Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:53:40.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Match Made in Heaven? Southern Evangelicalism and the Rise and Fall of Agrarian Populism in the 1890s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2018

Mattias Smångs  and
Kent Redding
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The agrarian populist movement of the late nineteenth century remains among the largest social movement and third-party revolts in American history. It embodied a full-scale critique and mobilization against the inequities of the Gilded Age, and its influence stretched well into the Progressive and New Deal eras. While most accounts of the movement and party’s emergence and rapid demise have centered on economic conditions and interests, we link movement and third-party emergence and failure to the institutional arena second only to partisan politics in its impact on southern society at large, namely organized religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism. This article offers the first systematic analysis of the extent to which organized religion in the South channeled the mobilization of agrarian populism. The results both support and contradict the argument that agrarian populism was rooted in organized southern religion by suggesting that evangelical Protestantism channeled the mobilization of the Farmers’ Alliance movement but not the People’s Party. While white southern evangelical religion served as a potent cultural resource and mobilizing structure for the movement, the move to partisan politics helped create a disjuncture between movement and party from which Populism never recovered.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 63 - 86
Copyright
© Social Science History Association, 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ali, Omar H. (2010) In the Lions Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Andrews, Kenneth T., and Seguin, Charles (2015) “Group threat and policy change: The spatial dynamics of prohibition politics, 1890–1919.” American Journal of Sociology 121 (2): 475–510.Google Scholar
Austin, Peter C., and Steyerberg, Ewout W. (2015) “The number of subjects per variable required in linear regression analyses.” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 68 (6): 627–636.Google Scholar
Ayers, Edward L. (1992) The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bailey, Amy Kate, and Snedker, Karen A. (2011) “Practicing what they preach? Lynching and religion in the American South, 1890–1929.” American Journal of Sociology 117 (3): 844–887.Google Scholar
Bailey, Fred Arthur (2005) “That which God hath put asunder: White Baptists, black aliens, and the southern social order, 1890–1920,” in Glenn Feldman (ed.) Politics and Religion in the White South. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press: 11–34.Google Scholar
Barnes, Donna A. (1984) Farmers in Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of the Southern Farmers Alliance and People’s Party in Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Barnes, Donna A. (2011) The Louisiana Populist Movement, 1881–1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Bartley, Numan V. (1990) The Creation of Modern Georgia. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Baum, Christopher F. (2008) “Stata tip 63: Modeling proportions.” The Stata Journal 8 (2): 299–303.Google Scholar
Beeby, James M. (2008) Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement, 1890–1901. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Benford, Robert D. (1993) “Frame disputes within the nuclear disarmament movement.” Social Forces 71 (3): 677–701.Google Scholar
Billings, Dwight B. (1981) “Class and class politics in the southern populist movement of the 1890s.” Sociological Spectrum 1 (3) :259–292.Google Scholar
Buenker, John D. (1973) “An American kulturkampf: The birth pangs of cultural pluralism,” in John D. Buenker (ed.) Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform. New York: Scribner: 163–197.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Craig (2012) The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Christiano, Kevin J. (1984) “Numbering Israel: The US Census and religious organizations.” Social Science History 8 (4): 341–370.Google Scholar
Coker, Joe (2007) Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Creech, Joe (2006) Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Cunningham, David (2013) Klansville, USA: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Finke, Roger, and Stark, Rodney (1992) The Churching of America, 1776–1990. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Flynt, Wayne (1981) “One in the spirit, many in the flesh: Southern Evangelicals,” in David Edwin Harrell Jr. (ed.) Varieties of Southern Evangelicalism. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press: 23–44.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric (1995) Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gahr, Joshua, and Young, Michael (2014). “Evangelicals and emergent moral protest.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 19 (2): 185–208.Google Scholar
Gamson, William A. (1975) The Strategy of Social Protest. Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press.Google Scholar
Goode, Richard C. (1993) “The godly insurrection in Limestone County: Social gospel, populism, and southern culture in the late nineteenth-century.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3 (2): 155–169.Google Scholar
Goodwyn, Lawrence (1976) Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gould, Roger V. (1995) Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Green, Samuel B. (1991) “How many subjects does it take to do a regression analysis.” Multivariate Behavioral Research 26 (3): 499–510.Google Scholar
Haines, Michael R., and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (2006) “Historical, demographic, economic, and social data: The United States, 1790–2000” [computer file]. ICPSR02896-v2. Hamilton, NY: Colgate University and Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producers], 2004. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2005.Google Scholar
Harrell, Jr., and Paul, Frank E. (2001) Regression Modeling Strategies: With Applications to Linear Models, Logistic Regression, and Survival Analysis. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Harvey, Paul (2004) “God and Negroes and Jesus and sin and salvation: Racism, racial interchange, and interracialism in southern religious history,” in Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (eds.) Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 283–329.Google Scholar
Harvey, Paul (2005) Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, William F. (1984) “The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and the Georgia senatorial election of 1890.” Journal of Southern History 50 (2): 197–224.Google Scholar
Iacobucci, Dawn, Schneider, Matthew J., Popovich, Deidre L., and Bakamitsos, Georgios A. (2016) “Mean centering helps alleviate ‘micro’ but not ‘macro’ multicollinearity.” Behavior Research Methods 48 (4): 1308–1317.Google Scholar
Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (1999) United States Historical Election Returns, 1824–1968 [computer file]. ICPSR00001-v3. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor].Google Scholar
Jenkins, J. Craig, and Perrow, Charles (1977) “Insurgency of the powerless: Farm worker movements (1946–1972).” American Sociological Review 42 (2): 249–268.Google Scholar
Kantrowitz, Stephen (2000) Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, Michael (2008) “Access to saloons, wet voter turnout, and statewide prohibition referenda, 1907–1919.” Social Science History 32 (3): 373–404.Google Scholar
McAdam, Doug (1982) Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McAdam, Doug, McCarthy, John D., and Zald, Mayer N. (1996) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John D., and Zald, Mayer N. (1977) “Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial theory.” American Journal of Sociology 82 (6): 1212–1241.Google Scholar
McMath, Robert C. (1975) Populist Vanguard. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
McMath, Robert C. (1993) American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
McVeigh, Rory (2009) The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Morris, Aldon (1981) “Black southern student sit-in movement: An analysis of internal organization.” American Sociological Review 46 (6): 744–767.Google Scholar
Morris, Aldon (1984) The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Noll, Mark (2002) America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
North Carolina State Farmers Alliance (1887–1902). Day Book. Farmers’ Alliance papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Raleigh.Google Scholar
North Carolina State Farmers Alliance (1892) Proceedings, Fifth Annual. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.Google Scholar
Oberschall, Anthony (1973) Social Conflict and Social Movements. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Papke, L. E., and Wooldridge, J. (1996) “Econometric methods for fractional response variables with an application to 401(K) plan participation rates.” Journal of Applied Econometrics 11 (6): 619–632.Google Scholar
Peal, David (1989) “The politics of populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (2): 340–362.Google Scholar
Postel, Charles (2016) “Murder on the Brazos: The religious context of the populist revolt.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (2): 197–219.Google Scholar
Rabinowitz, Howard N. (1992) The First New South, 1865–1920. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson.Google Scholar
Ransom, Roger L., and Sutch, Richard (1977) One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Redding, Kent (1992) “Failed populism: Movement-party disjuncture in North Carolina, 1890 to 1900.” American Sociological Review 57 (3): 340–352.Google Scholar
Redding, Kent (2003) Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina’s Road to Disfranchisement. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Redding, Kent, and James, David R. (2001) “Estimating levels and modeling determinants of black and white voter turnout in the South, 1880 to 1912.” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 34 (4): 141–158.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Michael (1976) Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Simmons, Erica (2014) “Grievances do matter in mobilization.” Theory and Society 43 (5): 513–546.Google Scholar
Smångs, Mattias (2016) “Doing violence, making race: Southern lynching and white racial group formation.” American Journal of Sociology 121 (5): 1329–1374.Google Scholar
Snow, David A., and Benford, Robert D. (1988) “Ideology, frame resonance and participant mobilization.” International Social Movement Research 1 (1): 197–218.Google Scholar
Snow, David A., Rochford, E. Burke Jr, Worden, Steven K., and Benford, Robert D. (1986) “Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation.” American Sociological Review 51 (4): 464–481.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles (1978) From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
US Bureau of the Census (1906) Religious Bodies: 1906. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Young, Michael P. (2002) “Confessional protest: The religious birth of US national social movements.” American Sociological Review 67 (5): 660–688.Google Scholar
Young, Michael P. (2006) Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Rhys H., and Alexander, Susan M. (1994) “Religious rhetoric in American populism: Civil religion as movement ideology.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33 (1): 1–15.Google Scholar
Williamson, Joel (1984) The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Woodward, C. Vann (1951) Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Woodman, Harold D. (1977) “Sequel to slavery: The New History views the postbellum South.” The Journal of Southern History 43 (4): 523–554.Google Scholar