Americans increasingly understand ourselves and our country through the lens of an urban versus rural divide. Yet this geographic framing, while politically potent, obscures a more fundamental fault line in our society: the division between the working class and the ruling class.
Working people have transcended false geographical divisions and united to take on concentrated wealth before. In Texas at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, farmers and industrial workers began organizing themselves into the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor, respectively. But the more advanced their struggle became, the more they recognized their common enemy, ultimately forging an alliance between working-class Texans from the cities to the countryside.
This rural-urban worker alliance would birth the nineteenth-century populist movement and shape American politics for generations to come. Today, with our nation’s politics dominated by geographical antagonism at the expense of working-class unity, we would do well to rebuild these links between the town and the country.
At the end of the 1800s, Texas was beginning to transform from a rugged frontier state into an economic powerhouse. Although the state was still impoverished following the Civil War, it had an abundance of land. This bounty brought with it extensive speculation by British and Northern capitalists and the Eastern railroads. Their interests often clashed with those of the existing residents, who fiercely resisted the parceling out and fencing in of the once-open range.
While…
Auteur: David Griscom
