A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas.

A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas. By Jeannie M. Whayne (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. xvi plus 324pp.).

Remarkably, it has been over twenty-five years since the publication of a monograph on the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU), the Arkansas-based rural union that Jeannie Whayne justifiably calls "the most significant agricultural protest movement in the twentieth century [U.S.]" (5). Donald Grubbs' Cry From the Cotton appeared in 1971. Since then the STFU has been featured in Anthony Dunbar's neglected account of the religious radicals who challenged the shibboleths of the interwar south, Against the Grain (1981); Robert Martins 1991 biography of Howard Kester, a Christian socialist and STFU organizer; and Jack Temple Kirby's survey of the impact of modernization on the twentieth century South, Rural Worlds Lost (1987), among others.

Whayne's book is of interest then, because it provides a renewed glimpse at the sharecroppers' organization. Although her work adds little to the basic narrative of the STFU's rise and fall during the 1930s, unlike any other account, hers roots the union in the local history of which it was a distinctive part, not just the agricultural programs of the New Deal or the creation of the modem labor movement. This proves both the strength and weakness of A New Plantation South.

The STFU has remained something of a puzzle for historians. Led by a curious alliance of white socialists and black preachers, an interracial group of powerless sharecroppers and farm tenants mounted a credible challenge to some of the most powerful agricultural interests in the twentieth century South and their Washington allies who administered the New Deal farm programs. Poinsett County, in an isolated corner of northeastern Arkansas, was home to this remarkable organization. But why? Most of Whayne's book, devoted as it is to peeling back layers of forty years of history in Poinsett, constitutes an effort to answer this question.

Her analysis operates on two levels, which at times cut against one another. Many readers looking for a history of the STFU will have to hack their way through the dense social history that takes up the first half of Whayne's narrative. The Arkansas delta remained untrammeled wilderness twenty years after the close of the Civil War, and Whayne devotes a lot of space to discussions of disputed land claims, conflicts over drainage projects, and political rivalries between "Ridge"(that is high ground) and "Delta" factions of Poinsett's farmers and merchants. The problem here is that the finest grained detail about a very small, rural county--only 21,000 people inhabited Poinsett by 1920--makes it very difficult for Whayne to encompass a grander scale. Given that the book's climax describes a showdown between sharecroppers and planters, one might imagine that class constituted a major fissure in the county's history. But from Whayne's account it often appears that political conflict followed ecological lines in Poinsett County, as Ridge, Prairie, and Delta factions competed for political influence.

That said, once Whayne does get to the 1930s, the impact of New Deal farm programs on Delta agriculture and class relations, and the emergence of the STFU, her unsurpassed knowledge of Poinsett's local history allows her to challenge some long-held misapprehensions about sharecropper politics in this region. In 1900, more than half the farmers in the Arkansas delta owned their own land; only twenty years later, this figure had shrunk to 7 per cent. Defining as sharecroppers those laborers who did not own mules (determined by tax registers), Whayne finds that in 1930 84 per cent of African American tenants fell into this lowest rung of the South's agricultural ladder. But did this imply that agricultural labor in the region had been proletarianized, as many historians assume? While it is true, as Harold Woodman has shown, that these landless sharecroppers legally had no claim on the crop they grew (in contrast to share tenants), this did not transform them into wage laborers, as he and others maintain. To the contrary, as Whayne suggests, regardless of their relative standing before law, "tenants and sharecroppers saw themselves as independent farmers in copartnership with planters"(199), and rejected their treatment as disposable wage hands to be evicted at the landlord's command. Moreover, the delta's plantation workers "did not labor in gangs for large centralized operations," (8) as most historians of the STFU have implied. Instead, working small plots of land with family labor, tenants and sharecroppers in northeastern Arkansas "enjoyed a sense of independence and detachment" (8) from their landlords.

This account of the social organization of labor has profound implications for understanding the character of the STFU as a rural social movement able to mobilize an interracial constituency. Faced in the New Deal era with the intrusion of highly capitalized farming, the consolidation of landholdings under the auspices of agricultural recovery programs, and their own impending transformation into wage hands, "black and white tenants and sharecroppers took a final stand against proletarianization," Whayne concludes. Yet she never claims too much for the union's premature interracialism, recognizing that "blacks and whites created their own separate islands of stability" (196), even while they interacted on a daily basis and experienced a "shared hardship" (197) as they came tumbling down the agricultural ladder together. Attuned to the STFU's ability to transcend racial animosity with common class interests, Whayne also admits "one key to its appeal" as it spread "was its decision not to demand that all local affiliates adopt the interracial approach." (208)

One of the conundrums of the STFU's resistance to proletarianization was that this rested on the defense of a plantation system often held up as the most brutal example of exploitation. But it was also "a way of life and a place within a culture that [sharecroppers] cherished." (217) Evictions and the transition to seasonal day labor proved a threat to the stability of this rural culture, though Whayne unfortunately gives little content to the "customs and rituals" sharecroppers and tenants were reluctant to abandon.

Moreover, given the density of her locally based research, it comes as a surprise that Whayne does little to identify STFU members or to correlate membership with economic status. We never learn who joined the union, or why, or who did not; these remain important questions for future research into the STFU. Whayne does, however, show how women were central to the union's strength, bolstering community solidarity with their literacy, economic activities, and church groups. And, whereas outside agitators like Howard Kester regarded delta tenants as "unchurched," Whayne uncovers a vibrant religious life in the community; Tyronza township, for example, had one church for every 277 inhabitants.

Whayne offers one other striking revision. Commonly blamed for stimulating evictions by taking cropland out of production, in Poinsett County the New Deal crop reduction program ultimately failed, in part because even while the AAA paid farmers to reduce acreage, other government loans helped bring more delta land under cultivation. Thus "the federal government made further exploitation likely and the destruction of the tenancy and sharecropping system a relity." (218) Evictions coupled with expanding acreage meant that in the 20 years between 1935 and 1955 the number of farm laborers divorced entirely from the land they worked in Poinsett County increased from a little over 1000 to nearly 10,000. Unable to check this transformation, by this measure the STFU proved a dismal failure, as "tenants and sharecroppers had no place on the neoplantations that emerged in the postwar period." (220)

For now, Whayne's book will stand out as the most original interpretation of this tragic process and the sharecroppers' Sisyphean resistance to it. But she has only prepared the ground. Exceptionally well-documented on 60 reels of microfilmed papers, the full social, cultural, and racial history of the STFU still remains a fertile field for scholars of the twentieth-century rural South.