Planters' Protective Association

The Planters' Protective Association (1904–1908) was an agrarian organization formed in the Kentucky and Tennessee "Black Patch" dedicated to fair business and the protection of farmers' economic interests in light of the market dominance of the American Tobacco Company.

In September 1904, following the threat of economic ruin as tobacco prices fell below the cost of production, white farmers in the region formed the Planters’ Protective Association. Representatives of the American Tobacco Company refused to negotiate with the leaders of the Association, asserting they lacked any feasible legal authority. Between 1906 and 1908, then, masked bands of nightriders adopted a policy of vandalism and terrorism. These riders dynamited factories, set fire to trust warehouses, and destroyed thousands of dollars of property belonging to the tobacco monopoly in what would be later referred to as the "Great Tobacco Strike of the Century."

Southern Progressivism

By the early 20th century, following the expansion of Northeastern corporations into the Southern states, discontented farmers were united under the common goals of social and economic reform. Envisioning the corporate enterprises of the Northeast as a common threat – together with their myriad agents, insurance companies, oil trusts, lumber outfits, and railroads – Southern progressivism sought to "bust the trusts" and weaken the economic influence of the monopolies through the regulation of labor and franchise laws.

In the very soil that had nourished the Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, Southern progressivism connected with farmers, middle class workers, and small businessmen. While Southern reformists had historically been urban and middle class in nature, the growing pressures of monopoly and economic manipulation resulted in the political union between discontented farmers and middle class businessmen. "A new South has arisen, a South that is made up of young, progressive and wide-awake men," Alabama reformist Joseph Manning told a Northern newspaper in the late 1890s. "Now we have got to get a new regime in office, new blood, new brains; got to change the whole system and whole spirit of the South…"

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