H. L. Mitchell
Buhle, Paul
The New York Times missed Mitch's death on August 1, 1989 and so did nearly all the liberal and left publications that share the interracial ideals of the old Southern Tenant Farmers Union...
...The labor movement nationally was preoccupied with its own immediate problems...
...262 • DISSENT...
...Agricultural strikes by remaining tenants, civil liberties cases, support from Thomas and the Workers Defense League, congressional testimony, and, above all, steady organizing brought the STFU thirty thousand members by the middle 1930s...
...He had a disarming sense of humor and he used it to good purpose...
...By the early 1970s, Mitchell formally retired...
...But its membership was ill-fitted to the customary union structure...
...Planters used the acreage-restriction payments to move many of the sharecroppers off the land...
...The STFU desperately needed an affiliation...
...It could not possibly make dues payments or supply complex paperwork...
...The New York Times missed Mitch's death on August 1, 1989 and so did nearly all the liberal and left publications that share the interracial ideals of the old Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU...
...Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1988...
...There, with the outbreak of the Depression, various "share the wealth" ideas grew widely popular...
...Nothing short of the collectivization of cotton production proposed by the STFU—an alternative to reactionary southern agrarianism and more radical, Mitchell recalled, than any proposal by the Communists—could have reversed the tide...
...Judged realistically, it was a hopeless cause...
...He lived to write a long version and a short version of his story, and to promote a documentary SPRING • 1990 • 261 Notebook film of the STFU, narrated by his friend Eddy Albert.* Michael Harrington, introducing one of these texts, remarked in 1979 that reading it "is like having a conversation with history...
...Meanwhile, he brought his little movement into the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the 1940s, and eventually merged it with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters...
...Norman Thomas, visiting Tyronza, suggested 260 • DISSENT Notebook the formation of a sharecroppers' organization...
...the White House needed its alliance with the Dixiecrats...
...Nor could they count on federal help...
...And yet, no socialist veteran had spent so much time on the campus lecture trail in recent decades, documenting and dramatizing his experiences as an iconoclastic story-teller with the manner of a rural comedian...
...Our Land Too—The Legacy of the STFU...
...Roll the Union On: a Pictorial History of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union...
...The enthusiasm of young southern historians for the STFU's story piqued his curiosity, and he arranged to have the extensive files of the union—marvelously preserved and donated to the University of North Carolina—microfilmed as a set...
...Washington's smallest lobby," as Mitchell called his staff, continued to press for aid for various relief projects...
...Eleven-year-old H.L...
...Unlike some of his Communist opponents of a time fifty years gone, he never seemed to hold a grudge (although he relished telling about Ronald Reagan in 1940s Hollywood— where Mitchell was fundraising— "cheating the CP of its dues" by regularly attending party front functions...
...Mitchell had on his side only the desperate courage of the sharecroppers and a personal genius for creating publicity...
...A handful of very brave blacks and whites, including Mitchell, founded the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1934...
...Speaking whenever possible (which was often), he plugged his microfilm collection...
...The dream ended with the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO...
...There, as he saw a black delivery boy roasted alive, he felt an overwhelming chill: "Nauseated, I broke through the crowd and rushed back to the railway station where I stretched out trembling, on the cold ground...
...Howard "Buck" Kester, southern socialist minister and Mitchell's close friend, wore a cyanide pellet around his neck, given him by George Washington Carver, to meet the possibility of torture...
...As erstwhile comrades in the southern struggle took opposite sides, the STFU membership melted away...
...In retrospect, this was a terrible blow to agricultural labor and to the struggle for racial equality...
...The outcast status of racial minorities and accelerating mechanization worked against him...
...The Depression and the New Deal meanwhile accelerated the agrarian social crisis developing around him...
...He was off and running...
...Mitchell used the money for relief, and for lobbying Congress...
...He died, as he lived, on the intellectual margin, at his home base in Montgomery, Alabama...
...Among socialists and liberals his work remained a favorite cause, while AFL head George Meany (even more so than William Green) offered only mean-spirited cynicism...
...Always, he aided ongoing mobilizations—at one point southern sugar cane workers and fishermen, at other times the western and southwestern agricultural laborers who eventually, although with great difficulty and limited success, made up the United Farm Workers...
...Mitchell—this is a story he told often—rode a special excursion train with his friends and neighbors from his home in Halls to Dyersberg, Tennessee...
...He saw everyone, even the plantation owners who wanted his neck, as the victims of class society...
...His self-presentation of elderly-radical-aswalkinghistory had an independent value that, I think, the young understood best...
...The idea had real support among 'croppers, but that was about as far as it went...
...Local authorities, augmented by the planters' own hired goons and a very active Ku Klux Klan, lashed out with impunity...
...He could be a little saintly, despite his salty reputation as a ladies' man...
...It demythicized him, even as he recreated a narrative in which the civil rights struggle had roots in past agricultural struggles in which socialists had played an active role...
...Kudzu Productions, 1988...
...He saw, I think, that the baton had been passed on to Cesar Chavez...
...Mitch didn't know it yet, but he was ready for activity of a different kind, just as remarkable in its own way...
...Mitch attended dozens, possibly hundreds of national conventions of historians and academic meetings of historically minded radicals over the next fifteen years...
...Prices fell and agricultural mechanization began in a serious way...
...In my imagination, the conversation between these two princely plebeians still goes on, a dialogue of socialist values and socialist possibilities in twentieth century America...
...Black Communists and their followers in rural Alabama who met force with force had been driven underground...
...Communist complicity with an emerging bureaucracy led Donald Henderson, head of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America to impose impossible demands...
...But Mitchell could not consolidate his limited victories, though agricultural labor militancy continued around him for twenty years...
...q * Mean Things Happening in the Land, Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979...
...Mitchell heard his first socialist speech three years later, in 1920, soon began reading Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books, campaigned for Robert LaFollette in 1924, and moved with his parents to the cotton district of northeast Arkansas...
...Soon, a massive sit-down of tenants in southeast Missouri brought Mitchell unprecedented national publicity and a boost from Eleanor Roosevelt in her weekly magazine column...
...By now a dry-cleaning proprietor, Mitchell and his closest comrade, a filling-station operator, established their own Red Square in a corner of Tyronza for Norman Thomas's 1932 campaign...
...Another outburst of direct action, again in southeast Missouri in 1942, can be fairly called the first massive interracial sit-in of the South...
...not the history of the presidents and princes, but the history of those who do the dying—and the living...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
