Review

General Books

In Feeding the Wolf, Gregg Cantrell portrays the disquieting political career of John Rayner. Born a slave in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1859, Rayner pursued formal education at the Raleigh Theological Institute after the Civil War, preparing himself for later engagement as a minister and political organizer. Subsequently, he enrolled in St. Augustine's Normal and Collegiate Institute. Then he briefly taught in rural schools outside Raleigh. Early in the 1870s, Rayner departed for Tarboro in the black-majority Edgecombe County, where he married, established a family, and began a political career to a series of appointive offices. Frustrated by the fading prospects for African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, Rayner moved west. By 1880, Rayner resided in Calvert, in rural eastern Texas's Robertson County. Rayner rapidly established himself as a supporter of the Republican Party and an activist in the Farmers' Alliance. Agricultural depression in the 1890s caused Rayner to reassess his partisan allegiance and catalyzed his joining the insurgent Populist Party, in which he rose rapidly to countywide and statewide leadership. Organizing indefatigably between 1892 and 1896, Rayner strove for a class-based alliance transcending the color line. This goal necessitated Rayner fostering a realist strategy of alliance between the People's Party and the African American constituency of Texas's Republican Party, even as he envisioned forging an enduring Populist Party constituency. When, in the 1896 presidential election, the People's Party national leadership endorsed William Jennings Bryan, fusing the Populist and Democratic parties nationally, Rayner felt betrayed. The Democratic Party symbolized to Rayner racial exclusion and corruption. Rayner counterthrust in Texas, challenging the Populist Party's national leadership by brokering a deal encouraging Texas Populists to vote for Republican presidential candidate William McKinley, while the state Republican Party would not field state candidates so Populist candidates would have increased prospects of electoral victory by picking up Republican votes. To defeat Rayner's scheme, Texas Democratic Party leaders legally and extralegally blocked African Americans from voting, while appealing to the racist ideology of white solidarity. Stunned by the effectiveness of the racial appeal that invalidated all his years of strategizing and tactical work, Rayner retreated. His political rout was followed by his unsuccessful fundraising activities for two Texas institutions for vocational education organized on the model of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. Rayner subsequently flirted with the eugenics and nativist movements, while acquiescing in the promulgation of Progressive-era laws imposing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other limits on suffrage. Through these latter forays, Cantrell argues, Rayner sought to vindicate his faith that, had restrictions on eligibility for the franchise been in place to limit voting to the population fully capable of participation in citizenship and thereby to exclude unfit Texan voters who rallied around white supremacy in 1906, a Populist victory would have materialized.	1
The strengths of Cantrell's work are several. First, this is the first biography of an African American Populist, as well as one of only a few studies of African American southern leaders of the Populist and Progressive eras. Second, based on extensive archival work, reading of North Carolina and Texas newspapers, interviewing, and grounding in secondary sources, Cantrell's account of Rayner's life fleshes out the broad themes about bi-racial populism in Texas that Lawrence Goodwin advanced in Democratic Promise (1976) and adds depth to studies of populism on the national level. Third, the book is suitable for classroom adoption, especially at the upper-division level. [It should be noted that Feeding the Wolf is an abridged version of a longer work, Kenneth and John B. Rayner and the Limits of Southern Dissent (1993), portraying the political career of Kenneth Rayner—John Rayner's European American father and master, himself a wealthy North Carolina and Tennessee planter and businessman—before addressing John Rayner's life. An iconoclast, the senior Rayner affiliated with the Whig and American parties while serving first in the North Carolina legislature and then in the United States Congress, championed colonization, served as a delegate in North Carolina's secession convention, and later embraced racial accommodationism and uplift through education.]	2
A major shortcoming of Feeding the Wolf lies in a decision, presumably of the publisher, that the abridged biography of John Rayner be printed without notations and bibliography. The result is unsatisfactory: the reader cannot derive the basis for statements made. Moreover, when faculty members endeavor to teach students methodology in writing history, including the form and function of source documentation and bibliographies, the deletion of them from books marketed principally to undergraduates undermines that effort.	3
San Diego Mesa College Jonathan W. McLeod

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