Populism

American History Through Literature, 1870-1920, Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, Editors in Chief (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006)

“What’s the matter with Kansas?,” journalist William Allen White asked in 1896, as he surveyed the political landscape of his native state and wondered at the preponderance of politicians “who can bellow about the crime of ’73, who hate prosperity, and who think, because a man believes in national honor, he is a tool of Wall Street.” The frenzy of the state’s ruling Populists had not been slaked, in White’s view, by having created a climate hostile to investment and become the laughingstock of the rest of the country; “then, for fear some hint that the state had become respectable might percolate through the civilized portions of the nation, we have decided to send three or four harpies out lecturing, telling the people that Kansas is raising hell and letting the corn go to weed.” In his essay, widely-reprinted in the Republican press, White dripped sarcasm as he sought to convey how his state had lost touch with reality: “Whoop it up for the ragged trousers; put the lazy, greasy fizzle, who can’t pay his debts on the altar, and bow down and worship him. Let the state ideal be high. What we need is not the respect of our fellow men, but the chance to get something for nothing.”

The bewilderment of White and other Republicans notwithstanding, Populism resonated among southern, Midwestern and western farmers because it bespoke their situation and articulated their often inchoate sense that America had betrayed its democratic principles. As Seagraves, the small-town editor in Hamlin Garland’s 1890 story “Among the Corn-Rows,” thinks after speaking with a Midwestern farmer, “This working farmer had voiced the modern idea. It was an absolute overturn of all the ideas of nobility and special privilege born of the feudal past. . . . Seagraves felt that it was a wild, grand upstirring of the modern democrat against the aristocrat, against the idea of caste and the privilege of living on the labor of others. This atom of humanity (how infinitesimal this drop in the ocean of humanity!) was feeling the nameless longing of expanding personality. He had declared rebellion against laws that were survivals of hate and prejudice. He had exposed also the native spring of the emigrant by uttering the feeling that it is better to be an equal among peasants than a servant before nobles.” Seagraves tells the farmer he would like to use his ideas in an editorial, prompting the farmer to comment “My ideas! Why I didn’t know I had any.”

The Farmer Feeds Us All

In the post-Civil War era, farmers increasingly found themselves victimized by the growing incursion of market forces into formerly remote areas, ensnaring them in a web of national, and even international, commercial relations. With the goal of contracting currency, Congress had demonetized silver in 1873—an act Populists would later decry as “the crime of ’73,” though it was little noticed at the time—and moved the country onto the gold standard by the end of the 1870s. For many farmers, the result was the cycle of ever-increasing debt that was sharecropping, tenancy, peonage or the crop-lien system, leaving them caught, as Garland termed it in the title of another story, “under the lion’s paw.” In the South, the lien system came to be viewed by farmers as a new form of slavery as they were forced to sign over to the furnishing merchant first their crop and eventually their land. “In fact,” the historian C. Vann Woodward has concluded, the crop-lien system “came to be more widespread than slavery had been, for it was no respecter of race or class; and if it be judged objectively, by its economic results alone, the new evil may have worked more permanent injury to the South than the ancient evil.” Dominant economic and social theories, with their emphasis on laissez faire capitalism and Social Darwinism, offered no sympathy for debt-ridden farmers in the same way they offered none for the growing number of unemployed wandering the country in the many depression years of the late-nineteenth century. As an editorial in the Lincoln, Nebraska, Farmers’ Alliance described the situation, “The actual state of society to-day is a state of war, active irreconcilable war on every side, and in all things. . . . Competition is only another name for war. It means slavery to millions—it means the sale of virtue for bread—it means for thousands upon thousands starvation, misery and death. After four thousand years of life is this the best that we can achieve? If so, who cares how soon the end may come?”

Farmers frequently joined together in singing Knowles Shaw’s 1870s-era ballad “The Farmer Feeds Us All” with its chorus:

Then take him by the hand,

All ye people of the land,

Stand by him whatever troubles befall;

We may say whate’er we can,

Yet the farmer is the man,

Yes, the farmer is the man that feeds us all.

But integration into larger market networks drove crop prices down while increased reliance on monopolies like the railroads, over whose rates they had no control, made it more difficult for the farmers to feed their own families. In an era of spectacular economic growth, the irony was not lost on farmers that their desperate straits existed in the midst of economic abundance. In the words of Alabama populist Milford Howard, “The granaries are bursting with wheat; the bins are filled with corn; the stock-yards are overflowing with cattle, hogs and sheep; the fields of the South have been white with cotton—an abundance everywhere throughout the entire country. Of it we can say, as was said of the Promised Land of Canaan, ‘It flows with milk and honey.’ Notwithstanding all this, the people are starving.”

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, farmers in all regions had responded to the situation with the formation of a variety of cooperative organizations, including the Granger and Northern Alliance movements in the Midwest, the Agricultural Wheel in the South, and the Texas Alliance in the Southwest. These cooperative organizations had been crucial in the development of what Lawrence Goodwyn has termed the “movement culture,” which allowed the farmers to understand the commonality of their interests and the nature of those who opposed them, whether furnishing merchants, land companies, banks, railroads, or grain elevator companies. Out of this movement culture developed the collective self-confidence necessary to allow the farmers, en masse, to formulate an alternative to the dominant cultural understanding of the American economy and their role in it. Economists told the farmers they were responsible for their own troubles, having overproduced the market and thus driven prices down. But farmers found a different culprit in the monopolies and trusts that wielded such extensive control over Gilded Age society. “Between [the] plenty ripening on the boughs of our civilization and the people hungering for it,” wrote Populist muckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd in his 1894 classic, Wealth Against Commonwealth, “step the . .. . syndicates, trusts, combinations, with the cry of ‘overproduction’—too much of everything. Holding back the riches of the earth, sea and sky from their fellows who famish and freeze in the dark, they declare to them that there is too much light and warmth and food. They assert the right, for their private profit, to regulate the consumption by the people of the necessaries of life, and to control production, not by the needs of humanity, but by the desires of a few for dividends.”

The People’s Party

With the failure of the attempts at economic self-help, farmers increasingly realized that a turn to politics had become necessary, and so in the early 1890s was born the People’s Party. In its major statement of purpose, the 1892 Omaha Platform, the party called for a flexible paper currency to be distributed through the sub-treasury plan, a system of government-owned warehouses in which farmers could store their crops while borrowing against them; the public ownership of the railroad, telegraph, and telephone companies; a graduated income tax; and the direct election of U.S. senators. With precious few allies in the universities, the mainstream press, and other traditional seats of cultural power, the populist movement developed its own processes for spreading its message, including the National Reform Press Association, with its hundreds of newspapers spread across the nation. “For a fact,” Nebraska’s Platte County Argus commented, “this ought to be a campaign of education.” And the Populist leaders took seriously their role as educators, as can be seen in the extensive use of statistics in the writings of Kansas’s Populist Senator William Peffer; Lloyd’s densely detailed descriptions of corporate malfeasance; the many case studies discussed in 1892 presidential candidate James Weaver’s campaign book A Call to Action; and the learned disquisitions on such subjects as the Indian caste system and English labor history that peppered the speeches of the South’s most famous Populist, Tom Watson. Such raw material provided fodder for the extensive network of stump speakers who campaigned across the country. The message spread rapidly, as the Populists won elections in several southern, Midwestern and western states, and their presidential ticket in 1892 gained more than one million popular and twenty-two electoral votes.

In his dystopian novel Caesar’s Column (1890), Minnesota populist Ignatius Donnelly described American republicanism as a sham—“We are a Republic only in name; free only in forms. Mohammedanism . . .. never knew, in its worst estate, a more complete and abominable despotism than that under which we live. And as it would be worse to starve to death in sight of the most delicious viands than in the midst of a foodless desert, so the very assertions, constantly dinned into our ears by the hireling newspapers, that we are the freest people on earth, serve only to make our slavery more bitter and unbearable.” Seeing themselves as inheritors of the republican ideology of “producerism” dating back to the American Revolution, Populists believed they were completing the unfinished democratic project of the Civil War. As Weaver said, “We shall proceed to show that in the very midst of the struggle for the overthrow of the slave oligarchy, our institutions were assailed by another foe mightier than the former, equally cruel, wider in its field of operation, infinitely greater in wealth, and immeasurably more difficult to control. It will be readily understood that we allude to the sudden growth of corporate power and its attendant consequences.”

The growth of corporate power had come to dominate government, the courts and the press, but its fundamental impact was even more pernicious in that it ensconced greed as the dominating nexus of social relations. As the Texas Populist intellectual Thomas Nugent described it, “The spirit of plutocratic capitalism is the dominating force in our organized social and industrial life. . . . It robs genius of its glory, makes of intellect a drudge and a slave, and utilizes the achievements of science to raid the stock markets and enlarge the margin of profits. Thus it wipes out as with a sponge the distinction between right and wrong, makes merchandise of the noblest ideals, sets gain before the world as the highest end of life, and converts men into predatory human animals.”

At its base, the Populist argument rested on the labor theory of value, that labor created wealth, which then became capital. But as capital became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, it began to dominate political channels, and the combination of concentrated capital and state power served to impoverish the working classes, both rural and industrial. In Nugent’s words, “Capital could never have attained such ascendancy, but for the legislation which has given it unjust advantages and enabled it to monopolize both natural resources and public functions and utilities.” Or as Weaver claimed, “Labor can create wealth but it cannot create money. It requires a statute to speak money into existence. It is the creature of law, not the product of nature.” In boiling the issue down to its most fundamental level, Watson pondered, “What is the labor question? In a nutshell it is this: Labor asks of capital, ‘Why is it you have so much and do so little work, while I have so little and do so much?”

The Populists’ wide-ranging and penetrating critique of Gilded Age capitalism rested, ironically, on a belief in the sanctity of competition and private property. Populists sought some degree of individual economic independence and private property was essential in achieving it. In their view, as historian Norman Pollack has stated, “property was only a threat when it became integrated with mechanisms of domination” and thus worked contrary to the interests of the community, and the Populist goal was to use the power of the state to prevent the growth of monopolies where practicable and assume ownership of natural monopolies in order to serve the public interest. Existing monopolies thwarted genuine competition and the philosophy of laissez faire left only the brutal competition among surplus laborers that drove wages downward and among farmers working to pay off their debts in a deflated economy.

Self-consciously standing against the dominant ideology, Populists challenged such justifications of excessive wealth and poverty as Social Darwinism, arguing instead that government had a responsibility to protect the weak. In the words of Lorenzo D. Lewelling, Kansas’s Populist governor, “The survival of the fittest is the government of brutes and reptiles, and such philosophy must give place to a government which recognizes human brotherhood. It is the province of government to protect the weak, but the government to-day is resolved into a struggle of the masses with the classes for supremacy and bread, until business, home and personal integrity are trembling in the face of possible want in the family. . . .. If it be true that the poor have no right to the property of the rich let it also be declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.” Populists also delighted in subverting the dominant discourse and using the language of the business classes for their own ends. In an age when the specter of anarchism haunted capitalists, the Decatur, Texas, Times argued the monopolists were the true anarchists: “Red-handed anarchy is fast developing in the soldiery of our beloved Republic, in the courts, the elections, in the legislatures and congress.” Similarly Henry Demarest Lloyd could use the language of self-interest and Social Darwinism for Populist ends, arguing “the whole problem can be argued out from the point of view of self-interest, putting the self-interest of the community against the self-interest of the individual; the self-interest of the better against the self-interest of the worse; and reading the survival of the strongest to mean the survival of the stronger virtues, not the stronger greed.”

Populists saw their movement as very much in the American grain and presented themselves as the true defenders of the Constitution and the law. In their view, the corporate hijacking of the courts and law-making bodies represented a betrayal of the American constitutional system. This commitment to established constitutional means also set the parameters of acceptable Populist activity, largely defined by party organizing and participation in elections, and a rejection of violence as a political tool. As Nugent cautioned, “in combatting monopoly, let us never forget that neither force nor infringement of individual liberty is justifiable or safe. Let us remember that we ought above all others to set ourselves against anarchy in every form, against every measure calculated to break down the security which the laws afford to private property, and in favor only of those lawful and orderly methods which can always be successfully defended, and the observance of which will never fail to enlist for the workingman the sympathies of the good and worthy people of every class. .. . . A good cause committed to violent methods inevitably finds in them its grave. An intelligent ballot is the only refuge of justice and liberty.” Similarly Donnelly’s cautionary tale, Caesar’s Column, warned of a coming apocalypse when the workers turned to violence, culminating in “a hell of injustice, ending in a holocaust of slaughter.”

Breaking Down Barriers

A special project of the Populists’ efforts to build a mass movement was the attempt to form alliances that bridged several of the deepest rifts in Gilded Age America. From their agrarian origins, farmers reached out to industrial workers and the unemployed, fellow victims, in their view, of the war between the classes and the masses. The Omaha Platform championed the cause of industrial labor with its call for the limitation on immigration to reduce competition for jobs, enforcement of the eight-hour workday, the abolition of the strikebreaking Pinkerton Agency, and support for the Knights of Labor. The party stood with labor in all the era’s major conflicts. In the 1892 strike against Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Plant, Mary E. Lease, one of Populism’s most famous stump speakers, specifically called on Kansas farmers to send the striking workers a trainload of supplies: “We have been told by those who deal in misrepresentations that the farmers were not in sympathy with the wants and demands of laborers in town and city. Let us hurl this falsehood back, and show to the world that the farmers of Kansas are imbued with the spirit of 1776, and in sympathy with the toilers and oppressed humanity everywhere.” In his book A Strike of Millionaires Against Miners (1890), Henry Demarest Lloyd described miners caught in a circle of debt similar to the crop-lien system. “Sometimes it was one thing, sometimes another; but the upshot of it was that, mostly, when the miner came to settle with the company for the preceding month’s work, he found that, after paying for his oil, and the sharpening of his tools, his rent or his monthly installment on the lot he had bought, his monthly contribution to the doctor, and his bill at the company’s store, there was nothing left. He had just made ends meet; perhaps he was a little behind.”

Similarly the Populists supported the cause of the unemployed. In their critique of industrial capitalism, Populists like Lewelling viewed the growing number of unemployed as a direct product of the combination of monopoly and increasing mechanization. “In this country, the monopoly of labor-saving machinery and its devotion to selfish instead of social use, have rendered more and more human beings superfluous until we have a standing army of the unemployed numbering even in the most prosperous times not less than one million able-bodied men.” In his 1891 novel Congressman Swanson, Charles C. Post described the business classes’ response to the growing number of unemployed: “And as the machinery of legislation was in their hands, or the hands of their dupes and tools, the politicians, ‘Tramp laws’ were passed, and it became a crime for a man out of employment and out of money to ask for bread.” Standing as staunch supporters of demonstrations of the unemployed like that led by Jacob Coxey in 1894, the Populists called for the federal government to create a program of public works to provide jobs for the unemployed.

Finally, in trying to build a national movement, the Populists found themselves confronting the sectionalism and the regional hold the two main political parties had on American politics. In an era in which the bloody shirt was waved regularly, the Populists called on farmers and workers to break with their traditional political loyalties and support a third party. And in the South especially, this split involved even more basic social issues, as existing party politics intermingled at a fundamental level with the region’s racial divisions. Populists in the South, then, in challenging the dominant Democratic Party, confronted directly that party’s ideology of white supremacy. Not all Populists were willing to make this break with the past, but many southern Populists proved ready to stand in economic and political solidarity across racial lines. Speaking of black and white farmers, Watson said, “Now the People’s Party says to these two men, ‘You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.’ ” Similarly, the Louisiana People’s Party adopted a resolution proclaiming, “We declare emphatically that the interests of the white and colored races in the South are identical. . . . Legislation beneficial to the white man must, at the same time, be beneficial to the colored man.” Black Populists too, realized that joining the movement involved a wrenching break with traditional loyalties; as a black Georgia farmer wrote, “It seems to be a hard thing for us colored men to give up the republican party [sic], but let us stop and consider: We are living in another man’s house, working another man’s land, and our smoke house and meal-tub are in town. Let us quit the old party and vote for wife and children and a chance for a home.” And yet, as white southern Populists stressed, this willingness to break with the region’s racial heritage and withstand the Democrats’ fearmongering cries of “Negro Rule” had its limits. As one white Alabama Populist wrote, “This has nothing whatever to do with social equality. It is a question of the material interests of both races.”

Fusion

By allowing itself to be contained largely within existing political processes, Pollack has said, Populism’s “protest was largely, if not exclusively, confined to the channels that the society had established to neutralize dissent.” These self-imposed ideological parameters created a profound dilemma for the party in 1896 when the question of fusion with the Democrats seemed to offer the best chance for electoral victory. As historian Robert McMath commented, “Here the logic and history of Populism as a movement collided with the ultimate political question: how to get more votes than the other guy.” Within the Democratic Party, the “free silver faction” emerged in the mid-1890s calling for the free and unlimited coinage of silver. Fueled by such popular works as W.H. Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School (1894), bimetallists called for a policy of inflation that, in the Populist view, still left the fundamental issues unresolved; it did nothing to counter the trend toward monopoly, nor did it create a flexible monetary system that could keep up with population or industrial growth. When the free silver faction took control of the Democratic Party and nominated William Jennings Bryan, Populists faced the choice of fusion with the Democrats, and thus jettisoning most of their platform, or running their own candidate and guaranteeing the election of the gold standard Republican William McKinley. Led by such fusionists as Watson and Weaver, the party chose to ally with the Democrats, though many Populists never accepted the decision. As an outraged Donnelly said, “The Democracy raped our convention while our leaders held the struggling victim.” Having channeled its militancy into electoral politics, defeat in 1896 proved devastating, and the Populist Party never recovered. In Pollack’s words, “Populism did not decline gradually. It fell over a precipice, to some extent a situation of its own making.”

Bibliography:

Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Revised Edition. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1995.

McMath, Robert C. American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

Pollack, Norman. The Just Polity: Populism, Law, and Human Welfare. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Pollack, Norman, editor. The Populist Mind. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1967.

Ridge, Martin. Ignatius Donnelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971 [originally published, 1951].

Woodward, C. Vann. Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.