Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South

Abstract

This is an intriguing book that is worth the attention of scholars interested in agrarian life and labor, religion, and reform alternatives that have been lost before the relentless onslaught of the “natural” workings of market economics. Spirit of Rebellion is a well-written, imaginative reworking of Jarod Roll's dissertation on agrarian social and economic protests in the bootheel lowlands of southeast Missouri in the first half of the twentieth century, climaxed by the now largely forgotten roadside protests of 1939 that provided a few modest remnants of success for small farmers engaged in the struggle to exercise some control over their lives. Roll's story is fairly straightforward: landless farmworkers, black and white, employed a Bible-based cosmology of agrarian producerism to try to improve their lives and those of their children. They failed in the end, of course, because they were overcome by the massive weight and momentum of capital and property rights. For a time, however, families that lived by the sweat of their brow—per the biblical admonition—collectively agitated for the simple necessities of life: land ownership, autonomy, and control over their own labor. In drawing these conclusions, Roll's tale is rather timeless. What makes it fascinating is how plain people were able to find theological underpinnings for their belief that those who worked the land were engaged in a sacred enterprise in accordance with providential design, and were, therefore, entitled to some profit as God had produced all wealth in the first place. Such a cosmology was obviously and seriously at odds with laissez-faire capitalism brought to the countryside (and in such vogue today)—and thus doomed to failure after the New Deal expired.