Who Made Jim Crow?

Stephen Kantrowitz. Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 448 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Born in 1847 to an elite planter family in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, Benjamin Ryan Tillman--"Pitchfork Ben" as he came to be known by admirers and foes alike--went on to become a prominent architect of white supremacist politics as well as a self-styled agricultural reformer during the decades following the Civil War. As a young man, Tillman helped to lead the efforts of Democratic elites to overthrow Reconstruction in South Carolina; their counterrevolutionary movement culminated in the fraudulent defeat of Republicans and the installation of Confederate veteran and Ku Klux Klan leader Wade Hampton III in the governorship in 1876-7. In the years following the Redeemers' triumph, Tillman enjoyed success as a planter and involved himself in Democratic politics. Amidst growing political turmoil in the 1880s, Tillman emerged as a self-described champion of men he termed "the farmers"--meaning white men who headed agricultural households--against those he deemed the farmers' enemies--arrogant "aristocrats," non-producing "merchants," and ambitious black "gentlemen." Running as the defender of "real" southern men against this range of pretenders, Tillman wrested control the Democratic Party away from the Redeemers-turned-"Bourbon aristocrats" he had once helped to empower and gained the governorship of South Carolina in 1890. In the ensuing years, Tillman was a vocal advocate of suffrage restrictions and played a key role in bringing about the 1895 constitutional convention that generated the poll tax, literacy, education, and "understanding" requirements that would depress voter turnout--and largely disenfranchise black men--in the state for decades to come. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1894, Tillman spent the final decades of his political career on the national stage, where he played the part of a southern agrarian rebel, devoted to promoting the interests of his region's white farmers against the combined threats of African American equality, federal interference, and aristocratic misrule.

In Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, Stephen Kantrowitz meticulously deconstructs previous interpretations of Tillman as a radical agrarian reformer who fought as tirelessly on behalf of poor white farmers as he did against African American interests. Tillman, Kantrowitz argues, was indeed a vital generator of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century white supremacist politics and ideology, not only in South Carolina but also for the nation at large. At the same time, however, Kantrowitz steadfastly rejects the notion--promoted by Tillman and embraced by his contemporaries--that Tillman was a true friend of struggling white South Carolina farmers. Instead, Kantrowitz recounts Tillman's consistent opposition to the far-reaching political and economic changes urged by committed agricultural and "producerist" reformers in the Greenback-Republican, Alliance, and Populist movements of the 1880s and 1890s. As Kantrowitz demonstrates, Tillman acted throughout his career to blunt the economic aspirations and political strivings of the very men and women he claimed to represent. Indeed, Kantrowitz gives considerable credit to Tillman for the defeat of third-party politics in late-nineteenth-century South Carolina.

Paradoxically, Tillman and other like-minded political leaders were willing to sacrifice the economic and political interests of large numbers of non-elite whites in order to shore up the institution of "white supremacy"--a phrase that accomplished significant ideological work by neatly obscuring the inequalities and conflicting interests among white South Carolinians. Kantrowitz aptly describes the social reality that underlay repeated calls for white unity: "[T]he reconstruction of white supremacy required that certain whites be held down" (p. 227). But the willingness of Tillman and other elites to repress the economic and political initiatives of poorer whites did not merely reflect the goal of African American subordination. Rather, measures promoted as a means to ensure "white supremacy," such as the creation of property and literacy requirements for the franchise, expressed elite Democrats' abiding distrust of poor white...