Thad Snow - From Missouri: An American Farmer Looks Back

MANY PEOPLE HAVE HEARD THE SAYING, I'm from Missouriyou have to show me. It means, in various interpretations, that Missourians are hard-headed, skeptical, set in their ways, not easily swayed, and proudly hail from the Show-Me State. Thad Snow was born in Indiana in 1881 and came to Missouri as a grown man, but he was from Missouri in the sense that he insisted upon seeing the world through his own eyes and felt a deep connection to his adopted state.

When Snow arrived in Missouri, the physical and social landscapes were changing. He lived to see the state's southeastern Bootheel transform from heavily forested wetlands to open fields, where cotton grew. With sharp, questioning eyes, he watched African American sharecroppers come from Arkansas and Mississippi to work in the newly opened agricultural land. As time went on, he became a social critic, who recognized the injustice of a system of labor that enriched only a few and left many impoverished. In January 1939 when farm laborers camped out along the highways in the sharecroppers' roadside demonstration, he concluded that this demonstration was the greatest thing that ever happened in the Bootheel.

Snow helped to change the landscape. In 1910, he purchased a thousand acres of swampland in Mississippi County and developed it into a prosperous farm. He hired people to log off most of his acreage, although he did preserve a patch of woods. Workers on his farm placed drainage tiles under the ground to carry off excess water. All around him in the Bootheelwhich he called Swampeast Missouriprivate landowners and public organizations were digging ditches to funnel water from the cut-over fields into the Mississippi River and its tributaries, reclaiming the rich soil for agriculture, but changing the land forever. In the 1920s, many landowners, including Snow, planted their acreage to cotton and employed sharecroppers to plant, weed, and harvest their crops. It was an exciting process, turning swamps into farms, but as time went on, Snow would come to regret what he had done.

The landscape changed Snow. When he came to Missouri, he viewed himself as a twentieth-century pioneerbrave, ambitious, and looking for a challenge. After living through several floods, he realized that human beings could not completely control the natural environment. In the late 1920s, Snow opposed the creation of the Bird's Point-New Madrid Floodway, which designated thousands of acres in Mississippi and New Madrid County for inundation in the event of a disastrous flood. During the great overflow of the Mississippi River in January 1937, he watched sadly as farm laborers fled from their homes when the United States Army Corps of Engineers dynamited a levee. He began to think hard about the way people changed the land, and he began to connect the exploitation of the land with the unfair treatment of workers.

The Great Depression made everything worse, and in the 1930s, Snow shocked a lot of people in the Bootheel. He invited the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) to organize his sharecroppers, and he befriended a charismatic African American preacher, sharecropper, and labor organizer, Owen Whitfield. When Whitfield led the roadside demonstration, Snow openly expressed his support. This was a risky thing to do. Snow's granddaughters remember hearing that when police officers were looking for Whitfield, he was hiding in the corn crib on Snow's farm. On a recent visit to the farm, Whitfield's daughter, Shirley Whitfield Farmer, confirmed that this was true; her father had hid there in a time when angry men were out to get him. At a later time, in the 1950s, recalled Snow's granddaughter, Lee DeLaney Love, We hid in there too, when we were kids. At that time, she was unaware of the corn crib's connection to a historical event.

The roadside demonstration brought national attention to the hard-pressed farm workers of Southeast Missouri. Newspapers in St. Louis and other cities printed images of more than a thousand white and black sharecroppersmen, women, and children alikecamped out in makeshift tents along the highways. Many of them had been evicted from the land and were homeless. Whitfield went to St. Louis and made connections with church members, union leaders, writers, and sympathizers who joined the St. Louis Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Sharecroppers (St. Louis Committee). Students from Lincoln University in Jefferson City traveled to the Bootheel to offer encouragement and aid. The weeklong demonstration ended when the Missouri Highway Patrol cleared the people from the roadsides and placed them in temporary camps. In the aftermath of the demonstration, the federal government recognized the desperate predicament of the sharecroppers andbegan building housing for them at several locations in the Bootheel. The St. Louis Committee purchased land in Butler County, where Whitfield and a group of dispossessed farm workers set up a community called Cropperville.

Braving the wrath of some of his neighbors, Snow spoke up for the demonstrators, defending their actions. Whitfield confided his plans to Snow shortly before the sharecroppers took to the highways, but Snow was not, as some people believed, the mastermind of the demonstration. He visited the demonstrators in their tent camps, kept in touch with journalists and state officials, and told anyone who would listen that the sharecroppers' cause was just. A Sikeston newspaper editor repeatedly hurled invective at him. The mood became ugly and menacing, but Snow firmly believed that Whitfield was doing the right thing. Long after the roadside demonstration, the two men continued their friendship. Snow visited Whitfield at Cropperville, and Whitfield became a major figure in Snow's memoirs.

With his strongly held beliefs and larger than life personality, Snow made enemies, but he also made friends. Lucius T. Berthe, a consulting engineer for Mississippi County's levee district, came to Snow's house with a rambling, fact-filled manuscript railing against the Bird's Point-New Madrid Floodway. Snow helped him edit and publish it in 1937 as a small book with the title Old Man River Speaks. St. Louis writer Fannie Cook contacted Snow after the roadside demonstration when she was planning a fact-finding trip to Southeast Missouri. Cook, who met Whitfield in St. Louis, helped to organize the St. Louis Committee. Snow became, at least in part, a model for Joel Gregory, the main character in Cook's 1941 novel, Boot-heel Doctor. In the novel, Gregory defied local convention by befriending a black sharecropper and labor organizer named Reuben Fielding, who was clearly patterned on Whitfield. Snowan atheistcounted among his friends and acquaintances Catholic priests, Protestant ministers, and itinerant Bible salesmen. They found their way to his porch and onto the pages of this book.