Murder on the Brazos: The Religious Context of the Populist Revolt

Abstract

In the 1880s and ‘90s, Waco, Texas, served as a trading center for the cotton districts of central Texas whose farmers gave rise to the Farmers’ Alliance and turned the region into a Populist hotbed. Waco was also known as the “City of Churches,” as it was the site of Baylor University and other efforts of evangelical churches to build up their institutions. What is less well known is that Waco and its rural environs were also hotbeds of religious heterodoxy. Waco's Iconoclast magazine became a lightning rod of conflict between the Baptists and their skeptical and liberal critics, a conflict that played out to a murderous conclusion. Historians have taken due note of the evangelical environment in which the Populist movement emerged in late nineteenth-century rural America. But in the process the notion of evangelical belief has been too often rendered static and total. The Baptist-Iconoclast conflict in Waco provides an entry point for a better understanding of the dynamic and conflicted nature of the religious context, and the influence of liberal and heterodox ideas within the communities that sustained the Populist cause.

A Match Made in Heaven? Southern Evangelicalism and the Rise and Fall of Agrarian Populism in the 1890s

“…Although agrarian populism largely drew on traditional Jeffersonian producerism and Jacksonian republicanism, evangelical Protestant axioms, according to which the economic and political conditions of the late 1880s and early 1890s violated divine principles ordained by God, infused, the argument goes, the agrarian revolt with sacred, transcendent purposes and meanings. “In the Alliance and People’s Party, political and economic goals fused,” Creech argues (2006: xxix), “with evangelical goals of salvation” (also Goode 1993; McMath 1975; Postel 2016; Williams and Alexander 1994). Two, it suggests that evangelical Protestantism through its leadership and organizations provided mobilizing structures for garnering support for agrarian populist protest: “[T]hroughout the South evangelical ministers, lay leaders, and congregations, in conjunction with local Farmers’ Alliances, were at the fore in local Populist [People’s] Party organization” (Creech 2006: xviii; see also Ali 2010; McMath 1993).…”

“…While social movement scholars have long recognized the role played by religious organizations in the mobilization of the twentieth-century civil rights and conservative movements in the United States, their role in important nineteenth-century social movements has only recently begun to be appreciated (Young 2002, 2006; see also Calhoun 2012 on the neglected role of religion in nineteenth-century social movements). A number of historical studies suggest a connection between southern religion and agrarian populism (Ali 2010; Creech 2006; Goode 1993; McMath 1975, 1993; Postel 2016). One sociological study (Williams and Alexander 1994) also makes such a linkage.…”