Quiescence despite Privation: Explaining the Absence of a Farm Laborers' Movement in Southern Illinois

Abstract

We didn't have sharecroppers in here very much like we did in the South. Those families were paid a salary, which wasn't very much, and they always had a hard way to go, but most of the farmers, they had just about as hard a way to go as their tenants; their farms were small. … They [the tenants] all had their own garden, and own livestock and everything, and some of them even did do a little sharecropping. Most of them worked only so much a day for so much an hour. … But you know, one thing through here, whenever the work closed down in the fall of the year they didn't have any income. And they were really—[they had a] hard way to go. Now a lot of farmers that had more feeling for them would carry them through the winter, but I remember lots of them didn't have any income at all in the wintertime and it was really a big hardship.