The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas by James D. Ross (review)

James D. Ross Jr. offers a new perspective on the origins, activism, and demise of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) in this book. Seeking to move beyond romanticized accounts of the union as an inspiring example of interracial organizing that was mostly instigated by the tenant farmers themselves, Ross provides evidence that local and national members of the Socialist Party of America played a more influential role in forming the union than earlier scholarship suggested. Moreover, he argues, internal racial and ideological conflicts contributed to the union's ultimate demise, along with external factors such as violent repression and the displacement of farmers from the land in the wake of agricultural mechanization. Drawing on previously unexamined documents from the papers of individual activists and the STFU archives, including the letters that rank-and-file members wrote to union leaders, Ross makes a case for recognizing the variety of actors and political philosophies that shaped the STFU's history and legacy.

The recollections of Arkansas socialist and founding member H. L. Mitchell helped establish many of the core themes that appear in existing histories of the STFU. Analyzing Mitchell's various accounts of how the union began and how they changed over time between the 1930s and 1960s, Ross notes that Mitchell downplayed his early radicalism to avoid being labeled a communist. In the 1930s, though, Mitchell's beliefs were in line with the militant faction in the Socialist Party, which viewed revolution as both inevitable and eminent now that capitalism was collapsing under the pressures of the Great Depression. These ideas were not shared by the majority of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in Arkansas. Most of them continued to aspire to private property ownership and the economic independence this promised, in keeping with republican values that idealized the nation's small farmers. Nor did Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas believe that activists could rely on the inexorable forces of history to deliver justice for working people, as evidenced by his efforts to encourage Mitchell to undertake the organizing work needed to push the nation toward democratic socialism. According to Ross, it was Thomas who first suggested the idea of organizing a union when he visited Arkansas in February 1934. After government officials failed to do anything to address the problems of mass evictions and rural poverty, Mitchell and other socialists realized the need for collective action to protect the interests of tenant farmers. Meanwhile, tenants on the Fairview plantation in Poinsett County were meeting together to discuss their plight. When Mitchell called a meeting of selected white and black farmers in July 1934 (which he later said was organized by the farmers themselves), those present voted easily to form a union, and the STFU was born.

Ross shows that most rank-and-file union members were motivated by their desperate economic circumstances more than a commitment to socialist ideology. Members hoped the union could help them secure basic necessities such as food, clothing, housing, medical care, and (most importantly) land to farm and eventually own. Many also expressed notions of justice that grew out of their religious beliefs, described by Ross as a "rural, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal Protestantism" that called on people to "analyze their situation in the light of scriptures, to fight against injustice, and to care for one another" (89). Although the union's founders hoped that members could overcome their racial prejudices and work together in a strong interracial movement, this was more difficult, and less successful, than some earlier studies of the STFU have suggested. Locals were mostly segregated and black members were marginalized, which alienated many African Americans who joined the union. In addition, both white and black members' views on the types of reforms that were needed to solve the economic crisis differed from those held by their leaders. Whereas most members preferred measures that would end landlord abuses and make...