Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914

8. Conclusion

(CHAPTER 8) Conclusion The rural community in the eastern third of Texas underwent a fundamental transformation between 1870 and 1910. Immigrants from the rest of the South dramatically increased the population. Farm values tripled, and in the cotton counties they nearly quadrupled. In Hunt County, 1910 farm values were six times their 1870 level, even as the average farm size shrank from 157 to 78 acres. Tenancy skyrocketed everywhere but especially in the cotton counties; by 1910 over two-thirds of all Hunt County farmers were tenants. The farmers’ chances of owning land narrowed, manifested in the rising percentage of mature farmers still sharecropping. Tenants and other rural poor people also lost the use of the free range in most places, and the incidence of livestock per farm family plummeted; the per-farm number of subsistence animals on Hunt County farms halved. Livestock’s relative place among all farm family assets fell from one third to less than a tenth. While small owneroperators struggled to maintain a compromise between subsistence and commercial production, tenants were compelled to plant so much of their farms in cotton that self-sufficiency became a dim memory. Absolute poverty rates in Hunt County increased six times. The richest 30 percent increased their share of the wealth, while the poor majority, the 70 percent remaining, lost ground. Yet, even as its economic foundation collapsed, the plain folk community stubbornly held to a set of values that emphasized family, work, 208 chapter 8 and community interdependence. The struggle to wrest a living from the physical environment continued to dominate these people’s lives as nothing else could. Neighborly cooperation was their ideal; while the ideal was probably rarely attained, the yeomanry commonly practiced a matter-of-fact communitarianism evidenced in tending the sick and joining in cooperative seasonal work. Most rural people had to work, and small farm owners and tenants spent similar amounts of time behind the plow. Farm women toiled in meal preparation and homemaking in the most literal and laborious sense, and most spent a good portion of their time and energy in the fields. In most respects, tenants and owners shared a common rural culture arising from three centuries of social exchange between the plain folk, slaves, freedmen, and poorer whites of the American South. There were few profound divisions among this people in the fundamentals of life: marriage and family customs, work, faith, food, celebrations, and language. In any event, among working farmers, both owners’ and tenants’ lives were dominated by the same rain or lack thereof, temperature, soil, seasonal endeavors, interest rates, and cotton market prices. This overwhelming, undeniable, omnipresent , physical fact of undifferentiated work and worry bound small farm owner and tenant neighbors together on an emotional and practical level. The changing economy placed great strain on the culture of mutuality , however. Plain folk community cohesiveness already contained a profound, and ultimately fatal, fissure in white supremacy. Ironically, racism may have been only the most striking component of an otherwise cohesive value system based on blood connections. Supportive and sustaining to insiders, such networks could be cold indeed, even brutally violent, to outsiders or vulnerable minority groups. Increasing tenancy rates further weakened the rural community’s cohesiveness, taking away independence of action, weakening family bonds by requiring greater geographical mobility, and producing a new anti-egalitarian class of absentee-landlords. By the turn of the century, rural dwellers lived in varying degrees of community, defined either by their physical location or social status, which ran from cohesive high-ownership kinfolk communities to the most atomized pseudo-communities of mobile tenants. A significant minority of rural poor people did not lie down for what they saw as an economic assault upon their community. Their habit of seeing the world in a moral light caused them to subject the new economy to a searching critique, as manifested in the debate over “the land question.” Through its indigenous leadership of preachers, teachers, and Conclusion 209 newspapermen, this community sought to work out the morally correct basis for ownership during the first two decades of the twentieth century . The most traditional among them argued that those who profited by owning land upon which others were forced to labor indeed violated their moral precepts. A minority among them even came to argue that “use and occupancy” should be the legally enforced standard for land ownership. Texas farmers had long given more support than...