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voted for Bryan—as a Democrat—a hard money Republican from Ohio won the election.
Populism remained alive after 1896, but by that time the southern branch of the Democratic Party had embraced a strategy designed to eliminate the threat of a white yeomen farmer/black sharecropper alliance. Beginning in the early 1890s, the rhetoric of racism appealed to many southern white yeomen, and the passage of disfranchisement and segregation statutes in the southern states in the 1890s shored up the Democratic party’s control and further increased planter power over African American farm labor. Disfranchised, segregated, and burdened by debt peonage, black sharecroppers faced severe constraints.
By the end of the century, farmers across the nation faced declining production levels, but these problems were particularly acute in the South. The promise of help to southern white farmers and planters in the late nineteenth century came from an unlikely, and largely unwelcome, source: the federal government. The Morrill Land-Grant Act, passed during the Civil War, granted federal lands to states to found agricultural, engineering, and mechanical colleges. The opportunity was not immediately embraced by southerners and even after the colleges were created in the early 1870s, southern legislatures were often hostile to them and starved them of funds. Nevertheless, augmented by the 1887 Hatch Act that funded the creation of experiment stations to work directly with farmers, the land-grant institutions slowly developed a following among some southern farmers and planters (Scott 1970).
Black farmers—whether sharecroppers or farm owners—were not served by the original land-grant institutions, even though they represented the largest number of farm laborers in the South. Although the overwhelming number of black farmers were sharecroppers, the number of black farm owners had increased in the late nineteenth century. They held small parcels on typically poorer land, and they struggled to survive in an uneven playing field. By 1890, it had become clear that the 1862 land-grant institutions were not serving black farmers and a second Morrill Act was passed. The second Morrill Act provided funds—rather than a land-grant—to create black agricultural and mechanical institutions. Unlike the grant of land awarded to states in the 1862 act, which, if used wisely, provided for continued funding, the meager funds allotted to the black schools were quickly exhausted. To add insult to injury, southern state governments were hostile and unwilling to provide sufficient ongoing funding for the black colleges. Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881, became Alabama’s 1890 Morrill Act institution and was able to secure donors to augment its operations under the leadership of Booker T. Washington. Washington emphasized the practical application of farming principles and launched extension work with black farmers in 1892 at a conference in Tuskegee attended by approximately 500 black farmers. The gathering of farmers at Tuskegee became an annual affair and included satellite conferences, all of which offered advice on production of farm products and animal husbandry and provided opportunities for farmers to present “products from their own farms” (Crosby 1977, 1983, 1986).
Washington organized a Department of Agriculture at Tuskegee in the mid-1890s and hired George Washington Carver away from Iowa State College to run it. Carver’s scientific accomplishments are well known, but he also proved to be an excellent educator and convinced talented young men, like his protégé, Thomas Monroe Campbell, to become promoters of agricultural education. Campbell and his cohort took the movable school to farmers in Alabama, meeting black farmers on their own ground. Once the Cooperative Extension Service’s program was created in 1914, Campbell supervised extension activities directed at African Americans in several southern states. Carver himself traveled the South, promoting self-sufficiency through the cultivation of crops like peanuts and potatoes. In 1906, he launched the Jessup Agricultural Wagon which traveled Alabama with information, tools, and seeds. Carver, Campbell, and their cohort struggled to reach sharecroppers on southern plantations, however, because of the reluctance of planters to allow any outside influence on their labor force. This began to change with the appearance of the most devastating agricultural pest to ever face southern cotton farmers (Crosby 1977).
The boll weevil beetle probably entered south Texas cotton fields from Mexico in the late nineteenth century. Farmers and planters—and thus the agricultural bureaucracy—became alarmed, but despite the use of arsenic-based poisons, the weevil reached into all areas of the South by the 1920s and constituted a monumental threat to cotton growers. Its march across the South had the effect of driving planters—and thus their sharecroppers—into the arms of the land-grant institutions which offered solutions. Over time, the boll weevil became a powerful symbol of the region’s plight and, unfortunately, obscured the more fundamental problems such as white supremacy, soil infertility, and the destructive credit system that inhibited experimentation with other crops (Giesen 2011).
The passage of the Smith-Lever Act in 1914 created the Cooperative Extension Service and outlined an ambitious program for aiding farmers in an era when movement from farm to city was beginning to alarm policy-makers. Farming areas across the country faced this problem, but it was also in the very decade the Cooperative Extension Service was founded that the Great Migration of African Americans began to threaten the labor needs of southern planters. The new extension service provided matching funds for hiring farm extension agents in agricultural counties across the country but recognized the power and influence of the most powerful landowners—whether planters in plantation areas or the biggest farmers in non-plantation areas. As a World War I boom in agriculture was followed by a severe agricultural recession, the initial reluctance of county quorum courts in the South to provide the matching funds for extension agents gave way to a recognition that farm agents offered some opportunities for struggling farmers and planters. The appearance of the boll weevil just as the federal agricultural bureaucracy was taking shape in a new way worked to the advantage of planters in cotton counties. Through their influence with—or control of—quorum courts, they made certain that county funds were dedicated to the promotion of a program that served their interests.
The Cooperative Extension Service understood most land in the South was farmed by African Americans, whether sharecropper or small landowner, thus it created a separate black farm agent system. Black farm agents worked with black sharecroppers as long as white landowners were assured that the program they offered did not violate planter control over their labor force. Thus, the program outlined by the extension service for black farmers was not oriented toward helping black sharecroppers climb the agricultural ladder from landless laborer to farm owner. Black farm agents, however, also worked with a small but important cadre of African American farmers who held small parcels of less desirable lands (Reid and Bennett 2012). Black agents, moreover, followed the principles laid out by Carver and Campbell and focused on attaining self-sufficiency rather than the market-oriented program outlined by white farm agents.
The white extension service agents served as the face of the state land-grant institutions and the information they provided, but they also provided access to federal programs. The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 was designed to provide credit to farmers across the country. The program was underfunded, however, and in 1923, the Agricultural Credit Act offered short-term loans, usually designed to fund planting. It, too, was underfunded and little in the way of a long-term remedy for the problems confronting farmers. Nevertheless, the romance between farm agents and southern farmers and planters deepened in the 1920s as farm agents introduced these and other programs in attempts to come to the aid of struggling farmers.
White farm agents faced a fundamental dilemma in the 1920s, however. Even as they proposed diversification and a turn away from cotton monoculture, they provided planters and farmers with information about how to better grow their monocrop of choice: cotton, tobacco, or rice. Farm agent annual reports from Arkansas, for example, reveal their attempts to convince farmers to rotate cotton with soybeans, a crop that restored nitrogen to the soil (Whayne 1996). This made imminent sense, but planters and farmers were reluctant to embrace a crop that had no viable existing market and, more importantly, their long-standing association with cotton factors as their principal lenders acted as a powerful barrier to diversification of any kind. Cotton factors, who had contracts or relationships with textile mills, demanded that cotton be grown in exchange for advances. Diversification would have been anathema to them. Farm agents recognized the financial exigencies facing the farmers they served, and with federal programs providing too few funds for loan, and with an eye on quorum court funding and the reality of the power of the cotton