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Joseph Gerteis is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is a coeditor of Classical Sociological Theory and Contemporary Sociological Theory. Class and the Color Line won the 2005 President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association.

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"The first serious review in years of the great late-nineteenth-century social movements. Combining a theoretical overview with selected case studies, Joseph Gerteis convincingly demonstrates how the race, class, and republican identities of the actors were shaped by the shifting strategic possibilities of the moment."--Leon Fink, editor of the journal "Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas"

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CLASS AND THE COLOR LINE

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................viiIntroduction......................................................................11. Republican Radicalism..........................................................152. Race, Class, and Republican Virtue in the Knights of Labor.....................493. The Knights of Labor in Richmond, Virginia.....................................764. The Knights of Labor in Atlanta, Georgia.......................................1025. Race and the Populist "Hayseed Revolution".....................................1266. Race and the Agrarian Revolt in Georgia........................................1517. Race and the Agrarian Revolt in Virginia.......................................1768. Class, Status, Power, and the Interracial Project..............................201Appendix: Data Collection, Sources, and Methods...................................211Notes.............................................................................221References........................................................................253Index.............................................................................269

Chapter One

Unless a halt, all along the line, is called, the sun of American liberty might just as well set now as to wait a few more years and then go down in blood. The drift of events all tends to[ward] a certain destruction of this republic, and if men who join the Alliance fail or refuse to learn the lessons that should there be taught, a few more years will wind up the whole concern on to a few billionaires, and they will own white and black trash alike. -ALLIANCE FARMER (CHIPLY, FLORIDA), REPRINTED IN THE NATIONAL ECONOMIST

In quoting a small Populist newspaper, one of many scattered throughout the South, the official journal of the Farmers' Alliance called attention to the urgency of the movement's mission. Although written in the fevered style typical of both the Populists and the Knights, the passage reprinted from the Alliance Farmer highlighted some central concerns about the direction of late-nineteenth-century life. For both farmers and industrial "mechanics," America's Gilded Age seemed to present a stark choice: organize or perish. The economic side of the argument was driven by the contrast between the harsh new economic realities and the long-established identities of those who saw themselves as free and independent citizen-workers. This was nowhere clearer than in the tendency of the movements to refer to both wage labor and tenant farming, with all seriousness, as conditions of "slavery." The economic concerns were entangled with political and civic concerns as well. As the social status and independence of the working people of America became imperiled so did "American liberty" and thus the republic itself.

Finally, and significantly, the Alliance Farmer quote pointed out the connection between class and race. The political and economic dimensions of the class critique were stated in an established republican idiom that would have been familiar to working people a generation before. Yet this critique was tied to a new understanding of the need to organize across the color line. This was an uncomfortable conclusion for white adherents of the movements, particularly in the South, who desperately wished not to be reduced to the status of "black trash." Nevertheless, the class concerns had direct implications for the color line. In the post-Reconstruction South, working people both black and white could be "owned" in the same way.

The Populists and the Knights of Labor have been widely understood as pivotal movements. Labor scholars have pointed out that the development of these organizations marked a crucial point in the history of American class formation where the republican traditions of the nineteenth century became linked to the political challenges and labor protests of the twentieth. But they have also been seen as pivotal because of their approach to the color line. At this liminal moment, an old language of class could offer new orientations toward racial boundaries. Both in terms of class and race, the movements were notable for their inclusive boundaries that began to build broad coalitions across enduring divides of skill, ownership, and race. In this chapter I provide an overview of the sweeping economic and social changes of the 1880s and 1890s. Against this setting I introduce the Knights of Labor and the Populist movements within the context of two significant theoretical and historiographical shifts-the first concerning the nature of class interests and identities, and the second concerning the connection between class and race. The first major part of this chapter concerns the movements and the way that they construed their interests through an established republican lens. Modern scholarly work has tended to see class as a historically and culturally constructed set of relationships and identities rather than as fixed entities with objectively given interests. This shift has prompted a significant reconsideration of the radical potential of the republican class idiom of the Knights and the Populists. In particular, the "producerist" class identity of the movements allowed for a broad construction of the movements' class boundaries, encompassing skilled and unskilled workers, independent farmers and tenants, sharecroppers and farmhands. It also led to a fundamental and uniquely republican challenge to the economic, political, and social conditions of the era.

A parallel shift has occurred in the way recent scholarship has understood racial boundaries and their connection to class by focusing on racial formation as a dynamic process and the relational contexts-historical and cultural as well as economic-in which that connection is forged. While this new work has set the stage for a similar reconsideration of the radical potential of the movements, their racial legacy has remained a point of some confusion. In the second major section of this chapter I sketch the way the movements approached the "color line," and in so doing I set up the main focus of the book-the sources and limits of the interracial project. Organizing across the color line necessarily involved making sense of race in relation to class, and on both sides of the color line it involved asking questions: Are these folks with us or against us? Do our interests dictate that we compete or cooperate?

TRANSFORMATION AND CONTENTION IN THE GILDED AGE

Americans of the Gilded Age witnessed massive changes in industrial and agrarian economies as well as the unparalleled organization of working people into mass movements. In manufacturing, skilled-trade industries began to give way to deskilled factory systems, while traditional fraternal trade organizations and artisan guilds shifted to full-fledged labor movements. A similar process occurred in farming, as rising tenancy rates accompanied declining prices for agricultural products and agrarian movements began to publicly advocate major changes in economic and monetary policies. Moreover, the era saw the unification of these industrial and agrarian movements-culturally, rhetorically, and to a degree organizationally-into what its adherents saw as a great reform...