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Reviewed by:
  • Yeoman, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870–1914
  • Jim Bissett
Yeoman, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870–1914. By Kyle G. Wilkison (College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2008) 297 pp. $40.95

Although historians generally agree that the transition to industrial capitalism brought fundamental change to American farmers, they are less certain about the effects of those changes and the intensity of farmers' reactions to them. A recent, award-winning study of Populism, for example, took issue with the notion that small farmers were fundamentally at odds with the values of the emerging industrial capitalist system, concluding that Populists consciously attempted to conform to industrial capitalism by making their organization more "business-like." This interpretation presumes that the small farmers who represented the core constituency of the Farmers Alliance believed that hard work and "businesslike [End Page 626] efficiency" could move them up the agricultural ladder and earn them a share of the wealth created by industrialization.1 Wilkison's Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists represents an effective rejoinder to such an interpretation. Through an intensive analysis of life in the agrarian communities in east Texas from 1870 through the beginning of World War 1, Wilkison demonstrates convincingly that the clear majority of farmers in this community were heading down the agricultural ladder toward tenancy and that, far from embracing the new business interests of industrial capitalism, these farmers recognized that their interests were fundamentally at odds with those of the businessmen with whom they interacted.

Wilkison makes these arguments through a masterful blending of traditional historical sources with statistical methodology, employing the strengths of each approach to balance the other's limitations. The book provides poignant documentation of the human cost of industrialization by telling the stories of those who suffered most profoundly. Through a sophisticated statistical analysis of tax rolls and manuscript census records for Hunt County, Texas, Wilkison demonstrates conclusively that these negative effects were widely shared in the county, which experienced a steep rise in tenancy and an astonishing sixfold increase in the absolute poverty rate between 1870 and 1910.

In the process of making this central point, Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists explores important issues related to class solidarity and conflict. Although Wilkison does not go so far as to argue that tenants and yeomen were united by a sense of class consciousness, he finds considerable evidence of "sympathetic solidarity" and "plain folk cohesion" caused by the "overwhelming, undeniable, omnipresent, physical fact of undifferentiated work and worry" shared by all who worked the land (85, 90, 208). The real division in this equation was not whether farmers owned or rented the land that they worked but whether they worked it at all. Thus, townspeople and absentee landlords were seen as a common enemy by both tenants and yeomen.

This sense of cohesion provided fertile soil for social movements among farmers; Wilkison discusses in some detail the organizations that emerged. As his title indicates, most of his attention is given to the Texas Socialist Party. Unfortunately, this organization, like those that preceded it, was poisoned by white supremacy, a cultural force too powerful for it to transcend. Even so, the book portrays Texas socialists as sophisticated social activists who understood that religion could be a powerful part of their ideological arsenal and who opposed the national socialist movement on the crucial issue of land ownership, arguing persuasively, though unsuccessfully, that the Marxist aversion to the ownership of private property ought not to apply to small farmers.

Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists is well worth reading. In clear, thoughtful terms, it employs an impressive variety of evidence to offer [End Page 627] sophisticated analysis about crucial issues related to the agricultural crisis in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

Jim Bissett
Elon University

Footnotes

1. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York, 2007).

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