Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas
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1930s unions
A01=James D. Ross
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agrarian struggles
agricultural labor
American labor history
Author_James D. Ross
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biracial membership
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=KNA
Category=KNAC
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Category=KNXU
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class divisions
cooperative land ownership
COP=United States
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Depression-era South
Eastern Arkansas
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external factors
food and shelter
fundamentalist Christianity
Great Depression
H. L. Mitchell
historical perspective
historical revisionism
immediate needs
internal divisions
James Ross
labor movements
land ownership
Language_English
Marxist inspiration
mechanization of agriculture
member goals
New Deal indifference
New Dealers
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Pentecostal Christianity
poverty
Price_€50 to €100
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racial justice
racial tensions
rank and file perspectives
repression by wealthy planters
revisionist history
rural South
sharecroppers
sharecropping
social history
social movements
socialist convictions
socialist leadership
softlaunch
Southern tenant farmers union
STFU
STFU goals
STFU internal tensions
STFU rank and file
tenant farmers
tenant farming
union activism
union demise
union failure
union implosion
union leadership
union letters
union narrative
Product details
- ISBN 9781621903529
- Weight: 430g
- Dimensions: 160 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 30 Apr 2018
- Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Founded in eastern Arkansas during the Great Depression, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) has long fascinated historians, who have emphasized its biracial membership and the socialist convictions of its leaders, while attributing its demise to external factors, such as the mechanization of agriculture, the repression of wealthy planters, and the indifference of New Dealers. However, as James Ross notes in this compelling revisionist history, such accounts have largely ignored the perspective of the actual sharecroppers and other tenant farmers who made up the union's rank and file. Drawing on a rich trove of letters that STFU members wrote to union leaders, government officials, and others, Ross shows that internal divisions were just as significant–if not more so–as outside causes in the union's ultimate failure. Most important, the STFU's fatal flaw was the yawning gap between the worldviews of its leadership and those of its members. Ross describes how, early on, STFU secretary H. L. Mitchell promoted the union as one involving many voices–sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord–but later pushed a more simplified narrative of a few people doing most of the union's work. Struck by this significant change, Ross explores what the actual goals of the rank and file were and what union membership meant to them. �While the white leaders may have expressed a commitment to racial justice, white members often did not,� he writes. �While the union's socialist and communist leaders may have hoped for cooperative land ownership, the members often did not.� Above all, the poor farmers who made up the membership wanted their immediate needs for food and shelter met, and they wanted to own their own land and thus determine their own futures. Moreover, while the leadership often took its inspiration from Marx, the membership's worldview was shaped by fundamentalist, Pentecostal Christianity. In portraying such tensions and how they factored into the union's implosion, Ross not only offers a more nuanced view of the STFU, he also makes a powerful new contribution to our understanding of the Depression-era South.
James D. Ross JR. is an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is a specialist in the interaction of race, class, and religion in twentieth-century United States history.
