Book Review

Canada and the United States

Benjamin Ryan Tillman, Jr., had a dream, and in that dream, white, male, landowning farmers (i.e. society's producers, in his view) held sway in their individual households and the wider world. In the last third of the nineteenth century, Tillman's dream was threatened by black voters, by renegade whites who helped to form interracial political coalitions, and by non-productive moneyed powers who colluded at the national level with federal authorities. Tillman spent his life fighting these enemies in words and deeds, both of which Stephen Kantrowitz carefully analyzes. The fight required a measure of reform, but Tillman was no radical, his biographer reminds us. Limited by his understanding of Reconstruction, which meant an alliance of inept black officials and traitorous whites kept in power by a tyrannical federal government, Tillman refused to join the Populist Party with its interracial overtones and federally sponsored subtreasury proposal. Instead, he seized on the free and unlimited coinage of silver as a panacea, and the most significant reforms that he achieved in South Carolina were a state liquor dispensary (established in 1892 and dispensed with by the state legislature in 1907), an agricultural and mechanical college for white males (Clemson University), and an industrial and normal school for white females (Winthrop College).

. . .