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Overview
A sweeping overview of the American peasantry: the largely sharecrop cultivators who, in Seavoy's analysis, rejected the labor norms of commercial agriculture. About equal numbers of black and white sharecroppers chose to practice subsistence cultivation in order to minimize agricultural labor. The study begins with pre-Civil War slave plantations and the landless white peasants who migrated to North America to escape full-time paid labor in Britain. Seavoy then describes and analyzes the operation of the postbellum sharecrop system and related Back Caste System; the different origins of southern and northern Populism; the massive displacement of southern peasants (after 1950) when cotton cultivation was fully mechanized, and how the voluntary joblessness of the urban underclass has been perpetuated by the welfare entitlements of the Great Society.
Synopsis
A sweeping overview of the American "peasantry" from the pre-Civil war era to the contemporary underclass.
Booknews
Challenging the nearly universal view that the US has not had peasants, Seavoy (business economics and public policy, Indiana U., Bloomington) applies the term to a high percentage of pre-1950 southern farmers and employs an Adam Smith-based labor theory of value to his analysis of the evolution of agriculture in the South: from the slave plantation through New Deal agricultural policies to the impact of recent urban migration. Illustrated with 45 data tables highlighting such variables as slavery in 1860, cotton and other crop yields, changing demographics, and the labor status of underclass Chicago residents in 1987. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.