Mob Rule in the Ozarks

About

On January 15, 1923, a crowd of more than a thousand angry men assembled in Harrison, Arkansas, near the headquarters of the M&NA Railroad, which ran through the heart of the Ozark Mountains. The mob was prepared to use any measure necessary to end the strike of railroad employees that had dragged on for nearly two years, endangering livelihoods and businesses in an area with few other means of transportation. Supported by local officials, the mob terrorized strikers and sympathizers—many were stripped and beaten, and one man was lynched, hanged from the railroad bridge south of town. Over the next several days, similar riots broke out in other towns along the M&NA line, including Leslie and Heber Springs.

This violence effectively brought to a close one of the longest rail strikes in American history—the only one, in fact, ended by a mob uprising. In Mob Rule in the Ozarks, Kenneth C. Barnes documents how the M&NA Railroad strike reflected some of the major economic concerns that preoccupied the United States in the wake of World War I, and created a rupture within communities of the Ozarks that would take years to heal. The conflict also foreshadowed, for both the region and the country, the pendulum’s swing back to moneyed interests, away from Progressive Era gains for labor. Poignantly for Barnes, who sees parallels between this historic struggle and present-day political tensions, the strike revealed the fragile line between civil order and mob rule.

Author

Kenneth C. Barnes is distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Who Killed John Clayton? Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861–1893 and Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960. For his most recent book, The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Barnes garnered his third J. G. Ragsdale Book Award in Arkansas History.

Praise

“Mob Rule in the Ozarks is a rare achievement, a page-turning, blood-boiling work of history that pulls the hoods off the architects of past vigilante violence to help us understand our perilous present moment.”
—Guy Lancaster, author of American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching and editor of the online CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas

“Kenneth Barnes’s deft analysis of the violence and repressive aspects of the 1921–23 railroad strike in the Arkansas Ozarks sheds necessary light on a class conflict that impacted the region for decades. Highlighting the KKK’s role in crushing the strike, Barnes provides additional evidence that the Klan served the interests of bosses, not workers. Mob Rule in the Ozarks is an original, first-rate study.”
—Chad Pearson, author of Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century

Reviews

“This well written and meticulously researched volume by Kenneth Barnes, distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, is indeed a fine addition to the Arkansas History Series of the University of Arkansas Press in Fayetteville and indeed a significant addition to historical scholarship of the nation. The series is edited by Jeannie Wayne of the UA and Kelly Houston-Jones of Arkansas Tech University. Photographs, cartoons, and other illustrations support Barnes’ excellent text in helping readers to understand pro and con feelings, particularly how frustrations could give rise to kangaroo courts and extreme violence in small Ozark towns of that period. Of value for those who would teach the subject is the 1920s railroad map of north Arkansas on page 13 that was furnished to Barnes by Steven C. Hawkins.”
—Maylon Rice, Fort Smith Historical Society Journal, April 2025

“Kenneth Barnes has written a fascinating study of this little-known (at least outside of the Ozarks) strike. … This excellent study explores the intersection of two important components of the early 1920s, the post–World War I labor crackdown and the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. Students of both should read this monograph.”
—Jon Huibregtse, Missouri Historical Review, July 2025

Media

Award

Winner, 2025 J.G. Ragsdale Award (Arkansas Historical Association)