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

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-7269482

1558-1454

Zachary Smith,

Race, History, and American Society

J. Blake Perkins brings impressive research and a lively narrative to bear in his challenge to scholars such as Bethany Moreton (To Serve God and Walmart, Harvard University Press, 2009) and Darren Dochuk (From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, W.W. Norton, 2011) who have portrayed late twentieth-century rural people’s antimodernist and antigovernment ideologies as a static feature of southern rural culture since the nineteenth century. Focusing on his native Arkansas Ozarks, Perkins explains that while these principles among rural southern whites enjoy a long history, their motivations and undercurrents have remained anything but static since the populist insurgency of the 1890s. The faith poor Ozarkers placed in the federal government to create economic opportunities for rural folks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he argues, eroded over time as local elites tasked to administer the programs of a largely decentralized federal state enforced policies in ways that maintained the local status quo and thus their own political and economic positions. These circumstances, Perkins concludes, led to intense resistance to local management of federal policies until the last half of the twentieth century, when decades of unfulfilled promises left poor Ozarkers open to the pro–states’ rights and anti–federal government arguments of the New Right and Tea Party movements.The final two chapters are the most significant and strongest sections of the book, as Perkins explains how in the late twentieth century local elites maneuvered themselves into position to exploit or resist federal policies aimed at the poor. More specifically, local elites’ administering of federal policies allowed them to take credit for programs’ successes while shifting blame for their failures onto the federal government. Under these circumstances, the federal government could not receive anything but blame for the inadequacies of a program like the Ozarks Regional Commission (ORC), an underfunded federal effort to revitalize chronically depressed sections of the mountainous region. The few resources available to the ORC were focused primarily onto urban areas, where local business elites received the lion’s share of the benefits while the most destitute sections of the region remained untouched by the program. Yet when the rural poor complained of this arrangement, “local leaders passed the buck to federal bureaucrats in Washington” (185). Decades of buck-passing and the continued failure of the federal government to relieve rural Ozarkers’ economic plight had essentially eradicated the optimism of the old populist movement and helped create cross-class opposition to the War on Poverty and subsequent uplift polices that relied on federal bureaucracies for their administration.In part 2 of the book, Perkins aims to reveal the underlying populist motives of individual Ozarker resisters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a series of “microhistories.” Here his arguments pack far less of a punch. While I do not disagree with Perkins’s claim that many poor Ozarkers were populists and that this would have led to some resistance to how federal policies were carried out, the author too often speculates as to the nature of his subjects’ resistance, leaving us to wonder whether resistance to local elites’ exploitation of populist-inspired federal laws was ideological or practical. The individuals he features do not appear to fit the familiar populist molds of the agrarian state-builders who distrusted a corrupt federal bureaucracy (Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform, University of Chicago Press, 1999) or the rural modernists who hoped to seize the reigns of the federal state and wield its bureaucratic power to fit their aims instead of those of big capital (Charles Postel, The Populist Vision, Oxford University Press, 2007). Instead, they often come across as angry and frustrated at any person or institution that would advance the interests of elites instead of those of the common man, especially themselves.A case in point is the moonshiner Harve Bruce, featured in chapter 2. During his 1897 trial for shooting and killing two local revenue officers and wounding two others as they closed in on his backwoods still, Bruce “seems to have been” angry at another local revenue officer “who he likely felt had unfairly used his elite status” to gain the federal post that allowed him to suppress smallholders’ economic freedom (52). Yet the author does not provide evidence, direct or indirect, that Bruce held this specific attitude toward this officer or toward those he was on trial for having shot. Later, Perkins attempts to weave Bruce into the populist cloth with “important clues . . . which tend to suggest” that Bruce indeed held deep-seated populist sentiments (61). One of these clues was Bruce’s long-held commitment to the Democratic Party and the significant support the populist Democratic governor Jeff Davis enjoyed in Bruce’s section of the Ozarks. However, in 1887 Bruce named a son after the procapitalist Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, which suggests that his apparent allegiance to the Democrats was rooted in nothing more than sectional loyalty to the party. Bruce might not have fit the backwoods antistatist stereotype; he could have shot the revenue officers in a fit of populist rage, but the evidence Perkins presents — which is undoubtedly all that is available — suggests that it is equally if not more likely that Bruce would have taken shots at any man tasked with stripping him of his very lucrative livelihood, be it a local elite or a “furrin” federal bureaucrat from outside the region.Nonetheless, Perkins’s central claim is both timely and important. In an age of deepening political and cultural divisions between the rural and urban sections of the United States, studies that seek to explain the source of rural conservative anti-elite and antigovernment politics are needed more than ever. Perkins’s contribution definitely advances our understanding of this phenomenon. Yet the issues outlined above and the limited role religion played in his argument undercut its potential to correct the misconception that New Right antistatism and Trumpian anti-elitism are part of rural Ozark-ers’ DNA.