Arkansas and the New South

Arkansas and the New South, 1874-1929. By Carl H. Moneyhon. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Pp. xii, 168. Foreword, introduction, illustrations, bibliographic essay, index. $26.00, cloth; $14.00, paper.) Forty-six years after Arkansan C. Vann Woodward produced his magisterial Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, Carl H. Moneyhon has published the first scholarly synthesis of Arkansas history from the end of Reconstruction to the Great Depression. Like his distinguished predecessor, Moneyhon was handicapped by a paucity of secondary works on which to build. Making good use of available sources and bearing in mind the debates on the nature of the New South that have raged since Origins, Moneyhon has produced a valuable work both for the reader with a general interest in Arkansas and the scholar who may now be inspired to advance this field of knowledge. For Moneyhon, as for Woodward, the central questions are economic: why did Arkansas fail to modernize to the extent that New South advocates dreamed possible? Did Arkansas actually progress further than has been recognized? Brushing aside the cultural determinism stated most crudely by H. L. Mencken, Moneyhon focuses on the human and material forces that held Arkansas back and those that propelled her toward a balanced and prosperous economy. While describing this tug of war between tradition and change, Moneyhon also gives us powerful sketches of family and community life, race relations, and government. His observations about social and political institutions bring to mind historian Robert Wiebe's "search for order," in which an emerging urban middle class seeks replacements for the certainties of home, church, and community amidst rapid change. The culmination of this process is the triumph of progressivism. The fundamental fact about Arkansas's economy is that it was the most agricultural of any southern state. In 1876 farm products accounted for 93 percent of the value of goods produced, and in succeeding decades most "manufacturing" involved processing farm and forest products. The familiar story of agricultural decline at the end of the nineteenth century plays out against a backdrop of severely limited opportunities for non-farm employment. Champions of the economic status quo held the balance of political power. Entrenched landed interests held sway, leaving Arkansas with a legacy of local control and pay-as-you-go government. Thus the forces of change (a relative handful of businessmen, professionals, and editors) had a difficult row to hoe. Moneyhon strives to show how much progress they made, first with the extension of rail lines across the state (impressive, but the railroads were mainly "foreign" monopolies), and then with the rise of extractive and manufacturing activities (timbering and lumbering accounted for 64 percent in 1890). He chronicles bituminous coal mining in western Arkansas, modest cotton textile and machine tool industries, and railroad machine shops at Little Rock and Pine Bluff. Though Moneyhon is certainly justified in emphasizing how far the state progressed, the percentage of diversification into manufacturing was small. …