Southern History Month 2019: The Great Revolt of the Rednecks

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

I would like to open this article with a fascinating excerpt from Albert D. Kirwin’s book Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925:

“The one-party system which prevailed in Mississippi after 1876 vested the power of election in the party convention and the control of the convention in the hands of comparatively few men. The dissatisfaction which this one-party system produced was closely linked with economic depression. In the period 1880-1890 conditions were generally bad, but after the latter date they grew worse. In 1878 production of cotton in the South had equalled the mark set in 1860, and thereafter it steadily increased until by 1890 the production of 1860 was doubled. This increase was reflected by a drop in price. At the same time production in other parts of the world was bringing outside competition. Until 1890 the price of cotton hovered around 11 cents. By 1892 the price had dropped to 7 1/2 cents. From there it descended, with occasional small but temporary increases, to 4.9 cents in 1898. Seven-cent cotton was considered below the cost of production, and farms had to be mortgaged to pay the lien merchant. But banks were reluctant to lend money on even good lands, and interest rates were high.

The farmer became convinced he was the “forgotten man.” To him it seemed that an enemy class – “Wall Street speculators who gambled on his crop futures; the railroad owners who evaded taxes, bought legislatures, and overcharged him with discriminate rates; the manufacturers, who taxed him with a high tariff; the trusts, that fleeced him with high prices; the middleman, who stole his profit” – had got control of the Democratic Party – the party which had redeemed him from Negro-Republican Rule. To seek salvation in the Republican Party was as useless materially as it was unthinkable morally, for the farmer it seemed that that party was even more abandoned to the power of the trusts than was his own. The result of all this discontent was the formation of the Populist Party …

The farmers believed that their old leaders had abandoned them and were “just as much the tools of plutocratic opinion” as were the Republican leaders. The agricultural interest, they argued, was not regarded at heart by either of the old parties. “What they call ‘vested rights’ and ‘business interests’ will finally control them,” said the Populists. The old parties were “Tools of the money power,” “Cowards when it comes to any real protection of the many against the organized robberies of the few.” These and other phrases were dinned into the ears of Mississippi farmers by the leaders of the new party. Finally the farmers, “Oppressed, depressed, and suppressed,” knowing something was wrong somewhere though they knew not precisely where, “like drowning men, were willing to catch at straws. …

The leader of the Mississippi Populists was Frank Burkitt, former Democratic agrarian leader and editor of the Chickasaw Messenger. Both he and Barksdale had accepted the principles of the Ocala platform in 1891, but both sought at first to effect reforms within the Democratic Party. With the defeat of Barksdale, Burkitt went into open revolt and began organizing the Populists to overthrow what he called the “putrid, putrescent, putrifying political moribund carcass of the bourbon democracy.”

In the 1890s, the Mississippi farmer was caught between a rock and a hard place: the black majority supported the Republican Party while the Democratic Party was controlled by Bourbon Democrats. The Bourbon Democrats supported the hardcore free-market, laissez-faire capitalism that had punished the farmer for the past twenty years. Driven to the end of his rope by 4 cent cotton, the redneck finally revolted against the Bourbon Democratic establishment.

Led by their “Great White Chief” James K. Vardaman, the rednecks triumphed over the Bourbon Democrats in 1903 gubernatorial election and White populists ruled Mississippi politics for much of the early 20th century. We’ve already seen how Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi gave E. Michael Edelstein a heart attack on the floor of Congress by triggering him with accusations that his fellow Jews were trying to incite a war between the United States and Hitler’s Germany.

Rep. John Rankin, a populist from Mississippi worked with Senator George Norris of Nebraska, a progressive from Nebraska, as well as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration both of which galvanized and electrified the economy of the Tennessee Valley in the mid-20th century.