The Redistributionist Legacy of Southern Populism during Redemption

• In Event: Southern Reconstruction and Its Aftermath: APD and HPE Perspectives

Abstract

Why did Southern US states vary in their levels of redistribution and public goods provision in
the early 20 th century? Any variation is surprising given that these states shared similar political
economies, racialized barriers to political participation, repression of social movements, and
single-party politics. I argue that the divergence between states with higher and lower levels of
redistribution is rooted in two decades of multi-party competition and social movement
mobilization that preceded the imposition of subnational authoritarian regimes under Jim Crow.
By organizing white farmers and farmworkers into a movement to improve their material
conditions in the 1880s and 1890s, the Farmers’ Alliance and People’s Party altered the terms on
which these poor farmers and workers were incorporated into the new single party regimes that
state Democratic Parties imposed across the South after 1900. In states with more robust Populist
mobilization, the Populists successfully altered the terms of factional competition within the
Democratic Party in ways that materially benefitted poor white farmers and farmworkers – and
this legacy persisted even under Jim Crow. I test this argument via a qualitative, empirical study
based on archival research in four Deep South states: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and South
Carolina. I track patterns of Populist mobilization before Jim Crow, and then observe divergent
patterns of party factionalism and redistribution, with a focus on public infrastructure and
education, between 1900 and 1948.

Author

• Daniel Blinderman, University of Michigan