Menu:


Links:

Excerpt from: "Southern Farm Labor Unions: Noble Failures or Resonant Legacies?"

During the 1930s, several Southern farm labor unions formed to challenge unfair policies of landowners and New Deal agencies. Although they were only loosely connected to one another, each of these groups (including the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU), the Louisiana Farmers' Union (LFU), and the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union (SCU)) shared vocal opposition to landowners and New Deal policies, a progressive outlook, interracial makeup, and other similar qualities. The diversity of these groups and their valiant aims have attracted the interest and sympathy of many historians. From the 1960s until today, this attraction has tempted scholars to present the unions as viable alternatives to the New Deal or missed opportunities to change society. The ways in which this sympathy has been presented has evolved, and this evolution underscores the developments

"...recent histories, following broad trends in historical theory, have studied the [Share Croppers' Union and Louisiana Farmers' Union] to argue that their labor protests carried cultural meanings that transcend concepts of political success or failure."

in social history and cultural history over several decades. Earlier histories focusing on the STFU, like many social histories of the 1960s, emphasize class conflict and present the group as a noble failure. Re-periodicizing labor struggles, studying other farm labor groups, and focusing on race and culture has yielded different interpretations. More recent histories, following broad trends in historical theory, have studied the SCU and LFU to argue that their labor protests carried cultural meanings that transcend concepts of political success or failure...

Cultural History of Southern Farm Labor Unions

In Hammer and Hoe, a history of Alabama’s Communist Party, Robin D. G. Kelley pioneered the cultural history of the 1930s Southern farm labor movement. This ethnographic look at black Alabama Communists argues that
Evicted Tenant Farmers
“Alabama’s black cadre,” including the Share Croppers’ Union, “interpreted Communism through the lenses of their own cultural world.”1 For example, “much like the trickster characters in African-American folklore, many black Alabama Communists expressed great pride in their ability to outsmart the bosses…. In the rural areas, handbills announcing strikes or simply popularizing the SCU were not only distributed to other sharecroppers but targeted at the landlords” to purposefully infuriate them.2 The communist ideology of the labor struggle was also interpreted through the cultural media of gatherings and song. "Leaders of the SCU, "Kelley writes,
"The communist ideology of the labor struggle was also interpreted through the cultural media of gatherings and song."
"sustained a tradition of transform[ing] popular spirituals into political songs
"Parkin (vicinity), Arkansas. The families of evicted sharecroppers... charged that by membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union they were engaging in a conspiracy to retain their homes.&quot Photograph: John Vachon, Office of War Information. Library of Congress Photographs and Prints, LC-USF34- 014000-Ef
with new messages.”3 This cultural approach to farm labor history differs from the previous social history approaches while sharing the same bottom-up perspective of its social history predecessors.


Hammer and Hoe demonstrates the gradual transition in historiography from the popularity of social history to the emergence of cultural history. As the author has admitted in an interview, the book began as a study of class conflict much akin to traditional social history:

So I went to graduate school to study history not to be a history professor, but to be a professional Communist…. I chose to go back to the period of Stalinism to figure out what happened when you build a movement around the notion of the self-determination of African Americans…. Were they struggling for land?... But once I got to the archives and once I began to interview people I realized I was asking the wrong questions….In fact, the question I should have been asking and that I ended up asking was: what happened when these home-grown, rural and urban African American workers and sharecroppers confronted an international movement?... What are the kinds of cultural baggage they brought to the movement?4
"Kelley discovered the importance of 'cultural baggage' as many other historians had by the 1980s.&quot

Like many social historians, Kelley originally asked a politically-motivated, materialist question about the struggle for resources (land, in this instance) while looking for the proposed alternatives to 1930s American society. Instead, Kelley discovered the importance of “cultural baggage” as many other historians had by the 1980s. Hammer and Hoe therefore combines the virtues of both social history and cultural history. Even Geoff Eley has described Robin D. G. Kelley as “one U.S. scholar who has always maintained analysis of class and race brilliantly together,” in his books including the “remarkable” Hammer and Hoe.5 The book demonstrates how the study of race and culture can “be tackled using the familiar social historian’s methods.”6 Another look at the farm labor movement from an even stronger cultural history viewpoint – Gellman and Roll’s essay on Owen Whitfield – would further downplay questions of political alternatives and successes even more than Kelley’s book had.

Like Hammer and Hoe, historians Erik S. Gellman and Jarod H. Roll argue that culture was a central component of tenant farmers’ unions’ histories. Emphasizing religion, they argue that the viability, successes, and failures of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union were important but secondary to the historical experience of dissent. Their essay, “Owen Whitfield and the Gospel of the Working Class,” concentrates on the titular STFU leader. Whitfield, they argue, preached a “radical gospel” that “emerged amid the collapse of relatively stable and prosperous communities in the early 1930s.”7 This version of farm labor history details Whitfield’s life, from his early preaching in the Baptist church to his STFU agitation and his later work with the People’s Institute of Applied Religion in the 1940s. From this perspective, the STFU represented not just an embattled labor struggle but instead just one component of Whitfield’s progressive religious activism.

1Robin D. G. Kelley. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 93.
2Ibid, 102.
3Ibid, 105.
4Jeffrey J. Williams, “History and Hope: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley,” The Minnesota Review ns 58-60 (2003): 93-110. http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns58/kelley.htm.
5Geoff Eley. A Crooked Line: From Social History to History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 257.
6Ibid, 134.
7Erik S. Gellman and Jarod H. Roll. “Owen Whitefield and the Gospel of the Working Class in New Deal America, 1936-1946,” Journal of Southern History 72, No.2 (May 2006): 304.