Way behind its time

This morning the ADG has an article called "Way ahead of its time," paying homage to the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum in Tyronza, Arkansas. Arkansas State University is the museum's sponsor. In fairness, I have not visited the museum, but I am thoroughly familiar with the subject. We should recall the agricultural history of Arkansas, which includes tenant farmers and sharecroppers in Delta cotton fields. But to me most current discussions lose a sense of perspective. Let's focus on what's really important.

While the Southern Tenant Farmers Union played a role in Depression Arkansas, we tend to exaggerate it today. I knew H.L. Mitchell, the co-founder of the union, and I personally heard him play stress how he was ahead of Martin Luther King in running an integrated union. He probably did not originally intend to integrate the union; it just made sense because the union was such a small group. But he did not see that as the key function of the union at the time.

The STFU was behind its time, however. First of all, socialism did not work and had never worked. More importantly, the union wanted the government to support small farms. By the 1930s, southern agriculture was on the cusp of a major revolution. We already had too many farmers farming too little land. Small farms were highly inefficient. That would have to change, not remain the same. After World War II, southern agriculture meant larger farms but fewer farms. Mechanization was coming to the South like it had come to the Midwest and other regions. Nobody wanted to to farm work anymore. We get nostalgic about it today as long as we don't have to do it.

In fact, the creation of the STFU was prompted by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration -- better known as the AAA -- a unsuccessful government attempt to control the price and production of cotton. The AAA was the created by people who favored large planters; they ignored the role of farm labor and sharecroppers. This shows what can happen when the government gets involved.

So what's really important here is not that the union was "bi-racial" but that it was part of an agricultural revolution. The role it played in that revolution was not positive. The solution to rural poverty was that people had to leave farming. And they did that themselves without government help. They joined the Great Migration and moved to California, Illinois, and Michigan, and other states that had jobs. 

I want to add that this topic was actually discovered during the 1960s, and many historians wrote about it. I think they covered the subject very well. Look for Don Grubb's Cry from the Cotton and David Eugene Conrad's The Forgotten Farmers.