Arkansas’s Gilded Age

The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest

Matthew Hild

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780826221667
• eBook ISBN: 9780826274182
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book is the first devoted entirely to an examination of working-class activism, broadly defined as that of farmers' organizations, labor unions, and (often biracial) political movements, in Arkansas during the Gilded Age. On one level, Hild argues for the significance of this activism in its own time: had the Arkansas Democratic Party not resorted to undemocratic, unscrupulous, and violent means of repression, the Arkansas Union Labor Party would have taken control of the state government in the election of 1888. He also argues that the significance of these movements lasted beyond their own time, their influence extending into the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union of the 1930s, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and even today's Farmers' Union and the United Mine Workers of America.

The story of farmer and labor protest in Arkansas during the late nineteenth century offers lessons relevant to contemporary
working-class Americans in what some observers have called the "new Gilded Age."

NOTES

Introduction

1. Jeremy Brecher, Strike!, rev. 3rd ed. (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2014), 369–75; Gil Troy, The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), 124, 126, 135, 136–38, 149–50, 167–71, 177, 179–81.

2. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1873). The hyphenated spelling of “to-day” in the subtitle was common at the time of the book’s publication.

3. Claire Goldstene, The Struggle for America’s Promise: Equal Opportunity at the Dawn of Corporate Capital (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 11–15; William A. Link, Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 289, 293; Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877, updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015), 46–47.

4. Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 50–53.

5. Recent studies that examine producerism include Goldstene, Struggle for America’s Promise, and Benjamin F. Alexander, Coxey’s Army: Popular Protest in the Gilded Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

6. McMath, American Populism, 52, 170–71; T. V. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, 1859 to 1889 (Columbus, Ohio: Excelsior Publishing House, 1889), 245.

I. The Roots of Discontent

1. Thomas A. DeBlack, With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861–1874 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003), 201.

2. Ibid., 216–24 (quotation on 224).

3. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 69.

4. Conservative southern Democrats used the term “redemption” to describe their takeover of state governments from Republicans between 1869 and 1877, implying that they had “saved” the South from Republicans and “black rule.” Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8; David Emory Shi and George Brown Tindall, America: A Narrative History, brief 10th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 607.

5. Carl H. Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 1874–1929 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), 5, 21 (quotation); Stanford University, “Per Capita Income in the United States: 1880–1910,” Railroaded, accessed October 20, 2016, http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/railroaded/gallery/interactive-visualizations/capita-income-united-states-1880-1910.

6. Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 25–26; Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 168, 169.

7. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Session of the Arkansas State Grange, Patrons of Husbandry, Held at Little Rock, January 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26, 1877 (Little Rock: Webb and Burrows, 1877), 6.

8. Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 6–7; Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 169–70; The National Economist Almanac 1890: National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union Hand-Book (Washington, DC: National Economist Print, 1890), 71; Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 210; W. Scott Morgan, History of the Wheel and Alliance, and the Impending Revolution, 3rd ed. (Hardy, Ark.: s.p., 1891; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 56–57.

9. John M. Wheeler, “The People’s Party in Arkansas, 1891–1896” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1975), 35–36.

10. Department of Agriculture. Miscellaneous. Special Report No. 2. Proceedings of a Convention of Agriculturalists Held at the Department of Agriculture, January 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, and 29, 1883. (Second Convention.) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 56–57.

11. Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 51.

12. Granville D. Davis, “The Granger Movement in Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 4 (Winter 1945): 340–41 (quotation on 341); O. H. Kelley, Origins and Progress of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry in the United States; A History from 1866 to 1873 (Philadelphia: A. Wagenseller, 1875), 389, 396.

13. Davis, “Granger Movement,” 342–43; Fite, Cotton Fields No More, 51.

14. Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 14; Theodore Saloutos, “The Grange in the South, 1870–1877,” Journal of Southern History 19 (Nov. 1953): 476–77 (quotation on 477); Story L. Matkin-Rawn, “‘We Fight for the Rights of Our Race’: Black Arkansans in the Era of Jim Crow” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin—Madison, 2009), 39.

15. Davis, “Granger Movement,” 347.

16. Ibid., 349–50.

17. Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 78.

18. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Session of the Arkansas State Grange, 24.

19. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 214.

20. Davis, “Granger Movement,” 347, 349; Wheeler, “People’s Party in Arkansas,” 83 (quotation).

21. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Session of the Arkansas State Grange, 4.

22. New York Times, February 12, 1874.

23. C. Fred Williams et al., eds., A Documentary History of Arkansas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1984), 132–34 (includes a reprint of an article from the Crawford [Ark.] Bulletin, June 25, 1874).

24. Utica (N.Y.) Herald, n.d., quoted in the Marietta (Ga.) Journal, June 20, 1873.

25. Davis, “Granger Movement,” 351.

26. Ibid., 349, 351–52; Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 18; Jeannie M. Whayne et al., Arkansas: A Narrative History, 2nd ed. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013), 261.

27. On the decline of the Grange in Arkansas and elsewhere during the mid- to late 1870s, see Davis, “Granger Movement,” 347–51; Whayne et al., Arkansas, 277; Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Session of the Arkansas State Grange, 4, 9–11; Saloutos, “Grange in the South,” 486–87; D. Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867–1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974), 35–40. For an example of corruption in the cooperative enterprises of the Arkansas Grange, see Clark Grange #232, Pope County, Arkansas, Records, Organizational Materials, Committee Reports, August 21, 1875, microfilm, Arkansas State Archives, Little Rock.

28. Hild, Greenbackers, 20–21, 30; Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Pulaski, Jefferson, Lonoke, Faulkner, Grant, Saline, Perry, Garland, and Hot Springs Counties, Arkansas (Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing, 1889), 438–39.

29. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 32.

30. Judith Barjenbruch, “The Greenback Political Movement: An Arkansas View,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 36 (Summer 1977): 108.

31. Little Rock Daily Arkansas Gazette, September 13, 1876.

32. Barjenbruch, “Greenback Political Movement,” 108; Wheeler, “People’s Party in Arkansas,” 98.

33. On the Grange and currency reform, see Hild, Greenbackers, 21–22.

34. M. Langley Biegert, “Legacy of Resistance: Uncovering the History of Collective Action by Black Agricultural Workers in Central East Arkansas from the 1860s to the 1930s,” Journal of Social History 32 (Fall 1998): 78–79 (quotation on 76); Grif Stockley, Ruled By Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the Present (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009), 49–50 (second quotation on 49).

35. Whayne et al., Arkansas, 237, 241–46; Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 125–26; Randy Finley, “Arkansas,” in Ency...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. The Roots of Discontent
• II. Building the Foundations of Rebellion
• III. The Great Upheaval
• IV. The Union Labor Party
• V. Populism and the Depression of the 1890s
• VI. Twentieth-Century Legacies
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index