Kantrowitz, Stephen : University of Wisconsin-Madison

Stephen Kantrowitz is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Stephen Kantrowitz's new book merits serious attention. Based on broad research in primary sources, including an impressive array of manuscript collections, it has immense strengths. Most important, Kantrowitz takes Tillman seriously, recognizing that he was far more than some country rube and race baiter. . . . I commend Professor Kantrowitz for giving us a first-rate book."

--Journal of American History

"A thoughtful biography of one of the archracists and pillars of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South."

--New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Kantrowitz writes well, argues coherently, and has a strong point of view."

--Washington Times

"Kantrowitz has not written a conventional biography. . . . In describing Tillman's political maneuvers, Kantrowitz thoughtfully deals with many of the issues that concern historians today: the ideological construction of whiteness with all its privileges, the importance of gender and the complex nature of class relations in a biracial society less than a generation removed from slavery. Remarkably, he manages to do so without retreating into the mind-numbing jargon that often accompanies such studies."

--Washington Post Book World

"Well researched. It shows how demagogues in a leadership role can manipulate the public�s mind in such a twisted manner so as to cause havoc throughout an entire area."

--Rapport

"[A] thoughtful biography. . . . Thoroughly researched, brilliantly argued. . . . A rich and insightful dissection of the rise of American racism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Kantrowitz has given us the best study we have of Benjamin Tillman, but he has also given us a way to understand how racism took hold in the post-Civil War South and gradually spread its tentacles to the rest of the country."

--Charles B. Dew, New York Times Book Review

"[An] excellent biography."

--Library Journal

"Many of us preach the need to place political history in its social context, with emphasis on the themes of race, class, and gender that have become central to the genre of social history. In this superb biography of the white supremacist 'Pitchfork Ben' Tillman, Stephen Kantrowitz practices what we preach. Tillman created the model for two generations of Southern 'demagogues'; this biography offers a model of how to write about them."

--James M. McPherson, Princeton University

"White supremacy and patriarchy created Ben Tillman, a son of the Old South who went forth to create the New South. Stephen Kantrowitz's meticulous research breathes life into Pitchfork Ben and rebuilds his world. And a meaner, rougher world it is. Kantrowitz's skillful analysis of the connections between gender, race, and the polling place represents the best of the new southern history. His eloquent narrative will make everyone who reads this book stand in awe of hatred's power."

--Glenda E. Gilmore, Yale University

"Kantrowitz's engaging stories and meticulous research offer a brilliantly gendered explanation of white supremacy. This book is a must for anyone interested in Southern history or American democracy. A first-rate book by a first-rate author."

--Orville Vernon Burton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of North Carolina Press Web Site, May, 2001

Introduction

Ben Tillman, Agrarian Rebel

"This is the message I bring to my people," U.S. senator Benjamin Ryan Tillman warned the South Carolina state Democratic convention in 1918: "[T]he world is passing through the greatest crisis in history." In that final year of his life, some of the particulars of the crisis were new, but most, especially the ever-looming "race problem," were not. Tillman's "people" had seemed to stand always on the brink of racial, economic, and political catastrophe. And if the crisis was constant, so was the white citizenry he intended to awaken: more than a generation after the overthrow of Reconstruction, with the nation poised on the threshold of woman suffrage, Tillman's "people" still consisted of the white farming men he had idealized and derided, represented and misrepresented throughout his adult life.

Ben Tillman defined his world against the revolutions of emancipation and Reconstruction that had overtaken it in his youth. White men were supposed to exercise productive, independent mastery over individual households and Southern society as a whole, but that mastery seemed to face daunting obstacles at every turn. Black laborers aspired to autonomy. Northern corporate interests--the "money power"--strangled the Southern economy. Republicans plotted to reestablish political dominance over the region. Abetted by a handful of traitorous white Southern men, these forces were slowly forcing the region's productive white men--"the farmers," Tillman called them--into "hopeless servitude" or perhaps even bloody revolution. Only by mobilizing beneath the banner of "white supremacy" could these men defeat their foes and create a peaceful and prosperous social order.

The roots of the crisis facing white patriarchy lay far in the past. Long before Tillman's birth in 1847, the region's leaders had warned of a coming struggle against an abolitionist-inspired slave insurrection. Tillman's brothers had stood among the Confederate soldiers who fought unsuccessfully to hold those threats at bay. In the mid-1870s, he himself had taken bloody part in the campaign of terror and fraud that brought down South Carolina's Reconstruction government. But the counterrevolution that the former slaveholders dubbed "Redemption" did not resolve the region's political and economic crises. Tillman continued fighting, first as an insurgent within the state Democratic Party, then as its leader, and finally before a national audience. Throughout his career as planter, terrorist, reformer, governor, senator, and nationally known orator, Tillman struggled to mobilize the farmers--as a constituency and an idea. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South.

Tillman sought to transform the slogan "white supremacy" into a description of social reality, reconstructing white male authority in every sphere from the individual household to national politics. The project was crucial, for in Tillman's world "racial equality" was an oxymoron; one race or another would dominate, and if white men failed to rally together, their households would be invaded or subjugated by hostile forces. Whether white men faced the federal government, African Americans, or furnishing merchants, Tillman wanted them to do so as masters, not slaves. He therefore imagined a world in which the fearsome alliance of racial, financial, and federal corruption had been permanently vanquished. His idealized organic society was an agricultural arcadia in which "the land-owning farmers were the salt of the earth, and called no man master."

"White supremacy," more than a slogan and less than a fact, was a social argument and a political program. It consisted of ideas and practices, promises and threats, oratory and murder. The golden age Tillman imagined had no need for such a slogan, for until Reconstruction, the idea of white supremacy had been implicit in the legal, social, and economic system of slavery and had been enforced and reinforced at every level of society from the plantation to the U.S. Supreme Court. But emancipation, equal protection, and manhood suffrage had destroyed this congruence between the law and the white male monopoly on authority. As a result, white supremacy was anything but a given in the postbellum South. The economic hardships and transformations of the postwar era drove wedges into the historic fissures among white men and created new ones as well. As old arrangements ceased to function, new ones became more and more imaginable. Interracial coalition politics, for example, no longer constituted the capital crime of fomenting insurrection. Whatever basis slavery had created for white unity had been permanently undermined, and thus in the postbellum era, white male solidarity and collective authority would have to be built on a new foundation. As one of the leading proponents of white supremacy, therefore, Tillman had to be many things at once: an ideologue, an organizer, and a terrorist. White supremacy was hard work.[1]

It was one thing to posit white male unity and another thing entirely to create and enforce it. No singular "white mind" existed in the postbellum South, no white "volksgeist," and therefore the reconstruction of white supremacy would require new forms of mastery. Almost from the moment of their military defeat in 1865, Ben Tillman and his colleagues began a war against Reconstruction. They entered the struggle well armed, for as slaveholders and Confederate officers, they had extensive experience mobilizing white men. In the twentieth century, it has become commonplace to explain the violent campaigns they waged against Reconstruction and later insurgent political movements as the product of white Southerners' "racism." But historic prejudices, however powerful and pervasive, do not by themselves do the work of political organization. Black political and economic striving undoubtedly troubled many white men, but paramilitary groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Tillman's Red-shirts did not simply "rise up." Rather, men of the leadership class forged political arguments and organizations that put white men's expectations of mastery to work. In 1876@-77, amid a national political crisis, they succeeded in overthrowing the elected Republican government of South Carolina.[2]

In this and subsequent campaigns, Tillman and his colleagues mobilized not only white men but also ideas about white manhood. Any real analysis of white supremacy cannot limit itself to studying mechanisms of physical violence and economic coercion, institutional effects, and the efforts of critics and opponents; it must also pay close attention to words and ideas. This does not mean simply exploring rhetorical figures or pursuing an intellectual history detached from other realms of human experience; it means confronting the evanescent and the material, the mental and the elemental, all at once--a formidable challenge. A single life, standing at the confluence of these conflicts, can reveal much about their natures and dynamics. Some caution is required: as Barbara Fields has noted, "[T]aking the former slaveholders seriously naturally does not mean taking them literally." Tillman's private thoughts and beliefs remain unknowable, but his words and deeds together allow us to reconstruct the political world of action and argument in which he operated. In this book, I try to take Tillman's words as seriously as his deeds--not because they had precisely the same kinds of effects, but because both words and deeds were planned, shaped, and directed. They were both part of the project of white supremacy.[3]

The reconstruction of white supremacy succeeded in part because it built on words and ideas with deep histories. White Southerners did not respond to postbellum challenges in the light of what might be as much as in the light of what had been. They knew that from slave conspiracies to Reconstruction militias and labor struggles, black men and women had challenged the barriers to their aspirations. Many whites continued to perceive black aspirations as inherently threatening. Rather than interpreting white responses to black striving as "anxieties"--matters of psychology--we must understand that people committed to racial hierarchy had always had a great deal to be anxious about and that whatever insecurities had characterized slaveholders' rule would only be magnified in the postbellum era.[4] But most white Southerners were linked by more than anxiety. They also shared common, if implicit, understandings of the relationship between race, gender, economic position, and social hierarchies--understandings that made white manhood the center around which all else revolved. Tillman made particularly skillful use of the language of the farmers, who were implicitly white and male. The work required by "farmers" was sometimes performed by "negroes" but often by "laborers" or simply "hands"; "farmers'" helpmeets were "farm wives." Social relations and language did not function with perfect harmony, as indicated by the existence of black proprietors, female-headed households, and dissolute or incompetent white farming men. The meanings of "manhood" and "womanhood" were open to question and contest, as were the meanings of "black" and "white." But the conflict over such meanings took place within the constraints of people's histories, situations, and imaginations, limiting and even undermining radical challenges.[5]

Human beings rarely understand all the ways their history has shaped them, and postbellum Southerners were no exception. Tillman's radical opponents struggled to reconfigure the meanings of race in ways that would bolster their economic and political programs. They failed, in part because they hewed to a notion of producerism that was rooted in a social experience long reserved for white men only, and in part because whenever they attempted to give political life to a different conception of productive labor, men like Tillman took up arms against them. After the failure of biracial agrarianism, other challengers to Tillman's reconstruction of white supremacy--such as black leaders defending manhood suffrage and white women demanding suffrage--often framed their arguments even less expansively, seeking safety in a shared manhood or a shared whiteness. Exploring the history of white manhood thus helps offer a richer explanation of white supremacy and its challengers than do conventional notions that "race" trumped "class."

The reconstruction of white supremacy required vanquishing white foes as well as black ones. Some of Tillman's most fearsome enemies were not Northerners or black Republicans but other white Southern men. In fact, Tillman spent much of his time and energy attacking those who fell outside the boundaries of defiant, agricultural, white Southern manhood, including white men who formed political coalitions with blacks or Republicans. Tillman and his allies understood race to be a biological fact, but they also understood it as something far more subjective; for political purposes, race could be determined by partisan allegiance and behavior as much as by phenotype. The most important negative reference for white manhood was a vision of black manhood that bore slavery's discursive double load of indolent incapacity and insurrectionary intent. But white men who contemplated a biracial political order were denounced as scheming incendiaries, "white negroes" who deserved whatever punishment they got.

White men could also betray white supremacy by asserting unwarranted authority over other white men--in effect, treating these white men not as equals but as slaves. Tillman, like many of his friends and foes, valued only labor that created tangible goods. According to this theory, sometimes called "producerism," merchants and middlemen were dependent for their livelihoods on the efforts of farmers and laborers. But in the post-Reconstruction decades, these unproductive white men rose to positions of great economic and political power. Mill owners, who controlled the work lives of a growing class of white millworkers, presented an even more extreme vision of white men submitting to one another. But Tillman reserved his fiercest attacks for the "Redeemer" Democrats he had helped put in power in the 1870s. He claimed that these do-nothing "Bourbons" and "aristocrats" stood by while the mass of white men slid toward dependence. Effete urban dandies and "dudes," they did not understand the need for collective action and treated agricultural white men with derision and disdain.[6]

These "aristocrats'" incompetence and impotence did not make them figuratively female, for in Tillman's producerist vision, white farm women were far superior to many white men. They were not visions of pedestalized purity but productive workers who could help restore the state's white agricultural households. Indeed, Tillman attacked the "aristocrats" for their blindness to women's legitimate roles. But although farmers' wives required respect, they were not actually or even potentially "equal" to white farming men. They did not belong in politics, which Tillman understood in almost military terms. White women had to be protected from threats to their physical safety, and from the 1890s onward--as the region's transformations altered the nature of interracial contact--Tillman would become one of the nation's most notorious advocates of lynching black men who were suspected of raping white women.[7]

Tillman's stinging, provocative attacks on merchants, middlemen, and the Redeemer leadership drew the attention of the state's white Democratic voters and earned him powerful enemies--powerful but not perceptive: when the state leaders responded to his attacks, they focused on Tillman's rough, rude style, denouncing him as a demagogue who was attempting to lead a white mob. Describing Tillman's putative constituency in insulting and belittling terms, these leaders seemed to be precisely the callous aristocrats Tillman had charged them with being.

To those who understood Tillman as he wished to be understood, the nickname "Pitchfork Ben" fit perfectly. The image of the one-eyed farmer poking at his foes before a roaring crowd masks the origins, intentions, and achievements of Tillman's life and career in just the way that Tillman himself desired. His enemies mistook style for substance; we must not repeat that error. Tillman was no radical. He led no mass movement. Although he claimed to represent reform, he had in the past championed policies hostile to poor men's interests; even after his agitation began in the mid-1880s, he offered no substantial programs to address the needs of debt-ridden farmers and ardently opposed programs that might have helped them. In part, this was because he normally refused to admit that federal power might have a legitimate role, tainted as it was by the memory of the Civil War's "coercion" and invasion and Reconstruction's "radical and negro misrule." Tillman claimed to champion the rights and needs of the farmers, but the aspects of his program that one could consider "constructive"--especially his role in founding institutions of higher education for white men and women--remained tightly bound by his fears of racial equality and federal power.

Even legislation aimed specifically at hampering black aspirations revealed the limits of his devotion to white men's collective rights. His efforts to bring state disfranchisement by imposing educational or property qualifications for voting caused many white men to fear that they, like white dissidents and aristocrats, might find themselves read out of the circle of "real" white men. In fact, his successful disfranchisement campaign depressed white turnout for more than a generation. Tillman's career helps explain how white men came to be their own worst enemies--or at least to elect them.[8]

Tillman did not in any literal way "represent" the men he claimed to champion. This is not the story of the white Southern yeomanry feeling its way from the slave South to the twentieth century, for Tillman was not of that class. It is even more emphatically not the story of the poorest Southern whites, landless people who rarely voted and played only a symbolic part in the campaigns of Tillman and his opponents. Instead of being the story of these white Southerners, in fact, it is the story of political and cultural elites manipulating images and ideas about such people. Tillman's political strength did not lie in his ability to preserve most white men's embattled household independence and precarious political authority--he offered them precious little of either. Instead, it lay in his ability to identify and attack the figures who seemed to pose the greatest threat to such men's independence. In the absence of sustained challenges from people offering more substantive remedies--an absence due in large measure to the violent assaults such people faced from Tillman and his allies--Tillman's slashing attacks at least acknowledged the anger, anxiety, and alienation that many white men felt.[9]

Some of Tillman's achievements were much more than symbolic. He did help set profound limits on black attainment in the post-Reconstruction South, presenting the black freedom movement with challenges that it would take more than a generation to overcome. This was no small accomplishment, and Tillman bragged of it constantly. He never hesitated to declare that he and his fellow Red-shirts had gained power through force and fraud in 1876, and he insisted that white men would always violently resist attacks on their power. He called for the nation to follow South Carolina's example and strip black men of the right to vote. But Tillman's victory did not represent the triumph of racial "radicalism" over a "moderate" or "conservative" alternative. Any close inspection of the lives and careers of Tillman's white Democratic opponents will reveal that they set more or less the same limits on black political aspiration as Tillman set. Like Tillman, they had studied political power in slaveholding's school, and if they sometimes made different choices than those made by Tillman, it was a matter of tactics, not a sign that they were less committed than Tillman to mastery by any means necessary. They all agreed on the necessity of a white-dominated, one-party South, and for the most part, they achieved that goal. By the last decade of Tillman's life, national political programs had to submit to the procrustean bed of white-supremacist strictures if they were to have any hope of passage.

This history of a powerful white-supremacist political leader draws much of its inspiration from recent scholarship in the history of race and gender, but it also builds on other legacies. Sixty years ago, C. Vann Woodward published Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, the story of a wealthy white farmer who fought for a more democratic, egalitarian South, failed, and devolved into a hateful demagogue.[10] Unlike Tom Watson, apostle of Populism, Tillman represented a Democratic Party that steadfastly opposed radical economic and social transformation; despite Tillman's reputation as an insurgent, he was fundamentally a conservative. Like Woodward's story, this one is a tragedy--not because Tillman failed to fulfill his potential but because he succeeded. In keeping with the irony that Woodward made so central to the practice of history in this field, this book suggests that Tillman's empty, symbolic form of "rebellion" succeeded where Watson's radical rebellion failed. It explores the ways Tillman achieved that victory by building on the experiences and expectations of white men, as farmers, soldiers, and formal political equals. It shows how Tillman used the legacies of the past--including racial slavery and white men's assumed monopoly over political and military power--to make radical challenges unbearably costly for their proponents.

It also shows how Tillman shaped the national understanding of the meaning of racial violence. Although Tillman frequently boasted that the Red-shirt campaign of force and fraud had been a concerted effort, he argued that the roots of racial conflict lay not in politics or economics but in racial instinct. When two races lived side by side, one or the other would have to rule, and by the twentieth century, Tillman could point to electoral violence, labor struggles, and widespread lynching as evidence that white men had prevailed. White men were the most civilized race on the planet, responsible for the world's greatest cultural attainments. Their superiority extended to physical courage and strength: when the purity or superiority of the white race was threatened, white men became capable of the most savage violence.

It was the claim of racial instinct, not the admission of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, that caught the national imagination and gave "Pitchfork Ben" the reputation that has followed him throughout the twentieth century. Tillman seemed to represent the very "white savage" that he described in his speeches. Volatile, uncouth, missing an eye, and clad in unfashionable clothes, Tillman was easily seen as the embodiment of the Southern "poor white," a man with hatred for "the negro" flowing in his veins. To his critics, Tillman represented an ignorant, intolerant white South that had seized the reins of power from a more cautious elite that, whatever its faults, had sought peace through compromise and accommodation. This consensus was a sign of Tillman's victory, not a description of it.

The persistent violence with which Tillman and other white Democrats met their challengers obscured the meaning of their victories. As a result, just as contemporary observers accepted Tillman's self-identification as the champion of the farmers, generations of Americans came to see white-supremacist violence not as a tactic but as a fact of social life, almost a force of nature. As the twentieth century opened, many people began to believe that Tillman was right and that the politics of white men--Southerners and perhaps others as well--followed from racial instinct or a cultural inheritance so deeply ingrained that it might as well be biologically rooted. If that were true, then Reconstruction had indeed been a mistake and biracial politics were foredoomed. If that were true, the nation might have to accept disfranchisement, segregation, and even lynching as the price of sectional reconciliation. If that were true, then perhaps the United States was--or even is--condemned to remain two nations, separate and unequal, and would never be a truly democratic republic. If that were true.

Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow.

As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South.

Friend and foe alike � and generations of historians � interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.

Introduction: Ben Tillman, Agrarian Rebel

1 Mastery and Its Discontents
2 Planters and "the Gentleman from Africa"
3 The Shotgun Wedding of White Supremacy and Reform
4 Farmers, Dudes, White Negroes, and the Sun-Browned Goddess
5 The Mob and the State
6 Every White Man Who Is Worthy of a Vote
7 The Uses of a Pitchfork
8 Demagogues and Disordered Households

Epilogue: The Reconstruction of American Democracy
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index



Illustrations
Map of South Carolina in the 1880s
Tillman in his thirties
"Leaders of the Farmers' Movement"
Tillman as a U.S. senator
Sallie Starke Tillman
"Senator Tillman's Allegorical Cows"
"Senator Tillman to tell the difference between black and white"
Montage of Tillman
Photograph from which the image of Tillman in the montage was cropped
Tillman before an audience
"The 'Three Joes'"
Tillman in his last decade