| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.1

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| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Persevering Rural Reformers

LESTER, CONNIE L. Up from the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers' Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee, 1870–1915. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. xii + 321 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $44.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8203-2762-X.
Studies of agrarian reform movements in the late nineteenth century have traditionally climaxed with the election of 1896 and the demise of Populism. The implication, made flamboyantly explicit in Lawrence Goodwyn's The Populist Moment (1978), was that agrarian activism ended with the century. At the same time, however, agricultural historians have emphasized that the conditions which had provoked rural protest, particularly in the South, remained largely unchanged.	1
In Up from the Mudsills of Hell, Connie Lester usefully expands the timeframe for considering agrarian activism. Focusing on Tennessee from 1870 to 1915, she describes a complex and sometimes contradictory history of cooperativism, independent politics, vigilantism, and bureaucratic development. If she does not quite find continuity, she does document "stickability" (158), or perseverance. And if earlier scholars, particularly Roger Hart in Redeemers, Bourbons, and Populists (1975), have dismissed Tennessee's agrarians as irrational, ineffectual, and conservative, Lester finds them rational, responsive, and eventually influential. Perhaps most importantly, Lester grounds them and her study in the context of their local communities, familial and religious bonds, and the most mundane details of their agricultural economies, which varied by crop, region, race, land tenure, capital, and credit. These differences shaped—and at times strengthened or weakened—their organized efforts to confront an industrializing national economy. Across these decades, Lester maintains, the state's farmers continually "struggled between the traditional view of agriculture as a way of life, with its attendant localism and communalism, and the modern view of agriculture as a livelihood with its increasing pressures to adopt business practices, incorporate scientific methods, and replace exchange networks with capital and technology" (2).	2
Tennessee farmers suffered from collapsing commodity prices, monopolistic markets, increasing tenancy, inadequate credit, and growing debt. To protect their interests, they turned to a series of agricultural organizations, from the Grange in the 1870s and the Agricultural Wheel and the Farmers' Alliance in the 1880s to the Farmers' Union in the early twentieth century. There is no rural nostalgia here. Although Lester neglects farmworkers (and to some extent tenants) and pays only intermittent attention to planters, she emphasizes that most farmers were engaged in commercial agriculture and pursued organized activity for its possible "financial and material benefits" (87) while maintaining as far as possible many of their traditional values.	3
Tennessee farm organizations thus drew upon community bonds and producerite rhetoric to attempt to control markets through cooperativism, to seek government action to promote agricultural interests, and to encourage the adoption of new farming practices. While such efforts were often compromised by rural divisions over "class, history, gender, and race" (66), what frustrated farmers most was the concerted opposition of powerful economic and political elites to the attempts of the Farmers' Alliance to establish marketing and purchasing co-ops. Turning to politics, Alliance farmers first worked through the Democratic Party and actually elected a governor and substantial bloc of legislators. But they achieved little reform and were soon driven from the party and into the People's Party in 1892. Lester maintains that Populists constituted "a more complex political threat than previously recognized" (158), which she attempts to demonstrate by emphasizing congressional rather than state elections and by pointing to Populist fusion possibilities with Republicans. But Tennessee Populists elected no candidates to Congress and few to other offices, and the party withered away because of internal divisions and external opposition after 1896.	. . .

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