Texas Fever and the Dispossession of the Southern Yeoman Farmer

Abstract

IN HIS CLASSIC NOVEL, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, JOHN STEINBECK HOLDS corporate greed responsible for the dispossession of the southern yeoman farmer. Historians have been generally more discerning, offering a complex narrative in which soil depletion, cotton dependency, land usage patterns, currency shortages, racism, international prices, government policy, and mechanization, as well as Steinbeck's banks and corporations, all play important roles in a decades-long process. However, with the exception of the white-hot emotions of a protest movement fomented by the Southern Farmers' Alliance at the end of the nineteenth century, the yeomen themselves have been portrayed as the passive victims of dispossession. Indeed, the Alliance and the People's Party offered the only widespread, articulated, organized, expression of yeoman discontent. Though lack of formalized political expression does not, in itself, indicate either passivity or acceptance, it does make the historian's job more difficult. Economic and political resistance, often in the form of violent public behavior, has to be dissected for meaning, and a text created where none originally existed.1