J. Blake Perkins. Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks.

Abstract

J. Blake Perkins’s Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks focuses on the Arkansas Ozarks in the hilly northern part of the state, covering the period between the 1890s and the 1970s. Its cast is primarily small-scale farmers, represented by singular characters, moonshiners, a populist governor, and rural socialists. Writers have portrayed the Upland South as isolated, lawless, and full of antigovernment sentiment. Perkins’s premise is that the people of the Arkansas Ozarks were not isolated but rather participated in America’s general social, political, and economic trends. Furthermore, they demanded government involvement to promote equal opportunity and freedom for themselves. Up until the Great Depression, the Ozarks were awash with homegrown activism. What small farmers and the area’s working class did oppose was the manipulation of federal programs by local elites and businesses to benefit themselves. Perkins begins his story in the 1890s, when the Populists ignited rural America. Laissez-faire economics was not working for the Arkansas Ozarks. Native son Jeff Davis, whom political enemies branded “the Wild Ass of the Ozarks,” embodied the Populist political revolt. Davis railed against outside economic powers like railroads that made prosperity, or even security, unobtainable by small farmers and working families. Yet Davis and other southern political leaders fell back on the support of leading business interests, limiting the vote for African Americans and poor whites and generally engaging in race-baiting.