In Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks, J. Blake Perkins examines the long, winding history of rural resistance to various efforts of the federal government in the Arkansas Ozarks. His findings challenge representations of rural Americans as being politically conservative because of an exceptional, age-old rural heritage. Using microhistories of small communities and individuals involved in pivotal events, Perkins finds that, from over a century beginning in the late 1800s, the politics of working people in the region changed significantly and paralleled national trends. Often, they did not resist government itself but the local elite that wielded federal power for their own benefit.
In the 1880s and 1890s, small farmers and working people in the Ozarks embraced a progressive critique of American society, calling for increases in the power and scope of the federal government in pursuit of ‘equal rights to all, and special privileges to none’, in the words of one association (p. 19). Their demands included nationalisation of railroads, an end to mono-polies, a progressive tax on the wealthy and corporations, and government programmes to help small farmers compete in national markets. Any preconceived notion of an age-old rural conservatism will crumble during Perkins’s examination of these earlier populist revolts.
Yet, candidates who rode populist sentiment into office rarely delivered meaningful reforms, and local leaders found ways to use federal power for their own gain, often at the expense of small farmers. Perkins’s meticulous research finds struggling farmers-turned-moonshiners battling not G-men from Washington, DC, but a local entrepreneur who recruited federal agents to his prohibition crusade. When a man killed a federal official in charge of the local tick eradication programme in 1922, he turned out to be one of many increasingly desperate smallholders unable to compete in the livestock trade with the prosperous cattlemen who supported costly tick treatments.
No projects were more highly anticipated than a series of dams that boosters claimed would result in flood control, public works jobs, cheap electricity, and long-term economic development, but the majority of the benefits went to prosperous landowners who could litigate for larger government buyouts and business owners located near new tourist destinations. Meanwhile, small farmers were forced off their land for less money, and the temporary construction jobs made little difference in the region’s economy.
When the Kennedy and Johnson administrations touted federally assisted economic development and a War on Poverty, hopes in the Ozarks quickly turned to disappointment as funding mostly benefited ‘growth centers’, which already enjoyed advantages over poorer rural areas. When the War on Poverty sought to circumvent state and local authorities, officeholders turned against it, accusing poverty warriors of subversive activities. With no organised opposition, local conservatives tapped into rural working-class values and forged a new conservative coalition of business leaders, disaffected smallholders, and low-wage workers.
Hillbilly Hellraisers is an important study because it sheds light on the failures of rural reforms that bred discontent. Perkins’s detailed investigations uncover highly localised power dynamics, while his century-long scope reveals the broader evolution of resistance to federal power. Perkins boldly draws out lessons for the current moment in his conclusion, urging reformers to understand power on a ‘microscopic’ level, ‘ensure that their programs actually reach the dispossessed populations’, and prepare for powerful opposition by having ‘an immense, impassioned, and largely airtight democratic front that has its sights locked on the local sources of unevenness that affect everyday life’ (p. 224).
