The Politics of Populism:
Germany and the American South
in the 1890s
DAVID PEAL
The Institute for Historical Study
A Populist newspaper in North Carolina commented in 1890 that agrarian
unrest was common just about everywhere, in "high tariff and low tariff"
countries as well as in "monarchies, empires, and republics." 1 Historians of
this discontent have neglected the international dimension of protest that was
so striking at the time. The countries that produced the most vigorous agrarian
movements, Germany and the United States, have been especially well protected from the scrutiny of comparison. One reason for this neglect is that
scholars in both countries emphasize their nations' peculiarities and capacity
to make their own histories. The most influential study of American Populism, for instance, is still John D. Hicks' The Populist Revolt (1931). Hicks
ascribed the movement to the closure of the frontier, the "safety valve" once
thought to be the special feature of American history. Most scholars today
reject the "Turner thesis," but continue to see populism as uniquely democratic. Just as American Populists have been celebrated as "good guys,"
German agrarian leaders have been demonized. The marked anti-Semitic
aspect of agrarian movements in the 1890s has led historians to link them
more or less directly to national socialism, the arguably unique "outcome" of
German history. Whatever the sources of this exceptionalism, the constrained
view has distorted the understanding of a crucial historical conjuncture.2
I would like to thank the following people for their help and suggestions in the development of
this article: Ruth Bleasdale, Jack Crowley, Geoff Eley, J. Morgan Kousser, John O'Brien, Jane
Parpart, Norman Pereira, Lawrence Stokes, and Graham Taylor. I would especially like to thank
the Killam Trust of Canada and the Dalhousie University History Department for giving me the
chance to prepare, present, and refine this paper.
1
JohnD. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis, 1931), 54; cf. Solon Buck, The Agrarian
Crusade (New Haven, 1920), 99; Mitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus
(Oct. 27, 1894).
2
C. Vann Woodward, "The Comparability of American History" in The Comparative Approach to American History, Woodward, ed. (New York 1968), 3-17, 346-58. On comparing
Southern history: idem., Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986), ch.
7. On German exceptionalism: Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German
0010-4175/89/2712-2346 $5.00 © 1989 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
340
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
341
This article seeks to place the movement launched by Otto Bockel, Germany's first anti-Semitic Reichstag deputy, in its broad contemporary context, instead of viewing it in light of its imputed Nazi outcome. The aim is to
clarify the conditions in which anti-Semitic slogans and programs entered
political life in Germany and to throw light on the failure and legacy of the
Bockel movement. Populism in the American South (the cotton states from
Texas to the Carolinas) lends itself well to comparison. Both movements
acquired institutional form in the late 1880s, mobilized small farmers on the
margins of political and economic life, adopted similar schemes of cooperative organization, and brought forth charismatic leaders skillful at playing on
popular grievances and ranging "the people" against their alleged enemies.
Both failed within a decade. Racism pervaded both movements and was
perhaps their principal legacy.
Despite exceptionalism and real differences in national histories, studies of
the two movements have been based on similar assumptions. Populist politics
have been consistently portrayed as a direct response (political mobilization)
to economic difficulty: in the South, to an exploitive credit system; in Germany, the "Great Depression" (1873-1896) is invoked to explain the outbreak of anti-Semitic politics. Yet the method works only when comparison is
suppressed: Why were anti-Semitic politics not uniformly distributed among
German regions during the depression? Why was American Populism not
universal among distressed regions in the South and West?3
Lawrence Goodwyn adopts a method both less reductionist and better suited to comparison. In The Populist Moment, he locates the roots of Southern
Populism in agricultural cooperation: economic factors are displaced to the
History (New York, 1984). Kenneth Barkin makes a strained case for comparing Populism with
Germany's elite Agrarian League in "A Case Study in Comparative History: Populism in Germany and America," in The State of American History, Herbert J. Bass, ed. (Chicago, 1970),
373-404. For a comparison of elites based on a caricature of Germany: Jonathan Wiener,
"Planter Persistence and Social Change: Alabama, 1850-1870," Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, 7:2 (1976), 235-60. On prewar anti-Semitism, see my Anti-Semitism and Rural Transformation in Kurhessen: The Rise and Fall of the Bockel Movement (Ph.D. thesis, Department of
History, Columbia University 1985), intro.
3
On the "Great Depression" as a "cause" of anti-Semitic politics, see the highly influential
book by Hans Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit: Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft,
und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1967); Geoff Eley criticizes this approach in his essay,
"Hans Rosenberg and the Great Depression of 1873-1896," in his From Unification to Nazism:
Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston and London, 1986), 23-41, esp. 32ff. On the incidence
of Populism: Peter Argersinger, Populism and Politics: William Alfred Meffer and the People's
Party (Lexington, 1974), 60ff; James Turner, "Understanding the Populists," Journal of American History, 67:2 (1980), 354-73; Anne Mayhew, "A Reappraisal of the Cause of Farm Protest
in the United States," Journal of Economic History, 32:2 (1972), 464-75. For a non-reductionist
political analysis that argues that Populism filled the need for opposition where the Republicans
were weak, the Democrats divided, and suffrage unrestricted, see J. Morgan Kousser, The
Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South,
1880-1910 (New Haven and London, 1974).
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342
DAVID PEAL
experience of cooperators; "economic background" and Populist politics are
mediated by consciousness shaped by cooperative organizations that failed.
"To describe the origins of Populism in one sentence, the cooperative movement recruited American farmers, and their subsequent experience within the
cooperatives radically altered their political consciousness." Through comparative analysis, the present article first evaluates the economic and cooperative explanations of populist politics, then develops a more satisfying political
explanation that throws light on populist racism.4
"Politics" in this article means electoral politics: How did popular movements become populist parties? How did they compete with other parties?
Why did they fail? Populist parties did not pursue electoral politics as usual.
Their leaders used the popular perception of the inadequacies of existing
parties to lend weight to their own claims to represent marginal rural groups.
Electoral politics, providing both a vehicle of protest and means of empowerment for the marginal and underrepresented, were used to challenge the
domination of elites. Unlike traditional politicians, the populist leaders in
Germany and the United States, independently of each other, invented a
"new" politics congenial to new voters, featuring mass rallies, lively newspapers, grass-roots clubs, and a folksy rhetoric. These new methods set the
terms of politics practiced at that time and forced other parties to change their
programs, as well as their styles. The tension between old and new politics is
a key to understanding the role of racism in populist politics.5
4
Lawrence Goodwyn Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford and
New York, 1976), xviii; abridged as The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian
Revolt in America (Oxford and New York, 1978). Cf. Turner, "Understanding the Populists"
and David Montgomery, "On Goodwyn's Populists," Marxist Perspectives, 1 (Spring 1978),
166-73. Stanley Parsons et al. argue that the cooperative movement was small, did not "precede" Populist politics, and did not have the educative impact claimed by Goodwyn. Their
criticism identifies the Southern Farmers Alliance too narrowly with the cooperative movement
and relies excessively on Dun & Company's Mercantile Agency Reference Book. A rating in this
book was used by a merchant as the basis of bank credit—the sort of credit cooperators wanted to
dispense with. The book listed successful enterprises, not failed or planned ones—the ones that
counted, politically. The undercapitalization of many cooperatives, and other signs of frailty
revealed by Parsons et al., does not contradict Goodwyn's contention that farmers faced formidable enemies, could not make it on their own, and needed to go into politics. Finally, as a political
movement, Populism predated the cooperative movement only in Kansas, an exception discussed
below. Throughout the South the key years of politicization were 1891-92—after the Alliance
failed. Goodwyn himself shows that the earliest Alliance program contained political demands.
Parsons et al. are on firmer ground in doubting the linkage between cooperative failure and
radical consciousness, which Goodwyn only asserts. "The Role of Cooperatives in the Development of the Movement Culture of Populism," Journal of American History, 69:4 (1983), 86685.
5
This paper does not define populism, but seeks to establish the comparability of the Bockel
movement with Southern populism and to see it in a new light. On populism, I learned much from
Ernesto Laclau, "Towards a Theory of Populism," in his Politics and Ideology in Marxist
Theory (London, 1977), esp. 143-76, and Margaret Cameron's more empirical Populism
(London, 1981).
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
343
MERCHANTS, THE MARKET, AND PEASANT CULTURE
The two movements are comparable by virtue of the structural likeness of
their rural social base. Populist votes were concentrated in hill districts like
Georgia's Upcountry; anti-Semitic votes, in Kurhessen in central Germany.6
Household autonomy was an ideal in Kurhessen and the hill districts, as in
most peasant societies, but Georgians were more successful at achieving it, as
measured by land distribution and farm size.7 Even in the eighteenth century,
only a minority of Kurhessian peasants lived from farming; grazing, seasonal
migration, and mercenary soldiering was the lot of the rest. The regions
varied in other ways, of course. Kurhessians held land in strips scattered
among two or three communal fields, and lived in compact, stratified villages
of long settlement. Georgians farmed consolidated holdings of comparable
size, living in homesteads clustered loosely by kinship. Seen as a whole, the
regions were dominated by the ethos and household orientation of more or
less independent peasants. The movements are also comparable because they
took place in regions poorly integrated into their larger national societies, a
fact revealed by the expansion of market relations and recognized by populists. Both movements can be situated in the tension-field between backward
regions and "exceptional" nations.
Studies of these regions at a time of rapid change have been characterized
by scholars' exceptionalism, reductionism, and also by their partiality toward
the "people's" diagnosis of their own economic situation. This applies particularly to perceptions of merchants. To gain access to the reality of populist
politics, it is necessary to cut through the anti-merchant bias on the part of
Populists and their historians.
Southern farmers in the 1880s hated merchants. Low cotton prices, expensive supplies, costly corn—in each case, the exactions of a middleman could
be held responsible, the "economic background" brought home. The new
system of store credit secured by a lien on the cotton crop was singled out for
harsh criticism. Populist sympathizer Charles Otken wrote in 1894 of the
"vast credit system whose tremendous evils and exorbitant exactions have
brought poverty and bankruptcy to thousands of families, . . . crushed out all
independence and reduced its victims to a coarse species of servile slavery." 8
6
Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of
the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York and Oxford, 1984), ch. 1-2; Peal, Anti-Semitism
and Rural Transformation, 29ff. On poor whites: Ira Berlin, "White Majority," Social History,
no. 5 (May 1977), 653-59; Harry Watson, "Conflict and Collaboration; Yeomen, Slaveholders,
and Politics," Ibid., 10:3 (1985), 273-98; V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation
(New York, 1949), Pt. I.
7
Hahn, Southern Populism, 44, 302ff; Peal, Rural Transformation, 32ff, 211-2, Appendix,
xiii, xv.
8
Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences
of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1977), 164 (Otken); Thomas D. Clark, Pills, Petticoats, and
Plows: The Southern Country Store (Indianapolis and New York, 1944), 315.
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344
DAVID PEAL
Historian C. Vann Woodward confirms this view, isolating the lien system as
a root "evil" of the post-bellum South.9 Economists Ransom and Sutch go
farther and seek to prove that shopkeepers' control of credit amounted to an
intentional monopoly in the black belt, the fertile, low-lying districts once
dominated by cotton plantations. Shopkeepers, they argue, extended credit to
cash-poor black croppers only against cotton, punishing clients who took their
business elsewhere. They deliberately discouraged corn-and-hogs husbandry,
while subjecting debtors to the risks of soil depletion and low prices.10
Historians of the poorer, less commercialized white hill country, the Populist
heartland, link the expansion of cotton growing there to other factors, like the
new railways, which lowered the costs of fertilizer and corn imports.'' Cotton
growing there, too, led to dependence on cotton and "bondage" to merchants.
All of these views neglect merchants' risks and costs, assume intentional
malice, and fail to consider circumstances in which farmers would need to
borrow or want to grow cotton. Despite the harshness in the operation of the
lien laws, it is incontestable that without the laws, credit would have been
unavailable, because of the devaluation of land after the war. When lien laws
were abolished in 1877, debtors pressed for their reintroduction.12 Only by
neglecting these factors does it make sense to endorse the contemporary view
of competition as "the life of trade," but "the death of the farmer." 13
Historians have accepted the descriptive accuracy of anti-merchant sentiment with little criticism, but popular economic thinking is arguably of greater value in providing insight into the assumptions of smallholders unaccustomed to commercial norms. As Bruce Palmer shows, Populists valued
occupations involved in the production of tangible wealth (agriculture and
some sorts of manufacturing), and they defined themselves within a local web
of personal ties among small producers. They did not reject the market, but
dreamt of a localized market society based on agriculture, not wage labor.
9
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 180;
Hicks, Populist Revolt, 43; Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, 26ff; Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860-1897 (New York, 1945), 90ff.
10
Ransom, Sutch, One Kind of Freedom; for criticism, see "One Kind of Freedom: A
Symposium," Explorations in Economic History, 16:1 (1979); Gavin Wright, Old South, New
South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986), esp. 10615.
11
Lacy K. Ford, "Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in
the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865-1900," Journal of American History, 71:2 (1984), 306,
passim: Hahn, Southern Populism, 143ff. Nine of ten landholders owned their farms in the
1850s; six to eight often owned farms in the 1880s. Ibid. 158-65; William Hair, Bourbonism and
Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 156-57. In general:
Anne May hew, "A Reappraisal of the Cause of Farm Protest."
12
Harold D. Woodman, "Post Civil-War Southern Agriculture and the Law," Agricultural
History, 53:1 (1979), 319-37.
13
Hahn, Southern Populism, 283.
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
345
The reverse of their ideal of the sturdy yeoman was their stereotype of the
merchant as parasitic "usurer." This anti-commercial idiom itself points to
the novelty of the market: storekeepers were mediators of the "system," but
they seemed like its embodiment.14 This is evidence not of irrationality and
much less of mercantile tyranny, but of vulnerability articulated in familiar
cultural terms. Moreover, commercial behavior was becoming the social as
well as legal norm. To cite Otken again:
Neither the merchants . . . nor the farmers . . . are to blame for this state of things; but
the commercial contract, under articles they formed a joint copartnership to do business,
deserves full and signal justice. It is a covenant to which the parties of the first part are
thoroughly organized, thoroughly systematic in keeping accounts, thoroughly acquainted with the cost and selling price of merchandise. . . . The parties of the second
part are thoroughly unorganized, thoroughly unsystematic, thoroughly uninformed as to
prices and as to their ability to pay them. . . ,15
The lien system, then, brought together economic unequals: "thoroughly
unorganized" small producers and "thoroughly systematic" merchants;
fanners not yet knowledgeable of the rules of the game in the commercial
economy; and rational, experienced merchants.
The Bockel movement shared a root hostility to the merchant with Southern
Populism.16 Here, too, the hostility was linked to credit scarcity; but again the
link was indirect, symptomatic rather than factually accurate. In the late
nineteenth century, the primary source of short-term credit was the smalltown
Jewish cattle trader and product dealer, whose clients could rarely pay in
full.17 Much of the resentment of the post-bellum storekeeper arose from his
novelty, his upstart ability (like Flem Snopes in William Faulkner's novel,
The Hamlet) to insinuate himself into the marrow of community life. Germany's rural Jews were no less indispensable, but the resentment ran deeper
and farther back, and the Jews never became insiders. From the old regime
until the mid-nineteenth century, scores of edicts had equated "Jew" and
"usurer" and protected gentiles from usury. These edicts combined Christian
Jew-hatred with the anti-commercial bias characteristic of precapitalist peasant society in the German states.
Annexed by Prussia in 1866, Kurhessen was subject at once to the new
framework of liberal capitalism. Laws now recognized the principle of individual equality, and, in 1869, Jews were emancipated. Building on their
14
Bruce Palmer, "Man over Money": The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill, 1980); Roscoe Martin, The People's Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party
Politics (Austin, 1933), 166 (usury); Peter Argersinger, "Pentecostal Politics: Religion, the
Farmers' Alliance, and the Gospel of Populism," Kansas Quarterly, 1:4 (1969), 30, passim.
15
From Charles Otken, The Ills of the South, excerpted in ,4 Populist Reader, George B.
Tindall, ed. (New York, 1966), 47-48.
16
On the anti-usury campaign, see my "Anti-Semitism by Other Means? The Rural Cooperative Movement in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany," Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, 32
(1987), 135-53.
17
On rural Jews, see my Rural Transformation, 36ff.
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346
DAVID PEAL
historical concentration in the commercial sector of the rural economy, Jewish
traders now mediated between the villages and the larger expansive economy,
and they prospered relative to their neighbors. The disparity was sharpened
during the agricultural depression of the 1880s. Especially galling, mobile
Jews were able to rise above the station accorded them by earlier edicts and
customary norms. Popular antipathy to Jewish usury was not abolished when
Jews were emancipated.18 While Jews did not encourage commercial farming, they did mediate the commercialization of economic life. High Prussian
taxes, low product prices, and growing habituation to purchased farm supplies
and "luxury" goods led peasants, especially smallholders, into protracted
indebtedness. Since traders secured credit against land, not crops, the mortgage came to mean much the same in rural Germany as the lien in the South:
the slippery slope to ruin. 19 Study after study—culminating in the influential
Usury in the Countryside (1887)—depicted a "typical" process: an invariably Jewish trader secures his claims against his debtor's land, renews the
contract on prohibitive terms, then willfully forecloses and sells the land to
new "tributaries." 20
Some scholars still accept Usury in the Countryside without criticism,
assuming that the anti-Semitic movement had an immediate economic cause.
This not only misses the crucial issue—the novelty of the market—but is also
belied by the evidence: foreclosure did not pay and its incidence decreased in
the 1880s.21 In Kurhessen as in the South, familial ruin seemed implicit in
every transaction with a merchant. Household autonomy, once elusive,
seemed increasingly out of reach. Peasants in both places shared inexperience
relative to the rational agents of the market. White smallholders and Kleinbauern, as well as landless former slaves, entered into capitalist social rela18
Ibid., 96ff; Monika Richarz, "Jewish Social Mobility in Germany during the Era of
Emancipation (1790-1871)," Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, 20 (1975), 69-77; Utz
Jeggle, Judendorfer in Wiirttemberg (Tubingen, 1969), 188-89. Emancipated Jews' mobility
was galling but was possible; emancipated slaves were unable to accumulate assets and become
independent. Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 81ff; Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and
Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and
London, 1985), 146ft' (violence against blacks), 177ff; (black ownership) blacks were "shot,
whipped or otherwise molested" by whites in Louisiana, citation from Hair, Bourbonism and
Agragrian Protest, 189; Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers (New York, 1974), 192; Jeff
Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black, White Relations in the American South since Reconstruction (New York, 1984), 45ff, 250.
19
The Georgia homestead exemption act of 1841 kept mortgages and foreclosures to a
minimum in the Upcountry, but was revised by Democrats in 1877. Hahn, Southern Populism,
75ff, 193ff.
20
Der Wucher aufdem Lande, in Schriften des Vereinsfiir Socialpolitik, Vol. 35 (Leipzig,
1887); Peal, "Anti-Semitism by other Means?"
21
Bernhard vom Brocke, "Marburg im Kaiserreich, 1866-1918," in MarburgerGeschichte,
Erhart Dettmering and Rudolf Grenz, eds. (Marburg, 1980). 476,482ff; Wilfried Schlau, Politik
und Bewusstsein: Voraussetzungen und Strukturen politischer Bildung in Idndlichen Gemeinden
(Cologne, 1971), 402ff; sources and criticism in Peal, Rural Transformation, 104 ff.
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
347
tions from a structurally weak position, and at a time of falling product prices
and rising costs. 22 Without alternative credit sources or steady income, peasants' worries about losing property or not being able to acquire it became
general. This anxiety was the Populists' capital.
COOPERATIVE CRUSADES COMPARED
Since Hicks, most historians have assumed that cooperation was a direct
response to mercantile exploitation. Goodwyn goes farther. He argues that the
experience of cooperation and the educational work of the Southern Farmers
Alliance (SFA) lecturers and editors implanted the ideal of a humane, cooperative alternative to capitalism; the organization's failure brought home the
ugliness of the system and the necessity of political activism. ' 'The spark that
lit the fuse of agrarian discontent'' was the message offered by the (SFA): ' 'join
the Alliance, build a cooperative, and get free of the credit merchants." 23
The preceding argument suggests a less linear, more complex linkage between cooperatives and politics. First, cooperatives were not simply economic in purpose, but were also set up to promote mutuality and counteract
the cultural tendency of liberal capitalism. Second, less an alternative to the
new system of capitalist social relations, cooperatives gave members the
means to overcome their substantive inequality and compete in the market.
Finally, in the Bockel movement, cooperatives did not so much anticipate
politicization as provide an all-purpose political organization; politics "came
first." In both countries, cooperation and politics were arguably parallel, not
sequential, responses to isolation and material vulnerability reinforced by
political marginality.
The Texas Alliance was founded in 1877 as a fraternal club of upcountry
Greenbackers opposed to the use of barbed wire by cattlemen. This practice
impeded access to pasture and water, aggravating the effects of the poor
harvests of the late 1870s. Even before the breakthrough of commercial
agriculture, then, farmers experimented with cooperative methods of protecting their landed independence. It was only in the mid-1880s (a time of labor
conflicts, falling cotton prices, and rising debt) that the Alliance took root.
Alliance leaders and editors developed a program of community and sectional
self-help, then sent lecturers across the South to organize sub-alliances in
1887-88. Mobilizing yeomen as well as some planters, absorbing similar
organizations in North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Alliance was
22
On the slaves' encounter with new social relations, see Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the
Middle Ground, 157ff; Harold D. Woodman, "Sequel to Slavery: the New History Views the
Post-Bellum S o u t h , " Journal of Southern History, 43:4 (1977), 5 4 1 , passim; Oscar Handlin,
"Reconsidering the Populists," Agricultural History, 39:2 (1965), 70; Handlin, " G o o d Guys
and B a d , " Truth in History (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 3 3 2 - 5 2 .
23
Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, 120; Hicks, 105.
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348
DAVID PEAL
nationally incorporated and numbered over a million members in 1890.24
Encouraged by SFA lecturers and writers, sub-alliances formed cooperative
stores where goods were bought wholesale and resold to members for cash,
while the profit was shared and cooperators assumed responsibility for default.25 In some states, sub-alliances went beyond "furnishing," to the bulking and marketing of cotton. Undercapitalized, poorly coordinated, undersold
by merchants, these local stores were not very successful. Members quickly
learned how costly it was to carry each other to harvest. The hallmark of
Alliance activity was a series of state and sectional enterprises that tried to
overcome local obstacles by instituting a "a monopoly" of Southern agriculture.26 In 1888-89, SFA members in four states established "exchanges"
to centralize the marketing of cotton and deal directly with large merchants.
The Texas Exchange worked out of a four-story building in Dallas and conducted a million dollars worth of business in its peak year, 1888. Exchange
managers weighed, classified, and priced members' cotton, then shipped it to
Europe when prices were highest. In a show of force, the SFA coordinated in
1889 a successful interstate boycott of the jute trust that supplied bagging for
cotton bales. 27
The enthusiasm generated by Alliance activities arose from more than the
bracing experience of the "cooperative crusade" against mercantile tyranny.
The sub-alliance was also one of the many voluntary fraternal and charitable
clubs that flourished along the frontier in the 1870s. Like the clubs, suballiances met secretly and instituted ritual to create "community out of the
heterogeneous mass of settlers." 28 The Alliance message found the greatest
resonance among smallholders, especially women, in isolated or newly settled regions like Georgia's Upcountry and Alabama's wiregrass counties,
where the organization latched onto existing patterns of mutuality. The tone
of sub-alliance gatherings transcended the narrowly economic: at school,
church, and home members joined for song and uplift as well as for lessons in
crop diversification. "You cannot imagine what a kindred feeling has sprung
up among us," wrote one sub-alliance secretary to the North Carolina Al24
Robert McMath, Jr., "Sandy Land and Hogs in the Timber: (Agri-) Cultural Origins of the
Farmers' Alliance in Texas," in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays
in the Social History of Rural America, Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds. (Chapel Hill and
London, 1985), 205-29.
25
Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers Alliance
and Cotton Tenancy (New York, 1976), 209-10, 255ff; Robert C. McMath, Jr., Populist
Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers' Alliance (Chapel Hill, 1975), 42-43; Hahn, 275.
26
Ralph Smith, "'Macuneism', or the Farmers of Texas in Business," Journal of Southern
History, 13:2 (1947), 227-28; Hair, Bourbonism, 155-56; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 29-30,
57 ("monopoly"), 68.
27
Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South, 1865-1933 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), 91-101; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 74ff; Schwartz, Radical Protest, ch. 14-15;
Smith, "'Macuneism,' " 228ff; McMath, Populist Vanguard, ch. 4.
28
McMath, Populist Vanguard, 7.
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
349
liance headquarters. "Bless the name of the Alliance . . . it is next to religion
with us, as its Constitution partakes so much of the faith, hope, and charity
commended in the Bible." 29 Such rhetoric appropriated and redefined the
"one-value system" of the rural white Protestant South, and its exuberance
challenged genteel elite religiosity.30
Since the Alliance served several purposes, its success (or failure) can be
measured in many ways. Its business record bespeaks a fiasco: The SFA was
defunct by 1892-93. As a "business organization for business purposes," the
SFA lacked experienced managers.31 More important, the credit scarcity that
ruined local cooperatives undermined state exchanges. Only by pledging
crops could they secure the necessary credit. Since the Texas Exchange could
not mobilize adequate cash or membership dues to finance the marketing of
cotton or wholesale purchases, Macune devised a "joint-note" plan, by
which sub-alliances secured joint orders by a lien on the cotton crop of local
"responsible" farmers. Bankers, however, viewed these notes as inadequate
collateral and would not lend against them—whether out of conspiracy, as
Goodwyn argues, or because it was too risky, is moot. 32
One obstacle to economic success was racism. If it had focused solely on
ending peonage, the SFA would have mobilized blacks as well as whites, but
the Alliance served only fanners who controlled their own crop: white yeomen. Black croppers and tenants shared yeomen's enemies (merchants and
planters) and sought independence, but were barred from membership in suballiances. To accommodate them, a Colored Farmers' Alliance (CFA) was
created as an appendage of the white organization, but relations between the
two were hostile, with economic conflict aggravating racial antagonism. The
SFA, made up of small employers, opposed CFA cotton workers' strikes; its
Mississippi branch was a "driving force" in calling for the first Southern
constitutional convention to disfranchise blacks. Negro emancipation did not
imply social acceptance any more than Jewish emancipation did in Germany.
Arguably, sub-alliance clubbishness institutionalized exclusiveness and undermined the SFA's material goals.33
29
Ibid., 64.
Ibid., 136; Palmer, "Man over Money", ch. 10; Argersinger, "Pentecostal Politics"; Gary
Peller, "Creation, Evolution, and the New S o u t h , " Tikkun, 2:5 (1987), 7 2 - 7 6 .
31
Smith, " ' M a c u n e i s m , ' " 233ff; Saloutos, Farmer Movements, 90ft. Goodwyn neglects
Macune's incompetence and unpopularity.
32
Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 75ff; Hicks, Populist Revolt, 136; McMath, Populist Vanguard, ch. 4.
33
Schwartz, Radical Protest, 114-15; Woodward, Origins, 193; Harold Woodman, "Postbellum Social Change and its Effects on Marketing the South's Cotton C r o p , " Agricultural
History, 56:1 (1982), 2 1 5 - 3 0 ; McMath, Populist Vanguard, 4 4 - 4 5 ; William F. Holmes, " T h e
Demise of the Colored Farmers' Alliance," Journal of Southern History, 41:2 (1975), 187-200;
Robert McMath, Jr., "Southern White Farmers and the Organization of Black Farm W o r k e r s , "
Labor History, 18:1 (1977), 115-19; Albert D. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks:
Mississippi
Politics, 1876-1925 (Lexington, 1951), 6 0 - 6 3 (Alliance and disenfranchisement). Ironically,
30
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350
DAVID PEAL
Racism and the failure to institutionalize commercial functions weighed
more heavily than a conspiracy of traders in undermining the SFA. One result
was politicization, but this result was neither direct nor necessary. In part, it
was the enthusiasm and evangelism of sub-alliance culture more than any
lesson about the system that was transferred to politics as cooperatives failed.
In part, Populism had little to do with any aspect of SFA success or failure.
The Populist revolt in Georgia was largely unrelated to prior Alliance activities; the fiery Georgia Populist, Tom Watson, did not even belong to the
SFA. 34 In Texas (and probably elsewhere) the crucial variable in populist
success was not the extent of mortgage debt or the educational impact of the
Alliance, but the sheer social and physical distance from centers of administrative and commercial power. Populism sank roots among backwoodsmen
who felt themselves "effectively excluded by town-oriented political operators." 35 The point becomes clearer in an examination of Kurhessen, a region
that shared with the Southern hill districts a tenuous connection with its larger
society. From this relative isolation sprang both cooperation and Populism.
A cooperative crusade accompanied the Bockel movement, but politics did
not flow from cooperation as one would expect by Goodwyn's model. Bockel
voiced the anxieties of smallholders without mediation. After gaining prominence as a speaker in anti-Semitic circles in Kassel and Berlin, the 26-yearold folksong collector took his creed to the Marburg countryside in the 1887
Reichstag campaign. With great elan, he conveyed to smallholders the plight
of the self-sufficient peasant entrapped by the predatory Jew, who reduced
peasants to "tributaries." Believing that Jewish emancipation had empowered an inferior race, Bockel wanted to turn back emancipation and
revoke the liberal laws that supposedly benefited only Jews. Thus, while
playing out the democratic implications of liberal equality for peasants, he
attacked the extension of equality to Jews. This campaign was innocent of
organizational groundwork. In 1880-81, large farmers and state officials in
the area did try to combat usury by setting up credit cooperatives like those
started by Friedrich Raiffeisen in the Rhineland, but efforts from above were
defeated by distrust and divided leadership in the villages. The suddenness of
Bockel's political breakthrough, mobilizing groups whose grievances had
been long unattended, may account for some of the appeal of the abrasive
racial ideology.36
early disenfranchisement in Mississippi made Populism a neglible factor in that state. See
Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 144, passim.
34
McMath, Populist Vanguard, ch. 5; Barton C. Shaw, The Wool-Hat Boys:
Georgia's
Populist Party (Baton Rouge and London, 1984), 4 2 - 4 4 , 52; Martin, People's Party in Texas,
165ff (evangelical appeal).
35
Turner, "Understanding the Populists," 363ff (incidence of Populist voting), 368ff (distance and political alienation), and passim.
36
Peal, Rural Transformation,
1 6 0 - 6 2 ; Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic
Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven, 1975), 55ff.
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
35I
Racism was not all Bockel offered; voters wanted more. In stumping the
villages he became more and more the brash populist, attacking town notables
and espousing social reforms having little to do with anti-Semitism.37 Along
with his populist tone and promises went sponsorship of grass-roots organizations. The most important of these was the Central German Peasants' Association (Mitteldeutscher Bauernverein [MDBV], 1890-94), which, by 1892-93,
encompassed some 500 cooperative Ortsgruppen (German sub-alliances).
Unlike the SFA in the United States, the MDBV was only one of many Bauernvereine in Germany, which never overcame confessional and regional differences to congeal into a single movement with a common social and political
program.38 One obstacle to such a merger was the MDBV's commitment to
independent politics. Other peasant unions maintained an apolitical stance or
were loosely affiliated with established conservative parties. This political
mission shaped its economic program. To break the supposed monopoly of
"usurers,'' the MDBV coordinated the capital-intensive trade in farm supplies,
especially fertilizer, long a preserve of Jewish merchants. Eager to displace
Jews, MDBV leaders neglected the more fundamental, but less lucrative
cooperative credit business, and they ignored cooperative marketing, since
commercial farming had made little inroad in the hills. 39
Like the SFA, the MDBV did not restrict itself to combatting merchants.
To isolated villagers, leaders also offered camaraderie. "People's festivals"
featured brass bands, marches, picnics, speechmaking, and disastrously unsuccessful "Jew-free" cattle markets. In this way, anti-Semites succeeded in
bringing together villagers by identifying a shared enemy. Anti-Semitic mutuality, too, was linked with larger political goals. The MDBV, an organization
that brought villagers together against Jews, served as an all-purpose antiSemitic political organization. Cells were mobilized to do the day-to-day
political work of rallying activists, getting out the vote, raising funds, mobilizing youth, and disrupting enemies' rallies. The MDBV itself was adduced
as evidence of the value of anti-Semitic politics. By voting anti-Semite,
villagers could continue to enjoy both the material benefits of bulk fertilizer
purchases and the cozy exclusiveness of Germanic sociability.
The MDBV's failure was a root of the demise of the Bockel movement.
First, its aims worked at cross-purposes. This organization of smallholders
was ill-suited to finance the campaigns of an expansive political movement,
yet Bockel and his minions used the MDBV for just this purpose.40 More
fundamentally, the MDBV like the SFA, lacked the credit underpinnings to
attain its economic goals. All evidence points to its inability to compete with
37
38
39
40
Peal,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Rural Transformation,
ch. 5.
299-300.
307-8.
173-75.
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352
DAVID PEAL
"usurers." Jewish merchants simply had longer experience, wider horizons,
knew their clients better, and were better capitalized. The drought-induced
fodder scarcity of 1893-94 exacerbated this weakness. Strained by the
drought and three political campaigns, the MDBV failed its members when
they most needed help. 41 Contrary to what one would expect by Goodwyn's
model, German populism broke into politics without a cooperative crusade
and ended despite, or because, of one. 42 The political phases of Southern and
German Populism were ultimately political in nature.
POPULIST POLITICS
In Germany, unification hastened the nationalization of politics: the domination of national issues, interest groups, and parties and the rise of patriotic and
imperialist clubs, but, in the South, after the humiliations of defeat and
Reconstruction, Democrats conducted politics against the national grain, in
willful sectional isolation. Germany's Reichstag, with its democratic suffrage, was the target of anti-Semitic politics. Southern Populists divided their
energies between Democratic state legislatures and Congress. The national
focus and multi-party environment of German populism suggests a greater
scope and openness in German politics, yet, by taking part in national politics, German populists were also subject to state opposition. By contrast,
Southern Populists benefited from the state-rights zeal of their Democratic
adversaries and enjoyed virtual immunity from federal opposition. Despite
these important differences, populists in both countries confronted similar
constellations of local elites, and followed parallel political trajectories.
After Reconstruction, Democrats and industrialists evinced reconciliation
with the Union by celebrating business and advertising Southern opportunities
to Northern investors. Their slogans of white supremacy and states rights,
however, were used to create sectional consensus and enforce the postReconstruction "taboo against insurgency" (V. O. Key, Jr.): that division of
the white South would bring about "negro domination." They did not state
that it would also threaten existing concentrations of power. Political change
meant cultural danger:
Changing one's party in the South of the nineties involved more than changing one's
mind. It might involve a falling-off of clients, the loss of a job, of credit at the store, or
of one's welcome at church. It could split families, and it might even call in question
one's loyalty to his race and his people.43
When the cultural sanctions in support of one-party rule failed, force and
fraud were employed without reservation.
41
Ibid., 3O8ff.
Ibid., ch. 6.
« Woodward, Origins, 244; ch. 1-3; Key, Southern Politics, 553; William Warren Rogers,
The One-Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865-1896 (Baton Rouge, 1970), ch. 3.
42
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
353
Despite the taboo, antagonisms did emerge within the white South in the
1870s and 1880s: most acutely along the fault line between hill district and
black belt, but increasingly between hill towns and villages as well. The laws
upholding the lien were the clearest evidence that smallholders were ill served
by Democratic politics. To defend the inviolability of contracts, mercantile
and landed interests also pressed state legislatures to abolish usury laws and
increase the extent of mortgageable property. In defense of private property,
smallholders' access to grazing land was curtailed, striking directly at their
independence.44 At the state level, the tax code favored business, while
public education was a low priority. State regimes further alienated yeomen
by granting vast tracts of land to railways and timber companies. Overall,
these conflicts between "backwoods farmers and courthouse elites" produced the "rage and alienation" that powered Populism.45
The SFA provided the organizational framework of this broad-based political alienation. Its dilemma was to achieve parity for farmers—without betraying white supremacy. At the state level, conservative Democrats dominated
politics, while precinct politics was in the hands of courthouse elites, whose
caucuses provided no scope for popular participation. The solution was to
support only Democrats who backed the SFA program—nationalization of
railways and establishment of federal warehouses (sub-treasuries)—and to
mobilize sheer numbers at the polls. At first, the tactic worked. In 1890, the
sub-treasury plan apparently had the backing of at least four governors, eight
legislatures, and forty-four U.S. Congressmen. Yet Georgia's "Alliance legislature" failed to support a bill revoking the charter of a railway engaged in
monopolistic practices, then elected a notorious Bourbon (patrician Democrat) as U.S. Senator. The record was similarly disappointing elsewhere.
Confusion at the state level resulted from the nature of the SFA demands,
which required federal, not state, measures. Indirection was compounded by
Alliance leaders' reluctance to carry their reform of the party of white supremacy too far.46
In 1891-92, speakers from the SFA's radical wing fanned out across the
South, channeling enthusiasm and calling for a new party to apply pressure on
44
Hahn, Southern Populism, 193ff, 223-24, chap. 7 (grazing restrictions); idem., "Common
Right and Commonwealth: The Stock-Law Struggle and the Roots of Southern Populism," in
Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor ofC. Vann Woodward, J. Morgan Kousser
and James M. McPherson, eds. (New York and Oxford, 1982), 51-88. On the comparable
division of communal forests in Germany: Peal, Rural Transformation, 216-19.
45
Hair, Bourbonism, 4 8 - 5 1 , 60ff, 111-12, 124ff, 26ff, passim; Woodward, Tom Watson,
Agrarian Rebel (London, Oxford, New York, 1938), ch. 4, 6, 8; Turner, "Understanding," 368
(quote).
46
Goodwyn, Populist Moment, ch. 5; Woodward, Origins, 240ff; Schwartz, Radical Protest,
268, ch. 17; Hahn, Southern Populism, 218 (caucuses); William F. Holmes, "The Southern
Farmers' Alliance and the Georgia Senatorial Election of 1890," Journal of Southern History,
50:2 (1984), 210-11.
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354
DAVID PEAL
the federal government to print greenbacks and create sub-treasuries.47 It took
two party-political developments to precipitate the break from the Southern
Democratic party. First, the Populists' upset 1890-91 victories in Kansas,
where the SFA had just begun to make inroads, placed pressure on Southern
leaders to follow a similar course. Kansas provided a model for insurgency
and a rationale for dissociation from the Democrats, for the sake of a crosssectional political movement took away the ability of Republicans of the
North and West to cry "bloody shirt," claiming that Populists were helping
Democrats split the Union. 48 Then, in 1892, in the midst of a depression, the
Democrats nominated "gold-bug" Grover Cleveland for President, enraging
Populists of every stripe. These realities overcame the reluctance of SFA
leaders, who dominated the first convention of the People's Party in Omaha
on July 4, 1892. SFA President Leonidas Polk of North Carolina would have
been the party's nominee, but died weeks before the convention.49
The record of the People's Party in Southern politics has been chronicled in
the classic histories. Here, two patterns emerging from the elections of 1892
and 1894 must be stressed. First, the new party elicited massive opposition
from the Democrats and the social elites who ruled the party. Deeply divided,
in the 1880s, Democrats were now forced to set aside differences. They
fought back with charges of racial treason and with violence; assaults and
murders accompanied campaigns in most states.50 Populist Tom Watson was
deprived of victories in Georgia Congressional races by open fraud.51 Subtler
means of influence were more pervasive. Georgia Populists were "turned out
of church, driven from their homes, and refused credit because of their beliefs." 52 Second, despite phony vote counts, the Populist party enlarged its
share of the vote between 1892 and 1894, winning the North Carolina legislature by cooperating with Republicans and gaining more than 35 percent of the
vote in the 1894 state races in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. 53
While the Democrats used white supremacy to rally whites and discredit
Populists, the new party was not above similar appeals. Electoral success
probably resulted from some degree of voter support for sub-treasuries and
47
Goodwyn Populist Moment, 148ff.
Goodwyn, 131-32, 210, passim; Argersinger, Populism and Politics, 51-53, 62.
Woodward, Origins, 243ff; Hicks, 229ff, 439-44.
50
Shaw, Wool-Hat Boys, 69-72; Hair, Bourbonism. 228 (rhetoric), 262 (lynchings); Martin,
People's Party in Texas, 181-82, 236-37; Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in
Alabama (Princeton, 1969), 43. For the divisions in the Southern elite and references: John W.
Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the
American South, (Cambridge, 1982), 161ff.
51
Rogers, One-Gallused Rebellion, 222ff, 283ff, 312; Woodward, Tom Watson, 238-39,
241-42, 269ff.
52
Woodward, Tom Watson, 223.
53
Hicks, Populist Revolt, 263, 337 (electoral maps).
48
49
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
355
government railway ownership, as well as sheer Alliance enthusiasm, but
Populists were unable to keep racism out of their own campaigns. In large
part, this was an effort to disprove the Democrats' calculated, systematic race
hatred, and their contentions that populism would "destroy white supremacy" and "bring about the death of our civilization."54 In part, Populist
racism was genuine—or a play to voters' real sentiments. Watson, once
considered a pioneer of racial amity, repeatedly denied that he favored social
equality for blacks; he spoke of biracial interests only when addressing black
audiences.55 Despite an understandable appeal for black votes, Populists
would not seat black delegates at their conventions in most states or recognize
their demands in programs. In 1892, one Georgian black was lynched by a
group of Populists!56
By competing with the Democrats on the terrain of white supremacy,
Populists jeopardized their own electoral position among blacks and forced
themselves into other electoral alliances (with urban reformers and businessmen) that compromised their principles without helping them at the
polls.57 At the national level, too, Populists let their stronger enemies set the
terms of competition. In a process beautifully documented by Goodwyn,
Democrats maneuvered Populists into narrowing their national platform to the
free-silver plank, then split them into pro-Democrat "fusionist" and independent "midroader" factions and co-opted moderates. This tactic cost the Democrats the 1896 election, but successfully divided and destroyed populism.58
Southern Populists were defeated less by Democratic duplicity than by
pervasive racism. Democrats had raised the cry of white betrayal against
them, then defeated them at the polls by stuffing the ballot boxes in black
counties. If their own racial ambivalence was not enough and elites had not
played to their supremacist fantasies, defeat only sharpened yeoman racism:
The bitter violence and blood-letting recrimination of the campaigns between white
conservatives and white radicals in the 'nineties had opened wounds that could not be
healed by ordinary political nostrums andfree-silverslogans. The only formula powerful enough to accomplish that was the magical formula of white supremacy, applied
without stint and without any of the old conservative reservations of paternalism. . . . 59
54
Shaw, Wool-Hat Boys, 69 (quote).
Woodward, Tom Watson, 22Off, 2 3 9 - 4 0 ; Woodward, Origins, 254ff. Woodward's favorable view has been attacked by Charles Crowe, " T o m Watson, Populists, and Blacks Reconsidered," Journal of Negro History, 55:2 (1970), 9 9 - 1 1 6 and Shaw, Wool-Hat Boys, 8 3 , 109,
114. Cf. Palmer, "Man over Money", ch. 5, 165-66; Woodward, Thinking Back, 36ff.
56
Robert Saunders, "Southern Populists and the Negro, 1 8 9 3 - 1 8 9 5 , " Journal of Negro
History, 54:3 (1969), 2 4 0 - 6 1 , esp. 245ff; Shaw, Wool-Hat Boys,84ff, 120, 1 3 8 - 3 9 .
57
Ibid., lOlf, 106ff; Palmer, "Man over Money", 154ff (on "Jeffersonian Democrats" and
the new middle class in Alabama).
58
Goodwyn, Populist Moment, ch. 8; Woodward, Watson, ch. 1 6 - 1 7 ; Woodward, Origins;
Hicks, Populist Revolt, ch. 11, 1 3 - 1 4 .
59
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd. rev. ed. (New York, 1974),
55
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356
DAVID PEAL
In a broader context, Barbara J. Fields has captured the dialectics of racial
politics in this episode even more acutely:
The most important obstacle thrown up by racialism is the fact that it formed a narrow
one-way bridge, which allowed potential support to straggle over to the side of the
Democrats while offering little scope for movement in the opposite direction. Patricians stood a better chance of attracting support among the common people than the
common people did of attracting support from the patricians. The racialism of the
black-belt elite, after all, carried with it the luster of victory. That of the white
common people became ever more tightly bound up with the rancor of hard blows and
final defeat, as they watched the basis of their proud independence eroded by economic and social forces with which they werefinallyunable to cope. . . .60
The failure of Populism in the South meant black disfranchisement, Jim Crow
laws, white political apathy, and the submersion of divisive political issues,
more than a chastened Democratic party and belated Progressive reforms, as
some have argued.
Bockel's political insurgency was bound up with fewer costs than that of
the Southern Populists. One reason was the diversity that his political environment tolerated or could not control. Confessional differences, conflicting
views of unification, the absence of elections to national office, and the lack
of real parliamentary responsibility were conducive to local political fragmentation. In annexed Kurhessen, neither the Social Democrats, nor the bourgeois parties (Conservatives, Catholic Centrists, National Liberals, left liberals), nor the tiny party of anti-Prussian, gross deutsch particularists could
build a stable electorate. Fragmented competition, not the ravages of usury,
made Bockel's victory possible in 1887. Four adjacent districts fell to his
allies in 1890, followed by another two in 1893. Only in Saxony did the antiSemites do so well, but there the success was fleeting.61
As in the South, conservative and liberal parties in Marburg were dominated by notables and were closed to popular participation. Politics was
reserved for professors, rentiers, and retired officers as well as lawyers,
businessmen, large farmers, and bureaucrats: the "interlocking networks of
rural and urban notables" who "selected themselves for political leadership
by virtue of property and education, a mixed cultural predominance experi-
82-83; Cell, Highest Stage, ch. 4; Joel Williamson, in Crucible of Race, challenges the "Jim
Crow" thesis by leaving politics out of his account of the emergence of "radical racism."
60
Barbara Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Region, Race, Reconstruction, Kousser and McPherson, eds., 159. On the violent aftermath of Populism in North Carolina:
Jack Abramowitz, "The Negro in the Populist Movement," Journal of Negro History, 38:3
(1953), 285; Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, 186-192; Cell, Highest Stage, 178-79,
185; cf. L. Goodwyn, "Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study,"
American Historical Review, 76:5 (1971), 1435-56.
51
On Saxony: Levy, Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Parties. In general: Stanley Suval,
Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill and London, 1985). In annexed regions,
affiliations were arguably even weaker.
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
357
enced by local inhabitants as a diversified moral authority, [and] some form of
successful capitalist enterprise." 62 Conservatives and National Liberals selected candidates, in caucus, from their own kind, a month before elections.
Before 1887, they waged campaigns with few flyers and rallies. Social clubs
like the Agricultural Society provided their organizational and financial resources, and the local press helped out largely through limited coverage and
considered neglect of the usually insignificant opposition.63
In this context, it is not surprising that Bockel directed his principal fire
against the social insiders who dominated local politics. As he wrote a supporter in 1886:
I'll tell you my views on the Conservatives, the only right views. . . . Don't believe
that they will join our cause. Whoever has once been a proper Conservative can never
leave the society of governors, judges, councillors, and courtiers. Among them we are
only plebeians. . . . The Conservatives are hostile to us. . . .No pity with the whole
Conservative society! I hate this pack more than all Jews and Social Democrats
together.64
In the South, Populist politics threatened the racist assumptions of Democratic
rule; Populists used racial slogans in large part to acquire legitimacy. In
Germany, by contrast, racism defined the identity of popular politics for both
voters and leaders. For voters, anti-Semitism gave focus to grievances and
familiar meaning to new uncertainty. The ancient equation of Jews and usury
was politicized, with race invoked to account for Jewish usury. For Bockel,
anti-Semitism was both a creed and a way to establish political identity. It has
been shown that he joined a program of cooperative action against usurers to
his racism when he went to his voters. He used "practical anti-Semitism,"
too, in justifying his claim to speak for "the people." 65
Unlike the Democrats in the American South, with their massive response
to the Populist upsurge, the Conservative and National Liberal notables in
Germany responded much more tentatively to the crumbling of their rural
Protestant constituencies. The Kurhessian Conservative organization did
write an anti-Semitic plank into its platform in 1887, five-and-a-half years
before the national party took this step, but Prussian officials regretted in
1890, after watching anti-Semites win several new seats in the Reichstag
election of that year, that the established conservative parties were idly watching the anti-Semites steal their districts.66 One reason for inactivity lay in the
diagnosis of the causes of the movement. So pervasive was concern about
62
Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after
Bismark (New Haven, 1980), 3 1 .
63
vom Brocke, "Marburg im Kaiserreich," 4 6 1 .
64
Quoted in Peal, Rural Transformation, 185.
65
As Conservatives became more anti-Semitic, Bockel branded them "only anti-Semites".
As they set up cooperatives, he declared that only he cared about the people. Ibid., 1 8 7 - 9 1 .
66
Ibid., 166, n.32.
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358
DAVID PEAL
"usury in the countryside" that notables believed that anti-Semitism sprang
from usurious exploitation of the peasantry, and that both could be combatted
by a vigorous cooperative movement. This view guided the state's swift and
effective sponsorship of Raiffeisen cooperatives after 1888 and the Conservatives' more hesitant creation of openly political "peasant unions." 67 The
deeper cause of inactivity was the inadequacy of notables' politics itself.
Demagoguery bruised the sensibilities of elites, but they lacked the resources
and personnel to respond in kind. More seriously, unlike the situation in the
American South, the social cohesion of elites throughout Germany was not
reflected in political unity. National divisions arising from conflicts over
unification and social policy prevented a speedy, unified response to local
episodes of populist politics.
This was the meaning of the February, 1893, founding of the Agrarian
League (Bund der Landwirte [BdL]) in Berlin—a belated attempt to articulate
elite agrarian interests with one voice and to counteract populist politics. In
Marburg, a chapter was set up in March, with the Agricultural Society as its
core. The Marburg BdL controlled a local newspaper, adopted an anti-Semitic
tone, and drew on the resources—speakers, flyers, probably money—of the
national BdL. 68 Like the SFA in the American South, the German BdL sought
to influence the political process by supporting congenial candidates. Unlike
the SFA, the BdL was situated on the far Right. Its local chapter set out to
break the Bockel movement by co-opting it—by promising economic benefits
and sponsoring local anti-Semites. Some "fusionists" promoted these efforts
out of opportunism or the conviction the BdL would complete Bockel's work.
In August 1894, Bockel was excluded from his own party. In the next month,
former allies Philipp Kohler and Otto Hirschel ousted Bockel from the MDBV
leadership. In October a new national anti-Semitic party renounced his political intransigence with respect to the BdL and Conservatives. In the next
decade, Hirschel and Kohler cooperated with the BdL in the Hessian assembly. Most striking was electoral fusion. In 1903, "reform" anti-Semites lost
three seats to BdL-backed anti-Semites in the heartland of the Bockel movement. Marburg also was lost in 1907. Anti-Semitic politics fell into the orbit
of the BdL and the Right. In the American South after Populism, paternalism
yielded to radical social distancing in black—white relations. In Germany after
Bockel, anti-Semitic politics lost its gritty anti-elitism and hoary fixation on
usury, becoming domesticated among the groups Bockel had despised.69
67
Ibid., 187, 258-70; Peal, "Anti-Semitism by other Means?"
Hans-Jurgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik undpreussischer Konservatismus, 2nd ed.
(Bonn, 1975). For a local study: James Hunt, "The 'Egalitarianism' of the Right: The Agrarian
League in Southwest Germany, 1893-1914," Journal of Contemporary History, 10:3 (1975),
513-30.
69
Peal, Rural Transformation, 167-68, 311-12, 379-88; on BdL racism: Puhle, Agrarische
68
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
359
THE RACIST LEGACY
What can be learned about the Bockel movement by this comparison? For
reasons rooted in the circumstances of German unification and the American
version of the same process—Civil War and Reconstruction—national political parties in both countries were defined along lines that left rural interests
poorly represented.70 The penetration of commercial relations in the next two
decades revealed this weakness. Courthouse and Rathaus stood, in the rural
mind, for closed politics, mercantile interests, a kidglove style, and the violation of customary norms. Populist movements did succeed in awakening
established parties to the underrepresentation of smallholders. Because of
political fragmentation and the impossibility of sectional containment, the
upsurge was less amenable to control in Germany.
Without effective political opposition, Bockel was able to translate economic anxieties directly into political terms. Conversely, the SFA could acquire its great size and importance in 1886-90 precisely because of the
obstacles to independent politics in the South. Cooperation and politics can
thus be seen as parallel responses to vulnerability aggravated by political
underrepresentation. Especially striking in the Bockel movement was the
alignment of racism with the hostility to the merchant. In the American South,
the feared storekeeper seemed to stand in the way of self-sufficiency; the
debased black was an object of contempt. Germany's hapless rural Jews,
whose legal emancipation was never seen as legitimate, played both roles.
The protean, layered quality of historical anti-Semitism facilitated this alignment of modern racism with the older hostility to usury; anti-Semitic cooperatives institutionalized the hatred of Jews-as-usurers.
A comparative view of the Bockel movement also throws light on the limits
of single-issue politics. While anti-Semitism gave a special virulence to the
movement, it also made it vulnerable to political takeover bids. Goodwyn has
made clear the extent to which the free-silver issue was imposed on Populism
by its Democratic enemies. Bockel helped his enemies by going into politics
on the plank of anti-Semitism. The increasing reformism of the movement
and its cooperative crusade may be seen as efforts to undergird political
independence by diversifying political appeal, yet a regional movement of
smallholders could not hold out for long against national groups better organized and financed and better able to disseminate anti-Semitism. There was
Interessenpolitik, 113-40; Dieter Fricke, "Die Organisation der antisemitischen Deutschsozialen
Reformpartei, 1894-1900," Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, 29:5 (1981), 432ff (text of
the 1899 tract, "Theses on the Jewish Question," calling for the "destruction" of Jewry in the
twentieth century). On "paternalist" racism (which ended with the Civil War in the U.S.) and
"competitive" racism (which followed the defeat of Populism): Pierre van den Berghe, Race and
Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York, 1967); Philip Mason, Patterns of Dominance
(London, 1970), 60ff.
70
Goodwyn, Populist Moment, ch. 1; Eley, Reshaping the German Right, ch. 1.
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360
DAVID PEAL
more to the movement than anti-Semitism, but the process of political competition made this the movement's chief legacy—just as in the United States,
at the national level, reformism entered mainstream politics largely through
the process in which Democrats co-opted Populism; in the South, Populism's
legacy was racism.
Ironically, by the standard view that sees only anti-Semitism in the movement, it was precisely anti-Semitism that defeated the Bockel movement.
Racism had established its political identity, but nothing prevented the BdL
from using anti-Semitism to co-opt the movement. Southern Populists mobilized yeomen against elites. They failed, yet revealed the Democrats' electoral vulnerability. On the Democrats' initiative, both groups of whites vented
their frustrations through a letting of black blood. As in Africa and India in the
1890s, at the opening of the imperial era, racism took an ugly turn in the
American South that was marked by distancing, racial rivalry, and violence.
Anti-Semitism after Bockel was devoid of populist style, program, organization, and leadership. "Conservative," racial anti-Semitism served, in Fields'
phrase, as a "narrow one-way bridge." 71
The bridge that brought small peasants into the agrarian camp in Germany,
to pursue the metaphor, was built of materials of their choosing. While in the
American South, racism was, in an important sense, imposed on Populism by
Democrats, anti-Semitism in Germany was a popular effort to establish independent politics. Implicitly, notables could no longer pursue politics in isolation, and, in certain circumstances, the bridge would permit travel in the
reverse direction.72 Underlying conflicts—over property and inheritance
taxes, Prussian suffrage reform, tariffs, and land reform—were no more
dispelled by anti-Semitic slogans than white supremacy disguised all conflicts
in the South. While one-party rule, sectional isolation, and disfranchisement
of blacks and poor whites blunted opposition and produced apathy in the
South, sharp political competition led to a rise in voter turnout in rural
Germany after 1900.73 The agonies of the South were encapsulated in the
nation at large, with Democratic rule reinforcing the isolation of the region's
71
Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial
Germany (New York, 1949), 47 ( " b r i d g e " ) . Conservative is in quotes to indicate the sponsorship, not content, of anti-Semitism. Levy finds no variation in content, only in strategies for
reaching anti-Semitic ends—by politics or through agitation and violence. My view stresses
changes of content within politics. Levy, Downfall of Anti-Semitic Parties; Peal, Rural Transformation. On the " n e w " racism of the 1890s: Philip Mason, Prospero's Magic (Oxford, 1962);
Cell, Highest Stage, 172f; Woodward, Strange Career, 7 2 - 7 4 .
72
In 1912, Marburg witnessed a resurgence of populism, with Bockel's bid for his old seat.
He lost, but the episode was telling. After 1918, the countryside was aswarm with volkisch
groups that the Right could harness only with difficulty.
73
Key, Southern Politics, 5 0 4 - 8 , 5 3 3 - 3 5 . Kousser attributes the drop in turnout to changes
in suffrage laws in Shaping of Southern Politics, 12ff, 4 3 - 4 4 , 5 5 - 5 6 , 173ff, 195, 208, etc. In
Germany, turnout dropped in the aftermath of the Bockel movement, but climbed steadily in the
Reichstag elections of 1903, 1907, and 1912. Peal, Rural Transformation, 4 1 3 - 8 1 .
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THE POLITICS OF POPULISM
361
low-wage economy. The processes at work in central Germany were nationalized, with parties to the right of the National Liberals trying to pre-empt
populist threats by appropriating their ideologies and programs. Conservative
accommodation helped undermine the stability of the Kaiserreich.14
Lastly, what of anti-Semitism in American Populism? In the 1960s this topic
produced much debate. The debate is of interest here because it mobilized
historians who furiously denied the comparability of Populism with "reactionary' ' ideologies in Europe. In response to Richard Hofstadter's remarks on
the subject in The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR, Norman Pollack
scoured the papers of Populism's leading anti-Semite (in Hofstadter's view)
and concluded that "[Ignatius] Donnelly's anti-Semitism therefore bears little
relation to twentieth-century manifestations; nowhere will one find here the
extermination camps. " 7 5 Pollack rightly views the Third Reich as incommensurable, though a really comparative view of his subject would have disabused
him of his brand of exceptionalism. Yet, since the appearance of his work and
that of like-minded Walter Nugent, historians have slighted rhetoric and
actions that in Europe would have been unmistakably anti-Semitic: the use of
"Shylock" and "Rothschild" to stand for plutocracy and the violence inflicted exclusively on Jewish merchants in the 1880s, not to mention the trial
and lynching of Leo Frank in 1914—15.76 These historians assume that Jews
have to be attacked on religious grounds for anti-Semitism to be present (which
would absolve Bockel if true) and that where there are few Jews there can be no
anti-Semitism (which would make Marburg an unlikely locale for such agita74
David Blackboum, ' "The Politics of Demagogy in Imperial Germany,'' Past and Present,
no. 113 (Nov. 1986), 1 5 2 - 8 4 . On the isolated labor market as the distinguishing feature of the
Southern economy: Wright, Old South, New South. On suffrage and demagogy: Kousser,
Shaping of Southern Politics, 80, 23 Iff.
75
Richard Hofstader, Age of Reform (New York, 1955), 67ff, 77ff. Norman Pollack, " M y t h
of Populist Anti-Semitism," American Historical Review, 68:1 (1962), 78; idem, The Populist
Response to Industrial America (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 1—12; idem, " F e a r of Man: Populism, Authoritarianism, and the Historian," Agricultural History, 39:2 (1965), 5 9 - 6 7 . In " T h e
Populist and the Intellectual," American Scholar, 29:1 (Winter 1959-60), 5 5 - 7 2 , Woodward
doubts the importance of anti-Semitism relative to racism; cf. Thinking Back, 40. On Donnelly's
anti-Semitism: Oscar Handiin, "American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the Twentieth
Century," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 40 (June 1951), 338ff.
76
After discussing the murder of several Jewish merchants, Hair concludes: " N o n e of its
orators or publicists appear to have ever attacked Jews as such; the references to Baron Rothschild
as the head of the 'money power' assailed him because he was an international banker, not
because of his religion." William Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 160. Walter Nugent
trivializes similar episodes in The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago
and London, 1963), 1 0 8 - 1 1 5 , 192; cf. Handlin's criticism in "Reconsidering," 6 8 - 9 ; Ransom
and Sutch gloss over an anti-Semitic comment by an English traveler in Mississippi, One Kind of
Freedom, 122, 3 4 2 - 4 3 , n.35. Cf. Woodward, Origins, 188, n. 42. Woodward ascribes Watson's
role in the Frank lynching to his post-Populist crankiness: Tom Watson, ch. 2 3 ; cf. Leonard
Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York and London, 1968). For more on Southern antiSemitism, see the essays by Edward S. Shapiro and Glen Jeansonne, in Anti-Semitism in American History, David A. Gerber, ed. (Urbana and Chicago, 1986), and Gerber's introductory essay,
p. 49, n. 7 1 .
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362
DAVID PEAL
tion). Jew-baiting, after all, was not universally approved in German politics.
Among many conservative notables, anti-Semitic code words like "mobile
capital" were used to keep politics decent, but not devoid of popular appeal. If
the "anti-Semitic labels were missing," however, "everyone knew what the
baggage contained." 77 As a focus for protest and a response to lost independence, anti-Semitism deserves reconsideration by historians of American Populism, especially because inquiry into the subject was suspended before any
solid research was carried out.
I am not arguing for a revival of the tendency to discredit populism as a
whole by isolating its irrational aspect. This tendency characterized the work
of postwar historians and—until recently—characterized studies of antiSemitic politics that saw the Bockel movement as an early chapter in the
history of Nazism. While earlier studies viewed racism exclusively as a psychological aberration, this article has tried to place it within the context of
political conflict—without denying that (especially in politics) racism can
make for enormous brutality. If it is recognized that popular struggles can
only be created out of existing cultural materials, then it becomes clear that
racism was too pervasive not to infuse populist movements in both countries.
It lent identity to German insurgency, could not be kept out of Populism, and
served as common ground with elites in both countries. The quality of racism
changed with its uses: Bockel's anti-Semitism was not that of the BdL or the
Nazis. I am, rather, arguing against simplistic historicist notions regarding the
rationality of peasants and their politics, as well as their diagnosis of their
situations: "Often it is precisely those who think and behave the most rationally in their narrow economic lives who are receptive to irrational views
and values in their non-economic lives." 78
77
Blackboum, "Politics of Demagogy," 172.
Rudolf Heberle, Landbevolkerung und Nationalsozialismus: Eine soziologische Untersuchung derpolitischen Willensbildung in Schleswig-Holstein 1918-1933 (Stuttgart, 1963), 170;
Jurgen Kocka, Alltagsgeschichte der NS-Zeit: Neue Perspektive oder Trivialisierung? (Munich,
1984), 53 (on unreliability of Hessian peasants' diagnosis of their own situation); Robert Moeller,
"Peasants and Tariffs in the Kaiserreich: How Backward were the Bauern?"
Agricultural
History, 55:4 (1981), 370-84 (a defense of rational peasantry). In the manner of Pollack, some
historians have begun to diminish the importance of anti-Semitism in German populism.
78
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