Making Race, Making Power by Kent Redding

Author:Kent Redding [Redding, Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 19th Century
ISBN: 9780252092237
Google: zXSPwqumx68C
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2010-10-01T00:37:03+00:00

Figure 9. Schematic Diagram of the Two-Equation Model for Farmers’ Alliance and People’s Party Relationships

To this basic model, I have included two additional equations as a check on the causal inferences developed. The third equation is similar to the second except that it uses votes cast for the Populist presidential candidate as the dependent variable. The fourth equation simply looks at the singular effect of the Alliance variable on the gubernatorial vote, controlling only for total votes cast. The following section discusses the four key theories that are tested and how they are operationalized.

For this analysis, county-level data derive from one of three sources: the 1890 decennial census, election returns from the 1892 North Carolina gubernatorial election,20 and archival records of the North Carolina Farmers’ Alliance.21

Dependent Variable Measures

There are no extant records of North Carolina’s Alliance membership, but there is a record of dues paid by each county Alliance to the state organization.22 Alliance members were assessed quarterly dues of 25 cents, 5 cents of which went to the state Alliance. Therefore, to obtain estimates of dues-paying members, I divided by .05 the highest amount of quarterly dues paid by each county to the state Alliance over the eight quarters of 1891 and 1892.23

There may be some slippage between the dues-paying membership (“dues membership”) estimates used here and the actual numbers of farmers who participated in Alliance activities but could not afford to pay dues. State Alliance records lament this latter incapacity but show that those who could not pay dues were “suspended” from organizational membership and activities. The records also indicate that dues payment reflected closer identification with the organization and its demands.24 This suggests that dues payment measures the most active of a larger sentiment pool of disgruntled farmers and is therefore a strong, though imperfect, measure of the Alliance’s organizational strength.25 The voting-dependent variables are specified simply by the total votes that People’s party gubernatorial and presidential candidates received in each county.

Accounts of Populist Bases of Support

Deprivation Theories and Measures

The oldest and most consistent reason given for the farmer rebellion is what might be called the “deprivation” argument—an argument first advanced by the farmers themselves. Hicks, the first major scholar of the movement, took the farmers’ claims at face value and agreed that worsening conditions brought on by crop price declines and rising costs had generated the rise of populism.26

The simplest measure of deprivation is the level of tenancy in each county. Landless farmers suffered the brunt of the crop lien system, and one of the greatest fears a yeoman farmer had was of becoming a landless tenant. Therefore, large levels of tenancy in 1890 should have affected Populist mobilization positively. I also tested other measures of deprivation, including the change in the ratio of improved to unimproved land from 1880 to 1890, change in the ratio of tenants to owners from 1880 to 1890, and change in the value of farm implements. None were statistically significant predictors of either Farmers’ Alliance or Populist support in initial analyses.

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