Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks by J. Blake Perkins (review)

The political transition from Populism to populism in American history is fraught with considerable misunderstanding by both academics and the public. One can trace relatively easily Populist ideology, leadership, and results of this late nineteenth-century agrarian reform movement which peaked with the failure of the People’s Party in 1896. It is more difficult to follow the political transformation of people who sought government-ensured economic equality to their rejection of federal assistance because they believed that it benefited the wrong people and diminished their voice in the formulation and implementation of public policy.

In this important study, J. Blake Perkins cogently follows political change in the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Ozarks. He argues that the failure of the Ozark Populists to gain federal reforms to guarantee a more equitable economic and social system began a movement toward political conservatism. Ozarkers soon contested the federal dismantling of local whiskey making because it bought needed income into the home, increasingly opposed federal policy that took their sons to war when their labor was needed at home, resisted the mandatory and expensive federal livestock dipping program to prevent Texas Fever because they did not sell their scrubby cattle on major beef markets, and opposed federal dam building because it took land and favored the economic development plans of local elites at the expense of the rural poor. Business leaders also resisted the programs of the Great Society, particularly the Office of Economic Opportunity. They did so because the federal government attempted to circum-vent them in the distribution of resources. The Ozarkers who controlled the economy and politics fought back and derailed federal efforts to improve the region’s economy. Local control became more important than federal dollars. Ozarkers also opposed the War on Poverty partly for racial reasons as well as their perception that it linked to the civil rights movement and urban radicalism.

Perkins has written an informative history about the transformation of the Ozark’s political culture from the Populist era to the Tea Party. He deftly shows that the desire of Ozarkers for federal economic assistance changed into political resistance because the government proved unresponsive. Even the local elites turned on the federal government when it began to deny them control of economic aid programs. Perkins presents a clear indictment of the federal government’s failure to assist Ozarkers in the Populist tradition along with a condemnation of local elites who counted out rural Ozarkers as citizens who deserved inclusion in economic development. Perkins, however, does not offer alternatives, other than generalities, to rekindle the Populist assertiveness and policy goals of the past. Rural Ozarkers today, he contends, do not have the same sense of unity and conviction. They now considered Big Government an anathema and federal programs as nothing more than a detrimental liberal agenda. Ozarkers believe that government does not solve problems; rather, government creates problems. At the same time, Perkins argues that local elites continue to support and control low wage, industrial, and tourism jobs for their own economic gain. Overall, Perkins gives political historians a new way to understand the rise of conservatism in twentieth-century America. Whether his findings can be generalized for other regions will depend on additional research.