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

6. The Land Shall Not Be Sold Forever: Land and God in 1910s Texas

(CHAPTER 6) “TheLandShallNotBeSoldForever” Land and God in 1910s Texas Late in 1910 two Hunt County preachers treated newspaper readers to an intense debate of “the land question” in Texas. Southern Baptist minister Brother J. R. Barrett presented a biblical defense of individual rights to “absolute ownership” of land and warned against “perverters” of Scripture who preached that the Bible limited such rights. The next issue of the Commerce Journal signaled the arrival of scriptural combat with a reply from the Rev. Morgan A. Smith, former pastor of the Commerce Methodist Church. According to Smith, preachers who failed to denounce the “theft of the earth from the people” as the “colossal crime of the ages” were “contemptible ecclesiastical lickspitals [sic].”1 The exchange crackled with preacherly invective for five weeks on the front page of this rural newspaper, reflecting the yeoman community ’s agitation over “the land question” in Texas. Evangelical Protestantism made up the single most important social institution within the rural community, and the church embodied some of the most cohesive—and divisive—forces within plain folk culture. Even with important divisions , it would be hard to overestimate the importance of these rural congregations to the everyday life of the community. Little wonder, then, that the most important political and economic questions should be expressed within a framework supplied by the culture’s religious tradition , especially a debate over land ownership. No other issue cut so 126 chapter 6 quickly to the core of the economic, moral, and cultural underpinnings of the yeoman community. Texas Socialists drove this debate. The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the Texas Socialist Party focus on land, because the rural poor majority defined ownership of land as their single most critical issue. Socialist leaders and ordinary people left an impressive record elucidating their culture’s sometimes paradoxical, but always morally expressed, attitude toward land ownership. The looming questions of alcohol prohibition and race complicated the political picture for these rural moralists. Some of the most highly respected Socialist leadership, as well as a good many of the rank and file, supported the legislative elimination of strong drink on the same moral grounds they supported socialism. On the other hand, most prohibition leaders, virtually all of Texas’s conventional denominational leadership , firmly supported capitalism and the emerging business ethic and just as firmly opposed the Socialist Party. Racism further complicated the picture for potential moral radicals. Among the white majority, rural , poor, or otherwise, white supremacy rivaled for centrality belief in any single tenet of Christianity. Racially egalitarian Socialists walked a very fine line: better publicly to doubt the Virgin Birth than to question white supremacy. The moral argument over ownership of land found expression in the language of the rural church, because the religious culture of the rural majority fostered the commonplace practice of making rigid moral judgments about all aspects of social behavior. By the second decade of the twentieth century, many rural Texans had seen just enough of the maturing national marketplace to know they did not like it. A significant minority delivered the most fundamental critique of capitalism yet seen with thousands of rural votes for the Socialist Party of America. This reaction resulted from the high value the rural majority placed on the obligations of neighbors, the centrality of work, and land ownership. By 1910, however, most of the members of this culture no longer owned their own land, and their culture failed to prepare them for the resulting loss of control over their lives. Furthermore, while many within the emerging economy prospered, as a group they grew poorer over time. The rural poor majority knew that their labor produced great wealth for the region. They could measure this in the increasingly comfortable standard of living of town-dwelling bankers, merchants, physicians, attorneys , and landlords, who made their money, directly or indirectly, from cotton. Inheritors of a culture whose precepts found articulation in “The Land Shall Not Be Sold Forever” 127 evangelical Protestantism, the rural poor majority denied that economic behavior lay outside the realm of moral judgment. The yeoman community itself, richly paradoxical with both cohesion and division, provided the context for such moral judgments. These people practiced a matter-of-fact communitarianism in which they saw each other as kinfolk, neighbors, and co-religionists, instead of as only economic competitors. But even as some teetered on the brink of class consciousness, most yeomen...