Matthew Hild knows Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists like sabremetricians know ballplayers—the arc of each one’s career, their wins and losses calculated to the third decimal place. Happily, he has fixed his connoisseur’s gaze on Arkansas, a state whose post-Reconstruction decades have been understudied but that saw an early and powerful eruption of the farm and labor protests that eventually yielded Populism. The result is the most comprehensive treatment of political conflict in Gilded Age Arkansas published to date. It nicely complements Kenneth Barnes’s Who Killed John Clayton? Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861–1893 (1998), a masterful study of a single county’s experience in an era when local politics and government counted for everything.
Hild begins with the Greenback candidacies of the late 1870s and then the formation, in 1882, of two organizations—the Agricultural Wheel and Brothers of Freedom—that wrestled with the toils and snares...
