The Politics of Despair: Power and Resistance in the Tobacco Wars.

Censer, Jane Turner

During my childhood my grandfather, a Kentucky burley tobacco farmer born in 1877, told me many stories. Along with ghost and other "hant" tales, he described his excitement at hearing William Jennings Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech in 1896. My grandfather spoke also of grimmer times - of the frustration of seeing his entire tobacco crop bring little more than the expenses of selling it. Yet in all the stories my grandfather told me, he never mentioned the farmers' protests in the early twentieth century usually known as the Black Patch War. Named for the dark tobacco grown in Western Kentucky and Northern Tennessee, this wave of vigilante action against the American Tobacco Company and farmers seen as its supporters, was marked by "night riders," masked men who burned warehouses, destroyed seedling beds, and threatened or even attacked opponents.

As I entered college and began to study history, I also discovered the writings of another Kentuckian slightly younger but far more famous than my grandfather. Robert Penn Warren used the Black Patch uprisings as the setting for his first book, Night Riders. Warren's was a somber view of Western Kentucky and of the protest - as his major protagonist, the young attorney Percy Munn, grew increasingly involved in the movement, he also became enmeshed in a cycle of violence that eventually led to his destruction. Tragedy and death were the only winners.

And there, along with two histories written in the 1930s, the story lay for many years. The Black Patch War lay outside the populist insurgency that historians chronicled, perhaps because these events did not fit into the 1890s, the usual time frame investigated. Less than a decade ago interest in this protest revived, as four dissertations - three of which have been published as books - dealt with aspects of the Kentucky farmers' movement. Tracy Campbell's The Politics of Despair is one of these new attempts at understanding the actions of early twentieth-century tobacco farmers, and it has much to tell us.

One-half of Campbell's book focuses on agrarian unrest in the Black Patch. From 1904 to 1910 Western Kentucky tobacco growers - farm owners, some quite wealthy, and tenants alike - joined a cooperative organization, the Planters Protective Association (PPA), to try to counter the oppressive economic conditions they faced. Campbell convincingly argues that not only had the American Tobacco Company, owned by the Duke family, achieved a monopoly for the American market, but it also connived with foreign buyers so that farmers received only one bid for their tobacco crops. Here Campbell does an excellent job of showing the background to the PPA's protest; in addition he carefully probes the financial problems the cooperative faced in marketing tobacco and obtaining credit for participating farmers. Campbell is on the most familiar ground as he argues that violent activities occurred as the cooperative began to falter in 1906. In his words, "The politics of hope, which had earlier characterized the tobacco movement, had given way to the politics of frustration and, ultimately, of despair" (p. 75). On this point he and Christopher Waldrep (Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch, 1890-1915 Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993) agree, but Waldrep more carefully delineates the folk aspects of vigilante actions and the state government's response. Campbell's attention remains more attuned to organizational and financial factors, probably because he believes that "Night riding . . . was nothing more than a secondary ingredient to the failing aspirations of the PPA" (p. 97).

While Campbell's account of the Black Patch War is informative, the most original part of his book outlines a second insurgency, the almost unknown strike of the burley tobacco growers in Central Kentucky, and links it to the Black Patch uprisings. Burley tobacco farmers whose product went into the burgeoning cigarette market, had also seen the prices offered them by the American Tobacco Company decline, falling as low as five cents a pound in the 1890s. And they too resorted to the cooperative movement, setting up two short-lived groups before the formation of the Burley Tobacco Society in 1906. But the Central Kentucky farmers took a different tack from their Western compatriots - after the tobacco companies refused to buy the crops of 1906 and 1907 from the cooperative, the organized burley growers staged a strike and grew no crop in 1908. The American Tobacco Company, given the low stocks of burley in its warehouses, capitulated to the cooperative and purchased the 1906 and 1907 crops for 20.5 cents a pound and 17 cents, respectively. Unlike the farmers in the Black Patch, the burley growers had triumphed; yet less than a year later the Burley Tobacco Society was in disarray.

How could such an agrarian triumph dissipate so quickly? Campbell argues that class conflict among tenant farmers and landowners formed part of the problem; he also blames the undemocratic, secretive tendencies of the leaders of the Burley Tobacco Society and the inflated salaries that they paid themselves. These are convincing reasons, but the stories that my grandfather didn't tell also may be instructive. The movement passed him by; he and his neighbors put in the cooperative only 200 acres of the 3,000 planted in burley in their county of Barren in 1909. Their lack of participation - and a factor that Campbell does not explore - may have stemmed in part from the pervasive localism of a rural state like Kentucky and the large areas of the state that would have to be canvassed to include all farmers who grew burley tobacco.

Indeed, had Campbell examined how farmers organized at the local level, he might have further fleshed out his sketch of the Burley Tobacco Society. The impetus for the group seems to have come largely from farmers in the north central part of the state, along the Ohio River. Exploring their efforts in recruiting in other areas - and difficulties caused by lack of interest, local rivalries or logistical problems - could have enriched this study.

While Campbell raises as well as answers questions, he has convincingly combined the two tobacco protest movements and has integrated them into a history of agrarian resistance and organization. This is a considerable achievement; it also makes his story one that I wish I could have told my grandfather.

JANE TURNER CENSER George Mason University