The Ongoing Burden of Southern History by Angie Maxwell Todd Shields Jeannie Whayne

Author:Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields, Jeannie Whayne [Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields, Jeannie Whayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States
ISBN: 9780807147580
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2012-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

EXPLAINING AND COMPARING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

1890s Populism and various strands of conservatism in postwar America are movements organized in opposition to prevailing political institutions and ideologies, and both lived in a state of dynamic contention with established parties and political ideologies. The term contentious politics applied equally well to late-nineteenth-century Populists and to anticommunists and social or economic conservatives of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.55 Despite profound differences on policies, these, and a host of other movements that have flourished over the past two centuries, are similar in their use of available cultural and technological resources and in the choices they face in trying to get a foothold in politics. Late-nineteenth-century Populism and some manifestations of early-twenty-first-century conservatism can be usefully compared as movements with histories of their own. Unfortunately, neither Woodward nor Hofstadter offered useful guides for this kind of comparison.

Woodward’s explanation of his Populism was grounded in the economic self-interest of American farmers. Fair enough as far as it goes, but beyond that, his explanation of the Populist movement required only four things: “great financial distress and inequality; an ideology and program that interpret this distress to the sufferers and offer remedies; charismatic leaders like Tom Watson … to do the explaining; and just enough instability or competition in the political system to give agrarian radicalism a chance of electoral success.”56 Hofstadter’s explanation was even thinner: provincial and backward-looking farmers distressed by their loss of status were stirred to act collectively by a handful of second-rate literary figures and conspiracy theorists like Ignatius Donnelly and “Coin” Harvey. In their different ways, both Woodward and Hofstadter tended “to see isolated, deprived individuals as the main actors in collective action,”57 rather than considering the ways in which social networks drew people into movements, helped determine who would join and who would not, and engaged in “dynamic contention” with the prevailing political forces and institutions of the day.

Since the 1960s social theorists and historians of collective behavior have developed more useful ways of understanding social movements, including Populism and other contentious movements in American politics, and also for comparing popular mobilization across time and space. These approaches begin by taking seriously the history and culture within which movements emerge. Students of social movements now seek to understand the whole range of cultural resources that movement participants have at their disposal for conceptualizing, articulating, and acting on their grievances. These resources include not only popular visions of a rightly ordered political economy (often expressed through national historical narratives), but also popular religion and value systems, ethnic and other group identities, and dense networks of voluntary associations.

Social movements involve the organized effort of people to achieve goals that are, in some sense of the word, political. Movements are a form of “contentious politics” engaged in sustained interaction with governments and political institutions.58 Social movements as we know them first emerged in the early nineteenth century, primarily in Great Britain, Western Europe, and the United States. They have followed broadly recognizable patterns and careers

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