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Rehabilitation as the Wage of Starvation: The 1941 Local 313 Sharecropper Strike's Critical Theory of Normativity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2019
Abstract
This paper examines the 1941 pamphlet “Down with Starvation-Wages!,” written by Local 313 striking sharecroppers in Southeast Missouri, as it both anticipates and places into deep historical tension theories of normativity that would come to be associated with continental European critique after World War Two. The pamphlet's contents are both a local response to and critical theory of New Deal struggles over the meaning and bureaucratic administration of rehabilitation. I first examine the schematic history of federal Rehabilitation programs as they emerged in the biomedical context of the First World War and were then transformed in the agricultural-economic context of the New Deal era. Across these contexts, I demonstrate that their main discursive and procedural function was the cultivation of their white beneficiaries as economic and political self-sovereigns. I then argue that the brief attempt to extend this Agricultural Adjustment Administration-administered form of Rural Rehabilitation programming, ostensibly an index of citizenship, to 1939 striking sharecroppers constituted one attempt to dull the normative force of an organized population, which had long been treated as surplus. I outline the relocation of remaining protesters to the farming cooperative of Cropperville by the St. Louis Committee for the Rehabilitation of Sharecroppers as an intermediary mode of social management that aimed to prevent organized sharecropper protest without extending the promise of full citizenship. The Local's 1941 subsequent “starvation-wage” is thus a relational theory of racist exploitation that allowed the state of starvation to emerge among black persons. In its maintenance of various orders of black persons’ virtual value as perpetually unrealized, its economy is made to run through cycles of starvation, bondage, and debt; as well as nutrition, rehabilitation, and repair. The Local's subsequent endorsement of the 1941 strike and of coalitional organizing with white sharecroppers thus instrumentalizes the very uneven racist distribution of history and life chances by the starvation-wage as a political resource in elaborating potentially novel arrangements of life.
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- Information
- International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 96: Blackness and Labor in the Afterlives of Racial Slavery , Fall 2019 , pp. 60 - 78
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- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2019
References
NOTES
I thank Lisa Diedrich, Victoria Hesford, Liz Montegary, and Nancy Tomes for their critical engagement at various stages of the article's development. Furthermore, the comments of special issue editors Shona Jackson and Franco Barchiesi—as well as the piece's anonymous reviewers—were crucial to the core of its argument.
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5. The function of freedom as complementary to subjection is diagnosed by Hartman to be a virtually omnipresent (though varyingly manifest) aspect of the afterlife of slavery. Hartman, Saidiya, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
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8. More specifically, the next logical step in socioeconomic ascendance once a sharecropper was deemed fully reformed by their stay in Cropperville was the entrance into tan-yard labor. Tan-yards were chemically toxic sites of leather and other specialty textile production. Its workers were almost exclusively black, in part because the working conditions were considered by many white workers to be below the conditions of sharecropping. The Bootheel interviewees of the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative oral history project included many tan-yard workers. At least two of these constituent interviews were conducted between a formerly enslaved tan-yard worker who now performed “free” tan-yard labor for the same family that owned the plantation upon which she formerly worked. For a case by FSA members that the tan-yards’ proximity to northern industrial work positioned this form of labor as an advancement for black sharecroppers, see the excerpt from the FSA personnel training manual: Joseph Gaer, “Toward Farm Security,” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941), 82–85. For the transfiguration of subjection across plantation and post-plantation tan-yard economies, see: Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 10, Missouri, Abbot-Younger. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material: 40–44; 70–72. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn100/. For an extended discussion of the noxious nature of tan-yard labor, though in an urban and Northern US context, see: Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Harvard, 2014), 180–220.
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13. See: Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar and Kyla Wazana-Tompkins, So Moved: Ferment, Jelly, Intoxication, Rot (forthcoming).
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16. The quoted phrase selected here is taken from E.L. Kirkpatrick, Analysis of 70,000 rural rehabilitation families, Social Research Report No. 9 (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture), 23–24.
17. Walker, Stephen P., “Accounting and Rural Rehabilitation in New Deal America” Accounting, Organizations, and Society 39 (2014): 208–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; I take the term “responsibilitization”—the individual internalization of political economic risk management—from Foucault's lectures on “The Birth of Biopolitics.”
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21. Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Division of Information, Tenant-Protection Provisions under AAA (Washington, DC, March 1940), 1–5.
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24. Kirkendall and Cantor, 815.
25. Ibid.
26. “Sheriff disarms Sharecroppers near New Madrid,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 17, 1939: 3.
27. Kirkendall and Cantor, 815–16.
28. Ibid.
29. On records regarding the sources of the Committee's funding, see: folders 351–54 of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The most prominent leader of the Committee was its co-chairman, the novelist Frannie Cook. The other co-chair was the novelist Josephine Johnson Smoot. See: Clarissa Start, “Gets Up at 5 AM to do Her Writing,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 10, 1941: 51.
30. “Committee for the Rehabilitation of Sharecroppers Formed Here,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 17, 1939: 3.
31. Snow, Thad, From Missouri: An American Farmer Looks Back (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 2012): 203Google Scholar. The phrase “mass hysteria” is used to describe the landlords’ reaction to the sit-in thirty-six separate times throughout Snow's memoir.
32. See the following FSA pamphlet for this phrasing: Paul V. Maris, “Policy Interpretations,” Rural Rehabilitation 1 (February 1935): 13. For a reiteration of this argument concerning the fiscal implications of sharecroppers’ distance from the Human, see: Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures, Hearings before the Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures, Part 2, Dec. 5, 1941, Jan. 23, and Feb. 3, 1942, 77th Congress, 1st–2nd session. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1942), 370–404.
33. Joint Committee ibid, 378.
34. H.R. Rockwell, “Thad Snow's Prophecies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 19, 1941: 18; “Thad Snow a Witness,” Sikeston Standard, December 2, 1941: 3.
35. Snow, 236.
36. “Former Sharecropper, Who Never Had Dollar One Season to Another, Looks Forward to Happy New Year on Farm Government Helped Him Acquire,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 2, 1941: 25.
37. Ibid.
38. Bois, W.E.B. Du, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1935), 700–701Google Scholar.
39. CLR James, “Down With Starvation Wages in South-East Missouri,” Print. MS #1529, Box 19, Folder 9, Series IV.1, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, New York. Print, 2. [Though the pamphlet was written by the Local, James is listed as the author in his personal archive.]
40. More specifically: “TO THE OFFICIALS OF THE FSA …You and the home economists and the county demonstrators are always coming around to us telling us to eat liver and to eat eggs.” By “home economists and county demonstrators” they are specifically referring to those members of the Rehabilitation Committee who, along with FSA workers, would visit Cropperville to measure and offer advice on the daily metabolic functions of its workers. See James, 5.
41. Du Bois, 237–324.
42. “Southeast Missouri's Disposed Sharecroppers Build a New Life at Their Cropperville Colony,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 9, 1942: 8–9.
43. James, 2. Here the estimate of Cropperville consisting of 800 houses differs from the secondary literature narrating its initial settlement, which estimate the town to consist of 150 such houses. To find out exactly how many houses Cropperville consisted of, a close examination of Fannie Cook's archives would be the most likely route to finding the original building plans.
44. James, 3.
45. This is a riff and a response to Dipesh Chakrabarty's waiting-room in Provincializing Europe.
46. “Southeast Missouri's Disposed Sharecroppers Build a New Life at Their Cropperville Colony,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 9, 1942: 8–9.
47. James, 3–4.
48. “Compress Adds New Warehouse,” Sikeston Herald, February 12, 1941: 83.
49. Paul Williams, “Missouri's Biggest Cash Crop, Cotton, Is Going to Gins in Fabulous Bootheel,” The Kansas City Times, November 16, 1949: 26.
50. The pamphlet writers no doubt would have been familiar with the news coverage of the terrorist suppression of a 1936 sharecropper strike near Earle, Arkansas. Reports in the Jefferson City Post-Tribune, the main news source distributed throughout the rural Bootheel, detailed that local black sharecroppers were subject to this violence whether they were involved in the strike or not. Thirty-five of the striking black workers were immediately imprisoned for vagrancy; while eight black sharecroppers who hadn't joined the strike refused to work because “they were afraid they would be shot down in the fields.” This long-publicized and locally acknowledged violence only became a matter of state or criminal concern when the white social workers Claude Williams and Miss Willie Sue Blagden were hired by the STFU to investigate the murder of Wright and subsequently kidnapped and flogged by a number of local planters. See: “Sharecroppers in Arkansas Strike; Terrorism Reported,” Jefferson City Post-Tribune, May 20, 1936: 2; “FDR Orders Investigation of Floggings,” Press and Sun-Bulletin, June 17, 1936: 23.
51. “Sharecropper Strike Explained to Club by Young Participant,” The New York Age, Aug. 22, 1942: 6.
52. Ibid.
53. On the contingently united direct action among black and white workers in the Civil War, see: Robinson, 48. Therein he highlights that Du Bois's general strike was not a collaboration among black enslaved persons and poor whites based either in mutual recognition or mutual benefit, but instead consisted of “the general impact on the secessionist South of a series of actions circumstantially related to each other,” of which both black enslaved and free persons and poor whites happened to be a part.