Agrarian Radicalism

AGRARIAN RADICALISM. The rural radical movements, rarely outright Marxist not often socialist in any explicit way, have often linked up with the Left by virtue of common enemies and, to a lesser degree, similar aspirations. This ambiguous relationship has hidden a pattern, more usual in labor and reform movements, of agrarian leaders’ sophistication in Marxist concepts and has obscured the disproportionately influential role sometimes played by a nucleus of Left activists in rural causes.

The essentially conservative character of most agrarian dissent, demanding the preservation of existing small-property relations, could be seen as well in contemporary artisanal movements, both immigrant and (especially) native-born, through most of the nineteenth century. Rural and urban workers alike sought to restrain the destruction being wrought by burgeoning capitalism, not only of economic opportunities, but of republican virtues that seemed to make America a unique site. Irredentist demands for the return of stolen lands, by Native Americans and by Mexican Americans, generally followed a different and much less successful course, isolated by a lack of sympathy from the vast majority of white Americans. Yet taken together, the various rural moments of unrest and violent uprisings constitute the most frequent resistance to rising capitalism.

The Civil War accelerated the growth of industrialism enormously and simultaneously made possible or politically necessary the partial achievement of a long-standing radical demand through the enactment of the 1862 Homestead Act. As envisioned by printer-agitator George Henry Evans and incorporated in early Republican Party platforms, such an act would encourage emigration from the cities, thereby raising wages, and create a formidable small-property democratic stratum. In practice, the granting of huge tracts to railroads along with other speculators and the rapid monopolization of banking and transportation limited the farmer’s influence and subjected him to severe exploitation. In the post-Reconstruction “New South,” Black and white sharecroppers, still landless in any meaningful sense, faced the same problems and worse.

Out of this dilemma emerged a series of agrarian self-help associations, the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance being the most prominent. The Grange (or Patrons of Husbandry), founded in 1867, grew rapidly during the 1870s into a honeycomb of social, cultural, and cooperative marketing and supply operations. While its ban on politics and its exclusion of Blacks vitiated any militant role, the Grange prepared many individuals for other actions. The Farmers’ Alliance developed during the 1880s with a speed unprecedented in US protest movements. It sponsored, at the local and regional level but especially in the South, a “subtreasury” plan whereby every county with sufficient agricultural production of basic grains or commodities such as cotton would have a central warehouse sponsored by the government that would issue receipts for farmers’ products at a fair price and with an honest grading of quality. As a few contemporary critics have noted, the arguments of the prolific Alliance press often paralleled Marxian thought in identifying key exploiters if not in advocating any collective resolution.

True to the finest traditions of American radicalism, the Alliance went further in relation to Blacks and women than any other contemporary movement, labor or socialist movements included. The “Colored Alliance” appeared in 1888 and spread widely through the South, although probably never near the claimed peak of more than a million members in sixteen states. To a greater degree than among whites, within this movement the effort at economic cooperation predominated, difficult work carried on sub rosa in large part. Its story therefore remains shadowy and by no means fully explored. Its most dramatic direct action occurred with a strike of black cotton-pickers in September 1891, inciting a wave of repression that ended the Colored Alliance. But the political ramifications went further, surfacing in a variety of political campaigns that promised an end to lynching and, in some cases, embraced full Black participation in government. In all, this was the most important movement of Black Southerners between Reconstruction and the civil rights era.

Leading Populist women arose, generally from small towns or cities within farming states, to become leading orators and organizers, chapter secretaries, and writer-editors. They argued for the “cooperative household,” where, their common oppressions removed, all members of the family would share the work then done by women. They also established a critique of male privilege as a ruinous principle of American capitalism. Establishing their own newspaper, the Farmer’s Wife, and their own National Women’s Alliance in 1891, they viewed their participation as crucial to success (“Put 1,000 women lecturers in the field and the revolution is here,” as a Farmer’s Wife maxim went). Mary Elizabeth Lease (1850–1933), who made her fame calling on Kansas farmers to “raise less corn and more hell,” traveled through a variety of movements to become an idol of ordinary Populists and a national leader of their movement. At the end of the 1890s, she joined the Socialist Labor Party for a brief period.

Caught between a drought that persisted through most of the 1890s and continuing low prices, the Farmers’ Alliance (now increasingly known as the Populists, or People’s Party) elected numerous state legislators, along with a few governors and congressional representatives. The Alliance majority favored, although with considerable ambivalence, solidarity not only of women and blacks but also between farmers and workers. By 1892, then, leaders proffered offers of unity to left-leaning urban coalitions and to the waning Knights of Labor, as well as to the fast-growing but politically ambiguous Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

This dramatic bid failed owing to mutual distrust and deep conflicts of interest. Immigrant socialist activists looked with abhorrence on the temperance movement, many of whose supporters sought the illegalization of alcohol; besides, farmers sought higher prices for commodities, while workers needed lower prices or higher wages. The “Omaha Platform” of 1892 attempted to paper over these differences, calling for the subtreasury, government reclamation of lands held on speculation, government ownership of railroads and telegraph services, support for organized labor, the silver standard, and opposition to “any subsidy or national aid to any private corporation for any purpose.” Incidents of racial solidarity in the South, and of material support for labor strikes and movements of the unemployed, encouraged hopes that a grand revolutionary change was close at hand.

But over the following few years, the Populist movement disintegrated with alarming speed and thoroughness. Apparent proximity to power emphasized racial, class, and regional differences. Large farmers in particular sought only minor adjustments in social relations. Even some of the most apparently radical figures (“Sockless Jerry” Simpson, for instance) eagerly supported US overseas military and economic expansion in the name of wider markets. Common cause with blacks, let alone racial egalitarianism, proved difficult to sustain. Western Populists in particular enthused over the “free” minting of silver, ostensibly to increase the circulation of money and ease agrarian debts but also incidentally favoring silver-rich districts. In the 1896 presidential campaign, assembled Populists first turned in the direction of railroad-strike hero Eugene Debs, but closed their major political protest by accepting the Democratic Party nominee, reformer William Jennings Bryan. The defeat of Bryan by William McKinley punctured hopes of ordinary Populists and their many radical supporters, rural and urban, of gaining a foothold for change within the political system.

The collapse of Populism and the formation of the Socialist Party in 1901 afforded many former Populists (albeit only a small portion of the Populist movement, mostly in the Southwest and West) an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot that bound them to dreams of merely reforming capitalism. Instrumental in this development was the Coming Nation—and its successor, the Appeal to Reason—which reached tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands who had passed through agrarian radicalism.

That a vast socialist constituency should be organized through an acerbic, folksy newspaper rather than a political movement was characteristic of American radicalism. In a real sense, the lecturers, conventions, and press of the abolitionist and woman’s rights movements a half-century earlier had been the true precursors of southwestern socialism. “One Hoss Philosopher” J. A. Wayland, land speculator and entrepreneurial publisher of the Coming Nation and the Appeal to Reason, was famous for his sales-talk of socialist ideas to strangers. The two newspapers served as an extension of this logic. He regarded the victims of capitalism as contributing to their own enslavement, and often said so directly in his column; abolishing wage-slavery and its variants, he believed, would complete the task begun with the American Revolution and advanced with the abolition of Black slavery. While the Appeal supported the Socialist Party and urged readers to enlist, it did not focus on inner-party affairs, controversies, or (with a few exceptions such as Eugene Debs, perhaps the most beloved of all living beings to Appeal readers) personalities. It raked the muck of capitalist-created misery, and through a chatty style pointed a way out in the promise of a cooperative society.

The area around the Appeal’s home territory of Girard, Kansas, offered a striking example of mixed semi-rural socialist constituencies. Known as the Little Balkans, southeastern Kansas had a major coalfield with half a dozen immigrant nationalities, at least one ethnic socialist periodical, in Italian, and a powerful United Mine Workers socialist contingent. Beyond the coal patches, pastoral and small-town life dominated the scene. Once established, the Appeal Building, “Temple of the Revolution,” was the most prominent feature of the town. Here, socialist and middle-American values (with such characteristic tangents as spiritualism and vegetarianism) found a common meeting ground. Too rarely, however, did socialists notice that the most natural proponents of the synthesis were themselves middle-aged, drawing values from a world already disappearing.

The Socialist Party developed considerable strength in many rural areas, not only in Kansas, but also in Oklahoma, parts of Texas, Arkansas, the Dakotas, and Minnesota. Typically centered in the small towns, where farmers, coal miners, tradesmen, railroad workers, and others shared culture and exchanged information, the Socialist Party local upheld education, in the republican spirit, as training ordinary people to attain their own and common interests. Vast encampments modeled upon the revival-tent form drew thousands, sometimes for almost a week at a time, to listen to socialist messages and be entertained by socialist musicians. Contesting local, state, and national political power, while important, was perceived as a means more than a goal of their mass explanatory effort amid crisis-ridden and doomed capitalism.

Ironically, the Socialist Party national leaders themselves never resolved what the Germans called the “Agarfrage,” whether and how future agrarian production would be state- or private-owned. Farm constituents, especially as they grew toward their political apex in 1910–1912, fervently opposed collectivist schemes, eclectically supporting ostensibly “Left” and “Right” positions on various questions within the socialist movement. By and large, the agrarian leaders remained on their own, blessed by a sense of autonomy and the ability to reach formulations acceptable to their constituents.

By 1904, Oklahoma Socialists had scored their first political victory, notably in a mining town of the Choctaw Nation, with the election of a mayor. Many such triumphs followed. By 1910, indeed, Oklahoma had the strongest Socialist Party base in the United States, some 5,482 members, 800 more than New York State. Texans, with far fewer members, could boast of a vigorous press, including the Hallettsville Rebel, with more than 20,000 circulation. Two years later, at the political flood tide, Oklahoma Socialists polled more than 40,000 votes, 16.6 percent of the state’s total. Louisiana added more than 5,000, Arkansas more than 8,000, and Texas more than 25,000.

Socialists were limited by legal disfranchisement of Black and white small farmers alike and were virtually crushed by waves of repression that increased after 1912. Especially in Oklahoma, socialists struggled to resist Black disfranchisement as they called for women’s enfranchisement. Direct action by desperate tenants, whose plight most resembled that of the urban proletariat, both heightened the importance of the socialist movement and threatened it with disaster. Oscar Ameringer and a battalion of other socialist editor-agitators participated widely in such organizations as the Oklahoma Farmers Union, the Texas Land Renters’ League, and the Working Class Union, but these could not overcome the enormous power of bankers and landlords. Repression spread, lynchings rose, and vigilantism became the rule in many counties as socialists were publicly identified with banditry and virtually outlawed.

The Green Corn Rebellion of 1917, which pitted radical Oklahoma farmers against the selective service system, ended in a military debacle and an open opportunity for government action. Participants received long prison sentences, and the Socialist Party in Oklahoma, while retaining selective strengths, never regained its formidable status as threat to the two-party system.

Meanwhile, World War I fell hardest upon the rural Socialist Party press. The US attorney general’s suspension of second-class mailing permits, along with a wave of patriotism upon entry into the war and Woodrow Wilson’s liberal declarations, destroyed the vast majority of socialist papers. In another sense, the mostly middle-aged rural socialist population finished out its activism in a bold expression of antiwar sentiments. The next generation, less appalled by the “electric light towns” (a rural socialist phrase for the county seats) than fascinated by sophistication, had abandoned the appeals to republican virtues anyway.

In some regions, the radical agrarian movement gained new strengths, however. To some degree, the war had alienated rural German and Scandinavian stock from the political mainstream. Secondly, more workable forms of reformist radicalism could be created in the absence of a viable socialist movement. In North Dakota the Non-Partisan League, founded by A. C. Townley in 1915, soon took over the state government by political maneuvering and instituted a state bank and state grain elevator. In Minnesota a Farmer-Labor Party burst forth to answer the severe decline in farm prices and to accommodate militant populations (such as formerly proletarian Finnish workers, removed by blacklist to rural districts). In Wisconsin the Progressive Party of Robert La Follette lost the support of the urban middle classes but salvaged its prospects by a shift to rural populations and ethnic workers.
The Farmer-Labor Party ventures of the 1920s afforded Communists important new opportunities, and the Socialist Party a last major opportunity, at influencing large rural populations. The Communists gathered pockets of support in Minnesota and such spots as Sheridan County, Montana, where

had been a left-wing socialist weekly with a strong local base of support, and its editor, Charles “Red Flag” Taylor (1884–1967), had become both a Communist and a state legislator. Communists, hamstrung by internal party factionalism and by dependence upon their allies in the Chicago Federation of Labor, resolved first to lead an avowedly radical Farmer-Labor Party (with Taylor as chair) and then virtually abandoned the effort as the La Follette candidacy gathered steam. Opposing La Follette’s Progressive Party run, they lost key contacts and most of the non-ethnic support they had gathered. Socialists, on the other hand, threw all their remaining energies into the La Follette campaign, but emerged with little to show for their effort.

Perhaps the greatest Left triumph and defeat in the entire rural sector was the Cooperative Central Exchange (CCE), centered in the heavily Finnish iron-mining region around Superior, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota. Working outward to the small towns of the region, the “cooperators” established some fifty-six stores by 1921 and created their own training school and an educational department that taught Marxism as a facet of the search for a cooperative world. At their peak toward the end of the 1920s, the CCE, the largest single cooperative network in the United States, fell into the miasma of Communist factionalism and the larger reality of Party insistence upon ultimate political controls of hitherto largely autonomous efforts. In 1930, after an overwhelming defeat, the Communist cooperators withdrew their eighteen stores and established their own small-scale network, which dissolved itself in Popular Front days.

Communists thus entered the Great Depression with only a fraction of their former rural influence. Their main asset, Ella Reeve (“Mother”) Bloor, had relocated to be with her new husband, a Left farm leader, and immediately set out upon speaking tours of the desperately impoverished rural districts. Joined by young activists Harold Ware and Lem Harris, Bloor and Charlie Taylor revived the United Farmers League, launching new branches in Montana and the Dakotas.

This small Communist contingent existed within a network of newer farm protest leaders and institutions, radical in immediate demands but far from Marxist. Locked in Third Period logic,Communists found the demands of other organizations, let alone the organizations themselves, extremely difficult to endorse, and correspondingly, tempting to attack, however self-isolating the result. The Farm News Letter, Lem Harris’s cautious alternative to the harsh tones of Producers News, took more constructive ground in setting forward a program of farm “holidays” from mortgage payments and federal price supports. Working in a virtual Popular Front manner, Harris and Ware intervened in the series of major conferences farmers themselves held. Their new paper, the Farmers National Weekly, had a brief but impressive success.

The failure of a national farm strike and the beginnings of federal payments badly undercut the rural movement by 1934, and the more sectarian Communist wing took control of the apparatus, ironically just as the Popular Front had begun to take hold in Communist strategy generally. A turnaround brought the Farmers National Committee for Action, directed by Harris, into new friendships and alliances, especially with the antiwar sentiments from many non-Marxist rural activists. The Producers News folded in 1937, but the Farmers National Weekly gained supporters, as Communists battled against Father Coughlin’s conservative following (who supported William Lemke in the 1936 election). Communists found a haven in the National Farmers Union (NFU), founded in 1902 and functioning as a New Deal–oriented umbrella protest movement. Hard-core support remained concentrated in the upper Midwest, disproportionately Finnish in character. Communist participation in Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party, severely damaged when Elmer Benson lost his reelection bid as governor in 1938, remained a factor in state politics for a decade.

The Socialist Party played a notable role, briefly but poignantly, in support of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, led by H. L. Mitchell. Reclaiming an abandoned socialist political base and building a unique biracial tenant organization, Mitchell won a few important victories for improvement of conditions. Unlike the southern Communists who participated in a shootout at Reeltown, Alabama, Mitchell (sometimes directly helped by Norman Thomas as visiting speaker) chose a more careful course, by garnering federal support for civil liberties. Even the Trotskyist movement made a contribution to the agrarian struggle, through Ernest R. McKinney’s and C. L. R. James’s participation in a southeast Missouri tenant farmers’ action of 1942. The Communist-led United Cannery, Agricultural and Allied Workers (UCAPAWA), a sometime STFU rival and after World War II, the foremost vehicle for organizing Mexican and Mexican American workers in the West, carried on the struggle despite strikebreaking by the Teamsters among others. Its mostly failed efforts led to the later crusades of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers for many years with the same Teamster rivals.

By World War II, the Left had acquired another ally, the New York State-based Dairy Farmers Union, and its paper, Farmers Defender. As in the NFU, to which the Dairy Farmers Union affiliated, the “united front” brought a strong sense of unity, which Roosevelt’s death and the emergence of the Cold War thoroughly eclipsed. For a time, the NFU ardently resisted the drift. Identified as Left-linked, it was subject to many attacks, and (to the surprise of Communists as well as others) took no official position of support for the Henry Wallace-Glen Taylor Progressive Party ticket in 1948. A modest recovery of Left strength within the NFU fell to pieces with the Korean War.

The World War II also had another effect. Mobilizing manpower and providing new avenues of economic opportunity, it scattered familiar Left constituencies, drawing many radical farmers and their descendants into the armed forces or into cities from which they did not return to the land.
What remained of Left influence rested largely in the hands of Iowa’s Fred Stover, longtime NFU activist and for a time in the 1940s the organization’s foremost leader. His opposition to the Korean War was the last of many defeats within the organization. His new National Farm Organization of the mid-1950s contained a handful of now mostly middle-aged radicals, the monthly Farm News a final radical outpost. Patterned after the Holiday movement twenty years earlier (an organized refusal to market crops at ruinous prices), the National Farm Organization found no strategy for the direct, cooperative marketing that it espoused.

The 1960s brought new and different insurgencies to Black southern and Chicano western districts. But most later radical agricultural organizations—with a total potential constituency of less than 5 percent of the US population—experienced only sporadic successes against low prices and the steady advance of agribusiness. Organic farmers’ cooperatives wove together networks of quiet base-building, and elsewhere smaller collections of progressives sought to hold on to a share of the increasingly commercialized “health food” market. Meanwhile, the farm economy worsened, especially during the later 1980s, and a chiliastic (often anti-Semitic) armed Right had more success than the Left in responding to the fears of small farmers. New patterns of radicalism, led by such mainstream figures as former Texas commissioner of agriculture Jim Hightower and by Jesse Jackson, had only begun by that time to assume political-economic forms sometimes surprisingly similar to the old cooperative schemes of the Farmers’ Alliance.

The National Sustainable Agricultural Coalition (NSAC), founded in 2009, brought together more than a hundred member groups engaged in a wide array of activities. The coalition became all the more necessary as the ongoing corporate domination of farmland and the farmer coincided with a political shift of small town and rural areas across much of the country into the hands of a more deeply conservative, more openly racist Republican Party. New political opportunities opened with a growing gap in the traditional hostility of farmers toward environmental regulation. Top-soil depletion continued to undercut productivity and meanwhile the owners of farmland began to look with interest at potential federal investments in soil as “carbon sinks,” with ample compensation for owners removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere back into the ground. The elusive “silver bullet” threatened to push aside the wider focus of political efforts of the NSAC on sustainable practices like the strengthening of cooperatives, but the arrival of global warming underlined the necessity for new ways to farm the land and new strategies for progressives.

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