Ben Tillman & The Reconstruction of White Supremacy

Stephen Kantrowitz. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Ben Tillman was a key political figure in South Carolina from late Reconstruction through the early Progressive Era. Beginning as a terrorist opposing Reconstruction rule and Black political participation, he parlayed his early prominence as an unapologetic leader of the "Red Shirt" militias into a long career as a Democratic Party operative, Governor, and finally several terms in the US Senate. Well known as one of the leading figures in the campaign to restore white supremacy and create the Jim Crow state, "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman proudly and shrewdly deployed his propensity for violence both rhetorical and physical to back him his national image as a crude but determined representative of the common (white) man.

Kantrowitz approaches Tillman's career from two vantage points. On the one hand, he considers the ways in which Tillman and his supporters conceptualized "whiteness". Tillman applied both racial and gendered facets to his conception of what made a truly "White" man. Tillman based his notion of whiteness on a Jeffersonian producerist idealization of the independent white farmer.

This played into the second facet of Tillman's life--his frequent rhetorical flirtations with radicalism and agrarian populism. Many observers at the time assumed Tillman was a Populist and even a Progressive (early in his career he promoted agricultural reform and education), and many historians and biographers since have followed suit. But Kantrowitz points out that Tillman himself was actually a substantial landowner (and the son of a planter) rather than one of the simple farmers he claimed to champion. More importantly, his commitment to agrarian reform and Progressive measures was severely limited by his primary commitment--to white supremhacy as he understood it. Maintaining the latter meant often sacrificing the best interests of many common whites, for fear of empowering or allowing a political opening to African-Americans.

In the end, Tillman's brand of white supremacy could only be maintained at a heavy cost--a willingness to engage in violence against both Blacks and Whites who failed to adhere to rigidly defined social roles would be coupled with a serious undermining of democratic participation, and economic stagnation. Tillman died feeling pessimistic that his system could survive. He was right, but it would take several more decades and much more suffering before his toxic legacy of a politically and legally enforced formal caste system would be undone.