Italians, the labor problem, and the project of agricultural colonization in the New South, 1884--1934

This dissertation examines a unique transnational experiment to change labor patterns in the cotton producing South. Building upon region-wide efforts launched in the 1880s, beginning in 1894, a group of wealthy Southern landowners appealed to the Italian government to send farmers as part of an effort to reapportion the distribution of land in the South. These landowners offered portions of their plantations to be claimed by incoming Italian colonists. Plantation owners actively designed a program to give away their land to new immigrants because they expected that permanently settled Italians would alleviate the 19th century post-emancipation "labor problem" --- a perception amongst whites that newly mobile blacks were no longer a "reliable" labor source. Ironically, the experiment's reliance on the Italian government made solving the labor problem more complicated as the government's representatives gave power to these new settlers not available to native-born workers.;White southern landowners led by LeRoy Percy, Hugh MacRae, Charles Scott and Austin Corbin, Italian peasants, and their government fashioned a project for colonization in the South between 1884 and 1934. Over time, the labor contract and its terms became the arena for conflict between the contradictory forces embodied in what began as an elite-controlled land reform program but had, in the process, given voice and a defined sense of rights to these small farmers living in the Arkansas Delta.;This dissertation draws out the tension between ethnic Italians and white Southerners' understandings of farm labor and the planter-tenant relationship, conflict that determined the structure of the Italian labor project at its most critical site, Sunnyside Plantation, Arkansas. When charges of peonage charges came to light, powerful allies in the Italian government championed the emigrants' cause. These allies had their own vested interest in the establishment of a permanent, thriving settlement outside of Italy and in the cultivation of italianita, or italianness. This dissertation tells the story of how a small group of white southerners tried to solve the post-emancipation labor problem by reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy, and how this experiment both defied and reinforced traditional labor patterns in the American South.