The Christian Left, Agricultural Labor Unions, and the Sacralization of Rural Life in the 1930s

The November 1935 edition of The Catholic Worker carried two front-page articles about agricultural labor. The first, "Back to Christ—Ba ck to the Land!" argued that rural life and work were more spiritually meaningful than "the old capitalist industrialist system," and that Catholics should lead an exodus from the city to the farm. The second, "Lynch Terror Fails to Stop Sharecroppers’ Union Growth," described the violent reaction of plantation owners against the Sharecroppers Union in Alabama and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas. These two articles encapsulate the conflicting impulses of leftist religious reformers toward rural labor during the Great Depression. Religious liberals and radicals repeatedly emphasized the sacredness of the earth and suggested that rural life was somehow more fundamentally Christian than urban life. At the same time, they worried that agricultural labor was most difficult to organize and that rural plantation owners were even more unscrupulous and corrupt than urban businessmen.

This paper analyzes the relationship between the religious left and agricultural labor in the 1930s, focusing in part icular on a network of Catholic and Protestant activists who became involved with the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) in the Arkansas Delta. The STFU organized in 1934, and it survived the decade in large part because of its leaders’ ability to draw national attention and support. The union relied heavily on its connection with outspoken members of the religious left, including activists like Dorothy Day and Reinhold Niebuhr and organizations like the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and the National Religion and Labor Foundation. Even as progressive Christians discovered that workers who lived on the sacred earth endured conditions just as hellish as workers who lived in the cities, they celebrated southern sharecropper unions as the embodiment of prophetic religion and rural virtue.