Joseph Gerteis is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is a coeditor of Classical Sociological Theory and Contemporary Sociological Theory. Class and the Color Line won the 2005 President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association.

CLASS AND THE COLOR LINE

INTERRACIAL CLASS COALITION IN THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR AND THE POPULIST MOVEMENTBy JOSEPH GERTEIS

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4210-6

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………….viiIntroduction…………………………………………………………….11. Republican Radicalism………………………………………………….152. Race, Class, and Republican Virtue in the Knights of Labor…………………493. The Knights of Labor in Richmond, Virginia……………………………….764. The Knights of Labor in Atlanta, Georgia…………………………………1025. Race and the Populist “Hayseed Revolution”……………………………….1266. Race and the Agrarian Revolt in Georgia………………………………….1517. Race and the Agrarian Revolt in Virginia…………………………………1768. Class, Status, Power, and the Interracial Project…………………………201Appendix: Data Collection, Sources, and Methods……………………………..211Notes…………………………………………………………………..221References………………………………………………………………253Index…………………………………………………………………..269

Chapter One

REPUBLICAN RADICALISM

Unless a halt, all along the line, is called, the sun of American liberty might just as well set now as to wait a few more years and then go down in blood. The drift of events all tends to[ward] a certain destruction of this republic, and if men who join the Alliance fail or refuse to learn the lessons that should there be taught, a few more years will wind up the whole concern on to a few billionaires, and they will own white and black trash alike. –ALLIANCE FARMER (CHIPLY, FLORIDA), REPRINTED IN THE NATIONAL ECONOMIST

In quoting a small Populist newspaper, one of many scattered throughout the South, the official journal of the Farmers’ Alliance called attention to the urgency of the movement’s mission. Although written in the fevered style typical of both the Populists and the Knights, the passage reprinted from the Alliance Farmer highlighted some central concerns about the direction of late-nineteenth-century life. For both farmers and industrial “mechanics,” America’s Gilded Age seemed to present a stark choice: organize or perish. The economic side of the argument was driven by the contrast between the harsh new economic realities and the long-established identities of those who saw themselves as free and independent citizen-workers. This was nowhere clearer than in the tendency of the movements to refer to both wage labor and tenant farming, with all seriousness, as conditions of “slavery.” The economic concerns were entangled with political and civic concerns as well. As the social status and independence of the working people of America became imperiled so did “American liberty” and thus the republic itself.

Finally, and significantly, the Alliance Farmer quote pointed out the connection between class and race. The political and economic dimensions of the class critique were stated in an established republican idiom that would have been familiar to working people a generation before. Yet this critique was tied to a new understanding of the need to organize across the color line. This was an uncomfortable conclusion for white adherents of the movements, particularly in the South, who desperately wished not to be reduced to the status of “black trash.” Nevertheless, the class concerns had direct implications for the color line. In the post-Reconstruction South, working people both black and white could be “owned” in the same way.

The Populists and the Knights of Labor have been widely understood as pivotal movements. Labor scholars have pointed out that the development of these organizations marked a crucial point in the history of American class formation where the republican traditions of the nineteenth century became linked to the political challenges and labor protests of the twentieth. But they have also been seen as pivotal because of their approach to the color line. At this liminal moment, an old language of class could offer new orientations toward racial boundaries. Both in terms of class and race, the movements were notable for their inclusive boundaries that began to build broad coalitions across enduring divides of skill, ownership, and race. In this chapter I provide an overview of the sweeping economic and social changes of the 1880s and 1890s. Against this setting I introduce the Knights of Labor and the Populist movements within the context of two significant theoretical and historiographical shifts-the first concerning the nature of class interests and identities, and the second concerning the connection between class and race. The first major part of this chapter concerns the movements and the way that they construed their interests through an established republican lens. Modern scholarly work has tended to see class as a historically and culturally constructed set of relationships and identities rather than as fixed entities with objectively given interests. This shift has prompted a significant reconsideration of the radical potential of the republican class idiom of the Knights and the Populists. In particular, the “producerist” class identity of the movements allowed for a broad construction of the movements’ class boundaries, encompassing skilled and unskilled workers, independent farmers and tenants, sharecroppers and farmhands. It also led to a fundamental and uniquely republican challenge to the economic, political, and social conditions of the era.

A parallel shift has occurred in the way recent scholarship has understood racial boundaries and their connection to class by focusing on racial formation as a dynamic process and the relational contexts-historical and cultural as well as economic-in which that connection is forged. While this new work has set the stage for a similar reconsideration of the radical potential of the movements, their racial legacy has remained a point of some confusion. In the second major section of this chapter I sketch the way the movements approached the “color line,” and in so doing I set up the main focus of the book-the sources and limits of the interracial project. Organizing across the color line necessarily involved making sense of race in relation to class, and on both sides of the color line it involved asking questions: Are these folks with us or against us? Do our interests dictate that we compete or cooperate?

TRANSFORMATION AND CONTENTION IN THE GILDED AGE

Americans of the Gilded Age witnessed massive changes in industrial and agrarian economies as well as the unparalleled organization of working people into mass movements. In manufacturing, skilled-trade industries began to give way to deskilled factory systems, while traditional fraternal trade organizations and artisan guilds shifted to full-fledged labor movements. A similar process occurred in farming, as rising tenancy rates accompanied declining prices for agricultural products and agrarian movements began to publicly advocate major changes in economic and monetary policies. Moreover, the era saw the unification of these industrial and agrarian movements-culturally, rhetorically, and to a degree organizationally-into what its adherents saw as a great reform movement devoted to reclaiming a more equitable and respectable position for all “producers of wealth.”

Although the immense changes in production during the era did not completely do away with older arrangements, they did alter the conditions of economic and social life to a degree that was obvious to working people. The emergence of class protest in the industrial Northeast is the most familiar part of the story, but the southern states were an equally important location of major economic and social transformation, and they also became a key site for the central protest movements of the 1880s and 1890s. Significantly, the South was also the context for the most direct renegotiation of race within the protest movements, as the Alliance Farmer quote above suggested.

Boosters and speculators touting the industry and entrepreneurial spirit of the “New South” were fueld by hope as much as fact (see Woodward 1951; Ayers 1992). Still, they had some impressive evidence with which to back up their claims. Following Reconstruction, the economic transformation of the South proceeded at a stunning pace. The South never came close to catching up with the rest of the country in terms of the absolute level of industrialization. Yet the transformation was proceeding much more quickly in the former Confederate states-for example, in the increase of over 200 percent in a single decade in the capital invested in manufacturing (see table 1).

The expansion of railroads in the region spurred the emerging industrial economy and changed the social and physical landscape of the South as well. Established cities saw the birth of new factories, cotton mills, and other capital-intensive industries that transformed traditional trade and employment relations. New cities developed alongside the expanding mining and railroad industries, and in so doing became hubs of commerce that drew migrants from the surrounding countryside and across the country. Enabled by new rail connections, rural industries created labor camps in the middle of sparsely populated areas, such as those made for logging and turpentine production in the pine woods of North Carolina. Like the urban factories, these rural industries were the subject of bitter complaints. Particularly salient concerns included the competition with convict labor gangs and the use of “scrip” payment good only at the company store. As one worker attested from such a camp in Mississippi: “I do beleave that we are treated worse than any human on earth, and to call our selfs free men we have to leave home to go to work before daylight & it is black dark when we get home again.”

The railroads also played an important part in the transformation of agrarian economies, in particular by facilitating the spread of cotton cash-crop farming to smaller farms and previously diverse agricultural regions. In the process, older economic institutions took on new forms in the decades after Reconstruction. Big trading merchants had long held a compound role as bank, agent, landlord, and financial agent for cotton producers. In the cash-poor and credit-starved environment of the postwar South, local merchants took on the roles that the large cotton “factors” once held. Local merchants would advance seed, fertilizer, and credit to tenants and other small farmers for the coming year.

Because farmers generally did not have the cash to purchase goods outright, the purchases were commonly made on credit, often at interest rates of 20 percent or higher. The arrangement was typically handled through the merchant’s lien on the future crop. The sale of the resulting crop allowed some farmers to break even or in certain cases end up the year with a small profit. Many more went into debt and became ever more dependent upon the lien system to provide for their needs for the next year. Merchants controlled the terms of the trade, since they could collect the cotton at harvest when the price was low and then sell it when the terms suited them better. In the words of Harold Woodman, local merchants became “the most important economic power in the Southern countryside” (1990 [1968]: 296). Larger planters could manage to avoid being subject to the whim of the merchants (some were in fact merchants themselves), but they too were squeezed by the difficulty of obtaining sufficient credit as well as by contracting prices when it came time to sell their crop. A great deal of the discontent among small farmers was expressed as a fear of foreclosure and a loss of independence. Of most concern to southern farmers was the slow growth of tenancy arrangements, whereby tenants “rented” farms in exchange for cash, or much more commonly in exchange for a share of the expected future product. The spread of southern tenant farming does not seem large in the aggregate statistics, but here the figures have to be read carefully. By 1890, over 40 percent of all farms in the South already operated on the basis of some kind of tenant arrangement. Southern tenants also operated on a much more tenuous basis than their counterparts elsewhere. Tenant farms in the rest of the country were not appreciably different in size from owner-run farms-they most commonly ranged between 100 and 500 acres, according to census classifications. Southern tenants were scraping by on a much more meager scale, typically working between 20 and 50 acres. In other words, southern tenancy was a survival strategy, not an entrepreneurial enterprise.

In this context of fast-changing industrial and agrarian relations, the Knights and the Populists became the first large-scale movements of working people to organize across America, and the first to organize in the South in a serious way. Because of their size, their influence, and their ability (at least for a time) to bring working people together across significant lines of division, these movements captured the attention of the nation. The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was founded in December 1869 when skilled garment cutters in Philadelphia decided to reorganize their mutual benefit society into a secret fraternal order. The membership grew little by little, but the Knights’ rules of secrecy kept its growth limited both spatially and numerically. By 1874 there were more than eighty local assemblies of the Knights of Labor, all concentrated near Philadelphia (Ware 1959: 24-26, 30). The birth of the southern Populism was similarly local and unremarkable, beginning with the formation in 1877 of the “Knights of Reliance” in Lampasas County, Texas (Goodwyn 1976: 33-36). Soon afterward, the organization changed its name to the Farmers’ Alliance and began to spread into neighboring counties. By 1880, there were twelve local chapters (later known as “sub-alliances”) in three contiguous counties in north-central Texas. The small organization began arrangements for expansion by putting a lecturer in the field and issuing charters to new sub-alliances. The 1886 meeting of the Texas Alliance reported 104 Texas counties organized (Dunning 1975 [1891]: 40-51; Schwartz 1976: 92-93). Both organizations soon began to expand beyond their initial locales, however, and within the space of a few years they had won massive memberships as well as the attention of the nation as a whole.

Spurred by a well-publicized and initially successful strike against the railroad baron Jay Gould, the Knights of Labor membership grew to over 100,000 members in 1885 and then to more than 700,000 the following year. Throughout the country, new local assemblies were being organized faster than they could be chartered by the Knights’ central office, and the demand for new organizers seemed insatiable. The Knights were not able to hold this peak membership for long, however. The 1886 boom brought the movement wide popular notice, but it was a mixed blessing. The prolonged struggles with Gould left the organization overextended financially and organizationally. The Knights’ success also brought a new level of opposition from industry (Phelan 2000; Voss 1993). By 1890, the membership had declined to about 100,000. After this point, internal conflict and membership decline became harder to ignore. Membership records were not published after 1890, but it is clear that the strength of the organization was quickly dwindling. Despite its boom-and-bust life cycle, the cultural and political impact of the Knights of Labor was enormous. Over its life, nearly 12,000 local assemblies of the organization were founded nationally.

The Knights of Labor was also the first national labor organization to organize extensively in the South-1,909 of the assemblies were located there. Indeed, the Knights’ victory over Jay Gould in 1885 was “won in considerable part in the shops of Texas and Arkansas,” according to C. Vann Woodward (1951: 230). The southern expansion of the movement followed the arc of the Knight’s fortunes nationally. The first southern assemblies of the Knights of Labor were chartered in Alabama and Tennessee in 1878. The Tennessee group, designated local assembly (LA) 857, was composed of coal miners and was likely organized by a member who had been initiated in Pennsylvania’s mining country and later migrated South in search of work. Alabama’s first assemblies were located in its cities, two in Mobile and one skilled assembly of printers in Montgomery. Fourteen new assemblies were organized in 1879-there were three each in Birmingham and Mobile, and most of the rest were in smaller Alabama mining communities such as Jefferson Mines, Newcastle, Pratt Mines, Warrior Station, and Helena. A more sustained organizing effort began in 1882 and soon spread across the South. In the peak year of 1886, there were 718 new local assemblies chartered throughout the region.

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