The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America by Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll (review)

In the arena of high political drama during America’s greatest economic crisis, those at the bottom of society—President Franklin Roosevelt’s “forgotten man”—can easily be sidelined. Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll have sought to rectify that historical error by recounting the careers of two impoverished southern activist-preachers: Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams. Although born on different sides of the South’s racial divide, Whitfield (African American) and Williams (white) ultimately arrived at the same place. Both became champions of the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union and both embraced a religious theology that attempted to fuse Christianity, Marxism, and Dixieland populism.

As The Gospel of the Working Class makes clear, poverty, bitterness, isolation, and violence shaped the lives of Williams and Whitfield and their often suffering, but always supportive, wives. Ultimately, both men came to the realization that the culture that kept them apart was precisely what bound them together and, potentially, if united, would make their people stronger. Gellman and Roll tell this story well, bringing to life a lost world where desperation kept hope at bay. By combining biography and social history, the authors have given human faces to a political struggle that, in the short run failed, but sowed the seeds for post–World War II civil rights and economic activism.

If there is a lament to be made it is that this book should be greater in length so that several points of historical context could be more fully developed. For instance, the authors assert that the southern populist reform surge of the 1890s was “defeated by corporate monopolies” (5). The southern populist movement failed for any number of reasons, including an economic program that would have resulted in northern workers paying more for their food and clothing, and an evangelical Protestant cultural agenda that northern working-class Catholics considered to be discriminatory and repulsive. Any reform movement coming out of the South that sought to advance the interests of poor farmers would inevitably generate northern resistance for reasons far beyond the corporate boardroom.

A greater understanding of northern working-class Catholics would have been helpful when the authors reached the era of World War II and the Cold War. The authors’ discussion of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) and the communist persecution of Catholic clergy in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe requires greater treatment (148–149, 156). Members of the ACTU were critical of unbridled capitalism and communism—seeing both economic philosophies as the products of secular humanism. Catholic reformers had as little sympathy for strike-breaking industrialists such as Republic Steel’s Tom Girdler as they did for the radical leftists with whom Whitfield and Williams allied. That did not make supporters of the ACTU anticommunist reactionaries, it just made them critics who could either be assuaged or denounced. The Left chose the latter option, failing to understand that the racial divide in the South was paralleled by a religious divide in the North.

It would also be useful to have more data, description, and analysis of the post–Civil War southern agricultural economy. The tenant and sharecropping system that developed after the Civil War economically trapped both African Americans and whites—including many of the planters. While the planters often held political power and could wield violence against social reformers, their own economic standing was precarious. Southern planters depended upon federal subsidies in the 1930s, ensuring that they remained in the Democratic coalition for at least one more generation. The post–World War II mechanization of southern agriculture enabled planters to lower their labor costs by exporting the region’s poor to the North and West. Owen Whitfield would be in Detroit to greet the South’s exiles and futilely attempt to persuade poor whites and blacks to...