The Roots Of Southern Populism

In this examination of the rise of agrarian radicalism in the late 19th-century South, Hahn focuses on social change and popular consciousness while exploring populism's kinship with other movements such as labour radicalism.

"The Civil War and Emancipation changed the world of yeoman farmers as much as that of planters and slaves. Examining upcountry Georgia as a microcosm of nonplantation districts in the South, Steven Hahn in The Roots of Southern Populism shows how farmers experienced the unraveling of antebellum household economies, the development of market relations, the rise of a new class of merchant-landlords, and the growing tensions between countryside and town - and how their responses and struggles fueled the Populist movement of the 1890s. The Roots of Southern Populism continues to be a model for the study of Populism; popular politics, and the capitalist transformation of rural society. In a new afterword, Hahn reflects on the book's genesis, on its critics, and on the directions of subsequent scholarship in the fields."--BOOK JACKET.

Significant as a political, economic, and social organization, the southern Farmers' Alliance was the largest and most influential farmers' organization in the history of the United States until the rise of the American Farm Bureau Federation. McMath suggests that the ideas advanced by the People's party in the 1890s had been incubated within the alliance and that the shared experience of 1.5 million rural Americans helped give those ideas power in the Populist crusade. Originally published 1976. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The grass-roots Populist movement that swept rural America a century ago drew millions of farm men and women and clusters of non-farmers into a powerful crusade to reshape the nation's political economy. Populists sought to usher in a "cooperative commonwealth" to reverse the growth of America's monopoly capitalism and harness the engine of private ownership for the common good. Thus, Populism became a bridge between the nineteenth-century traditions of republicanism and producerism and the regulatory state of this century. McMath crisply interprets the development of the Populist crusade from its early beginnings in the turbulent 1870s to the emergence of the Farmers' Alliances a decade later. He deals with the founding of the People's (Populist) Party in 1892, and its ultimate demise. He describes Populism's important regional components, and he places the crusade in a larger context as he compares it to parallel movements in the Great Plains and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. American Populism is an impressive book about a major social, cultural, and political movement.

A major reinterpretation of the Populist movement, this text argues that the Populists were modern people, rejecting the notion that Populism opposed modernity and progress.

The society of the postbellum South was built upon two interweaving but ultimately irreconcilable systems: a racist caste system and an economic class system. The caste system was supposed to assure that all whites would be equals above the underclass of black laborers. But the class system that emerged in the years after the war placed lower-class whites in the same economic position as the emancipated slaves -- a situation totally at odds with prevailing white ideology.In White Land, Black Labor, Charles Flynn examines the interplay of the caste and class systems of Reconstruction Georgia, revealing how the efforts of both the planters and poorer whites to retain blacks in a position of subservience assured that in this state -- as in the South as a whole -- there would be little significant economic progress until well into the next century. The caste faith of the white Georgians encouraged landowning employers to seek increased exploitation rather than economic growth; at the same time, it motivated landless whites to focus their energies on the greater subordination of black laborers rather than on achieving equality with wealthier whites.Despite the facade of southern caste faith, the constitutional amendments adopted during Reconstruction assured that blacks could not legally be treated as a separate laboring class. As a result, the measures employed by the planters to increase their control over the black laborers applied to a growing number of landless whites as well. With blacks more free and whites more oppressed than the prevailing social ideology deemed appropriate, the distinction between the system of class division among whites and the caste barrier that separated blacks and whites began to fracture -- leading to political dissent in the nineteenth century and setting the stage for the demagogue politicians of the twentieth century.