Federal Troops Research Articles

"As Though We Were Kin": Faulkner's Black-Italian Chiasmus

A telling if scandalous revelation offered by Joel Williamson relates a significant feature of William Faulkner's ambivalent relationship to his deeply conflicted personal and cultural history: never openly recognized his kin, but in March, 1956, when he was abandoning his campaign for racial sanity in the South and vomiting blood in Oxford, his second cousin [the mulatto] Faulkner Hughes was preparing to reign as Queen at the annual cotillion of the Me-De-So Club in Baltimore. (1) The obvious personal and social denial at work in this constellation of affairs retains a startling similarity to the prevailing treatment of racial matters in the greater corpus of Faulkner's works. Although Faulkner never publicly acknowledged his shadow kin, he persistently created fictional figures whose lives are made problematical by racial and social contradictions similar to those present within his own family. This literary trend is reason enough to call into question the conceptual alignment between the personal and the political informing Faulkner's ambivalent responses toward miscegenation. Faulkner's personal reaction to the hypocrisy of a racialized and his fictive portrayal of its corrosive effects are both permeated by a significant theme of loss and regret, what Irving Howe calls a weight of (273). Such social discomfort haunts Faulkner's characters in numerous situations as they confront a racial agon involving unstable identity and cultural marginality. The issue of non-disclosure that Williamson raises over Faulkner's disquieting silence is likewise present in one way or another in the racially conflicted lives inhabiting Faulkner's fictive universe. Lucas Beauchamp, Charles Bon, and (perhaps) Joe Christmas are all figures negotiating a denied, doubtful and/or hidden family origin. Each character must hazard the conditions of despair that Howe considers, and each is finally subjected to persecution and/or rejection based upon the denial operating within a family resisting disclosure of a mixed-race heritage. Given Faulkner's detailed, psychically complex, and socially anomic fashioning of these characters' experiences, it is possible to question whether the kind of of failure within the society (273) that Howe suggests is characteristic of Faulkner's rhetoric is not also a carefully constructed, if at least partially unconscious, personal confession of Faulkner's hidden relationship to the miscegenation in his own family. Faulkner's tragic mulatto figures may well imply an attempt to balance his own account with the repressed guilt surrounding his shadow kin. The argument I make here is that by taking a certain perspective on a particular set of configurations involving Faulkner's life, and his personal and fictive discourses, it is possible to recover a compelling view on the issue of non-disclosure about his shadow relatives. Surprisingly enough, this perspective takes an unexpected route through a number of representations involving Italian Americans. Faulkner's curious strategy for dealing with issues of ambiguous racial identity employs a double-voiced articulation that proceeds by way of a chiasmus, in which the identities of blacks and Italian Americans are assimilated and reversed in a signifying arrangement involving both displacement and substitution. Faulkner's attempts to negotiate the problems afforded him by his family secrets and his public role as a writer treating racial politics led to his staging an anxious literary surrogacy, with Italian Americans covertly enabling Faulkner's confession of his unspoken kinship with African Americans. As Joel Williamson points out, 1956 was a pivotal time for Faulkner concerning a number of personal and public issues. Confronted that year with the prospect of a major incident erupting over the admission of a black student to the University of Alabama, and the possible ensuing intervention of federal troops, Faulkner announced that he would fight for Mississippi against the United States should similar problems spread onto his native ground (306). …

Irony and Political Islam: Dagestan's Spiritual Directorate

Russians say that there is a defeat in every victory and a victory in every defeat. On 16 September 1999, in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, combined forces of civilian militias, police, and Russian federal troops defeated insurgent militants from Chechnya who intended to establish an independent Islamic state in the Northeast Caucasus which would have united Chechnya with Dagestan and Ingushetia. On that same date the Dagestan People's Assembly enacted legislation intended to thwart future Islamic extremism by awarding official political status to the Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Dagestan (DUMD).

Federal Troops and the Elaine Massacres: A Colloquy

THOUGH CLEARLY A CENTRAL EPISODE in Arkansas's racial history and a tragedy of grievous proportions, much remains unknown about Elaine riots of autumn 1919. It is certain that dozens and perhaps hundreds of African Americans died at hands of whites in days following an initial exchange of gunfire between deputies in Phillips County and members of a black sharecroppers' union. The precise sequence of events and number of casualties, however, continue to be debated. So does role of U.S. Army troops sent to Phillips County on second day of violence. Though troops have long been credited with restoring order, Grif Stockley, author of most comprehensive study of episode-Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001)-believes that soldiers participated in slaughter of innocent black people. balance, he writes, the evidence suggests that military used excessive force and may have killed perhaps hundreds of (p. 66). Another student of events, Jeannie M. Whayne, has suggested that available evidence does not yet permit such a conclusion. In her essay, Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in Elaine Riots (Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Autumn 1999), she notes that troops disarmed white civilians as well as blacks and wonders whether Phillips County planters may have seen military intervention as a means to stop white violence before it undermined a sharecropping system based on black labor. Stockley and Whayne discussed evidence with respect to federal troops and Elaine massacres at a debate held on February 21, 2002, at University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville. The debate was conducted under auspices of Hartman Hotz lecture series and was moderated by Tom Dillard, curator of Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System. Excerpts from debate follow and are published with permission of University of Arkansas School of Law. Transcription is courtesy of Arkansas Center for Oral and Visual History. Grif Stockley: Before I begin to try to put on some evidence that military was involved, let me just briefly set stage for you. On September 30, 1919, there was a shoot-out at a small church in Hoop Spur, which is three miles north of Elaine. Black sharecroppers were having a meeting to discuss how they could improve their situation. Probably some whites, and I'm summarizing here, came out to disrupt meeting. There was a shoot-out. Nobody knows who fired first shot, but one white man, W. H. Adkins, was killed. After that, blacks fled church. Many whites believed that blacks were fighting back. Calls went up and down delta saying there was a revolt by blacks, and mobs of from six hundred to a thousand whites came in from neighboring counties next day. But also next day, there were some telegrams sent to governor's office in Little Rock asking that United States troops be brought in to put down situation. Governor [Charles Hillman] Brough came over on a train next day with about six hundred U.S. troops. They were armed with twelve machine guns. The troops who came over were veterans of Second Battle of Marne. They were stationed at Camp Pike. Since all of this occurred, things have been debated back and forth. But essentially in my view there was a massive cover-up. Evidence shows that United States troops were involved [in deaths of blacks]. The first piece of evidence is from Walter White, a field secretary for national NAACP who managed to get an interview with Governor Brough. [Although White was African-American], he looked white. He pretended to be a newsman. The next day he came down on a train to Helena and talked with some individuals, particularly whites. He was advised by [black attorney] Scipio Jones not to talk with blacks for fear he might get them in trouble. …

Two Centuries of Methodism in Arkansas 1800-2000

Two Centuries of Methodism in Arkansas 1800-2000. By Nancy Britton. (Little Rock: August House Publishers, 2000. Pp. 423. Acknowledgments, foreword, introduction, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) The Methodists have a lengthy presence on the American scene. Theirs was the first religious body to declare allegiance to the Republic ofter the Revolutionary War, and they quickly pledged their loyalty to President George Washington after his election. Some twenty years after formally organizing as an American church in 1784, members of the denomination began efforts to reach the inhabitants of Arkansas. To chronicle this two-hundred-year history of Methodism in Arkansas could be a tedious task and make for tedious reading. But Nancy Britton, author of two other books on Methodism, has covered this span not only in an informative way-and in as comprehensive a way as possible for a one-volume work-she also has made it readable. From an account of the initial efforts by two Methodist preachers (William Patterson and Lorenzo Dow), the narrative proceeds to the first known Methodist congregation, established by a young preacher, Eli Lindsey, around 1815-1816 on Flat Creek in western Lawrence County. From this small beginning, the stream of narrative slowly widens to encompass the 1820 creation of the Arkansas circuit, the erection of church buildings, and the various divisions that arose, beginning around 1830. The latter occurred when dissenters in the Methodist Episcopal Church broke away to form the Methodist Protestant Church. Keeping this and subsequent divisions straight requires close attention, but Britton helps by supplying sidebars and charts throughout the book. Illustrations and photos accompanying the text also are helpful. As the abolition movement in the North gained momentum in the country's religious bodies, it caused serious disruptions within Methodism and brought about a split among Methodist Episcopal delegates to the Louisville Convention in 1845. (Along the same lines, the Methodist Protestants adopted two administrations for their church in 1858.) The lines of separation between North and South during the Civil War fell generally along the boundaries established at the Methodist Episcopal's Louisville Convention. After the war, southern Methodists perceived a bias against them on the part of the Union army, when Federal troops seized and controlled their churches and property and used such facilities for hospitals, barracks, commissaries, and stables. …

More pain than gain: Deterrence in the American civil war

As defeat loomed, the Confederate States of America did not conduct a protracted guerrilla war against Federal troops during the American Civil War. The widespread suffering and destruction the Civil War visited upon the Southern states had considerable impact upon the hearts and minds of Southerners. The will to fight had diminished, and the Confederacy suffered a resounding moral defeat. William T. Sherman's campaigns in Georgia and South Carolina, in particular, demonstrate how the will to fight can be beaten out of an enemy. These campaigns are examples of the functioning of deterrence during conflict.

"A Good and Delicious Country": Free Children of Color and How They Learned to Imagine the Atlantic World in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana

In 1862, a free boy of color named Lucien Lamaniere, age fourteen, wrote a letter addressed to Tampico, Mexico. After describing a trip he once took to Europe he explained to his friend: am going next year and I invite you to come we will go to Paris together before coming back to New Orleans, we will go and visit that fine country called Hayti and if you are not satisfied of those two countries, we will go and visit Mexico the finest country after Paris. Not only was this an imagined letter (which I will explain) but it was also a rather fanciful one, Lucien had planned an impossi? ble voyage around the Atlantic. This impossibility becomes clear at the foot of his letter. As a postscript Lucien wrote, since the blockade I have not heard from you.1 Indeed, Federal troops were just off the coast of Louisiana, and a few months later the Union army had occupied the city of New Orleans.

Rethinking Pullman

For the residents of the former model town of Pullman, Illinois, 1994 was an important year. In May, 100 years earlier, a strike had broken out that pitted workers at the Pullman Car Works against George M. Pullman and the company that bore his name. Before the strike finally collapsed in August, it shutdown railroad traffic across much of America, brought federal troops into Chicago and cities as far away as Los Angeles, and led to the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs, the president of the American Railway Union (ARU). It also brought to a close the long-standing debate on the most famous of the company’s social experiments: the model town located on Chicago’s far south side. Since 1880, George Pullman had trumpeted the architecturally and socially crafted town and life inside it as solutions for the problems of urban, industrial America, and large numbers of observers had concurred with that evaluation (Wright 1884; Smith 1995: 177–270; Reiff and Hirsch 1989: 104–6). For almost as long, its critics had excoriated the town as representing the worst excesses of a capitalist society where one man and his company could dominate every aspect of a worker’s life in their dual roles as landlord and employer (Ely 1885; Carwardine 1973 [1894]).

The Pullman case: the clash of labor and capital in industrial America

When the American Railway Union went on strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894, it set into motion a chain of events whose repercussions are still felt today. The strike pitted America's largest industrial union against twenty-four railroads, paralyzed rail traffic in half the country, and in the end was broken up by federal troops and suppressed by the courts, with union leader Eugene Debs incarcerated. But behind the Pullman case lay a conflict of ideologies at a watershed time in our nation's history. David Ray Papke reexamines the events and personalities surrounding the 1894 strike, related proceedings in the Chicago trial courts, and the 1895 Supreme Court decision, In re Debs, which set important standards for labor injunctions. He shows how the Court, by upholding Debs's contempt citation, dealt fatal blows to broad-based unionism in the nation's most important industry and to any hope for a more evenhanded form of judicial involvement in labor disputes-thus setting the stage for labor law in decades to come. The Pullman case was a defining moment in the often violent confrontation between capital and labor. It matched wealthy industrialist George Pullman against Debs and gave a stage to Debs's fledgling attorney Clarence Darrow. Throughout the trial, capital and labor tried to convince the public of the justice of their cause: Debs decrying the company's treatment of workers and Pullman raising fears of radical unionists. Papke provides an analytically concise and highly readable account of these proceedings, offering insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the law at the peak of industrial capitalism, showcasing Debs's passionate commitment to workers' rights, and providing a window on America during a period of rapid industrialization and social transformation. Papke shows that the law was far from neutral in defending corporate interests and suggests what the Pullman case, by raising questions about both the legitimacy of giant corporations and the revolutionary style of industrial unions, can teach us about law and legal institutions in our own time. His book captures the passions of industrial America and tells an important story at the intersection of legal and cultural history.

Transcendentalists in the Streets

Transcendentalists in the Streets David M. Henkin (bio) Albert J. Von Frank. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. 448 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). On June 2, 1854, life in the city of Boston ground to a halt as its inhabitants gathered to watch a single African-American man walk down State Street on a Friday afternoon. A military force of nearly one thousand men, armed with guns, a large cannon, and orders to fire on the crowd if necessary, cleared the streets and guarded the cortege. For eight days Anthony Burns of Virginia had been incarcerated in the Federal Court House, awaiting a hearing under the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Throughout the week, Boston’s abolitionists had pursued a range of legal and extralegal strategies to secure the release of the man who had become, rather tangentially to his own dire cause, a symbol of resistance to the Slave Power. Hours of prestigious legal counsel, reams of inflammatory handbills, and dozens of impassioned exhortations from Protestant pulpits were mobilized in his defense. A failed attempt at armed rescue resulted only in the death of an Irish-born truckman who was part of the marshal’s guard. Finally, several of Burns’s friends and political supporters organized a drive to buy him from Charles F. Suttle, his putative owner. This last possibility seemed especially promising, but Suttle changed his mind, despite his desire to recoup the considerable expenses he incurred in trying to recover his slave. Suttle may have been concerned about the legal perils (if not the bitter ironies) of selling a slave to abolitionists in Massachusetts, but it appears more likely that he was responding to pressures from those (including President Franklin Pierce) who wished to use the Burns case as a demonstration of the federal government’s commitment to the Compromise of 1850. As Anthony Burns approached a Virginia-bound steamer, standing in shackles before an urban audience restrained at gunpoint, that commitment could not have been more palpable. The drama of Burns’s procession through the streets of Boston is staged dramatically and illuminated brilliantly by Albert J. Von Frank in his book-length study of the Anthony Burns affair. The reader follows Burns’s heavily-guarded footsteps through the eyes of a wide assortment of city dwellers, [End Page 560] ranging from outraged antislavery ministers, to a black teenager who wished Burns the strength to kill himself, to the gleeful militiamen who taunted the fugitive with a chorus of the popular minstrel number, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” Here, and throughout this impressive presentation, painstaking research and eloquent writing convey a meaningful sense of the public impact of Burns’s rendition. Anthony Burns was by no means the first fugitive slave to be recovered in the North (or even in Boston) after 1850, but Von Frank makes a strong case that this particular trial pricked white consciences, fired the imaginations of previously inert proponents of free labor, and unsettled the moral boundaries of slavery. Three weeks after Judge Edward G. Loring had certified the claim on Burns as the legal property of another man, the former fugitive found himself back in the South, his body chained and handcuffed for what would be four months in an unventilated pen without a toilet. In the North, meanwhile, Burns’s symbolic body hovered freely and ominously over an intensified antislavery climate. As Von Frank argues with great force and energy, Anthony Burns haunted the writings of the major figures of the American Renaissance (including Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published a year later) and his trial forced a major realignment in Massachusetts politics in the direction of an emergent Know-Nothing coalition—and ultimately toward the Republicans. It was the specter of federal troops imposing slave law on the people of the purportedly free state of Massachusetts, Von Frank suggests, rather than the conflicts over Kansas and Nebraska, that pushed Northerners to regard compromise as politically impossible and morally bankrupt and to flirt with thoughts of disunion and visions of bloody redemption. The intellectual weight of The...

The Reconstruction Presidents (review)

516 Rhetoric & Public Affairs presidency. This provocative book constitutes a major contribution to the literature on presidential leadership. Harold F. Bass Jr. Ouachita Baptist University The Reconstruction Presidents. By Brooks D. Simpson. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1998; pp. xi + 276. $ 35.00. Brooks Simpson, professor of history and humanities at Arizona State University, pursues an ambitious agenda in The Reconstruction Presidents. Using a traditional perspective that is rare today, he explains the complexities of the postCivil War era by unpacking the moves and motives of its presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rutherford B. Hayes. In the process, Simpson offers an insightful overview of the period's national politics that is significant for its scope and coherence. Those who found the regional detail of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (1988) overwhelming will enjoy the direct narrative and concise plot of The Reconstruction Presidents. Readers with an interest in the period's historiography or presidential studies will be interested in the text's method as well as its substance. In the introduction, Simpson acknowledges that some will consider his book a "curiously old-fashioned study"; yet, he declares: "presidents, national politics, and policy matter.... History from the top down still has its merits ..." (ix). From that critical position Simpson interprets Reconstruction policy, emphasizing each president 's style and political pragmatism. Lincoln, according to the text, used the realities of war to advance his own desire for equal justice and his public responsibility to maintain the Union. Johnson had little interest in protecting African Americans or remaking the South's culture, and "he clearly fumbled away an opportunity to gain much of what he sought" (230). Johnson did not direct the Southern states during those brief years when they were amenable to federal intrusion, and his inflammatory discourse only served to unify a divided Republican Party. Grant was a well-intentioned administrator who battled against criticism from every corner. Without a clear policy and few options, the president vacillated between intervention and appeasement. Hayes did not intend to end Reconstruction; rather, he sought to reshape it by eliminating race as a divisive issue. He hoped that the South would recognize the advantages of a black electorate once federal troops no longer seemed to protect the rights of African Americans over the rights of European Americans. Whereas most contemporary histories of Reconstruction focus on specific regions or particular themes, Simpson's text is reminiscent of John Hope Franklin's Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961); its comprehensive overview leads to conclusions that are specific to particular moments but important because they explain Book Reviews 517 the evolution of national policy. The text's strength lies in its explanation of how each president responded to unique but similar circumstances. For example, when the reader sees Lincoln's incomplete policies set against Johnson's agenda she notices subtle yet important differences. Johnson and Lincoln began with the assumption that the Southern states had not left the Union; therefore, they were not conquered territories. Both presidents pursued similar strategies: locate and encourage Southern Republicanism through the use of amnesty and appointments. However, Simpson demonstrates that Lincoln and Johnson differed in their willingness to influence regional governments. Lincoln used a variety of methods, from persuasion to coercion, to move the South toward policies that he favored. Johnson was displeased and sometimes frustrated with the state legislatures, but he refrained from intervening too forcefully. This subtle difference was significant, because Johnson's approach led to Southern resistance rather than cooperation. Moreover, it contradicts the historical argument that Johnson simply enacted what Lincoln had drafted. Comparative history can be helpful for many reasons, but Simpson's execution is interesting because it highlights the tensions that exist among presidential personalities , the circumstances that they face, and the institution of the presidency. This tension is evident in two themes that run throughout the book. Simpson does an admirable job detailing the antagonism between the presidents and Congress. Despite common party affiliations, none of the chief executives benefited from a warm relationship with the legislative branch. Second, the text considers the efforts of each president on behalf of African Americans. Except for Johnson, Simpson argues that...

Reforming the Negative through History: The U.S. Information Agency and the 1957 Little Rock Integration Crisis

During the cold war, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) used documentary films to explain America's race relations to the rest of the world. In 1963, the USIA was able to address race problems more directly after President Kennedy sponsored significant civil rights legislation. Although U.S. presidents considered the use of military force to promote integration a domestic political failure, a popular subject for USIA films was the 1957 Little Rock integration crisis in which President Eisenhower used federal troops to protect nine teenagers who integrated Central High School. This article traces the use of this domestic policy failure in five USIA documentaries, examining the political influences on the films and evaluating the documentaries' success in addressing the nation's race problems for overseas audiences.

Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in the Elaine Riots

PERHAPS NO EVENT IN THE HISTORY of the Arkansas delta has received as much attention and been the subject of more speculation than the Elaine Race Riot of 1919. Historians, struggling with a mass of rich but contradictory and even tainted evidence, have failed to arrive at a common narrative of events. One noted account amounts to little more than propaganda for the planter elite of Phillips County, while another, a contemporary essay written by a future black leader, focused on exposing the evils of the plantation system.1 As varied as their interpretations have been, however, virtually all share a common shortcoming. only exception is to be found in a novel based on the Elaine riot by an Arkansas protege of Norman Mailer-and that book failed to find an American publisher.2 Competing interpretations of the riot emerged almost as soon as it had ended. Walter White, assistant secretary-and, later, executive secretary-of the NAACP, visited Phillips County incognito in mid October 1919 in order to secure material for an article he later published in Nation. White's interest in the riot almost cost him his life. An African American who, with his blue eyes and blond hair, passed for white, he barely escaped a lynch mob that had discovered his true identity.3 White took exception to the official version of the riot embraced by white officials and published in Arkansas newspapers. This version insisted blacks intended to murder certain white planters and take their lands. Whites, it was said, had discovered the plot accidentally after two deputies whose car had broken down were fired upon by blacks attending a meeting of a sharecroppers' union at Hoop Spur church outside Elaine. Walter White countered that African Americans had organized the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America to sue planters for a fair settlement of their crops, that whites had fired into the church at Hoop Spur in order to disrupt a meeting of the union, and that blacks had returned fire only in self defense.4 However the incident really began, one deputized white official, W. A. Adkins, lay dead and another, Charles Pratt, was seriously wounded. Several days of brutal violence ensued. A posse was quickly raised and rushed to the scene. White men from other parts of Arkansas, as well as from Mississippi and Tennessee, joined in the hunt for the alleged insurrectionists, some of whom fought back. Local white leaders wired Governor Charles Brough asking for federal troops from Camp Pike to restore law and order. Colonel Isaac C. Jenks commanded the 583 soldiers who were dispatched early in the morning of October 2 and were accompanied by Brough. Immediately upon his arrival, Jenks disarmed all blacks as well as white civilians and set about quelling the violence. Martial law was declared, and federal troops patrolled the streets of Elaine and Helena and scoured the countryside. By the time order was restored two days later, five whites and at least twenty-five blacks lay dead. Several hundred blacks were incarcerated in Elaine and Helena. When the Phillips County Grand Jury convened on October 27, over one hundred were still being held. In subsequent trials twelve were sentenced to death for first degree murder and another sixty-seven to prison terms. white community celebrated the trials and convictions as evidence of the rule of law over mob violence.5 Most of the facts in the official version of the riot were disputed not only by Walter White but by lawyers who appealed the convictions of the twelve black men sentenced to death. Yet the official version showed some staying power. One account written forty years after the riot essentially reiterated it. In 1961 J. W. Butts and Dorothy James published The Underlying Causes of the Elaine Riot of 1919, in this journal, arguing that a few disgruntled and misled African Americans hatched a plot to murder white planters and take their lands, that this insurrection was discovered before the conspirators could bring their plans to fruition, and that the white community responded reasonably given the situation. …

"We Have Just Begun": Black Organizing and White Response in the Arkansas Delta, 1919

ON THE LAST NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER 1919, Phillips County deputy sheriff Charles Pratt and two assistants traveled twenty miles south out of Helena, Arkansas, in apparent pursuit of a bootlegger. Shortly after stopping-reportedly to repair a flat tire-in front of a small church at Hoop Spur, just north of the town of Elaine, a shot rang out, followed quickly by a volley of gunfire. Inside the church, a group of black farmers was meeting to consider plans to demand a better price for their cotton and a fairer settlement from their landlords. Many had recently joined the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, a local group that had organized chapters of black workers in several Phillips County communities. Interrupted in their discussions by the shooting and believing their union to be under attack, the men hastened to the windows, loaded their weapons, and joined the fray.1 After receiving news of the initial clash at Hoop Spur, public officials, local businessmen, and plantation owners in Helena organized a campaign to crush the black union. Their efforts, aided by the intervention of more than five hundred federal troops, marked the bloodiest clash of a tumultuous year of racial violence and labor strife in the United States.2 Joining armed posses from three states, the troops raided homes, chased sharecroppers into the woods,jailed and interrogated hundreds of black men and women, and forced hundreds more back to work in the fields and sawmills. Army reports acknowledged twenty-five African Americans were killed. Unofficial reports place the death toll much higher.3 In the aftermath of the Elaine Race Riot, sixty-seven African Americans were hurriedly sentenced to prison terms for their participation in a purported rebellion and twelve were condemned to death for the murder of five white people who died in the fighting. All the sentences were overturned after a highly-- publicized five-year legal battle that reached the United States Supreme Court.4 Looking back across eighty years, the attempt by African American workers to organize a union in the Arkansas delta might appear foolhardy, even self-destructive, given the overwhelming political, social, and economic power of the white elites. It would be easy to fall back upon popular stereotypes of black southerners in explaining the surprising upsurge of militancy in Phillips County. Their efforts might be dismissed as the tragic result of the assumed rural isolation, ignorance, and naivete of black delta farmers. Similarly, it would be easy to rely on popular representations of white southerners to explain the murderous reaction of Phillips County whites. Most contemporaneous press accounts and some historical treatments have considered the events in such a way. The southern press presumed that gullible sharecroppers had been duped into a money-making scheme by either Robert L. Hill, a charismatic black union organizer, or U. S. Bratton, a white attorney who had provided legal assistance to some of the union members.5 The national black press and liberal magazines emphasized the viciousness of the posses and law enforcement officials, but offered little to explain the motivations of Phillips County whites. Attempting to build popular support for the legal defense of the accused sharecroppers, these publications described the black men as simple and guileless victims of a racist hysteria.6 Much of the subsequent scholarship on Elaine, including two books and a half-dozen articles, has not proceeded much beyond these characterizations. The black farmers are portrayed as passive victims while whites remain a monolithic mob of reactionary hatemongers. The stereotypes, however, obscure the very distinctive conditions shaping the actions of both blacks and whites in Phillips County in 1919. At the end of the First World War, county residents confronted radically changing economic and social conditions. Under these circumstances, blacks and whites developed conflicting visions of Phillips County's future and their role in it. …

"The Vampire That Hovers Over North Carolina": Gender, White Supremacy, and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898

ESSAY "The Vampire That Hovers Over North Carolina" Gender, White Supremacy, and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1 898 by Andrea Meryl Klrshenbaum ? ?? November 1 898 hundreds ofwhite men took to the streets of Wilmington, North Carolina, to retake the city from the clutches of "negro domination." The rioters began their day of death and destruction by reducing the offices of the local black newspaper to rubble. They then headed into the predominandy black section of the city, where shooting ensued. Most African Americans were defenseless against the onslaught ofwhite violence, destruction, and murder. Estimates vary widely, but by the end of the day, anywhere from 14 to 250 people, most ofthem black, were dead, and many prominent Republicans, Populists, and African Americans were banished or had fled the city in fear.1 The Wilmington race riot of 1898 marked the violent culmination of the Democratic party's white supremacy campaign in North Carolina. In their efforts to end political control by the Populist-Republican coalition, also known as Fusion , Democrats used the protection of white women as a rallying cry to unite white men in Wilmington and across North Carolina. The use ofwhite supremacist ideology to incite the riot is well documented in historical accounts, while the importance ofwomen and gender, defined here as societal expectations based on perceived sexual differences, is often ignored.2 Gender greatly influenced the power structure oflate-nineteenth-century political developments in North Carolina . Adding fuel to the fire of the white supremacist campaign, the combined power of gender ideology and sexual anxieties shaped the dynamics that led to the Wilmington race riot. The Democratic political machine effectively combined the fear of aggressive black male sexuality and the ideal of white female purity to create a sexualized and gendered political rhetoric that incited members ofthe white community to violence. Democratic, Populist, and Republican newspapers all used this rhetoric to greater and lesser advantage throughout the white supremacy campaign. In 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew all of the Federal troops remaining in the South, marking the end of Reconstruction. Across North Caroli- na, Republican control ended as Democrats regained the majority ofpolitical offices in elections held around this time. In Wilmington, Democrats had regained power one year earlier by electing a majority to the board of aldermen, the governing body of the city. As the Democratic party consolidated control after 1 877, the number of black officeholders and voters in North Carolina shrank rapidly. Party leaders then enacted several measures to ensure their continued power. Democrats gerrymandered Wilmington voting districts in order to reduce the political strength ofthe black population. Under the new system, blacks would be a majority in only one of the five wards even though they constituted 5 6 percent ofthe city's population. According to the city charter, each ward would elect two representatives to the board of aldermen; the board would then elect one of its members as mayor and fill the vacant position by election or appointment. As in many larger urban areas, the government of Wilmington consisted of a small cadre ofpowerful city bosses who ensured that people supportive of their views were elected to the board of aldermen.5 The Democrats held power in North Carolina until 1894, when they lost control ofboth houses ofthe legislature to the statewide fusion ofthe Populist and the Republican parties. "Frequent reminders of the turbulent era of carpetbaggers and scalawags had for years kept the mass ofwhite men voting solidly Democratic," notes historian Helen Edmonds. "But to many white farmers, by 1 894, the familiar cry of defending the state against Negro rule was becoming an outworn shibboleth."4 The Populist party was formed in the late 1 880s out of the Farmers' Alliance, an organization created to voice agrarian discontent with economic conditions across the South and Midwest. Prices for farm products had dropped steadily since the Civil War, and farmers were struggling to survive economically.5 The rural poor hoped that the creation of a new political party would give them a voice in government. Populist leaders initially employed the ideology ofwhite supremacy and excluded blacks from the party. In 1 892 Populist candidates wielded racist messages to...

The Little Rock Crisis and Foreign Affairs: Race, Resistance and the Image of American Democracy

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce a school desegregation order at Central High School in the fall of 1957, more than racial was at issue. The image of American democracy was at stake. The Little Rock crisis played out on a world stage, as news media around the world covered the crisis. During the weeks of impasse leading up to Eisenhower's dramatic intervention, foreign critics questioned how the United States could argue that its democratic system of government was a model for others to follow when racial segregation was tolerated in the nation. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was concerned about the impact of the crisis on the nation's international prestige. In the context of a war battle for the loyalties of the peoples of other nations, the image of American democracy as a just system of government was thought to be a critical national security issue.In this context, this paper argues, the impact of race discrimination on foreign relations, a cold war for civil rights reform, was one of the factors motivating Eisenhower's handling of the Little Rock crisis. Yet the protection of the nation's image abroad would, at least in the Little Rock case, Cooper v. Aaron, affirming Brown v. Board of Education as the supreme law of the land. However, as strong as the Supreme Court's opinion was in Cooper about the role of the courts in enforcing equality, the token desegregation upheld in Little Rock made clear that the equality ultimately achieved in that case was more formal than substantive. Still, Cooper aided the Eisenhower Administration's efforts to appease foreign critics. To the extent that foreign affairs was a motivating factor in Little Rock, formal -- the creation of an image of constitutional -- would be enough to satisfy the war imperative for civil rights reform.

Fort Meade, 1849-1850 (review)

book reviews159 Cattle had grazed in Florida since the Spanish period and well-heeled ranchers were in place by the time of the war. As a removed and presumably safe outpost, the state was a natural source of beef. The export of cattle rivaled in importance that of salt. The Army of Tennessee was a major beneficiary. Yet, with beef, as with much else in the "rebel storehouse," expectations were unfulfilled . Some ranchers balked at selling beeves to the Confederate government, and commissary officials were sometines inefficient. In the meantime, as other army of Confederate beef acquisitions were shut off by advancing Federal armies, Florida beeves took on increased importance. Union troops targeted cattle just as surely as they did salt works, and fewer and leaner cattle was the reality by 1864. "As in the past," Taylor writes, "too much was expected from the Florida peninsula when plans were being formulated to provision the faltering South and its gray warriors" (126). Admittedly, the activities ofcommissary and quartermaster officials does not promise inherent drama and riveting reading. Even so, some might hope for a more lively account ofthe subject, and a greaterfocus on individuals as providers would help.The vignette ofJacob Summerlin, a colorful cattleman who furnished beeves to the Confederacy, is fleshed out well. But that is the exception.A more human dimension could only add flavor and readability. A variety of sources have been consulted, but little research has apparently been done at the National Archives, where a close look at the record collections seems appropriate. These objections do not unduly detract from the contribution that has been made. The Southern economy, as with the homefront generally, has received less attention than is warranted. This book may inspire similar treatments in other states or regions. What was particularly indigenous and valuable to the Confederacy elsewhere? Failures regarding logistical supply may add to the multifaceted explanation for the Confederacy's defeat. At least in Florida, production/supply might best be described as an extremely qualified success. Most fundamentally, the author argues that the state could not be the bottomless granary or the limitless provider that some envisioned. Even so, he notes that scholars have neglected "the extent to which Florida contributed the bounty of its lands to the rebel governments" (67). Taylor has righted that neglect. William Warren Rogers, Jr. Gainesville College Fort Meade, 1849-1850. By Canter Brown. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Pp. 232. $19.95.) In 199 1, Canter Brown published Florida's Peace River Frontier, a wellreceived study detailing the settlement ofthe southern peninsula during the nineteenth century. Brown's current work focuses specifically on Fort Meade, described by the author as the "oldest town in interior south Florida" (xi). In just over 150 pages of text he outlines the founding of the town, its role during the i6oCIVIL war history Third Seminole and Civil Wars, and its postwar development and eventual decline. The southeastern frontier, Brown contends, has been relatively neglected , as have studies ofcommunities that failed to prosper after the frontier's close. In this regard Fort Meade offers a contrasting view to examples of better-known frontier settlements. Lt. George Gordon Meade established an army post along Florida's Peace River in 1849. Officers later stationed there included A. P. Hill and Thomas J. Jackson. Fort Meade quartered troops and protected settlers during the Third Seminole War and several engagements took place nearby. The war's close brought more white settlement, and by i860 a profitable cattle industry had begun to develop. Fort Meade's inhabitants suffered severe hardships during the CivilWar. The town volunteered its share of men to the Confederacy, but the population included a sizable percentage of Unionists as well. Many Florida cattlemen, Brown argues, hoped to keep their herds intact to take advantage of postwar profits and thus held strong allegiances to neither side. Early in 1864 Federal troops occupied Fort Myers, on the Caloosahatchee River south of Fort Meade. Over the next year southwest Florida was the scene of small-scale, yet bitter fighting, with Union troops attempting to disrupt the supply ofcattle being sent northward from Florida ranges. Significant numbers of Unionists journeyed to Fort Myers...

Press reports on the chiapas uprising: towards a transnationalized communication

Media reports of the Zapatista uprising have magnified the event and brought it to a transnational audience. This ethnographic analysis of the news making process documents the ways in which media agents, historical agents and the audience reciprocally affected each other, as images are projected and received. The press presence shaped an image of the historical agents as the uprising began, thus creating a space in which indigenous actors affected global events. It initially emphasized the justice of Zapatista demands creating a new image of what revolution and democracy might mean. Press attention has, however, waned as the Mexican federal troops increased their pressure and the democratic process set in motion has reached a stalemate.

The Pullman Strike of 1894

The Pullman Strike of 1894

The Mennonite Colonization of Chihuahua: Reflections of Competing Visions

The administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico is famous for the enormous distribution of lands that it undertook, the prize of the bloody and protracted revolution that had promisedtierrato the nation’s peasants two decades earlier. Less well remembered are the actions the administration took against the peasantry, when federal troops stationed in southwestern Chihuahua killed several Mexicans while protecting a colony of Canadian-born Mennonite fanners. This quiet display of the central government’s authority was not the first of its kind in the area around the growing town of Cuauhtémoc. President Alvaro Obregón’s administration had also sent troops to Cuauhtémoc, and their mission then as under Cárdenas was the protection of the lives and properties of the small Mennonite enclave that resided in the area south of Chihuahua City. It was Obregón who invited the religious minority to settle in Mexico shortly after his election, and it was he who pledged federal government protection of the Mennonites’ interests. The incongruities evident in the case begin therefore not with the stationing of the troops in Cuauhtémoc, but much earlier, with the very concessions that Obregón gave the Mennonites in the years after the Mexican Revolution.

Forever Faithful: The Southern Historical Society and Confederate Historical Memory

Essay Forever Faithful: The Southern Historical Society and Confederate Historical Memory by Richard D. Starnes An important campaign of the Civil War began in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1869. Sporadic outbreaks of resistance had occurred since 1865, and the events in New Orleans merely gave organization and direction to Confederate resistance efforts. Like the military operations undertaken between 1861 and 1865, the dedicated white southerners who carried out the campaign were fiercely loyal to the Confederate cause. Unlike previous hostilities, this campaign, however, was bloodless, fought with pen rather than sword. On May 1, 1869, the Southern Historical Society was founded. It dedicated itself to preserving the Confederate perspective of the Civil War.1 Across the South at the time, Klan violence against blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags had spurred occupying federal troops to mobilize and state militias to be called out. As a result, conservative political movements opposed to Reconstruction in several Southern states began attracting popular support as Republican parties in these states split over how to implement the new government. The Southern Historical Society's establishment then came at a time when conservative white southerners were striving to reassert themselves both politically and socially, and power relations in the South were in disarray.2 During the period, it was only natural for white southerners to want to reestablish themselves historically as well, championing their view of the Civil War. Known to historians as "the Lost Cause," this southern view of the war held that secession had been a just reaction to an increasingly oppressive federal government . The Confederate attempt at southern nationalism had reflected a noble experiment, which was constitutionally and morally right. The South had done everything in its power to fight for the cause, but in the end it had succumbed to superior northern resources. Basically, the rationalization served as an explanation of defeat. Antebellum romanticism, southern religious beliefs, war experiences, and the social, political, and economic upheaval of Reconstruction made the explanation especially appealing to white southerners.3 While the Southern Historical Society purportedly was dedicated to history 's preservation, this was not exactly the case. The Society was uninterested in academic history, with its emphasis on objective evaluation of facts, sources, and 178Southern Cultures interpretations. Rather, the organization dedicated itself to the creation of a Confederate historical memory. Historical memory is an individual's or a group's recollection of past events. Historical memories do not represent the past as it occurred, but rather the past as it is perceived. Such perceptions do not arise spontaneously . Instead, they are created, and often bear the stamp of the times during which they were constructed. Many times, such historical memories allow a certain segment of society to come to terms with some contemporary calamity.4 This, in fact, was the mission of the Southern Historical Society. Creating a Southern Historical Memory: The Print Campaign Print was the best way to carry out the Society's campaign. Of course, the Society was not the first to present the Confederate interpretation of the "late unpleasantness ": In 1866, Richmond journalist Edward A. Pollard published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History ofthe War ofthe Confederates. In 1867, Virginia theologian and Confederate chaplain Robert Lewis Dabney published A Defense of Virginia (And through Her the South). These and other books rhetorically defended the South's cause as constitutionally and morally right. They portrayed Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, and other Confederate leaders as men dedicated to freeing the South from Yankee tyranny. These books placed any blame for defeat on Jefferson Davis and other Confederate politicians, although the superiority of northern resources in terms of both men and materials was also emphasized. Books were not the only forum used to defend the Confederate cause. In 1866, former Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill began publication of The Land We Love, a periodical dedicated to "literature, military history, and agriculture ." Hill concentrated his efforts on developing the theme of Confederate military prowess. Man for man, he argued, the Confederate forces were superior to those of the Union. Only lack of resources and lack of foreign recognition prevented the South from permanently establishing a new nation. (Several other magazines with similar...