Southern farmers and their stories memory and meaning in oral history

Southern Farmers and Their Stories NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOUTHERN HISTORY SERIES EDITORS Peter S Carmichael, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Michele Gillespie, Wake Forest University William A Link, University of Florida Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 by Frank J Byrne The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean Southern Farmers and Their Stories Memory and Meaning in Oral History MELISSA WALKER The University Press of Kentucky Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Copyright © 2006 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University All rights reserved Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com 06 07 08 09 10 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker, Melissa, 1962Southern farmers and their stories : memory and meaning in oral history / Melissa Walker p cm — (New directions in southern history) Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-2409-4 (hardcover : alk paper) ISBN-10: 0-8131-2409-3 (hardcover : alk paper) Southern States—Social life and customs—20th century—Historiography Farm life—Southern States—History—20th century—Historiography Southern States—Rural conditions—Historiography Farmers—Southern States—Interviews Oral history Memory—Social aspects—Southern States Interviews—Southern States Southern States—Biography I Title II Series F208.2.W35 2006 975’.03072—dc22 2006010201 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials Manufactured in the United States of America Member of the Association of American University Presses To my aunt, Laura Ann Walker Tate, who planted the seeds for this project more than thirty years ago, when she taught me to read the silences as well as the words in the stories people tell about their lives This page intentionally left blank Memory’s filled with what we think we’ve lived —Rick Mulkey, “Midlothian” This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction Chapter One Three Southern Farmers Tell Their Stories 37 Chapter Two Rural Southerners and the Community of Memory 77 Chapter Three Memory and the Nature of Transformation 117 Chapter Four Memory and the Meaning of Change 139 Chapter Five The Present Shapes Stories about the Past 177 Conclusion 223 Appendix One Demographic Data 231 Appendix Two List of Interviewees 237 Appendix Three Interviews 255 Notes 281 Bibliographic Essay Index 319 305 310 Bibliographic Essay Osterud, “Land, Identity, and Agency in the Oral Autobiographies of Farm Women,” in Women and Farming: Changing Roles, Changing Structures, ed Wava G Haney and Jane B Knowles (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), 73–87 In his landmark book, Passing the Time in Ballymenone, folklorist Henry Glassie provides a useful overview of the structural conventions and analytical framework of stories He pays special attention to the use of story to convey memories of historical events See Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) Memory is drawn in part from historical events On the relationship between historical events and individual memory, see Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, eds., The Myths We Live By (Routledge: London, 1990); Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Vol 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994); Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); W Fitzhugh Brundage, “No Deed But Memory,” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed W Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 1–28; Norman R Brown, Steven K Shevell, and Lance J Rips, “Public Memories and Their Personal Context,” in Autobiographical Memory, ed David C Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 137–57; Tracey E K’Meyer, “What Koinonia Was All About: The Role of Memory in a Changing Community,” The Oral History Review 24 (Summer 1997): 1–22 Other research has focused on how people use knowledge about the past in their daily lives Roy Rosenzweig, David Thelen, and scholars at Indiana University’s Center for Survey Research conducted a massive survey of 808 randomly selected Americans to discover how ordinary people use the past in their daily lives They found that people used shared experiences to build connections, to seek to understand how their personal past has shaped their present identities, and to search for alternatives for the future See Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) Sociologist Arthur G Neal has explored the impact of national trauma on collective memory, using major American events from the twentieth century as a case study He notes that national trauma has a similar effect on the collective consciousness of people as does a personal trauma on an individual National traumas cause social disruption and “People both individually and collectively see themselves as moving into uncharted territory.” Neal argues that citizens of a nation use the shared experience of national traumas to forge a collective identity built from memories of overcoming the impact of the trauma Myths, legends, and storytelling become the raw material for the creation of the sense of collective identity See Neal, National Trauma Bibliographic Essay 311 and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century (Armonk, N.Y and London: M E Sharpe, 1998), quote on p I found scholarship from psychology useful in understanding how memories are constructed Daniel Schacter’s and David Thelen’s surveys of cognitive research on memory and on literature about history and memory were a useful introduction to this literature See Schacter, Searching for Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1996) and Thelen, “Introduction,” in Memory and American History, ed David Thelen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), vii–xix More recently, Valerie Raleigh Yow provides an overview of the scholarship on memory from a variety of disciplines in Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2nd ed (New York: AltaMira Press, 2005), chapter Psychologist John N Kotre’s book also describes cognitive research on memory in terms accessible to nonspecialists See White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves through Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1995) I found two articles particularly helpful in understanding the nature and meaning of memory distortion See Michael Kammen, “Some Patterns and Meanings of Memory Distortion in American History,” and Michael Schudson, “Dynamics of Distortion in Collective Memory,” both in Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed Daniel L Schacter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 329–45 and 346–64, respectively Useful works on the role of memory in the development of identities, most particularly through autobiographical narratives, can be found in the realms of literary criticism, history, anthropology, psychology, and sociology See for example, Paul John Eakin, Making Selves: How Our Lives Become Stories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) and Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “‘You Must Remember This’: Autobiography as Social Critique,” Journal of American History 85 (1998): 439–65; Jean Peneff, “Myths in Life Stories,” in The Myths We Live By, ed Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (London: Routledge, 1990), 36–48; Rhys Isaac, “Stories and Constructions of Identity: Folk Tellings and Diary Inscriptions in Revolutionary Virginia,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Frederika J Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 206–37; Naomi Norquay, “Identity and Forgetting,” The Oral History Review 26 (Winter 1999): 1–11; Joseph E Davis, ed., Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Margaret R Somers, “The Narrative Construction of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach,” Theory and Society 23 (1994): 605–49; and Robyn Fivush, Catherine Haden, and Elaine Reese, “Remembering, Recounting, 312 Bibliographic Essay and Reminiscing: The Development of Autobiographical Memory in Social Context,” in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory, ed David C Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 341– 59 For more on the impact of aging on autobiographical memory, see Barbara Myerhoff, “Life History among the Elderly: Performance, Visibility, and Re-membering,” in A Crack in the Mirror, ed Jay Ruby (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982): 99–117; Gillian Cohen, “The Effects of Aging on Autobiographical Memory,” in Autobiographical Memory: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, ed Charles P Thompson et al (Makwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc Pub., 1998), 105–23 On variations in memory by gender, see Alexander Freund and Laura Quilici, “Exploring Myths in Women’s Narratives: Italian and German Immigrant Women in Vancouver, 1947–1961,” The Oral History Review 23 (Winter 1996): 19–25; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice,” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988): 34–62 Of course, this study examines a particular set of memories articulated by a particular group of people in a particular time and place Understanding that time and place is essential for understanding their memories The literature on the transformation of southern agriculture in the twentieth century is extensive, and this is not intended to be an exhaustive survey The best starting points for understanding the changes that swept the southern countryside are Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980) and Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986); Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); and R Douglas Hurt, ed., The Rural South since World War II (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998) Three recent works, including my own, examine the impact of this southern rural transformation on the region’s women See Rebecca Sharpless, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Melissa Walker, All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919– 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Lu Ann Jones, ‘Mama Learned Us to Work’: Farm Women in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) The classic work on the lives of African American women in the rural South is Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1985) Other important works on the Bibliographic Essay 313 transformation of particular southern subregions include Jeanette Keith, Country People in the New South: Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Jeannie M Whayne, A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); and Eldred Prince with Robert Simpson, Long Green: The Rise and Fall of Tobacco in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000) Historian Ted Ownby examines the evolving place of consumption in the lives of twentieth-century rural Mississippians, particularly focusing on the ways that consumption could reshape both power relations and assumptions about race, class, and gender See Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830–1998 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) The works of New Deal–era rural sociologists, journalists, and social scientists have enriched our understanding of twentieth-century transformations See Paul W Terry and Verner M Sims, They Live on the Land: Life in an Open-Country Southern Community (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993, reprint of 1940 edition); Margaret Jarman Hagood, Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (New York: W W Norton & Co., 1977, reprint of 1939 edition); Arthur F Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936) and Tenants of the Almighty (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1943); Charles S Johnson, Edwin R Embree, and W W Alexander, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy: Summary of Field Studies and Statistical Surveys 1933–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935); Charles S Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (New York: Schocken Books, 1967, reprint of 1941 edition); Howard W Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Howard W Odum, with an introduction by Bryant Simon, Race and Rumors of Race: The American South in the Early Forties (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) Photographers also left a rich record of rural southern economic problems See Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939) and James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988, reprint of 1939 edition) Many scholars have examined the role of the federal government in reshaping southern agriculture beginning with the New Deal Most blame federal policies for the destruction of small, diversified family farms, particularly those run by African Americans For example, historian Pete Daniel has shown how federal policies undermined the legal foundation of the crop lien system and how federal agricultural policies replaced crop lien laws as the force shaping southern agriculture USDA programs were structured 314 Bibliographic Essay to reward large farmers who used capital intensive methods and to disadvantage small diversified farmers See Daniel, “The Legal Basis of Agrarian Capitalism: The South since 1933,” in Race and Class in the American South since 1890, ed Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern (Oxford, England and Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1994), 79–102; and “The New Deal, Southern Agriculture, and Economic Change,” in The New Deal and the South, ed James C Cobb and Michael V Namorato (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 37–61 A similar argument was advanced by Jack Temple Kirby in “The Transformation of Southern Plantations, c 1920– 1960,” Agricultural History 57 (1983): 257–76 Historian Nan Elizabeth Woodruff has concurred, showing how Mississippi Delta landowners used federal and local agencies during World War II to develop and implement strategies to modernize the plantation economy while preserving their own political and economic power See Woodruff, “Mississippi Delta Planters and Debates over Mechanization, Labor and Civil Rights in the 1940s,” Journal of Southern History 60 (1994): 263–84 Political scientist William P Browne also argues that the destruction of African American agriculture was a result of federal policy See Browne, “Benign Public Policies, Malignant Consequences, and the Demise of African American Agriculture,” in African American Life in the Rural South, 1900–1950, ed R Douglas Hurt (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 129–51 Historian Donald Holley takes a more benign view of the federal government He does not see mechanization as the product of federal agricultural policy nor does he believe that mechanization caused the exodus from the land in the South Instead he argues that mechanization arose as a response to out-migration He saw mechanization as freeing African American sharecroppers from an economically exploitive system See Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000) Sociologist Jess Gilbert and political scientist Mary Summers argue that a small group of USDA officials did attempt to address the problems of small farmers, but that these officials were silenced when Congress eliminated their programs during and after World War II See Jess Gilbert, “New Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal: A Different Kind of State,” (pp 129–46) and Mary Summers, “The New Deal Farm Programs: Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture,” (pp 147–59), both in Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed, ed Jane Adams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) While Gilbert and Summers have succeeded in convincing me that a significant number of New Deal–era USDA officials—both in Washington and in the field—possessed noble motives and goals of creating agricultural programs rooted in grassroots democracy that would benefit the neediest farmers, I believe that they miss the point of the USDA’s critics Democratic agricultural reformers, clus- Bibliographic Essay 315 tered mostly in the Resettlement Administration and its successor, the Farm Security Administration, lost their battle to shape and control USDA programs In the end, programs to serve the interests of landowning commercial farmers consumed the lion’s share of the agency’s attention and budget and thus shaped farm policy for generations to come Rural transformation was inextricably linked to southern industrialization For accounts of this process, see Jacquelyn Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (New York: W W Norton and Co., 1987); James C Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877– 1984 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984) and The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–1921 (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2001); Randall L Patton with David B Parker, Carpet Capital: The Rise of a New South Industry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999); Ronald D Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); Paul Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 1730–1940 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Mary K Anglin, Women, Power, and Dissent in the Hills of Carolina (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002) Studies of the massive twentieth-century migration to southern cities also provide important insights on the process of rural transformation Historian Louis M Kyriakoudes recently reshaped our understanding of rural-urban linkages and the way they shaped the transformation of agriculture In an examination of Nashville and the middle Tennessee hinterlands, he demonstrates that rural people charted their paths to city life based on their previous relationships to city markets See Louis M Kyriakoudes, The Social Origins of the Urban South: Race, Gender, and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) Other important studies of urbanization in the South are David R Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982) and Region, Race, and Cities: Interpreting the Urban South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997) The history of the rural South is incomplete without careful consideration of race relations Two very fine recent works examine the ways rural African Americans resisted control of the white power structure, including white landowners Both make important contributions to our understanding of the sharecropping system and the way that African Americans themselves ultimately transformed and then destroyed that system See Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) and Steven Hahn, 316 Bibliographic Essay A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) Mark Schultz has shown how rural Georgia whites and blacks developed fluid and complex relationships based on personal interactions rather than an institutionalized Jim Crow system While white supremacy was still the rule, Schultz shows how the face-to-face interracial interactions that characterized rural life also provided many African Americans with freedoms unknown to urban blacks See Mark Schultz, The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow (Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005) A number of sources help to place southern rural transformation in a national and international context Historian Deborah Fitzgerald has argued that the emergence of an industrial ideal is a fundamental feature of twentieth-century agriculture In the early twentieth century, a new class of agricultural leaders from government, universities, agribusiness, and banking encouraged farmers to apply notions of specialization, mechanization, efficiency, and economies of scale to the practice of cultivating the land The result was the development of interconnected systems of production and consumption that operated like industry and tied various economic sectors and geographic regions together See Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) On the farm crisis of the 1980s, see Barry J Barnett, “The U.S Farm Financial Crisis of the 1980s,” in Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed, ed Jane Adams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 160–71; Bruce L Gardner, American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002); Russell L Lamb, “The New Farm Economy,” Regulation (2003–2004): 10–15; and Willard W Cochrane, The Curse of American Agricultural Abundance: A Sustainable Solution (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003) Good general surveys of the history of rural America, including the South, include David B Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) and R Douglas Hurt, Problems of Plenty: The American Farmer in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2002) Geographer Ingolf Vogeler’s book is useful to understanding the relationships between large agribusiness corporations and small farmers See The Myth of the Family Farm: Agribusiness Dominance of U.S Agriculture (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1981) Chapter is informed by a variety of work on the nature of rural community Historian Orville Vernon Burton argues that community studies still have much to tell us about the rural past in “Reaping What We Sow: Community and Rural History,” Agricultural History 76 (2002): 631–58 Bibliographic Essay 317 For more on the reality of life in rural communities, see for example, work by historians Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Jane Marie Pederson, Between Memory and Reality: Family and Community in Rural Wisconsin, 1870– 1970 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Susan Sessions Rugh, Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) For more on the role of mutual aid in rural communities, see John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 223–24 Studies of contemporary rural communities include Janel M Curry, “Community Worldview and Rural Systems: A Study of Five Communities in Iowa,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2000): 693–712; Cornelia Butler Flora et al., Rural Communities: Legacy and Change (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992); Glen H Elder Jr and Rand D Conger, Children of the Land: Adversity and Success in Rural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) Recent work on the decline of civic engagement has also informed my understanding of the meanings that rural southerners gave to changes in their own communities and in the meaning of community in general These include Robert N Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Commitment and Individualism in American Life (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1985); Robert D Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); and Paul K Conkin, A Requiem for the American Village (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000) Scholarly work on the development of the Protestant work ethic and on the meaning of work to the working and middle classes has informed the section on the rural work ethic The earliest theorizing about the origins and purposes of the Protestant work ethic was done by Max Weber See Weber, translated by Stephen Kalberg, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001) For more recent scholarship on the meaning of work to working-class men, see Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York and London: W W Norton & Company, 1998), especially 98–100; Michele Lamont, The Dignity of the Working Man: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (New York and Cambridge: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2000), especially 24–26 318 Bibliographic Essay On the American distrust of government, see Gary Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999); Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) Index Abernathy, Mr and Mrs Yates, 180–83, 186 Adams, Deola, 118–19 Adcock, Minnie, 150, 156 African American farmers, 18, 22, 33, 34, 66–76, 101 African Americans: and community, 199–200, 213–17; and memory, 100–101, 107, 139, 142, 146, 157–58, 160, 163–64, 171–72, 194, 224; and USDA, 33, 37, 70–73, 157, 162–63; and World War II, 28, 158 agrarian ideology, 3, 78–80, 83, 99, 110, 179, 215–16, 226 Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 25–26, 120–21, 150 agricultural extension work, 11, 21–22, 24, 56, 58, 65, 71–72, 83, 119, 124, 133, 175 Alexander, Essie Mae, 146, 208–10 allotments, 29, 110, 133, 150, 163, 215 American Agriculture Movement, 32, 169, 230 Andrews, John William, 151 Andrews, Norbert King, 114, 129 autobiographical memory, 8–9, 14–16, 38, 58, 66, 173 Ayers, Edward, Bailey, Charles, 166 Bailey, Howard Taft, 140, 146, 163 Bateman, David, 183–84 Bateman, Laura, 205 Bateman, Opal, 155–56, 197–99, 203 Bateman, Viola Anderson, 204 Bellah, Robert N., 4, 78, 93, 171 Benson, Dick, 134–36 Bodnar, John, 9, 153 boll weevil, 22, 29, 56, 67, 122, 157 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 81, 229 Boyce, Lena, 141, 181 Brantley, L D., 150–51 Browne, William P., 34 Brownell, Jim, 131 Browning, Kiffin, 213 Burton, Orville Vernon, 179, 196, 209 Butts, William, 92 Campbell, Will D., 111, 182 Carroll, Dovie, 186, 189–90 Carroll, Etta, 112, 189–90 Carter, Dan T., Carter, Ethel, 141 Carter, Jimmy, 32 Carter, Viola, 142–43 Chapman, J C., 112 civil rights movement, 163 Civilian Conservation Corps, 102 Clark, Julian, 162–63 class: definitions of, 6–7, 100–101; and memory, 5, 7–8, 38–39, 48–53, 57, 61, 66, 81, 87, 95– 96, 99–101, 103–5, 107–11, 115, 117, 123, 137, 140, 146– 319 320 52, 171–76, 178–79, 196–97, 205–6, 224, 226–28 Clause, Irene, 92, 192–93 Cohen, Lizabeth, 297 collective memory, 4, 7–9, 172 Colley, J C., 143 Colley, Lizzie, 143 community of memory, 4–7, 54, 77–116, 117, 139, 171, 173, 180, 219, 223–24 community, rural, 30, 33, 68, 100–101, 178–79, 195–215, 217–19, 224–25 Conkin, Paul K., 213 cotton, 1, 18, 22, 24–26, 28–29, 31, 37, 55–56, 66–67, 69, 72, 75, 77, 82, 87–91, 95, 104, 118–21, 126–31, 133, 146–49, 158, 160 Country Life Commission/ Movement, 120–21 Cuffie, Roosevelt, 205 Cunningham, Tom B., 125–26, 128, 147–48, 151–52 Index Edwards, Zelphia, 141 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 174 Engel, Susan, Engelbrecht, Ben, 97 Engelbrecht, Earlien, 97 Engelbrecht, Marvin, 126 Evans, Anna, 184 extension work See agricultural extension work dairy farming, 53, 97, 102, 127, 129–32, 165–66, 202 Danbom, David B., 78–79, 226 Daniel, Pete, 27 Davis, Ethel, 102–3 Davis, Fredda, 144–45, 181 Davis, Joseph E., 38 Davis, Otto, 133 debt, 19, 25, 31–32, 34, 41, 46, 82– 83, 123, 124–25, 134, 136, 149 Diggs, Mealie, 87 displacement of tenants, 140, 146– 52 See also leaving the land Dodd, Myrtle, 104–6, 110, 204 Donahue, Brian, 135 Downing, Avery, 153–54 Farm Bill: of 1985, 32; of 1996, 171 farm crisis of 1970s and 1980s, 15, 32, 34, 53, 169 Farm Security Administration, 111, 121 Farmer, LaVerne, 97, 110, 202 Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), 72–73, 159–60, 162– 63, 166, 168, 170, 175 federal agricultural programs, 17, 21, 24–29, 31–35, 37, 53, 70– 73, 117, 119–23, 132–37, 139– 40, 149–50, 152, 156, 161–72, 175–76, 214–15, 224–28 Fetner, Woodrow, 91 Finchum, Eva, 185 Fitzgerald, Deborah, 20 Flora, Cornelia Butler, 197 Folley, Della, 97 Foner, Eric, 210 Food Administration, 24 Foster, Jim, 183 Fouts, Mary, 16, 141 Freedom to Farm Act See Farm Bill, of 1996 Friedman, Paul, 162 Frisch, Michael, 8, 173, 219 furnishing merchant, 19, 67, 83, 149, 151, 158 Easter, Jessie, 158–59 economic equality, 35, 100–110 GI Bill, 124–25, 162, 174 Gates, Pat, 103 Index General Education Board, 21 George, Arthur, 98–99 George, Leler, 99 Gibson, O C., 157 Giles, Alice, 211 Gosney, Jessie, 167 Gosney, Kenneth, 130, 167, 225– 26, 228 Graham, Kate, 114, 167–70, 175, 229 Graham, William, 133, 167–70, 175, 230 Graves, Lonnie, 108–9 Great Depression, 10, 12, 14, 16, 23–27, 37, 39–41, 43, 44, 48–49, 53–5, 66–67, 80–82, 84–85, 92, 103–4, 115, 118– 19, 136, 143, 148, 154, 156, 158, 172–73, 225 Griffin, A C., 129, 148–49 Griffin, Grace, 148–49, 164–65 Grim, Valerie, 159 Halbwachs, Maurice, 172 Hale, Alma, 205 Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, 179–80 Hall, James, 160 Hall, Ophelia, 158 Hall, Pinkey, 81–82 Hamilton, Lehon, 130, 166–67 Hamrick, J D., 120–21 Hahn, Steven, 197, 205 Hardin, Alice Grogan, 154 Harper, Douglas, 95 Harper, Woodrow, Sr., 37, 66–76, 226–28 Harrington, Mary, 112, 154–55 Harris, Edna, 98, 113 Harris, Virginia, 85, 113–14 Hartsoe, Mae, 193 Harwell, Rita, 91 Head, A L., 119 Heard, Estelle, 89–90 321 Heard, John, 89–90 herbicides, 29, 33, 45, 126, 128, 146, 148 Holley, Donald, 28 Holt, Nancy, 98 home demonstration See agricultural extension work Hoover, Herbert, 25 Horn, C P., 155 Howard, Helen, 200 Howell, Elmin, 88 identity: individual, 38–39, 87, 95, 175, 226, 230; rural, 38, 75, 78, 95, 99, 102, 11, 113–15, 118, 175, 196–97, 212, 226 Irwin, Ruth, 119–20, 192, 203–4, 212 Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona, 172, 224 Jackson, Irene, 82, 84 Jackson, Lottie, 144, 187 Jackson, Ruthie Lee, 211 Jeffersonian ideology See agrarian ideology Jewell, Worth, 85–86 Johnson, Eunice, 186 Jones, Amy, 142, 205–6 Jones, Billy Lee, 102 Jones, Cora, 193 Jones, Lu Ann, 66, 83, 95, 123, 148–49, 162, 226 Kilby, T H., 207–8 Knapp, Seaman, 21 Ku Klux Klan, 190–91 Kuykendall, Leota, 1–13, 141 landowners, 11, 17–19, 22, 24–31, 33–34, 40, 61, 65, 80, 80, 88, 99–100, 107, 120–22, 127–28, 139–41, 147–54, 157–71, 173, 175, 199, 203, 206, 228 322 Lane, Mary Evelyn Russell, 206 Laney, John B., 149 Langley, Nellie Stancil, 184 Lasseter, Elizabeth, 84 Laycock, Betty, 132 Laycock, Curtis, 130, 132 leaving the land, 12, 17, 19–20, 27, 30, 74, 92, 139, 142–43, 146, 153–58, 164–65, 172–73, 211, 214, 228 See also displacement of tenants Lewellyn, Bill, 103, 110, 114–15, 225 Lewis, James, 161–62 Linam, R H., 88 Little, Arthur, 77 Little, John, 124 Little, Orry, 187 Long, Welchel, 159, 162 love for land, 98–100 Love, Mabel, 141 Lowder, Clayton, 147 Lucas, Maurice, 146–47, 206 Lyall, Dema, 87, 126–27, 144–46 Lyons, Theresa, 142 Malone, Vera, 108 Malone, William, 191–92 Massirer, Van, 132 Matthews, David C., 124, 213–14 Matthies, Howard, 92–93 Mayberry, R G., 158 McBrayer, Ruth Hatchette, 37, 54–66, 76 McCall, Letha Anderson, 185, 213 McDaniel, D Y., 155 McGee, Dean, 94 McIntyre, Virginia, 128 McNall, Scott, mechanization of agriculture, 1, 20, 26, 29, 45, 118–19, 122, 125, 127–28, 136, 146–50, 152, 215, 224 See also technology and rural life Index memory: nature of, 7–10, 13–15; and Southern farmers, 2–3, 223–30; types of, 7–10; uses of, 5–6, 75–76, 78–80, 115–16, 136–37, 139–40, 171–80, 215– 20, 223–25 Micthell, Cleaster, 107, 209 migrant farmworkers, 26–27, 61, 198 Moore, Bill, 182 Moore, Joan, 165–66 Moseley, Ora Nell, 87 Murray, Lurline Stokes, 83, 95–96, 123 Murray, Nathan, 133–34 mutual aid, 17, 35, 49, 67–68, 78–81, 93–98, 102, 115, 148, 179, 197, 201, 204–5, 208–9, 214–20, 223, 229 Neal, Arthur G., 156 Neal, Carl, 106–7, 286, 206, 211–13 New Deal, 10, 15, 25, 27, 29, 120– 22, 133, 150–51, 156, 163, 180, 215 Newman, Betty, 103 Nixon, Richard M., 31, 134 Office of Price Administration, 28 oral history: and memory, 2–4, 38, 227–28, 230; process, 11–16 Patterson, Thomas, 114 Pedersen, Jane, 204 Phelps, Frances Read, 81 Pierson, Oris, 201, 210 Pitts, Anna Bertha, 190–91, 194– 95, 214 Podsednik, Frances, 186, 210 Poland, Curtis, 156 Portelli, Alessandro, 2, 8, 9, 16, 79, 175 Index 323 Price, Pauline, 132 Production Credit Association (PCA), 31, 74 Progressive Farmer, 121 Putnam, Robert D., 94, 96, 220 Stevenson, J Robert, 131 Stock, Catherine McNicol, 34, 170 stories, 2–6, 8–10, 13–16, 73, 77– 80, 136–37, 171–73, 176–78 Summers, Ray, 91 Quinn, Eldred, 125 Quinn, Mary Webb, 102–3, 131 technology and rural life, 29, 117– 18, 125, 127–28, 140–41, 144, 146, 180–85, 210, 218 See also mechanization of agriculture Teer, Mike, 127 tenancy, 11, 18–20, 22–23, 28, 39 Tensley, Rosa, 83, 107 Terkel, Studs, 53, 173 Thelen, David, 177, 194 Tims, W C., 200, 203 tobacco, 17–18, 22–24, 29 Todd, Bertha, 201 Tonkin, Elizabeth, 15 tractorcade, 32, 168 Raper, Arthur F., 121–22, 199 religion, 114–15 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 10 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 10, 25, 150 Roosevelt, Theodore, 20 Rosenwald Fund, 21 Rosenzweig, Roy, 194 Rucker, William, 157, 159–60, 162–63 rural community See community, rural Rural Electrification Administration (REA), 132, 180 rural identity See identity, rural Samuel, James, 198–99 segregation, 10 Selective Service Administration, 28 self-sufficiency, 34, 43, 46, 67, 78– 86, 102, 115, 123, 216, 223 Sharecroppers Union, 26 sharecropping See tenancy Sharpless, Rebecca, 88, 104–5 Sherrod, Shirley, 202–3 Shipp, Mary, 157, 161 Simcik, Mary, 187–88, 201, 210 Smith, Ann, 86 Smith-Lever Act, 21 Southern Agrarians See agrarian ideology Southern Appalachia, 11, 23 Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, 26 Spencer, Robert Jefferson, 188 U.S Employment Service, 28 USDA (U.S Department of Agriculture), 20–22, 28, 31, 33–34, 47, 53, 73, 82, 122, 126, 129, 170, 174 See also federal agricultural programs Walker, L D., 143 Walker, Lula, 143 Wallace, Henry A., 120 War Manpower Commission, 28 Ward, Flossie, 113 Watkins, Jurl, 84, 88, 195 Weathersbee, Susie, 77 Webster, Eugene, 158 West, Annie, 159 West, John, 37, 39–54, 75, 80, 90–91, 118, 205, 228, 230 West, Martha Alice, 40, 52, 82, 180 Weston, Minnie Wade, 196, 199– 200, 210 White, Dorsey M., 209 324 Williams, Grover, Sr., 112, 131 Williamson, Wilma, 101, 110 Women in Farm Economics (WIFE), 169, 229 Wood, Monroe, 84, 211 work ethic, 35, 61–62, 78–79, 86–93, 99, 104, 106, 115, 184–85, 223 Works Progress Administration, 26, 150–51 world agricultural commodities market, 15, 31, 117, 120, Index 130, 136–37, 167, 175, 224, 227–28 World War I, 24, 28, 47, 51 World War II, 12, 15, 16, 27, 28–29, 37, 44, 55–56, 81, 118, 125–26, 131, 153, 155–56, 158, 166, 173–74, 190, 211, 224–25, 227 Young, Chris, 189–90, 206 Young, Kenneth, 109 ... Cataloging -in- Publication Data Walker, Melissa, 196 2Southern farmers and their stories : memory and meaning in oral history / Melissa Walker p cm — (New directions in southern history) Includes... life-transforming experiences—is therefore essential to Southern Farmers and Their Stories understanding the role of memory in our society Indeed, examining memory as it is expressed in oral history. .. meaning of interpreting and explaining By telling stories about life on the land, rural southerners searched for order and meaning in economic and social changes Storytelling is, in the words of