former radicalism, and nearly all emphasized their patriotism and religious orthodoxy as opposed to their lack of conformity to national values. Joseph McCarthy was only the final nail in the coffin for an already defeated movement. What resistance there was to the witch hunts was profoundly parochial in scope. Most of the men who were so concerned about freedom of thought and speech for themselves had not stood up before the coming of McCarthy against the deportation of Mexicans in the Southwest, the repression of the Puerto Rican independence movement, or the war against Korea. Nor did they respond by going underground and multiplying their efforts to organize the American working class. They at most stood up for their right to a private conscious, and the privilege of being tolerated by the capitalist state. And soon enough they were, since the state had nothing to fear from those it had already beaten. Thus ended the great eruption of the 30s South, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Epilogue: Southern History and the Ideology of Progress
“The South was the last region of the United States to experience the process, which continues at various speeds over much of the earth. The process is also known as development or progress, and hardly anyone who might begin this book does not know its course. So there are few surprises in the ending of this story. ”
The quote above is the conventional view of the South’s entrance into American capitalist modernity. It was an event, from this perspective, that was inevitable and straightforward, if not necessarily benevolent fully benevolent in its results. And it is not just garden variety liberal historians like Kirby and Mertz that share this view. H. L Mitchell of the STFU in his later years would say that revolution was never possible “because there have always been plenty of jobs, plenty of free land and things of that sort”. And Mitchell, for his part, was glad that this was so. The South was destined to be assimilated into the way of life of the rest of the nation. The rise of private agribusiness and the full integration of the local working class as cooperative members of the economic system would have happened anyway, regardless of anyone’s efforts.
Part of what is lost in this fatalism is the uncanny strangeness of the South’s position before WWII. The South was a little piece of the Third World within the US. Its conditions were more comparable to the colonized peasant nations of China or Vietnam than the rest of the nation. Like them, the South was economically underdeveloped, dominated by interests of the metropolitan North. Instead of developing its own industries, it was made the captive market of Yankee manufactured goods and a major producer of cheap raw materials for the rest of nations. But this state of underdevelopment paradoxically made it potentially a particularly lucrative place to invest, if only the right conditions could be created. Free of a buildup of older infrastructure or factories, the South could rapidly advance with the latest technology for the maximum profit. But at the same time, as it has happened always in the course of capitalism’s history, this underdevelopment was a state ripe for insurrection. For in such circumstances, modern technology and organization is combined with minds not domesticated by the disenchanted normalcy of capitalist life in the core of the world system.
The most revolutionary section of the nation turned out to be not the most educated, culturally progressive, and developed part, but the most backwards. Southern radicalism was the alliance of Northern imported ideologies with a local culture of intense piety, strong communal values, and familial loyalty: “They believe in the tenants of Isaiah and of Jesus and of Marx, and they are by their deeds social revolutionaries with a religious drive that keeps them in the midst of battle”. Unschooled black and white ministers were the backbone of the STFU. Some of it most noted leaders were preachers of the Gospel as well as of revolution: Ward Rogers, Claude Williams, Owen Whitfield, etc. The Communist Party in the South in particular is an interesting case of a hyper-modernist leadership having a symbiotic (parasitic?) relation with masses that were, culturally and socially, firmly conservative in many ways. In the imagination of the black cadre of the Communist SCU, Jesus marched with Lenin, the USSR was the new Ethiopia, and the cadences of the Bible mixed easily with the slogans of the Comintern. Their faith gave to the alien formulas of orthodox Marxism a mundane concreteness and, at the same time, a burning prophetic intensity. Religion provided a perspective which condemned without reservation the existing state of things as sin, unalloyed by narratives of progress which would seek to justify the privations of capitalism as being for the ultimate sake of emancipation. They were too unenlightened to be fooled by liberalism.
It was the lack of such a perspective of distance from modernity which makes even sympathetic historians of the sharecropper movement cede victory, in the end, to the powers that crushed it. If defeats happened, there was a higher immanent rationality of history at work that will recompense for the sorrows of past times with higher stages of development in the future. Capitalism, even when it cuts downs, always sows anew. Everything will harmonize in the end, they assume, even if elegiac tears may be shed in the meantime. The sense that there were possibilities for liberation that were unrepeatable, that were lost, and which will never be compensated for in the grand unfolding of “progress”, is absent from their work.
If we are to adequately write about past modern struggles, the perspective should assume that capitalism is always counter-revolution, even when it comes bearing gifts. When it wins, it kills possibilities for resistance, even as it builds new things in the debris. Its triumph anywhere, in anyplace, is the death of one more possibility of building a world beyond it. This is not to reduce history writing into a chronicle of woe. It is to make it an instrument for fighting back against the complacent hyper refined barbarism of the present, which would prefer the evils it builds upon to be hidden in a vague haze of forgetfulness. Memory of those who have suffered and died should become a spur for action, and a goad for thought, which would otherwise collude with the officially mandated oblivion.
Robin D.G Kelly. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) , 97
Ibid.166
Paul. E Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978),136
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959 (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 109-110
Ibid.120
Ibid. 126
Ibid.170
Ibid.165
Ibid. 34
Ibid.173
Ibid.182
Mary G. Robinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the rural South, 1920-1927 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 56
Paul. E Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 220
Paul. E Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 34
Robin D.G Kelly, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990),184
Ibid. 183
Ibid.177
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959, (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 133
Robin D. G Kelly. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) , 186
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959, (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 185
Paul E.Mertz, Paul New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 179
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959 (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 207
Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1987), 1
H. L Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in the Land (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 22
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959, (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 110
Ibid.90
Bibliography
E.Mertz, Paul New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978
D.G Kelly, Robin Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990
Kirby, Jack, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920-1960. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1987
P. Dunbar, Anthony, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981
Mitchell, H. L, Mean Things Happening in the Land. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 2008
G. Robinson, Mary, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the rural South, 1920-1927. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007
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SHAKE IN YOUR BOOTS, YOU LANDLORD DOGS!
The day of final reckoning is near.
The farming masses, white and black,
Will smash your rotting seat of power
From “To Those Who Fell” by Communist organizer, Clyde Johnson
“The tragedy of the Southern liberals and the Southern Communists is that a potential for great achievement was squandered”-Robert F. Hall
The New Deal, as a victory by compromise, finds a place in history surrounded by diffidence on the part of those who would admire it. The triumphant gains, as well as the lost possibilities, of the 1930s and 40s, haunts the U.S. liberal/leftist imagination to this day. Such can be seen to be clearly the case when examining a sample of historical accounts covering the struggle of rural labor in the 1930s South: Against the Grain by Anthony Dunbar, Rural Worlds Lost by Jack Kirby, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty by Paul Mertz, and Hammer and Hoe by Robin Kelly. All these books were written between the late 70s and the early 90s. They were written as the radicalism of the 60s that had sought to overcome the boundaries of the New Deal was waning away, and a neoliberal conservative consensus was rising which sought to bury both the 60s and New Deal as deviations from the “true America”. Thus, for the progressive intellectuals involved in producing these books, there is an apologetic as well as explanatory purpose at work. The brief appearance of the sharecropper as a national historical actor is made to serve as an admirable example for the less than heroic present, and perhaps provide guidance for how to overcome the contemporary political stalemate. But at the end of all their investigations stands the worrisome suggestion that the answer to the question of why the sharecroppers lost lies in their own ideology.
The sharecropper movements were brutally repressed by the infamous forces of landed power, red baiting, and white racism. But scandalously, they were also undeniably smothered by the policies of one of the most liberal administrations in U.S. history, in the course of pursuing the, ostensibly, progressive goal of economic modernization. The federal government under FDR rushed to find a solution for the depressed rural economy, but for the rural poor, the cure was worse than the disease. The priority of the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Agency) was to save the planter class by restoring the value of their property, and this would require the decrease of production and acreage. In effect, they gave landowner’s an economic incentive to get rid of tenants. Even the most conventionally liberal of the historians examined, Mertz and Kirby, both agree that the New Deal could, and should have, done more for displaced farmers. As Mertz explains, the lack of concern for farmers created displaced, immiserated populations living in hard pockets of poverty in the countryside and the inner cities of the nation. This noxious legacy of the New Deal continues to shadow present day America though it is hidden by the fact that many of its distant victims no longer live in the South, and are lost amid the general prosperity of post-war American.
Rout by the ancien regime is a clear cut matter, but how to narrate a defeat inflicted by forces which were supposed to be on the same side as the common man? All the authors feel uneasy about this part of the story. So the question is deflect to the sharecropper movements themselves, and authors look for a contingent or necessary reason for their lack of success. Perhaps it was a fluke, the unhappy result of avoidable tactical decisions by one faction or the other; such is the answer that Dunbar and Kelly lean towards. Perhaps the defeat of the Southern poor was the tragic, but inevitable, working out of historical development. This is the line of thought that Mertz and Kirby tend toward. What comes out, sometimes despite the historians of the period, is a different diagnosis, which goes beyond the voluntarism of the first, or the economic determinism of the latter. Undoubtedly, there were heavy material limitations for radical politics in that era, not the least of which was the repressive forces of the ruling class. But harsh material circumstances alone are not sufficient to explain the failure of a transformative project to take root, or else the national and social revolution that created modern China would have been impossible, though it faced far more daunting limitations of poverty and hostility. Rather, what possibilities existed were misinterpreted, and then carried down to path to defeat by the same people who intended to be most faithful to the dream of a second American revolution. And no potential futures in the world can be achieved, not matter how favorable the general circumstances, without an organization that truly wills them to be. Nor was it simply bad choices arising from groups with essentially sound political beliefs. Better strategies would not have overcome the deeper rot. The Southern radical movements were undone by their inability to creatively transcend the hegemonic ideologies of the United States regarding working class identity, race, democracy, and the imperialist state. This tragedy of the American left is repeated by its historians, who struggle to then fit these movements within the confine of a narrative of progress that frustrated revolution in the first place. They bury even further what they are trying to honor.
Yeomen Farmers, or Proletarians?
The rural poor of the South, particularly from the cotton producing regions, were one of the most exploited and impoverished laboring classes in the country before WWII. They were a negation of the all the values America thought it stood it for. Instead of ownership and self reliance, they were governed by landlord oppression and were chained down by debt peonage. Within a culture that prided itself on care for the household, they were known for their shabby and unhealthy lifestyle. In an epoch of science and enlightenment, the sharecroppers and tenants remained illiterate and proudly unreconstructed in religion. In a country that believed itself to be a model of opportunity here was a population that had suffered decreasing opportunity as cotton prices fell and land ownership became more concentrated since the 1870s. Women were worn down by the double burden of backbreaking work in fields and being expected to care for the domestic needs of their family. Generations had tied themselves to a cotton monoculture made increasingly unviable by the multiplications of centers of productions within the world system. Malnutrition was everywhere, as people subsisted on a thin and un-nutritious diet that still cost them most of their wages. The earth underneath was eroding away from overuse, but they had no reason to care, when the earth they worked upon was not their own. Here also was the spectacle of black servitude continued by other means, as descendents of the slaves worked the land in debt bondage, surrounded by the latent threat of racist violence.
On top of all this was the Great Depression, which leading to even more hunger, sickness, and despair. The US government propped up flailing rural elite, who were threatened with bankruptcy due to the collapse of prices. This decline, left to its own devices, perhaps would have led to the breakdown of large estates and the expansion of small ownership. Instead, the big landowners were strengthened with price controls and generous subsidies. They were given money for reducing acreage use which in affect meant that they were being encouraged to get rid of their tenants. And all the while, landlord terrorism remained always ready to rush in when economic compulsion was insufficient. The sharecroppers were trapped in a great reorganization of economic life, in which old and new apparatuses of power conspired against them. The work of the AAA’s clean cut bureaucrats and the KKK’s assassins converged on the same purpose, the expropriation of the rural poor from the land. Among these desperate people, American radials saw a class that constituted a weak link in the American system of inequality and racism.
But how to classify theses share croppers, who neither fit the mold of small property owners or members of the urban working class? More importantly, what was the ultimate goal of organizing the sharecroppers: Was it to establish all of them on their own plots of land, or was it the creation of a new rural proletariat? Related to this was the debate about whether or not collectivization was the right alternative to be proposed as an alternative to the New Deal.
Leftists were faced with the ironic situation that the rural farmers who were marked out for inevitable abolishment by orthodox socialist thought were the ones most open to being transformed into agents of revolutionary change. Karl Marx had treated the country side as a seat of reaction and passivity. For him, its inhabitants could not be a revolutionary force against capitalism by themselves. While the Russian Revolution, with the prominent role of the peasants in its victory, had somewhat broken this prejudice among intellectuals and political militants, the urban working class was still viewed as key. And this would lead the farmers and their leadership to repeatedly to look for aid from the rising trade unions of the city. But despite much talk, little was gained from this alliance.
Socialists and Communists alike in the 1930s looked to the USSR as an example for finding a non-capitalist solution for the management of the land, and from thence to figure out the ultimate position of the South’s poor farmers in the national economy. Yet the Bolsheviks had confronted the agrarian problem after the peasantry had already successfully revolted against the decaying gentry. During the first decade of their rule, they could discuss the question of whether to encourage limited rural capitalism or to go through with full collectivization, since they were the ones in power, and the great magnates and landlords were already defeated. But in the US, these elites were still there, propped up by the money of the state and local gangs of enforcers. So radicals had to discuss the same perplexing question as their Russian counterparts did, but without any control of the situation, and with time rapidly running out. They could only react defensively at any point of struggle they could find, without any chance to develop a consistent vision of their own regarding the future of the rural laborers.
Most Southern Radicals, notably the Socialist influenced Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) aimed to create a new class of small farmers, a model citizen for Jeffersonian republic. But this ran into the problem of how to consistently resist capitalist agriculture if the principle of private property was to be respected. The STFU condemned the Democrat’s Bankhead Bill, which proposed the government purchase land that could be then given out on a long-term loan basis. They charged that not only was the Bill’s program underfunded, but that it would constitute a huge gift to landlords with excess land of poor quality to sell. For both of these reasons, not enough land would be bought to adequately help the afflicted population. But to these criticisms, a Senator Hugo Black, a supporter of the bill astutely responded: “How else can a [tenant farmer] get land? We have [private] ownership of land in this country and unless we…socialize all the land, there is no earthly chance for a tenant to get land except by buying it….from those who own it”. The “New Homestead Law” proposed by the STFU would have fallen into the same problem, for it proposed the government buy virtually all land in the country before leasing it out to family farms and co-ops. Tellingly, (and not mentioned by Dunbar, who is the author most sympathetic to the union), it dropped its more radical solution in favor endorsing the passage of a (revised) Bankhead Act. The difference between the STFU and the New Deal Establishment was narrower than the former would have admitted.
To ensure every sharecropper could become a more or less traditional small farmer would have required a massive violation of property rights and vigorous top down action by the state. Neither of which was very attractive to the STFU, whose leadership, in the last instance, distrusted the power of the central government, which subverted the “proper” state of individual independence. It was how they distinguished themselves from the “reds”. As their organization fell apart in 1939, they sought refuge in the paternalism of private charity, which they considered far more preferable to the “paternalism” of the state. The STFU was reduced to asking for food aid for their members from the President’s wife, but it could console itself by the thought it was never tempted by collectivism. The failed attempt by these more moderate voices of the left to “redeem” the tenant farmers in the name of a nostalgic image of traditional America would instead lead to the elimination of the sharecropper as a class. Instead of ushering in a flourishing republic of small farmers, the era of agribusiness was born.
The much smaller Communist faction grasped the other horn of this dilemma, with similar mixed results. While trying to respect the sharecropper’s spontaneous demand for land redistribution, they ultimately aimed at the collectivization of the land. But without state power or the establishment of their own liberated zones in the black belt, they could not hope to implement any land program at all. So they increasingly moved to the position that their business was to organize the expropriated sharecroppers as wage labor, following the conventions of trade unions in urban industry. First they wanted to create two different organizations, one for the new rural proletariat, the other for the remaining sharecroppers, and later they all but gave up on the latter. This changed the struggle from one contesting the ownership of the land in America, to a less radical one demanding better treatment within the existing structures of ownership. This made the fight in the countryside fit a more recognizable trade unionist pattern that the party had always been more comfortable with anyway. The blue collar worker, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), felt was the way of the future. And in this, they coincided with the ultimate judgments of the New Deal liberals, who viewed the mass expropriation of the sharecroppers as a necessary historic evil in the creation of a modern economy. Thus even the most radical political force in the rural South had the same urban-centered vision of the future American laboring classes as the ruling class they opposed.
Appeasing the White Working Class
The most exploited of the exploited in the South were the African American sharecroppers, concentrated in the so called “black belt”. This was a long stretch of the land running from Virginia to Louisiana where a majority of the population was African American. Originally named for its rich, dark soil, not its demographics, this sub-region had used a large numbers of slaves in cotton production, and many of these slaves remained after emancipation as sharecroppers. They were the most prone to answer the call for radical solutions to their problems. They had the least to lose, and the most, potentially, to gain from an overturning of the present system.
Overall, 66% of the U.S. sharecropper population was white, as were the majority of those heading the most significant rural movements. But the most responsive and steadfast rank and file were disproportionally black. Notably, they made up the overwhelming majority of the Communist SCU (Share Croppers Union). And even the more moderate STFU had a membership that was 70% black by 1937. This enthusiastic participation was ultimately not reciprocated by the leadership of the radical movements. To varying degrees, they were more concerned with maintaining good relation with the racist white majority than advancing black emancipation.
This was most egregiously the case in the STFU. The union earnestly tried to promote civil rights, sometimes to the point of confronting the violence of local reactionaries. Yet its leaders remained distrustful and fearful about the existence of any distinctly black political consciousness that was not subsumed under immediate economic demands or long term integrationist goals. Minster and influential STFU organizer Howard Kester spoke for many at the union when he wrote in 1931 letter, with bold letters: “IT IS NOT THE ECONOMICS OF COMMUNISM THAT FRIGHTENS THE WHITE SOUTHNER; IT IS THE RACIALISM OF COMMUNISM THAT FRIGHTENS HIM”. The occasion for this outburst? That fact that the young defendants of the Scottsboro trial chose to be represented by lawyers from the Communist party’s International Labor Defense, instead of the more mainstream NAACP. In addition, the CPUSA, itself predominantly black in its Alabama branch, was vigorously defending the boys in the sphere of public opinion. While sympathetic to the Scottsboro boys, Kester thought the CPUSA “extreme” advocacy for black people was racially divisive and scaring away sympathetic white people. The spectacle of organized blacks with little to bind them to normal white authority was frightening even for a relatively progressive man like Kester. This distrust of African American power would continue throughout the decade, alienating many within the union.
This attitude was particularly toxic as the STFU membership became majority black. When one of the original founders, H.L Mitchell, was challenged (unsuccessfully) by a black man for president of the union, he interpreted this as the beginning of communist subversion of the party by his old friend Claude Williams. A familiar pattern of racial paranoia and hatred of communists came increasingly to the foreground of these proudly “Socialist” leaders, breeding distrust among the non-white rank and file. As black organizer Reverend McKinney observed regarding the STFU: “We [blacks] are just manufacturing some new masters who have always wanted to get the opportunity to handle the Negro” Later, in 1939, McKinney led a break with the original STFU, saying that it leadership had “made the Negro their goat”, and aligned his faction with the relatively more radical Congress of Industrial Relations (CIO) affiliated farm union.
The CPUSA, while originally stronger on the question of black empowerment, would also fall short of it original promises. The Communists saw African Americans as an oppressed nation, potentially separable from the United States as a whole. The black working class, they believed, were distinct from the white working class labor aristocracy that was maintained by redistributed imperialist profits. “Self Determination for the Black Belt” was an official part of the Communist Party’s program. However, they did not pursue with much focus the objective of full political emancipation for African Americans, and soon it became buried under the patriotic propaganda of the Popular Front, which aimed to flatter the sensibilities of white Southerners. Instead of winning over more whites, this opportunistic move led to the Party losing many loyal black rank and file cadres, while Southern whites remained hostile or indifferent.
Among all Southern radicals, there was constant emphasis on unity between black and white workers. While in many cases this was a sincere sentiment, it often was used as a cudgel against black agency. Expression of a distinctly black political identity, or even efforts by blacks to take control of the unions they held a majority in, were labeled as “racialism”, a deformation of the proper color-blind proletarian politics. The union of the black and white worker in effect amounted to the black worker remaining the subordinate (and most hardworking) partner in the building of a new world that would remain essentially Euro-American. The American Left preferred to downplay the role of race in America in favor of narratives of meritocratic advancement and the essential innocence of ordinary whites in the power structure. This bleaching of the labor movements had an international dimension as well. The blacks of the United States were a living link to the wider political awakening of the Third World, but this connection was not built upon in the mobilization of the rural South. Doing so would have required a more radical attack on US power than the Socialists would have agreed to, or a more confrontational line than the Communists would have found politically expedient.
The blind spots of the movement at the time are reflected in their later chroniclers. Even the most radical of the historians examined (Kelly, Dunbar) do not recognize the extant of a distinctively black political consciousness in the South of this period. Blacks are instead subsumed into the alleged generic working class as whole, and their political aims are treated as essentially integrationist. Blacks in the 1930s South simply wanted to become full Americans within the society that had oppressed them. Civil Rights and economic gains are made the sum total of their aspirations. What this ignores is the sheer extant, let alone the existence, of black nationalist politics in the region, represented the by the Garveyite movement. Before the Communists or the STFU had come, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement League (UNIA) had found a following among rural blacks, who appropriated for their own the message of black identity. Self-determination for African Americans was not an alien idea introduced by the dogmatists of the CPUSA, as Dunbar and Kelly insinuate, but a widely circulated idea in the Southern black community prior to the 30s. But one would not get this by reading the texts in question: Dunbar does not mention Garvey’s movement at all, while Kelly mentions it only twice, to emphasize that it was not much of a force below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Missing also in the accounts examined, all written in the aftermath of the 60s, is the radical legacy of the Southern black émigrés to urban areas. The wave militancy in the 60 and 70s can be seen as the last flowering of the 30s legacy, as the sons and daughters of former sharecroppers formed organizations like the League of Black Revolutionary Workers or the Black Panthers. Tragically, these movements were even more isolated than their predecessors. The black radials of the 30s operated in a regions where substantial, territorial contiguous block of it had a black majorities, a strong basis for a movement. But in this time before the great depopulation of the black belt, the radical organizations that operated within Southern black communities were controlled by whites. Ironically, when black nationalist organizations became a national fore, there was no coherent homeland to fight for, only a series of dispersed urban centers that could be easily contained by state power.
Trust in the System
All of major factions of the rural movement rallied at various times against the “Swivel Chair Liberalism” represented by FDR’s administration, which spoke so much of the common man, yet enforced polices that were turning hundred of thousands into landless paupers. There was widely held skepticism among the Southern radicals about any remedy proceeding from Washington, so much so that Mertz makes them share the blame for the delay of the of allegedly “progressive” legislation aimed at farmers in 1935. But despite the rhetoric it was to the federal government that these movements ultimately appealed for change. The power that was committed to pushing forward the programs destroying the Southern farmer was the one they, in the last instance, expected to achieve a veritable social revolution in the American countryside.
The STFU was caught in this reformist bind from its founding, when it had started simply demanding the US government to enforce the existing laws favoring sharecroppers. And even when the STFU began to make larger demand for the division of the land into the famer co-ops, it continued to view the problem of the sharecropper as one that awaited a decisive intervention on the part of the state. This remained the case even as, following the 1935 purge of progressives within the AAA, the chances of receiving a positive hearing from Washington faded.
The Communists initially tried to avoid this path of trusting in the cooperation of the state, but in the end, they embraced it with perhaps even greater enthusiasm. In the first part of the decade, when the Party focused mainly on Alabama’s black sharecroppers, had organized supporters in an underground manner, and encouraged the creation of armed self defense patrols to ward off police and landlord gangs. The incommensurability of the revolution with present status-quo was kept in the foreground, and the sharecroppers were taught to ultimately rely on themselves to end their oppression. But with the implementation of the Popular Front strategy in 1935, the Party moved away from underground, quasi-guerrilla tactics to the ways of civil society, in order to appeal to a more middle class liberal audience (particularly whites). As the Tenth National Convention of the CPUSA put it, “participation of an awakening Southern intellectual group” was essential. At the same Convention, the CPUSA affirmed the importance on the role of the black middle class, the same black middle class that had often openly opposed the extension of the franchise to their less well off brethren. But above all, this meant rapprochement with the white, progressively inclined bourgeoisie who were looking to break the monopoly of the Southern Democratic old guard. The party thus resigned itself to being a tool within an inter-elite power play.
The Party leadership became convinced of the (potentially) progressive nature of the Democratic Party and began to believe that more or less covertly joining in and influencing New Deal politics in the region would, in the long run, accomplish their goals. Regional focus shifted to pursuing formal liberties in the comparatively safer context of the urban center, which substituted for the far more dangerous struggle for concrete political and economic liberty in the countryside. Voter registration in particular was emphasized, while the movement to win land for the sharecroppers and black self-determination faded away. The ballot box became a black hole for the Party’s energies.
All these movements gravitated inevitably towards supplicating Washington assistance, and the court of national opinion to be kinder to the working class and to protect them from local violence. In the end, they won some short term sympathy, and made the plight of the sharecropper a part of the national dialogue. But neither of their real demands was fulfilled. The FDR administration required the support of the planter elites in control of the Democratic Party in the South, and thus was not interested in paying the political cost of reorganizing the region in a progressive manner. The rural left lost its momentum, and allowed itself to be outflanked and co-opted by the mainstream liberal consensus that was slowly destroying its conditions of existence
Better Dead than Red
A large factor in the demise of the rural movements was the adherence to a stultifying anticommunism by some it main players, particularly the STFU. This increased later in the 30s , as the national economy stabilized and respectable progressive opinion distanced itself from the alleged “totalitarianism” of the USSR. This undermined the possibilities for larger leftist alliances, as the Socialists and liberals shunned their Communist counterparts.
Perhaps ironically, this anticommunism was not a response to the rising radicalism of the communists themselves, who for their part were almost pathetically plaintive for a truce. Southern Communists, like the CPUSA in general, by the mid 1930s was looking for some sort of alliance with more moderate forces. In this, they were following the new line of the Comintern, known as the “Popular Front”, which called for its all communist parties to seek out alliance with the broader left against the rising forces of fascism (fascism in the American context being understood as white chauvinism and New Deal-rejectionist). This new strategy also coincided with their own desire to achieve quicker results on the ground than their half decade of underground work in the region had so far accomplished. To this end, they would even liquidate the virtually entirely black SCU of Alabama in 1936 for the sake of merging within a more respectable organization. Popular Frontism was sometimes fruitful, as the so called Democratic Front’s fights for voting rights, showed, but in the case of the rural battles, it led to disaster. For the Communist desire for a shared agrarian organization was met with delay, than outright hostility, from the other side.
The STFU leadership wanted an American countryside of small private farmers living in co-ops, not collectivization. Nor would they countenance revolution from below to achieve this aim. The STFU did not see the sharecroppers fight as a class struggle that would have to culminate in the complete overthrow of present society. Nor did they view, as the Communists did, the U.S. government as a hostile entity, joined at the hip with the landlord. This meant they put the sharecroppers fight squarely inside the confines of the U.S. political status quo, as opposed to projecting it as a struggle with truly revolutionary implications. In fact, they sometimes viewed themselves as acting as a break on the social upheaval that the “reds” were instigating. This meant that they were more than ready to attack potential allies of the left, not out of convenience, but out of principle.
The STFU board was open to the idea of alliance with the SCU, but its most powerful leaders like H.L Mitchell and J.R Butler successfully worked to sabotage this step. They did not view Communists as comrades, but as barbarous, Un-American”, foreign agents. Mitchell compared CPUSA organizer Donald Henderson to a throwback from the religious fanaticism of the 17thcentury: “Two to three centuries ago, such people as Henderson would have been off hunting witches, and it to be regretted that they are now engaged in attempting to organize farm laborers”.
Thus, the STFU declined to combine with the SCU in 1935. Then they refused to participate in a general cotton picker’s strike later that year, instead holding their own, ultimately weakening the effectiveness of both strikes. Later in the decade they would throw accusation of covert communist affiliation against respected leaders of their own organization, like Claude Williams. They joined the far right in labeling the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) as a Trojan horse for the CPUSA, and called for the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to investigate. More decisively for the future of their organization, they refused to co-operate with CIO because of the presence of Communists in its midst. When the Missouri Highway Demonstration of1939 occurred, the sharecroppers lacked effective leadership as the CIO and the STFU were hamstrung by their feud. After the Missouri demonstration ended in utter defeat, the STFU ceased to exist as an effective union, while the CIO lost interest in the increasingly doomed tenant farmers of the South.
This would all seem to indicate that Dunbar is right in saying that lack of left unity was one of the chief errors of rural movements. But this would seem indicate that lack of unity was the fault of all the factions, when in fact it was the most conservative of the sharecropper’s organizations, the STFU, which was responsible for continuously rejected the possibility of a broader coalition. The fixation by that union’s leadership on avoiding even the most informal alliance with communism led them to sacrifice creating an effective mass movement in favor of one that was toothless against the New Deal liberal establishment.
Nationhood and Imperialism
The situation of the poor Southern farmer, in his abject poverty and servitude represent a profoundly alien reality to what was considered “normal” in the United States. Most radical and liberals agreed tenant farming was an un-American phenomenon that needed to be eradicated. But hardly any would have dared raise the possibility that America as a whole would need to be abolished if the sharecropper would succeed. The toilers would be made to confirm to national ideology, as opposed to national ideology being made to confirm to the consciousnesses of the toiler. Even the most internationalist of the factions, the Communists, was eager to emphasize their patriotic credentials. Class identity was drowned out in a trans-class “American” identity. The ability of to see the United States as a privileged part of global division of labor was to be repressed in order to enable agitating for one’s own share of the plunder. In the case of blacks, there consciousness as a part of a long struggling people scattered throughout out the planet was to be shunned in favor of consciousness as members, or at least members to be, of the American political body. Integration with Washington would require shunning potential bonds with the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. The goals of the oppressed were defined as becoming full fledged imperial citizens, not as allies of the growing global resistance to empire.
The Popular Front period, followed by the great “antifascist” struggle of World War II, further blunted the rejection of the empire, as the US shifted in radical representation from being an exploiter nation to a courageous participant in the anti-fascist struggle. The Communists were ironically the most eager to do this, as they were committed to upholding the interests of the USSR. There had been brief return to the vocal anti-imperialism of the Third Period days in the period when the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (1939-1941) was in effect. But when the “homeland of socialism” was invaded by Germany, this was changed to cheering America as a democratic partner in the heroic struggle against Nazi aggression. While understandable at the time, this campaign of boosterism for the US would weaken their ability to criticize US foreign policy latter on, when the onset of the Cold War would make international war in the name of “Democracy” a permanent feature of American life.
Some socialists and radicals of no party affiliation became conscientious objectors. But even their gestures were often marked by expressions militarism. Howard Kester, for instance, was a conscientious objector, but he led the FSC’s (Fellow Southern Churchmen’s) call for creating an integrated volunteer combat division The preachers of the STFU turned their skills to mobilizing the masses against Hitler instead of the landlords or the AAA. The worthy cause of fighting fascism became the alibi for the assimilation of Southern radical discourse as a more or less loyal voice for US imperialism and militarism.
The End of the Movement
By the time the U.S entered WWII, the SCU was finished, and the STFU was all but dead. The tide of consolidation and mechanization went on, now wholly unimpeded. With no hope that any rural movement could reverse the tide of expropriation, many famers took refuge in the cities, becoming an unskilled reserve army for industry, if they were lucky. Even by 1940, it was already finished. The flight of the poor from the countryside destroyed communities, draining those habitats in which radical movement could flourish. The CIO were all the Communists had congregated moved the focus of its activities westward to the farm laborers of California, while the STFU gave up trying to organize sharecroppers, and instead focused on lining farmers up with war time jobs in the cities The militants and prophets destroyed, albeit with no little regret, the environment that had created them and which they had dedicated so many years of their life in trying to defend. And many of these men left disillusioned with revolution and trade unionism, moving on to civil society activism or conventional political careers to pursue what remained of their ideals.
The federal government’s meager support for a new social order in the South also waned. Amid a rising backlash against the New Deal, the meager aid Washington appropriated for supporting co-ops and rehabilitation disappeared. Any co-ops that existed were quietly shut down. The notion of saving the rural South for its farmers was replaced with official encouragement for immigration out of the region. American progressives had wanted to remake American society, starting with its most backward region, but ultimately they colluded in the destruction of the one class whose grievances had dramatically pointed beyond the status quo.
The onset of the McCarthyite era was just a mild a mop up job of the Southern left that had already been hollowed out from the inside. Compared to the assassinations, torture, and beatings suffered by rural activists in the 30s, it was a pinprick. Notably, most of the people called up before the Committee on Un-American activities no longer subscribed to their former radicalism, and nearly all emphasized their patriotism and religious orthodoxy as opposed to their lack of conformity to national values. Joseph McCarthy was only the final nail in the coffin for an already defeated movement. What resistance there was to the witch hunts was profoundly parochial in scope. Most of the men who were so concerned about freedom of thought and speech for themselves had not stood up before the coming of McCarthy against the deportation of Mexicans in the Southwest, the repression of the Puerto Rican independence movement, or the war against Korea. Nor did they respond by going underground and multiplying their efforts to organize the American working class. They at most stood up for their right to a private conscious, and the privilege of being tolerated by the capitalist state. And soon enough they were, since the state had nothing to fear from those it had already beaten. Thus ended the great eruption of the 30s South, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Epilogue: Southern History and the Ideology of Progress
“The South was the last region of the United States to experience the process, which continues at various speeds over much of the earth. The process is also known as development or progress, and hardly anyone who might begin this book does not know its course. So there are few surprises in the ending of this story. ”
The quote above is the conventional view of the South’s entrance into American capitalist modernity. It was an event, from this perspective, that was inevitable and straightforward, if not necessarily benevolent fully benevolent in its results. And it is not just garden variety liberal historians like Kirby and Mertz that share this view. H. L Mitchell of the STFU in his later years would say that revolution was never possible “because there have always been plenty of jobs, plenty of free land and things of that sort”. And Mitchell, for his part, was glad that this was so. The South was destined to be assimilated into the way of life of the rest of the nation. The rise of private agribusiness and the full integration of the local working class as cooperative members of the economic system would have happened anyway, regardless of anyone’s efforts.
Part of what is lost in this fatalism is the uncanny strangeness of the South’s position before WWII. The South was a little piece of the Third World within the US. Its conditions were more comparable to the colonized peasant nations of China or Vietnam than the rest of the nation. Like them, the South was economically underdeveloped, dominated by interests of the metropolitan North. Instead of developing its own industries, it was made the captive market of Yankee manufactured goods and a major producer of cheap raw materials for the rest of nations. But this state of underdevelopment paradoxically made it potentially a particularly lucrative place to invest, if only the right conditions could be created. Free of a buildup of older infrastructure or factories, the South could rapidly advance with the latest technology for the maximum profit. But at the same time, as it has happened always in the course of capitalism’s history, this underdevelopment was a state ripe for insurrection. For in such circumstances, modern technology and organization is combined with minds not domesticated by the disenchanted normalcy of capitalist life in the core of the world system.
The most revolutionary section of the nation turned out to be not the most educated, culturally progressive, and developed part, but the most backwards. Southern radicalism was the alliance of Northern imported ideologies with a local culture of intense piety, strong communal values, and familial loyalty: “They believe in the tenants of Isaiah and of Jesus and of Marx, and they are by their deeds social revolutionaries with a religious drive that keeps them in the midst of battle”. Unschooled black and white ministers were the backbone of the STFU. Some of it most noted leaders were preachers of the Gospel as well as of revolution: Ward Rogers, Claude Williams, Owen Whitfield, etc. The Communist Party in the South in particular is an interesting case of a hyper-modernist leadership having a symbiotic (parasitic?) relation with masses that were, culturally and socially, firmly conservative in many ways. In the imagination of the black cadre of the Communist SCU, Jesus marched with Lenin, the USSR was the new Ethiopia, and the cadences of the Bible mixed easily with the slogans of the Comintern. Their faith gave to the alien formulas of orthodox Marxism a mundane concreteness and, at the same time, a burning prophetic intensity. Religion provided a perspective which condemned without reservation the existing state of things as sin, unalloyed by narratives of progress which would seek to justify the privations of capitalism as being for the ultimate sake of emancipation. They were too unenlightened to be fooled by liberalism.
It was the lack of such a perspective of distance from modernity which makes even sympathetic historians of the sharecropper movement cede victory, in the end, to the powers that crushed it. If defeats happened, there was a higher immanent rationality of history at work that will recompense for the sorrows of past times with higher stages of development in the future. Capitalism, even when it cuts downs, always sows anew. Everything will harmonize in the end, they assume, even if elegiac tears may be shed in the meantime. The sense that there were possibilities for liberation that were unrepeatable, that were lost, and which will never be compensated for in the grand unfolding of “progress”, is absent from their work.
If we are to adequately write about past modern struggles, the perspective should assume that capitalism is always counter-revolution, even when it comes bearing gifts. When it wins, it kills possibilities for resistance, even as it builds new things in the debris. Its triumph anywhere, in anyplace, is the death of one more possibility of building a world beyond it. This is not to reduce history writing into a chronicle of woe. It is to make it an instrument for fighting back against the complacent hyper refined barbarism of the present, which would prefer the evils it builds upon to be hidden in a vague haze of forgetfulness. Memory of those who have suffered and died should become a spur for action, and a goad for thought, which would otherwise collude with the officially mandated oblivion.
Robin D.G Kelly. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) , 97
Ibid.166
Paul. E Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978),136
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959 (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 109-110
Ibid.120
Ibid. 126
Ibid.170
Ibid.165
Ibid. 34
Ibid.173
Ibid.182
Mary G. Robinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the rural South, 1920-1927 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 56
Paul. E Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 220
Paul. E Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 34
Robin D.G Kelly, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990),184
Ibid. 183
Ibid.177
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959, (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 133
Robin D. G Kelly. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) , 186
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959, (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 185
Paul E.Mertz, Paul New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 179
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959 (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 207
Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1987), 1
H. L Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in the Land (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 22
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959, (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1981), 110
Ibid.90
Bibliography
E.Mertz, Paul New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978
D.G Kelly, Robin Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990
Kirby, Jack, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920-1960. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1987
P. Dunbar, Anthony, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981
Mitchell, H. L, Mean Things Happening in the Land. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 2008
G. Robinson, Mary, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the rural South, 1920-1927. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007
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