Working Class in American History: Hillbilly Hellraisers (ePub)

J. Blake Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks—and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people as time went by. Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers' conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levers of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials, and Midwestern immigrants arose from the region's new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern anti-government conservatism bore little resemblance to the populist backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.|
Cover
Title
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: The Populist Ethic
1. The "One-Gallused" Crowd on Government
Part II: Rural Resistance
2. First Tastes: Moonshiners and G-Men
3. "Silk-Hatted Fellers" and Their War
4. The Damn Government's Tick Trouble
5. Bring On the Dam Progress
Part III: Toward a New Defiance
6. Growth Politics and Rural Disappointment
7. The War on Poverty and a New Right Resistance
Conclusion: Populist Defiance—Then and Now
Notes
Bibliography
Index|J. Blake Perkins , a native of the Arkansas Ozarks, is an assistant professor of history at Williams Baptist College.