Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas

Abstract

Thomas Alter II uses a multigenerational biography to recover a long history of agrarian challenges to capitalism in Texas and beyond that makes bold arguments about the genealogy of working-class radicalism in the United States and offers critical lessons for the American left today. Alter sheds new light on familiar subjects in the history of US agrarian radicalism—the Farmers Alliance, People's Party, and Socialist Party of America—by situating them in the transnational context of revolution: Germany in 1848, Mexico in 1910, and Russia in 1917. Focusing on three generations of the German American Meitzen family, who first arrived in Texas from Silesia in 1849 and became leading radical activists, Alter “demonstrates the existence of a decades-long farmer-labor bloc” that ran from the Greenback Party in the 1870s to the Farm-Labor Union of America in the 1920s (2). This farmer-labor bloc, he argues, “moved the political spectrum of US political culture both substantively and ideologically to the left” (2). While Alter sees the reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal as weak derivatives of farmer-labor bloc demands, he argues that these measures would not have happened without the agrarian radicalism kept alive by activists like the Meitzens. The farmer-labor bloc they helped build was at its most influential, he contends, when organized for independent political action, not when working within the partisan mainstream. Here Alter sees a clear lesson for the US left today: “Working-class protest movements have more success achieving their demands when they politically organize themselves as a partisan party independent of the two-party system” (3).Alter's through line is a biographical study of three generations of the Meitzen family whose members played leading roles in the development of the farmer-labor bloc, particularly in Texas. He follows their story, with its long pattern of involvement in radical politics, back to Silesia in the early nineteenth century. Here Alter finds the “roots” of the idea for a political movement to serve the needs of farmers and laborers that would later animate the Populist and Socialist movements, and the German immigrants, including the Meitzens among many others, who would actively transplant that idea after violent suppression of the 1848 German revolution forced their immigration to the United States. Arriving in Texas, the Meitzens helped lead a succession of working-class organizations—cooperatives, unions, and political parties among them—that sought to build a political coalition of farmers and wage workers to challenge the growing power of industrial capitalism. Alter uses their multigenerational activism to demonstrate the continuous development of the farmer-labor bloc through myriad linked and generally successive groups, including the Texas People's Party (1873), Greenback Party, Greenback-Labor Party, Grange, Farmers Alliance, People's Party, Farmers’ Union, Socialist Party, Nonpartisan League, American Party, Workers Party, Texas Labor Party, Farmer Labor Party, and more. In each case, Alter analyzes the movement through the lens of the Meitzens, whose long lives of committed action open up a wide-ranging intellectual and political history of American radicalism.Alter's transnational analysis not only extends his argument chronologically but also deepens it, particularly regarding Mexican influence on the American farmer-labor bloc. He shows how the influence of the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s helped push Texas Socialists toward a more radical land policy that emphasized the plight of tenant farmers, which in turn forced them to confront their previous comfort with white supremacist politics. By 1915, Texas Socialists were at the vanguard of the party's left that advanced a radical critique of capitalism and robust opposition to US military intervention in Mexico and Europe. The example of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution only accelerated that political trajectory. These transnational sources, Alter argues, made Texas farmer-labor radicals a “serious threat to the capitalist nation-state” (171).Alter's expansive approach makes Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth a significant addition to the literature on agrarian radicalism in the United States. While many readers will recognize parts of his story from the work of James Green, Mark Lause, Lawrence Goodwyn, and Kyle Wilkison, among others, Alter persuasively demonstrates that the farmer-labor bloc was a coherent, decades-long political lineage that subsumed movements that scholars generally treat as discrete, such as Populism and Socialism. He also shows that the farmer-labor bloc pursued a forward-looking radical alternative to industrial capitalism during its existence, thus offering a powerful counterargument to scholars who portray agrarian politics either as hopelessly backward or as an agribusiness seedbed. Importantly, Alter demonstrates the reach of the farmer-labor bloc well into the 1920s, a relatively understudied period of farmer and labor organizing, through the Nonpartisan League, Robert La Follette's 1924 presidential campaign, and the support from aging agrarian radicals that helped make Franklin D. Roosevelt the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party. Like all scholars of agrarian radicalism, Alter urges historians of urban, industrial working-class movements to take “these country bumpkins” seriously because without them, he asserts, “we might never have left the Gilded Age” (11).While Alter concludes that the Meitzens themselves do not make a great model for contemporary activists on the left because of their frequent willingness to tolerate the dictates of white supremacy, he does identify strategic political lessons from the farmer-labor bloc. The bloc was most successful, he concludes, when it organized independent political action in opposition to the two mainstream parties. Rather than work within the contemporary Democratic Party, Alter argues, working-class activists today should follow the example of the farmer-labor bloc's successes by creating a new political coalition “dedicated to radical economic reform and functioning outside the two-party system” (217).Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth is both provocative and compelling. Alter's crisply written and well-researched account is necessary reading for scholars of labor and left politics, as well as for activists and organizers who seek a better future for working people.