Arkansas faced a number of opportunities and challenges in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Not only did the state introduce some significant initiatives in response to the multi-faceted reform movement known as progressivism, it also endured race riots, natural disasters, and severe economic problems. Even as it attempted to modernize its road and school systems, expand its manufacturing sector, and deal with increasing urbanization, most Arkansans continued to live in rural areas and remained largely conservative, both in their attitudes toward traditional social relations, particularly with regard to race, and in their religious orthodoxy. The tension between the need to modernize and the provincialism of rural Arkansas persisted throughout the era and inhibited meaningful change. Although the Great Depression and the New Deal undermined the old system by introducing a new player in the field—the federal government—and provided a forum by which certain groups in Arkansas could dare to challenge elites, political power remained with those who traditionally ruled, and even divisions within that group did not work to the advantage of these newly assertive voices. Given the limitations of reform and the challenges of the Great Depression, the state was hardly poised to take advantage of the opportunities of the wartime economy that was on the horizon in 1940. Show
Progressivism Women had played an important role in the fight for prohibition, but they had been seriously hampered by their inability to vote. In the 1880s and 1890s, some women’s magazines and clubs championed enfranchisement, but other women’s organizations refrained from openly supporting voting rights for women. Women’s book clubs, which began to proliferate in communities throughout the state, typically confined themselves to promoting literacy and libraries, but other women became activists of a sort. The WCTU, for example, was heavily peopled by church women who had first developed a taste for activism through their association with organizations sponsored by their churches. For some women, it was a short step from the fight against demon rum to the struggle for voting rights. The suffrage movement gained an important ally with the election of Governor Charles Brough in 1916. His wife, Anne, was dedicated to the issue and, with her husband, helped convince the legislature in 1917 to allow women to vote in primary elections. Arkansas subsequently became the second state in the South to ratify the nineteenth amendment in 1920. Another progressive reform that had roots in the nineteenth century involved the end of the convict leasing system. Arkansas used convict leasing as a revenue-generating measure, but prisoners were often kept in horrible conditions, and Arkansas governors began to agitate for its abolition in the 1880s. By the turn of the century, the situation was approaching a national scandal, and in 1912, Governor George Washington Donaghey, who had been unable to convince the legislature to act, simply furloughed 360 prisoners from prison, thus making it impossible to furnish enough prisoners to honor convict leasing contracts. That effectively ended the system in Arkansas. A Crisis in Education Futrell, who believed that anything beyond an eighth grade education should be reserved for the privileged few, set about enacting his campaign pledge: retrenchment, and for him, this meant a reduction in state expenditures. He became embroiled in a controversy with the federal government when he used Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) funds to pay teacher salaries. When Harry Hopkins, director of FERA, threatened to cease funding all federal programs in Arkansas, including the farm program of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), something close to the hearts of the politically powerful eastern Arkansas planters, Futrell ultimately called for the repeal of prohibition so liquor sales could be taxed. He also supported the legalization of gambling, which provided for the opening of a dog track in West Memphis (Crittenden County) and a horse-racing track in Hot Springs (Garland County), both of which would be subject to taxation. He later endorsed a tax on retail sales. The school funding problem had been solved, at least for a time. Transportation Although the state was able to qualify for federal aid to roads in 1917, by 1921, the road system was in such disarray that its ability to qualify for matching funds in a federal roads program was in question. In order to participate in the program, the state needed to abolish the road improvement districts and centralize road construction in the Arkansas Department of Transportation. When the legislature balked, federal funds were withdrawn, and the improvement districts faced bankruptcy. Only then did the legislature pass the Harrelson Road Act in October 1923, giving the highway commission supervisory responsibility. However, the separate road districts continued to exist, and the commission exercised little significant influence. By 1927, the county road districts were either bankrupt or close to it. Governor John E. Martineau secured legislation that allowed the state to assume the debts and responsibilities of the road improvement districts and launched the Martineau Road Plan, an ambitious state highway construction program. His successor in office, Harvey Parnell, secured passage of legislation authorizing $18 million in bonds to continue the expansion of the Martineau Road Plan, and additional legislation permitted the sale of $7.5 million in bonds to finance a highway toll-bridge construction program. However, Parnell’s ambitious plans for expansion of the highway system in Arkansas were largely undermined by the deteriorating economic situation and the drought of 1930–1931. By 1933, the state’s highway debt reached a staggering $146,000,000, and Gov. Marion Futrell devised a strategy for refunding the highway debt. To consolidate all the highway debts into one, he called a special session in 1934 and pushed his Highway Refunding Act through. The highway debt problem had been temporarily solved. Crisis
in Agriculture As historian Carl Moneyhon suggests, the most significant problem was that too many people were trying to make a living on too few farms. Between 1900 and 1930, the number of farmers in Arkansas increased from 178,694 to 242,334, while the acres in farms actually decreased slightly, from 16,636,719 in 1900 to 16,052,962 in 1930. This statewide total masked a trend occurring in the Delta, where an expansion of the plantation system was transforming the landscape. With the advent of railroads in the late nineteenth century and the emergence of the lumber industry in many previously overlooked Delta counties, the plantation system supplanted forests and swamps. One particularly striking index of the plantation’s arrival was the increase in tenancy. During a period when the number of farmers had increased significantly, the number of farm owners remained almost steady, from 84,138 in 1900 to 85,842 in 1940. The number of share tenants increased in that period from 53,837 to 83,835. The particularly loathsome systems of tenancy and sharecropping placed an extraordinary burden of debt upon those least able to support it. Although both are forms of tenancy, the common vernacular characterized them as sharecropping or tenancy. In the sharecropping arrangement, a man without implements and mules secured a contract, typically a verbal one, with a land owner. The sharecropper was provided mules, implements, a place to live, and advances from the land owner’s commissary. At the end of the year, the planter paid the sharecropper about one third of the cotton crop in exchange for his labors. Given the high interest rates at the company store, many sharecroppers found themselves owing the planter at the end of the year. The tenant farmer was only marginally better off. He brought more to the bargaining table—mules and implements—but he, too, lived in a house owned by the planter and secured advances from the company store. Although he received half of the cotton crop in exchange for his labor, he often found himself in debt at the end of the year. Racial Turmoil Arkansas’s black population faced other challenges. As the plantation sector expanded and both black and white immigrants from other Southern states came to Arkansas to work the land, competition arose between them for plantation jobs. Planters often preferred black labor because they could pay them less and work them harder. Impoverished, segregated (isolated), and disfranchised, they made easy targets. A number of nightriding incidences occurred, with the object being to drive black farmers from the plantations so that whites could secure their positions. Two cases involving twenty-seven defendants were prosecuted in federal court in 1904, but only in one were convictions secured. The case, Hodges v. U.S., was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that body, in a landmark decision, ruled that black Americans had no constitutionally protected right to employment. Meanwhile, the lynching of blacks, which had reached a peak in the 1890s, began to taper off in the early twentieth century, but highly publicized lynchings still occurred—one in 1921 in Mississippi County and one in Little Rock in 1927. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which had revived during and immediately after World War I, did not play a major role in either of those lynchings but became a potent force in state politics, particularly in the 1920s. The Klan had broadened its list of targets in this twentieth-century reincarnation, however, and included Jews, Catholics, foreigners, and bootleggers. Only bootleggers were in sufficient supply in Arkansas to attract their attention, so blacks generally became a prime target. The most notorious case of mob violence against black citizens was the Elaine Massacre, which occurred in 1919 in Phillips County. Black farmers near Elaine (Phillips County) formed the Progressive Household Union of America that year and hired Ulysses Bratton, a white Little Rock attorney, to file suits against the planters for whom they worked. Believing they were being cheated by the planters, they sought to secure a fair settlement, and Bratton, a former federal prosecutor who had pursued peonage investigations earlier in the century, agreed to represent them. Even as Bratton was investigating their claims and gathering evidence, a shooting occurred outside a church where black union members were meeting on the night of September 30, 1919, leaving one white man wounded and another dead. The next three days witnessed mass violence against black men, women, and children, as mobs of whites from surrounding counties and from Mississippi sought to put down what they believed to be a black rebellion. Gov. Charles Brough arranged for federal troops to intervene, and their first order of business was to disarm everyone, black and white. Twelve black men were subsequently condemned to death, largely on the basis of coerced testimony in trials that lasted only minutes. The NAACP launched an investigation and pursued a series of appeals that eventually resulted in their release. Scipio Jones, a prominent black attorney in Little Rock, played a major role in representing the twelve men, and many other black Arkansans contributed to the cost of the appeals. Economic Opportunities and Challenges Although the war brought economic opportunity to certain industries in Arkansas, the postwar period brought challenges, both social and economic. Some historians view the Elaine Massacre as one manifestation of postwar readjustment, as labor and race riots escalated across the nation in 1919 and 1920. By 1920, the bottom fell out of the agricultural market, with cotton going from thirty-seven cents to six cents per pound. Although these prices recovered during the 1920s, it was too little, too late for many farmers, and then natural disasters followed in 1927 and again in 1930. The Flood of 1927 inundated 2,024,210 acres in Arkansas along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and had it not been for a well-organized Red Cross relief effort, many of the state’s citizens would have been left in dire circumstances. Water remained on many thousands of acres well into the summer, preventing crops from being planted. The flood was followed in 1930 with a severe drought that also necessitated Red Cross relief and exposed the poverty of rural Arkansas to the nation. Families were discovered on the verge of starvation, and it became clear that the drought itself was only partially to blame. The endemic poverty of the rural population was merely exacerbated by the drought. Frustration levels were high, and when farmers in England (Lonoke County) in January 1931 demanded Red Cross relief that was not immediately forthcoming, local merchants were prevailed upon to distribute supplies to them. The Great Depression Meanwhile, trouble of another sort was brewing in the Arkansas Delta. In 1934, black and white tenants and sharecroppers united under the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) and began to object to the way Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) programs were being implemented. The STFU brought up two major issues. First, they objected to the way that planters were appropriating crop reduction payments—funds they received in return for “renting” acres to the federal government in return for not planting certain crops, such as cotton. Second, because they were no longer growing such labor intensive crops, many planters evicted extraneous tenants. Although he sided with the planters, publicity surrounding violent attacks on union members, as well as the agitation of the union’s leadership in Washington DC, forced Futrell to establish a state commission to study the situation. Although the STFU never achieved its goals, it attracted wide attention to the plight of the state’s rural poor, and one of its founders, H. L. Mitchell, claimed that the integrated union laid the foundation for the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s. By the time Futrell left office in 1937, the state was operating on a cash basis and actually enjoyed a treasury surplus. His retrenchment efforts and the new taxes imposed on liquor and gambling were largely responsible, but many in Arkansas would have suffered had it not been for the massive amount of federal money pouring into the state through the FERA, the AAA, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA hired tens of thousands of Arkansans in construction projects, including building roads and erecting public buildings. Other WPA employees interviewed former slaves, wrote county histories, and collected questionnaires on churches throughout the state. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), meanwhile, put many young Arkansas men to work in camps in Arkansas, creating a number of state parks. Not all New Deal programs were as successful. The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) ran into stiff opposition from Harvey Couch’s Arkansas Power & Light Company (AP&L), which wanted to preserve the rural electric market for itself. Although electrical service expanded in Arkansas between 1900 and 1940, exposing tens of thousands of the state’s people to modern conveniences, electricity reached many rural areas only after World War II. Image and Reality Many Arkansans were uncomfortable with the image fashioned by Mencken, just as they became resentful of certain 1930s radio personalities who played on the hillbilly characterization of the Arkansas Ozarks. Lum and Abner (Chester Lauck and Norris Goff) and comedian Bob Burns both turned successful radio programs into movie careers and took their characterizations to a national audience. As historian Ben Johnson and journalist and historian Bob Lancaster suggest, Burns’s form of humor was particularly galling to many Arkansans because he made the Arkansas hillbilly the butt of his jokes, while Lum and Abner merely used “the rusticity of the characters” as flavoring. Regardless, much of America took from both shows a distorted image of Arkansas, which they came to see as a state peopled with ignorant mountain folk. There was much more to the state, to be sure, and even as these radio programs were misinforming the nation, poet John Gould Fletcher, who was one of the lost generation of writers who endured a self-imposed exile in Paris in the 1920s, was gaining acclaim. He composed a lengthy ode to celebrate the state’s centennial in 1936 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1939. At the same time, Fletcher also contributed to the emergence of a new appreciation of Arkansas’s folk culture. In 1935, he visited Emma Dusenbury near Mena (Polk County), who sung a number of forgotten songs. His account of his visit with her inspired others to record them and place the recordings in the Library of Congress. One of those who visited her was folklorist Vance Randolph, who interviewed mountain folk in the Ozarks and recorded much of their music. Musicologist John Lomax, meanwhile, visited Arkansas prisons and recorded “Rock Island Line,” which was later made famous by Leadbelly, thereby exposing the rich blues music of the state. Some communities eventually realized the commercial value of celebrating their folk culture and began to capitalize on it by sponsoring festivals that featured folk art and music. The King Biscuit Blues Hour, broadcast from Helena (Phillips County), exemplified this and, as well, the arrival of radio entertainment in Arkansas. From Helena in the Delta to Mountain View (Stone County) in the Ozarks, communities began to use the rustic image rather than run from it. Others of a more typically scholarly frame of mind began to lay the foundation for preserving and promoting the state’s history. The Arkansas Historical Association (AHA) published a few volumes on Arkansas history in the first decade of the twentieth century, but that organization was then eclipsed by the Arkansas History Commission (now called the Arkansas State Archives), created in 1905. Although the AHC was under-funded and little appreciated, it struggled to create an archive to preserve documentary evidence that later historians would find useful. In 1930, two history professors (David Y. Thomas and J. H. Atkinson) began to agitate for the re-creation of the AHA, hoping to promote, once again, the publication of scholarship on the state’s history. It was 1941 before they were successful, but the state has not been without its historical scholars since that time. Conclusion For additional information: Barnes, Kenneth C. The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2021. Blair, Diane D., and Jay Barth. Arkansas Politics and Government: Do the People Rule? 2d. ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Blevins, Brooks. Hill Folks: A History of Ozarkers & Their Image. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Bolsterli, Margaret Jones. Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Dougan, Michael. Arkansas Odyssey: The Saga of Arkansas from Prehistoric Times to Present. Little Rock: Rose Publishing Company, 1994. Gordon, Fon Louise. Caste and Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Graves, John William. Town and Country: Race Relations in an Urban-Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865–1905. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990. Grubbs, Donald H. Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Holley, Donald. The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Johnson, Ben. Arkansas in Modern America since 1930. 2nd ed. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019. ———. Fierce Solitude: The Life of John Gould Fletcher. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994 Ledbetter, Calvin R., Jr. Carpenter from Conway: George Washington Donaghey as Governor of Arkansas, 1909–1913. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993. Lisenby, Foy. Charles Hillman Brough: A Biography. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996. McNeilly, Donald P. The Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society, 1819–1861. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Moneyhon, Carl. Arkansas and the New South, 1874–1929. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Mitchell, H. L. Mean Things Happening in This Land: The Life and Times of H. L. Mitchell, Cofounder of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979. Niswonger, Richard L. Arkansas Democratic Politics, 1896–1920. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990. Polston, Michael D., and Guy Lancaster, eds. To Can the Kaiser: Arkansas and the Great War. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2015. Smith, Kenneth L. Sawmill: The Story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986. Stuck, Dorothy, and Nan Snow. Roberta: A Most Remarkable Fulbright. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Watkins, Patsy G. It’s All Done Gone: Arkansas Photographs from the Farm Security Administration Collection, 1935–1943. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018. Whayne, Jeannie, Thomas DeBlack, George Sabo, and Morris S. Arnold. Arkansas: A Narrative History. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002. Whayne, Jeannie, and Willard B. Gatewood, eds. Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993. Whayne, Jeannie M. A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Jeannie Whayne Which Progressive reform was most successful in reducing the prevalence of child labor?One such movement advocated the abolishment of child labor and the American ideal of childhood. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was the first federal law passed, and upheld, abolishing child labor in America.
Which of the following refers to the broad platform of Progressive reforms enacted by President Roosevelt in his second term in office?The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States of America between 1933 and 1939.
Which reform advocate was most responsible for establishing the social work profession?Social work pioneer Jane Addams was one of the first women to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded in 1931. Known best for establishing settlement houses in Chicago for immigrants in the early 1900s, Addams was a dedicated community organizer and peace activist.
Which US president of the Progressive Era was most involved in Conservationism?President Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most powerful voices in the history of American conservation. Enthralled by nature from a young age, Roosevelt cherished and promoted our nation's landscapes and wildlife.
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