Books You May Have Missed: Review of "Yeoman, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914

Yeoman, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914. By Kyle G. Wilkison. (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2008. x,297, pp. Paper, $40, ISBN-13:978—1-60344-065-3.)

Supplementing exhaustive archival research with detailed statistical analysis and intriguing oral history interviews, Kyle Wilkison outlines the spread of plantation tenancy and the attendant destruction of “plain folk” culture in late 19^th and early 20^th century East and Central Texas.  While Socialism in Texas received thoughtful treatment by James R. Green’s groundbreaking 1978 work Grassroots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 and Neil Foley’s equally innovative The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (published in 1999), the left wing in Texas remains sorely understudied.  Wilkison blazes a new path in this still emerging scholarly field by demonstrating how socialism overlapped with traditional, Texas rural values emphasizing community, shared sacrifice, and fair play. 

At the dawn of the 20th century, Wilkison writes, “Texas yeoman farmers exhibited both a high degree of community independence and individual family interdependence based on the widespread ownership of land and the liberty such property afforded even the common lot.” [p.8.] Increased cotton production, however, promoted landlessness and economic dependence across the Texas cotton belt.  As speculation and absentee ownership drove up land prices even as cotton prices dropped due to foreign competition and American overproduction, fewer farmers could afford land.  More rural Texans became renters, working for landlords who demanded that even more acreage of their property be used for production of the cash crop.  Renters, hoping to climb up the mythical “agricultural ladder” to land ownership instead wandered from property to property seeking in vain better financial arrangements.  This migration, however, cut these poor farming families off from the church, community celebrations and neighborly connections that sustained the agricultural community through hard times.  The relative success of socialism in highly religious East and Central Texas, Wilkison argues, derived largely from the desire not only to gain financial independence but also to re-forge lost community ties.  The most successful socialists adapted party ideology, appreciating and appealing to the local population’s strong religious faith, their tragically white supremacist racial attitudes, and the increasingly rootless peasantry’s desire for land ownership.

Wilkison writes well and perceptively.  The only shortcoming, and it is a minor one, is that the statistics-heavy opening chapters should have been leavened with illustrative quotes from the 51 oral histories Wilkison collected that are cited in his bibliography.  Wilkison interviewed former East and Central Texas landowners, tenants and sharecroppers (and their children) whose accounts demonstrate that many Texas middling and poor farmers saw no contradiction between conservative Christianity and support of socialism.  Wilkison, furthermore, demonstrates that even in very traditional East Texas communities, farming families elided assigned gender roles, though anti-black racism formed an impenetrable barrier dividing the agricultural oppressed.  Yeoman, Sharecroppers, and Socialists is a definitive work on the culture of cotton farming on East Texas and the ephemeral impact of radical politics in the Lone Star state.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism and the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.