Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830-1977

4. The Choctaw Agency and the Patronage Economy, 1918–1930

chapter four The Choctaw Agency and the Patronage Economy, 1918–1930 Evaluation of the role the Choctaw Agency played in rural Mississippi sheds light on the context in which the Choctaws negotiated their survival and reveals the multiple perspectives of class, race, and power Choctaws engaged as they sought autonomy. The Choctaw Agency was a contested ground. It created a patronage economy that was both a source of community pride and a cause of envy and resentment. White politicians and community leaders leveraged the presence of the agency to promote civic improvements. Indian Service schools accentuated class divisions over the role of government in education, and the agency ’s connections to the Catholic Church exacerbated sectarian strife that fed into the 1920s revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Klan-generated conflict further emphasized the gulf between Philadelphia’s business leaders and their middle- and lower-class neighbors. All this occurred at a time when the penetration of the modern consumer economy into rural America had destabilized class relations. Additionally, racial ideologies strengthened links between the agency and Philadelphia elites. Segregated Indian Service schools reinforced Jim Crow laws, and the need for the Office of Indian Affairs (oia) to maintain the support of Mississippi’s civic leaders facilitated the entanglement of agency personnel in racial politics. Analyzing these conflicts highlights how Choctaw alliances operated. For the Choctaws the agency was a place to interact with community leaders who could further their goals. Agency resources enhanced 77 The Choctaw Agency and the Patronage Economy, 1918–1930 the Choctaws’ position in the economic hierarchy, but, like their poor black and white neighbors, their struggles with poverty remained the most salient feature of their daily lives. At agency ceremonial functions, Choctaws performed a blended identity for their neighbors. They stressed their “quaint and colorful” ethnicity, which played to their neighbors’ imperialist nostalgia. Yet they also showcased their desire for economic progress and self-determination—actions that distinguished them from “poor white trash” in the racial triangulation of the rural South. At the height of the 1920s Klan revival, Choctaws cooperated with anthropologists John Swanton and Henry Bascom Collins in their studies of Choctaw culture and racial characteristics designed to prove that the Choctaws were not black. As they long had done, Choctaws traversed the convoluted tangle of race, class, regionalism, and ethnicity that characterized rural Mississippi by attempting to work their allies to their advantage. Their allies worked the Choctaw Agency as well. The Agency and the Patronage Economy The opening of the Choctaw Agency created both opportunities and challenges for rural Mississippians. When the oia began planning schools, agent Frank McKinley warned of possible conflicts with potentially violent poor whites: “I shall have to exercise considerable tact in dealing with this feature [schools] as there is bitter opposition among the lower type of whites to educational help for Indians. They grudge every penny so expended and object to the economic emancipation of the Indian.”1 The editor of the Neshoba County Democrat, Clayton Rand, echoed this sentiment: “Neshoba citizens envied the Choctaw their new schools which were much better than those provided for white children.”2 In response, Philadelphia’s civic leaders instituted “Better School Week,” holding rallies where luminaries such as Chief Justice Sidney Smith of the state supreme court urged educational progress. Yet low cotton prices and years of short crops had hurt tax revenues. Philadelphia elites proposed tapping the Smith-Hughes Federal Aid Act of 1917, which offered funding for local schools. This prompted some 78 The Choctaw Agency and the Patronage Economy, 1918–1930 lower-class citizens to protest on the grounds of states’ rights. Mississippi politicians also proclaimed commitment to states’ rights but were nonetheless happy to embrace federal funding for their pet causes. Eventually, Philadelphia’s boosters won the argument and began constructing better schools.3 This did not, however, quell the controversy over Indian schools. The presence of outsiders representing several reviled institutions incited conflict. A 1921 editorial in the Union Appeal, a newspaper in Newton County, sniffed: “We believe in education, but cannot see the justice of Congress appropriating vast sums of money to erect elegant schools in neighborhoods already provided with county schools, which money must be paid by the overly burdened tax payers who send their children to the county schools no better than the ones . . . for the Indians.”4 Outraged citizens wrote to Congressman Ross Collins echoing this assessment and...