Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 47
Odd Man Out
The Unique Ideology of the Populist Party
David Shelton, BIOLA University1
In 1992, an article appeared in American Heritage discussing the use and misuse
of the term “populist.” The author astringently points out that in modern political
dialogue, “populist” might mean almost anything; it could apply to anyone “who did
not outright propose restricting government to the rich, the wise, and the well born.”2
Twenty years later, the issue persists. Both President Barack Obama and one of his
major challengers have been described this way; both the conservative Tea Party
movement and the liberal Occupy Wall Street movement have also been plastered with
this conveniently vague label. A recent book on the Tea Party movement recognized
populism’s pliability as a modern political term, and attempted therefore to divide it
into two strands: left wing and right wing populism.3 Of course, this distinction does
not tell us anything about what the word means, and that is the real question. What
could this word possibly mean that it can be stretched to encompass members of both
parties, on seeming opposite sides of the political spectrum?
1
David Shelton wrote this paper as an undergraduate student in 2012. He is currently finishing his
undergraduate history degree at Biola University, and will enter a J.D. program in the fall of 2013. He can be
reached at [email protected]
2
B.A. Weisberger, “The Party of the People,” American Heritage 43, no. 3, (May 1992): 20,
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=khh&AN=9204272892&site=ehost-live <accessed March
18, 2012>.
3
Scott Rasmussen, Doug Schoen, Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement is Fundamentally Remaking
Our Two-Party System (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), chapter 1.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 48
The author of the 1992 article dryly noted that in the dictionary, a “populist” is
capitalized and refers to a member of a specific political party (the Populist Party),
active in the 1890s.4 This party, based among the farmers of the West and South,
attempted to break the two major parties’ electoral lock, but was eventually defeated
and dissolved.5 That is where any search for the meaning of our modern term must
begin. What did these Populists think? Where were they on our ideological spectrum,
and what might they have to teach us?
It is the purpose of this paper to attempt an answer to those questions: to say
what the Populists thought. I believe the modern, broad usage of the term “populist” is
reflective of the inability of Americans to fit the Populists into a neat category.
Nonetheless, the Populists did have a platform and Populism in the 1890s did mean
something specific. It represented a genuine third way in American thought: neither
laissez faire capitalist nor socialist, deeply historically rooted but not conservative. The
Populist Party attempted to examine freedom and power in an economic as well as
political context. This made them unique. It also made them fertile ground for
historical study, and produced a great deal of controversy among historians.
Literature Review
“So much has been written,” one researcher said of the Populist Party, “that
even a summary of the literature pointing out where scholars disagree would be
valuable.”6 An exhaustive treatment of the historical literature on Populism is
precluded by the spatial limitations of this paper.7 There are, nevertheless, certain
works that stick up out of the morass of literature and mark major turning points and
overlooks in the study of Populism. The first and greatest of these is The Populist Revolt,
written in 1931 by John D. Hicks, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska.
Called “the Progressive historian’s magnum opus on Populism,” Hicks’ book was
still considered the first book to read on the subject in the 1980s, and hardly a snippet
has been written on Populism that doesn’t mention it.8 Hicks set Populism into
Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” arguing that the Populist Party arose as
the West collapsed under the settlement of the late nineteenth century.9 According to
4
B.A. Weisberger, The Party of the People, 20.
5
Ibid.
6
Martin Ridge, “Populism Redux: John D. Hicks and The Populist Revolt,” Reviews in American History
13 (March 1985), 152.
7
For something approaching such an exhaustive treatment, though now a little dated, see: Worth Robert
Miller, “A Centennial History of Populism,” Kansas History 16 (Spring 1993): 54—69.
8
Worth Robert Miller, “A Centennial History of Populism,” Kansas History 16 (Spring 1993), 57; Martin
Ridge, Populism Redux, 148.
9
John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmer’s Alliance and the People’s Party (1931;
repr., University of Nebraska Press, 1961), vii, 405.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 49
Hicks, the Populists were the result of a new inability to flee west for a fresh start
during hard times.10 The Populist Revolt simplified Populist thought down to two
propositions: “one, that the government must restrain the selfish tendencies of those
who profited at the expense of the poor and needy; the other, that the people, not the
plutocrats, must control the government.”11 Hicks contends that the ideas of the
Populists were subsumed into the later Progressive reforms, and that therefore Populist
ideas have become outmoded, for “progressivism itself must progress.”12
In 1938 C. Vann Woodward, later professor of history at Johns Hopkins and Yale
Universities, took the Hicks interpretation and applied it specifically to the South.13
Woodward’s work, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, examines the life of Tom Watson (a
major Populist politician from Georgia). He creates a picture of the Populists as
accepting of capitalism, but opposed to capitalist finance and industrialization. On the
other hand, they are portrayed as extremely tolerant on the question of race relations,
which was an important factor in the old South.14 Woodward also notes that the
Populist candidates pulled large numbers of votes from labor as well as from the
farmers.15 Woodward pictured the Populists the way Hicks did: as Progressives arriving
a generation early, prescient and well within the main stream of American politics.
This benignant interpretation was challenged in the 1950s, chiefly by Richard
Hofstadter (DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University) in
his Pulitzer Prize winning The Age of Reform (1955).16 Hofstadter does not discard a
connection between Populists and Progressives, but he denies that either group was
necessarily progressive.17 Hofstadter accuses the Populists of a kind of paranoid
nativism brought on by their inability to deal with the modernizing world: “The
conspiratorial theory and the associated Anglophobic and Judophobic feelings were
part of a larger complex of fear and suspicion of the stranger…everyone remote and
alien was distrusted and hated—even Americans, if they happened to be city people.”18
Hicks and Woodward were ready to greet Populism as a father; Hofstadter worried that
Populism would have greeted him with the pointed end of a pitchfork.
10
Hicks, The Populist Revolt, 405.
11
Hicks, The Populist Revolt, 406.
12
Hicks, The Populist Revolt, chapter 15.
13
Miller, A Centennial History of Populism, 57. Ridge, Populism Redux, 147.
14
C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938; repr. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1955),
217—221.
15
Woordward, Tom Watson, 161.
16
Miller, A Centennial Historiography of Populism, 58. Ridge, Populism Redux, 147.
17
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (1955; repr., New York: Alfred A Knopf,
1965), Introduction.
18
Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, Introduction, 77—82.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 50
The clash between Hofstadter’s view and Hicks’ view produced, in the words of a
later scholar, “an historical debate that lasted well into the 1960s. Reactionary
Populists chased socialist Populists through the learned journals in a quarrel that
generated considerably more heat than light.”19 The quarrel was largely resolved by the
work of Walter T.K. Nugent (professor of History at Indiana University) in The Tolerant
Populists; published in 1963, the book effectively cleared the Populists of xenophobia,
racism, and anti urban tendencies.20 In 1965, Professor Robert Durden of Duke
University attempted to jump back into the Hicks—Woodward stream of interpretation
entirely, publishing a book on Populism in the election of 1896. Not even mentioning
the recent scholarly debate, Durden stated that the Populists foreshadowed the
Progressives and the New Dealers, and argued that Populist fusion with the Democratic
Party in 1896 (which marked the end of the Populists as a distinct national force) was
really entirely in line with Populist principle.21 According to Durden, the Populists were
“angry agrarian capitalists who found themselves unprotected” from the power of big
business.22
However, Hofstadter was not without persistent defenders, of whom the most
prominent was Karel Bicha of Marquette University.23 Bicha did not attempt to defend
Hofstadter’s contention that the Populists were xenophobes (that was no longer a
tenable position, thanks to Nugent), but he maintained that the Populists were
regressive and intent on preserving an old model of capitalism.24 Bicha said that
Populism could not be connected with Progressivism because Populism was not statist
as Progressivism was; further, any Populist statements that seemed liberal were in fact
“largely subterfuge.”25 Populism according to Bicha was conservative, purely capitalist,
and not interested in any sort of social change.26 This view met with a frosty reception
19
James Turner, “Understanding the Populists,” The Journal of American History 67, no. 2 (Sept. 1980):
356.
20
Turner, “Understanding the Populists,” 356. Martin Ridge, Populism Redux, 148. Miller, A Centennial
Historiography of Populism, 59. Nugent conducted a near-exhaustive study of Populism in Kansas, the state where it
was most dominant. He established that any figures or thoughts that fit the Hofstadter thesis were on the fringe of
Populism, rather than representative of it.
21
Robert F. Durden, The Climax of Populism: The Election of 1896 (Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 1965), Preface.
22
Durden, The Climax of Populism, 3.
23
Miller, A Centennial Historiography of Populism, 60.
24
Karel D. Bicha, Western Populism: Studies in an Ambivalent Conservatism (Lawrence: Coronado Press,
1976), 14—15.
25
Bicha, Western Populism, 15, 24.
26
Bicha, Western Populism, chapter 1.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 51
in academia, and constituted the last substantive defense of the Hofstadter view of
Populism.27
Simultaneous with Bicha’s final defense of Hofstadter, a new interpretation
arrived to compete for the attention of historians. In 1976, Lawrence Goodwyn (a
colleague of Robert Durden’s at Duke University) published Democratic Promise: The
Populist Moment in America, the first full scale, comprehensive study of Populism since
Hicks.28 Goodwyn argues that the Populists had a grand new vision of life that was
outside the traditional categories of socialist and capitalist and that was grounded in
the cooperative method.29 Democratic Promise states that the Populists opposed
idealizing progress and attempted to provide a more substantial vision for the future
that was apart from the “corporate state.”30 Lawrence Goodwyn didn’t see any
continuity between the Populists and subsequent movements and ages; Populism’s
“only enduring triumph—was the belief in possibility it injected into American political
consciousness.”31 Populist thought in Goodwyn’s view stood isolate, unique from what
came before it, and opposed to what came after.
In 1980 another historian made the case that it was not intellectual isolation
that distinguished Populism, but physical isolation. In an article for the Journal of
American History, James Turner (professor of History at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston) contended that the Hicks focus on the frontier “may not have
been far from the mark, after all,” but that the frontier characteristic Hicks should have
emphasized was social isolation.32 Populism was created, according to Turner, by the
isolated people reacting to increasing interaction with a quickly urbanizing society that
held different views than they.33 Populism was therefore an instinctive motion to
preserve old social patterns.34 It was an inherently conservative undertaking.
In 1993, Robert McMath of the Georgia Institute of Technology authored
American Populism: A Social History: 1877 1898. McMath criticizes previous scholarship
in the introduction to his book, proclaiming that writers on the topic “continue to read
into that historical moment the social concerns of their own time and the social
27
Miller, A Centennial Historiography of Populism, 60.
28
Ridge, Populism Redux, 149; James Turner, Understanding the Populists, 356.
29
Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), xii.
30
Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, xii—xiv.
31
Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, xxiii.
32
Turner, Understanding the Populists, 370.
33
Turner, Understanding the Populists, 370.
34
Turner, Understanding the Populists., 370—373.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 52
theories most commonly used to explain contemporary events.”35 According to
McMath, “Selection of evidence, regional focus, and the inevitable infusion of the
present into the past,” have all helped create the widely varying interpretations of
Populism.36 American Populism modifies Goodwyn somewhat, arguing that while the
Populists were in fact rooted in old and identifiable traditions, they were creatures of
the nineteenth century and not connected to the Progressive tradition as Hicks
thought.37 They were “democratic capitalists,” not “industrial capitalists,” and their
thought didn’t mesh with the “political and bureaucratic structures” that came after
them.38
After McMath, there is a brief hiatus in major literature on Populism, broken in
2007 by the publication of two books: The Populist Vision, by Charles Postel (professor
of History at San Francisco State University), and Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and
Populists, by Matthew Hild of the University of West Georgia. The latter was a study on
farmer labor relations in Southern Populism, while the former was a broader study of
Populism in general. Postel’s work won the Bancroft Prize in 2008, and was hailed as
“the most important book on Populism in 30 years.” It launched a full frontal assault
on Goodwyn’s interpretation of the Populists.39
Postel flatly states that the Populists “were as committed to the notion of
progress as any social group in post—Civil War America.”40 According to Postel, the
Populists were as modern as anyone else at their time; they just had an alternate vision
of where to go in their modernity.41 He asserts that Populists “embraced a nonpartisan,
managerial, and government as business vision of politics,” and that their vision was
simply an alternative capitalism.42 Postel tips his hat to Hicks and the Progressive
interpretation as well, saying that “the callused handed Populist shared much
ideological ground with the university groomed Progressive of the next generation.”43
Postel’s work is the latest landmark piece in the long struggle to define Populist
thought.
35
Robert C. McMath, Jr., American Populism: A Social History: 1877-1898, American Century Series, ed.
Eric Foner (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 9.
36
McMath, Jr., American Populism, 9
37
McMath, Jr., American Populism, 209-210. Miller, A Centennial Historiography of Populism, 67.
38
McMath, Jr., American Populism, 210.
39
Greg Cantrell, “Review of The Populist Vision by Charles Postel,” Journal of American History 94, no. 4
(2008): 1285.
40
Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4.
41
Postel, The Populist Vision, 4.
42
Postel, The Populist Vision, 5, 18, 22.
43
Ibid., 5.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 53
Matthew Hild’s study was much less ambitious. Hild examines Southern
Populism with an eye to how farmers, who were the backbone of the Populist Party,
interacted with the nascent labor vote.44 He points out that farmers considered urban
workers as kin of a sort; they were both “producers who worked hard but reaped little
fruit from their labor.”45 Hild also notes that this affinity was biracial in nature; both
whites and African Americans felt this connection to each other.46 The farmers felt that
labor shared their views; consequently they expected labor to vote Populist, and they
were not disappointed.47 Hild provides extensive documentation for an ideological
connection between farmers and labor that drew both to the Populist Party, and bases
that connection out of a Populist focus on producers of goods.
One other scholar deserves a mention in the litany of major Populist studies:
Worth Robert Miller of Missouri State University. In 1993 he produced a comprehensive
study of the historiography of this topic, and in 2008 he produced (along with Stacy
Ulbig of Sam Houston State University) a study of Populism in Texas, the hinge state
between the South and West Populist regions.48 Miller calls Populism “a thoroughly
American, largely nonsocialist, anticapitalist movement.”49 He views Populism through
the lens of republicanism, which he says was just as radical an idea in the late
nineteenth century as in the Founders’ day.50 According to Miller, the Populists were on
the left of the political spectrum, but they were there because they were grounded in an
historic doctrine.51
Over the past 80 odd years of study, many historians have tried to tidy Populism
into one category or another. The Hicks Woodward view of Populism as early
Progressivism has squared off with the Hofstadter view of Populism as nativist and
xenophobic and essentially conservative. Both were in turn sidelined by Goodwyn’s
idea that Populism represented an entirely different way of doing business, a
cooperative method, now obsolete. Turner posited that Populism was a reaction to
isolation and conservative; McMath answered that Populism was modified capitalism.
44
Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the LateNineteenth-Century South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 1—3.
45
Hild, Greenbackers, 6—7.
46
Hild, Greenbackers, Introduction.
47
Hild, Greenbackers, 150—151.
48
Worth Robert Miller, A Centennial Historiography of Populism, 54—69. Worth Robert Miller, Stacy G.
Ulbig, “Building a Populist Coalition in Texas, 1892—1896” Journal of Southern History 74 (May 2008): 255—
298.
49
Miller, A Centennial Historiography of Populism, 69.
50
Miller, A Centennial Historiography of Populism, 69. Miller and Ulbig, Building a Populist Coalition in
Texas, 256.
51
Miller and Ulbig, Building a Populist Coalition in Texas, 256; Miller, A Centennial Historiography of
Populism, 69.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 54
Postel insisted that Populists were as modern and capitalist as anyone else, and Miller
said that they were opposed to capitalism but not socialist. However, this swirling
historical melee begs certain questions: should we try to fit the Populists into our own
categories, whether those be “progressive,” “socialist,” or “capitalist”? Moreover, how
do we approach the problem of “understanding the Populists?”
Method
James Turner acknowledged in his 1980 article on the Populists that any attempt
to determine what such a large mass of people were thinking and feeling would be
remarkably difficult without years of research and a lengthy volume of work.52 This
means that a few key indicators from the Populists must be chosen. However, even here
one must tread with care. More than one scholar has shown a tendency to “tailor his
Populists to his hypothesis,” removing some regions or major figures from their studies
because they did not fit the thesis of the historian.53
This paper will operate on a certain set of premises. The first is that the party’s
ideology was reflected in its platforms, written in 1892 and 1896. Thus, those platforms
will provide the touchstones for the analysis. The second is that the songs sung at
Populist rallies represent the thoughts of the party’s constituency; not everyone can
give a speech, but everyone can sing, and few will sing a political ditty with which they
disagree. The third assumption is that the representatives of the Populist Party actually
represented its and their thoughts; it is unlikely that a person would go to the trouble
to back a third party only to nominate someone with whom he disagreed. Therefore,
their elected representatives are a major key to understanding the Populists.
These representatives have been chosen not only as representative of Populism,
but as representative of the different regions of Populism, in order to avoid the error of
tailoring data to conclusions. Congressman Tom Watson and Senator Marion Butler
represent the Southern wing, Governor Lewelling and Senators Allen and Peffer
represent the Plains, Ignatius Donnelly represents the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest,
and Governor John Rankin Rogers the Far West. Congressman James Weaver is also
included, by virtue of being the Populist presidential nominee. However, as was said
earlier, the touchstones of this analysis of Populism are to be the party platforms of
1892 and 1896.
Populism: The Platforms
The Populist Party platform of 1892 opens with a scathing indictment of the
state of the country, arguing that the United States had been hijacked by a moneyed
interest that was intent on running the nation to its specifications, regardless of what
52
Turner, Understanding the Populists, 357—358, 363.
53
Turner, Understanding the Populists, 357; Robert C. McMath, Jr., American Populism, 9.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 55
the general populace might have to say. It avers that the famed Robin Hood equation
has been reversed, and the rich are robbing the poor: “The fruits of the toil of millions
are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of
mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger
liberty.”54 The preamble traces the failures of government to a conspiracy of the
wealthy, who (it says) control both major parties, and arrange for unimportant issues to
become important as a diversion from what is actually going on: the enslavement of the
American populace.55
The particular object of the Populist platform is “to restore the government of
the Republic to the hands of the “plain people,” with which class it originated.”56 The
Populists assert that their goal is the same as that set out in the Preamble of the
Constitution: “to form a more perfect union and establish justice, insure domestic
tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure
the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”57 The Populists thought that
too much power had accrued to the big businessmen, that these men were using this
power to gain more wealth for themselves, and that general populace was getting left
out of the deal. They believed “that the power of government in other words, of the
people should be expanded…as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent
people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression,
injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.”58 It was a grand vision.
The party then moved to specific declarations of philosophy and policy planks. It
called itself a union of the labor forces of the US and declared that the interests of
“rural and civil labor” were paramount, stating that wealth “belongs to him who creates
it,” (by which they meant the laborers).59 It declared that the greatest threats to the
nation’s liberty came from the railroads (“the railroad corporations will either own the
people or the people will own the railroads”), and supported a constitutional
amendment to allow the government to administer the railroads according to a strict
civil service system.60 In the matter of economics, the Populists supported a graduated
income tax, a greater supply of money, a currency not manufactured by anyone but the
54
The Populist Party, “Populist Party Platform, 1892,” History Reference Center,
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=khh&AN=21212861&site=ehost-live <accessed March 24,
2012>.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 56
Treasury, limitation of government revenue, and savings banks to be administered by
the post office.61
The transportation plank in the Populist platform contained the above
mentioned idea that the railroads should be nationalized, along with the idea that the
telegraph and telephone services were just like the post office and should therefore also
be nationalized.62 The Populists were concerned about national corporations and their
potential power. The platform also included a plank concerning land, which said that
lands held by corporations in excess of their needs and lands held by people who didn’t
actually live on them ought to be “reclaimed by the government and held for actual
settlers only.”63 The Populists wanted as wide a distribution of land as possible.
Included as a supplement to the platform were resolutions passed by the
national convention that were not thought key enough to be included in the official
platform.64 Among these miscellaneous resolutions were encomiums on the secret
ballot system, support of term limits for the President and Vice President, support for
the direct election of Senators, and support for the initiative and referendum system.65
Also included in the supplement were resolutions in favor of the eight hour work day,
and taking labor’s side in a dispute over cloth manufacturing in Rochester.66
The Populist platform of 1896 is nearly identical to that of 1892; indeed, the
1892 platform is explicitly reaffirmed in the first words of the 1896 platform.67 While
the 1896 preamble was much shorter and less fiery, the platform maintained the 1892
planks concerning the railroads, the economy, communications, and land.68 It also
added some of the “good government” resolutions of 1892 (direct Senate elections and
the initiative and referendum) as official planks.69 The platform of 1896 also
maintained that American democracy was failing: “plutocracy has…been enthroned
upon the ruins of Democracy.”70
The Populist platforms show the Populist raison d’être: they felt that the
ordinary people of the country were being shunted into a lower economic class and
61
The Populist Party, “Populist Party Platform, 1892.”
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid.
67
The Populist Party, “People’s Party Platform,” in 1896: The Presidential Campaign. Cartoons and
Commentary. A Vassar College Web Site. http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/peoplesplatform.html <accessed March 24,
2012>.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 57
shut out of the government. The Populist platforms advocate an active government
that skews specifically toward caring for producers, the laborers and farmers who in
their view actually created the wealth that the great capitalists of the era were accruing.
Their attempt to expand the money supply, widen the distribution of land, and
institute a graduated income tax was an attempt to put both more money (by the
osmosis both of a greater supply and the shifting of tax burdens) and the means of
production (land) into the hands of more people.
The Populist platforms also place a great faith in the government as the
representation of the people (“that the power of the government – that is, of the
people” quoted above), whereas the corporations most definitely were not. Thus they
sought to place communications and transportation infrastructure solely in the hands
of government. They operated on the premise that something that was essential to all
the people should be controlled by all of the people, through governmental proxy.
Aside from the platforms’ belief in aiding productive labor and the identification
of government with the people, there are two important things to note. The first is the
1892 platform’s attempt to ground itself in historical precedent, making reference to
the Preamble of the Constitution and the belief that originally the American
government belonged to the mass of “plain people.” The second is the lesser
importance of “good government” measures in the platforms. Good government
measures were important insofar as they would help the populace to retain control of
its government and a fair representation, but the main struggle was to correct the
economic and material inequities that the Populists perceived. Producerism and a faith
in the government of the people were the major points; while good government
measures would help the government remain in the hands of the people, they were not
the main goal.
Populism: The Songs
The campaign songs of the Populist Party were not quite as substantive or
overtly philosophical as the party platforms. Still, certain themes recur in the songs
that match up with what the platforms called for. One of the largest themes was anger
against political bosses and power players, as well as the wealthy (particularly bankers).
The songs shout for political control to pass back to the people, and boast of the
prosperity that will come when that happens. They do not neglect to give arguments for
why they should succeed (usually based on the contention that they produce much of
the wealth the country runs on) nor are they chary of shouting for particular planks in
the platform, especially the plank in support of loosening the money supply. They also
take care to ground their opinions in history.
Typical of the songs is one entitled “Greenback’s The Money For Me,” and set to
the tune of “Bring Back My Bonnie To Me”:
I’ve been in to see the old fellow,
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 58
Who’s always claimed that he knew
Why ‘twas that the rich all grow richer,
While poorer and poorer we grew…
He told me some things about money
I never had thought of before
It’s all a creation of fiat,
And made by our government men.
He talked of those National Bankers,
And how to grow rich they had found;
They say, “We want gold, single standard,”
And gold is too scarce to go ‘round.71
The song presents a man previously in ignorance who is brought to the realization that
he’s being scammed by a large banking power that is tying up the money supply until
there is not enough to go around. The solution, suggested by the title, is to broaden the
money supply.
Another song typical of the movement is one entitled “The Farmer is the Man.”
It details the plight of a farmer quite obviously falling apart: his wagon broken down,
his clothing wearing out, his pride gone, his farm mortgaged beyond recovery.72 Yet the
refrain constantly reminds the auditor that “the farmer is the man who feeds them
all.”73 In the next to last stanza, the song sternly points out the consequences if the
farmer decides to quit working:
It would put them to the test
If the farmer took a rest,
Then they’d know that it’s the farmer feeds them all.74
The song argues that the farmer is the one who sustains the rest of the populace, but
the populace has forgotten to take care of him.
That theme is repeated and broadened in another song of the Populists, entitled
“Labor’s “Bye and Bye.”” That song widens the net of those who deserve recognition
and a say in the government of the country:
When the right over wrong shall prevail,
And the woes of the people shall cease,
Then all trades and producers shall hail
With a shout the glad triumph of peace.75
71
Leopold Vincent, compiler, Alliance and Labor Songster, 19, in Kansas Memory,
http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/209680 <accessed March 26, 2012>.
72
“The Farmer is the Man,” Annals of American History,
http://www.america.eb.com/america/article?articleId=386394&query=Populist <accessed March 26, 2012>.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid.
75
Vincent, Alliance and Labor Songster, 7.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 59
The song asserts that the people failing and deserving of help, the people who are being
shut out, are the producers and tradesmen. The men who are actually making the
things that Americans want and need are the ones who are suffering, and that, the
Populists feel, is not right. Another song (entitled “Our Battle Song”) repeats this
theme, trumpeting that the farmers and the laborers were fighting side by side in the
effort to root out “the money kings.”76
However, the songs of the Populists are not only concerned with plight of
producers and the depredations of the banks, nor is their only object to support the
widening of the the money supply. The songs also make extensive reference to the
Founders, as the Populists attempt to take up their mantle. One song, entitled “To the
Polls,” makes this the subject of its first stanza:
To the polls! To the polls! Ye are serving the right;
Let us follow the path our fathers have trod;
With the light of their counsel our strength to renew,
Let us do with our might what our hands find to do.77
The song ties the efforts of the Populists to the efforts of their forefathers. What path is
it that they think they and their fathers have in common? The refrain shouted at the
end of each subsequent stanza tells us: “The people are free!”78 The Populists believed
that their cause was the same as that of the Revolution: the freeing of the people. Only
this time, the people were being freed not from Britain, but from the depredations of
the wealthy and the bankers, who were using up the producing class and skimming off
all the benefits of what was produced for themselves.
The Populist version of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” tells the whole story. The
first stanza laments that the United States was “once land of Liberty,” but is now “land
of the millionaire,” while the producers suffer from “pockets bare.”79 The second stanza
continues in the same vein; the country was once “pure and free,” but now suffers from
“usury mills” that fill “banker’s tills.”80 The third stanza says that the speaker will “love
thy Greenback men” who are working for “Liberty again.”81 The final stanza promises
that the country “wilt again be free” and her citizens will demonstrate that they “are
men,” not to be fooled “again.”82 The song begins with a hearkening back to a past of
freedom that has been disturbed by a money power. This money power has left the
76
Vincent, Alliance and Labor Songster, 8.
77
Vincent, Alliance and Labor Songster, 5.
78
Ibid.
79
Vincent, Alliance and Labor Songster, 14.
80
Ibid.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 60
producers with next to nothing while it grows ever wealthier. Some men, however, are
determined not to give in, and they are working to expand the money supply in order to
regain some measure of freedom for producers. The song closes with an exhortation for
the general voter to stand up for himself, reclaim his freedom, and not let it go
henceforward.
The Populist songs, together with the Populist platforms, introduce the
argument that liberty and freedom can be threatened not only by political oppression,
but by economic oppression as well. They feel that there is a power in the banks and in
the government that is controlling opportunity in the country. They say that it is all
very well for a man to have the right to do what he wishes with himself and his property
without restraint from the government. Nonetheless, they cannot see what good does
this right does anyone if he has no property to dispose of, and no choice in how he
disposes of his own time. The Populists had to wonder what good a choice was if it
could not practically be exercised.
The Populist songs repeat this argument time and again as they rail against
banks and bosses, against those who, they think, dominate the financial and
governmental levers of power. They speak instead for the producer, the maker of goods
and foodstuffs, the things of real value to the country. In their view, these are the
people that government should be helping; these are the people that the financial
system should favor. Therefore, the songs plump for measures that they believe will
relieve the problems of the producers, especially the expansion of the money supply.
The songs, as has been seen, are peppered with references to paper money
(“Greenbacks”) and fiat currencies. They reason that the expansion of the money
supply will result in more money in the hands of the producers. Finally, the Populist
songs, together with the Populist platforms, refer the Populist struggle back to the
struggle of the Founders in the Revolution. The Founders were struggling for freedom
from Great Britain, political freedom. Now this freedom has been subverted by the
actions of the moneyed interests. Thus the Populist effort is directed against these
interests, which have managed somehow to threaten the inheritance Populists believe
the Founders left to them.
The platforms and the songs are the data points in this paper most directly
related to the ordinary supporters of the Populist Party. Next to be considered are the
views of the eight most prominent men that the Populists chose to represent them in
the national and state councils. Governors, senators, and congressmen, these men were
the voice of Populism to the nation. With one exception, they fall naturally into
regional categories. That one exception, James Baird Weaver, was the first in rank
among that distinguished group.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 61
The Politicians
James Baird Weaver was the Populist presidential nominee in 1892, winning 22
electoral votes.83 A former Union general from Iowa, he graduated from law school in
Cincinnati, and had held a number of minor offices, as well as served multiple terms in
Congress.84 He had run for the presidency once before, under the banner of the
Greenback Party in 1880, when he toured the country over to drum up support.85 In
1892, he wrote a 445 page campaign book, entitled A Call to Action. This is a densely
packed work, full of quotes from official documents, letters, testimony, and historical
references, and it covers the gamut of the Populist concerns.
Weaver prefaces his book with a statement of the general problem as he sees it:
“If the present strained relations between wealth owners and wealth producers
continue much longer they will ripen into frightful disaster.”86 He deplores the present
state of affairs, in which “money has become the Alpha and Omega of modern life.”87
There are problems and inequities that have arisen between the wealthy and those who
produce their wealth, according to Weaver. He is squarely on the side of the producers,
against “the few haughty millionaires who…make use of certain instruments to
accomplish their selfish purposes.”88 Weaver hopes that the people will resist this new
form of tyranny at the polls, and he offers his book as an aid in that task.89
Weaver opens the book with an examination of the two houses of Congress and
the Supreme Court, attempting to show how the government of the United States has
been corrupted and taken over by corporations and banks.90 The first specific reform
Weaver proposes in his work comes at the end of the first chapter, where he calls for
direct election of senators as a method of breaking the corruption of the upper
chamber.91 The House of Representatives comes in for the least punishment, with only
a few internal rules changes proposed.92 Weaver concluded a lengthy chapter on the
Supreme Court with a philippic against judicial activism that might have been written
83
Weisberger, The Party of the People, 20.
84
Hicks, The Populist Revolt, 164—165.
85
Ibid..
86
James Baird Weaver, A Call to Action: An Interpretation of the Great Uprising, Its Source and Causes
(1892; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1974), 5.
87
Weaver, A Call to Action, 6.
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid.
90
Weaver, A Call to Action, chapters 1—3.
91
Weaver, A Call to Action, 47.
92
Weaver, A Call to Action, chapter 2.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 62
by any modern political commentator, and a vague call for “new safeguards” against
that august body.93
Departing the issue of structural modifications to the national government,
Weaver turns to the other measures of Populism, first taking up the issue of land. The
first sentence of his fourth chapter is a quote from the Free Soil Party Platform of 1852,
and runs as follows: “All men have a natural right to a portion of the soil; and as the
use of the soil is indispensable to life, the right of all men to the soil is as sacred as
their right to life itself.”94 The chapter that follows details what Weaver regards as fraud
perpetrated by the railroad corporations, whereby they have gotten larger portions of
land granted to them than they were entitled to.95
Weaver’s position on money and the money supply comes in the next chapter,
where he repeats a sentiment found in both the Populist platforms and the songs, that
money is artificial, created by fiat, and that there ought to be a substantial amount of it
in circulation:
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…The
beneficial effects of the bountiful issue of money in times of public peril, verify
in the strongest possible manner the necessity for an adequate circulating
medium at all times.96
The implication is that there was currently not enough money circulating in the
system. Weaver later makes that premise explicit, asserting that money was made
scarce, and that the corporations were formed to get their hands on as much of the
scarce supply as possible, thereby “crush[ing] out personal enterprise and control[ling]
trade.”97 In the subsequent chapter, Weaver calls the activities of the corporation an
“evolution in crime,” and says that the granting of a corporate charter is like the
granting of a letter of marque, except without “an offense to justify it.”98
Weaver devotes a whole chapter entirely to the issue of the coining of silver. He
is in favor of it as a means of increasing the money supply, and he marshals an array of
historical arguments concerning silver, along with modern statistics, to prove his
points.99 Weaver also returns to the land issue, asserting that:
93
Weaver, A Call to Action, chapter 3.
94
Weaver, A Call to Action, 136.
95
Weaver, A Call to Action, chapter 4.
96
Weaver, A Call to Action, 185.
97
Weaver, A Call to Action, 224.
98
Weaver, A Call to Action, chapter 6, 266.
99
Weaver, A Call to Action, chapter 8.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 63
The most disastrous and discouraging effects of an evil financial system always
make their appearance at the centers of social life—the house and the fireside—
the most sacred places on earth. In modern life every respectable person is
expected to have two things—a definite abiding place and money to pay current
expenses…Nothing can be more cruel than an economic condition which makes
it difficult for persons, no matter how humble, to either retain or secure those
indispensable auxiliaries to life, comfort, and respectability.100
This is the heart of Weaver’s Populism. The previous chapters lead up to this argument,
and the few subsequent chapters, which discuss trusts, the Populist stand on
transportation, and the class inequality between the wealthy and the producers, all
refer back to this. Weaver thinks that the system has been rigged against the people by
the corporations and the banks, with the national government as an accomplice. His
solutions, as has been seen, include direct election of senators, increase in the money
supply, nationalization of the railroads, and the ability of everyone to have means of
production (especially land) available to them.
Weaver’s campaign tract features a suspicion of corporations, the wealthy, and
the current political system that is found in the Populist platforms and songs. His
solutions are to alter some of the institutional structures of government, increase the
money supply, and widen the availability and control by the people of means of
production. His goal, seen in the quote above, is that every person may have sufficient
means to live, and live by his own efforts. That is the position of the Populist candidate
for the presidency in 1892. Next to be examined are the positions of the various
Populist officials in the various regions in which Populism showed strength. First on
the list are Congressman Tom Watson and Senator Marion Butler of the South.
Southern Populism: Tom Watson and Marion Butler
Tom Watson was a lawyer and former schoolteacher from Georgia.101 He was
elected to Congress in 1890, and became the first Populist candidate for Speaker of the
House, receiving eight votes.102 Though he lost reelection in the next cycle due to
massive vote fraud, he rebounded to become in 1896 the Populist nominee for Vice
President.103 Marion Butler was a farmer from North Carolina, a graduate of the
University of North Carolina, and Populist Senator from the same state.104 Butler and
Watson were the leading Populists of their region.
100
Weaver, A Call to Action, 345.
101
Woodward, Tom Watson, 29, 41.
102
Woodward, Tom Watson, 167, 192—193.
103
Woodward, Tom Watson, 242, 300.
104
“Marion Butler, 1863—1938” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. William S. Powell, in
“Documenting the American South” at UNC Chapel Hill http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/butler93/bio.html <accessed
March 31, 2012>.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 64
In 1892, Tom Watson wrote The People’s Party Campaign Book, a hefty piece of
campaign propaganda designed to be a fact book for the use of any Populist trying to
persuade minds and win votes.105 Though much of the book is taken up with detailed
accounts of sessions and votes in Congress aimed at discrediting the opposing parties,
the structure and short arguments of the book prove instructive. Watson opens with a
history lesson on parties in the United States; he considers the subject so important
that he devotes the first five chapters of the book to it.106 Watson then moves to cover
the Income Tax, and what he calls the “vicious” repeal of that tax in 1871.107 From there
Watson discusses what he considers to be a series of economic abuses by corporations
and banks and the wealthy, using the government as their tool; he punctuates the study
with short attacks, particularly against contraction of the money supply, which he says
allowed the banks to get “unlimited power over all the productions of Labor. To what
extent this has wronged the Producer, God, only, knows.”108
Watson also writes in support of what he calls the “sub treasury,” which would
allow farmers and others to deposit surplus goods into government warehouses in
return for a loan.109 The depositor could then remove his goods and sell them later
when there was a better market and repay the loan; if the depositor failed to do that
within a certain period, the goods could be sold to discharge the debt.110 Among the
advantages Watson lists for the scheme are that it would “decentralize the Money
Powers of the Cities,” that it would “enable a poor man to get cash to put into his
business,” that it would “break up the monopoly of the Money Market,” and that it
would “equalize our Currency System so that all could share in its benefits.”111
Watson closes his campaign book with a full fledged attack on corporations. He
begins with a quote from another Georgia politician to the effect that “if the people of
this country ever came to understand the injustice of the present financial system there
would be the greatest revolution the world has seen since the Crusades.112 Watson goes
on to put this in his own words:
To restore the liberties of the people, the rule of the people, the equal rights of
the people is our purpose; and to do it, the revolution in the old systems must be
complete…We offer the good Law for each bad Law…We hate only the wrongs
105
Thomas E. Watson, The People’s Party Campaign Book, 1892 (1892; repr., New York: Arno Press,
1975), Preface.
106
Watson, The People’s Party Campaign Book, 1892, chapters 1—5.
107
Watson, The People’s Party Campaign Book, 1892, 40—41.
108
Watson, The People’s Party Campaign Book, 1892, 109.
109
Watson, The People’s Party Campaign Book, 1892, 199.
110
Ibid.
111
Watson, The People’s Party Campaign Book, 1892, 201—202.
112
Watson, The People’s Party Campaign Book, 1892, 206.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 65
and abuses, and the special privileges that oppress us…But we do say that the
infernal shame of the Law in aiding the strong man to pilfer the weak one can be
stopped and must be!113
Watson saw the issue as economic oppression: the big banks and corporations were
using their power to bilk the smaller producers and using their influence in government
to protect their system. Further, Watson saw the Populist movement in historical
context, particularly as a Jeffersonian movement; in a major Fourth of July address in
1893, Watson gave a detailed argument to demonstrate that the Populist doctrines all
grew from Jefferson’s doctrines of personal freedom, which had been the longstanding
creed of the South.114
Marion Butler echoes Watson’s sentiments in a speech also made in 1893.
Attacking “the professional and monopoly organizations,” he says:
They use their power to inaugurate and execute hostile legislation against other
classes not organized, or poorly organized and weak. The latter exercise of this
power in defiance of right, but too often under the cover of unjust laws, is the
snake in our body politic, and the curse of our civilization… None have suffered
more from this evil condition, as a rule, than the industrial and agricultural
classes the bone and sinew, the wealth producers of the land.115
Butler pictures the problem as the efforts of an organized group of non producers to
legislate for their own gain and against the producers. Butler is therefore calling on the
producers to organize and work to retake the government, work to counteract the
malevolent influence of the greedy.116 Like Watson, Butler puts the struggle in
historical context, as a fight for “the principles of Jefferson and Jackson.”117
The picture of Populism from the South is very like unto the picture of Populism
in the national platforms and the campaign songs. It is characterized by a desire to
equalize perceived injustices by economic reforms, including the expansion of the
money supply, the sub treasury plan, and attacks on corporations and banks. Southern
Populism is concerned with the producer of wealth, and feels that the producer is being
raided by others who have more economic power than he. However, perhaps not
unsurprisingly, Southern Populism bears a difference in that it places a heavy emphasis
on tradition, and less emphasis on institutional reforms like the direct election of
113
Watson, The People’s Party Campaign Book, 1892, 220—221.
114
Thomas E Watson, The Life and Speeches of Tom Watson (Thomson: Jeffersonian Publishing Co., 1911,
Facsimile, Ann Arbor: Xerox University Microfilms, 1975), 99—130.
115
Marion Butler, Addresses of Marion Butler, President, and Cyrus Thompson, Lecturer, to the North
Carolina Farmer’s State Alliance, at Greensboro, N.C., Aug. 8, 9. and 10, 1893, at its Seventh Annual Session, 2—
3, in Documenting the American South http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/butler93/butler93.html, <accessed March 31,
2012>.
116
Butler, Addresses of Marion Butler, 3.
117
Butler, Addresses of Marion Butler, 4.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 66
senators. In the South lengthy speeches are given defending Populism as Jeffersonian,
but institutional “good government” reforms go unmentioned. The next region to be
examined, the Midwest, will place more emphasis on such reforms.
Midwestern Populism: Ignatius Donnelly
Perhaps the most entertaining figure of the Populist Party was Ignatius Donnelly
of Minnesota. Three time Congressman, author of the preamble to the 1892 platform
and gubernatorial nominee of the Populist Party in Minnesota in the same year,
Donnelly is described by John D. Hicks as “a man of varied talents.”118 Donnelly
displayed those talents by writing Caesar’s Column in 1890, a “milestone” dystopian
novel written from the Populist perspective. In 1896, Donnelly followed Caesar’s
Column with The American People’s Money, a defense of Populist ideas in the form of a
dialogue between a farmer and a banker on a transcontinental train trip.119
Caesar’s Column describes a world gone wrong; it is a vivid picture of what a
Populist envisioned if the party was unsuccessful in its endeavors. Donnelly gives this
description of the world in his novel:
The laboring classes have become more and more desperate…Now a single
nabob owns a whole county; and a state is divided between a few great loan
associations…all idea of national glory, all chivalry, all pride, all battles for
territory have long since ceased. Europe is a banking association conducted
exclusively for the benefit of the bankers. Bonds take the place of national
aspirations. To squeeze the wretched is the great end of government; to toil and
submit, the destiny of the peoples.120
Caesar’s Column depicts the economic power of the banks and corporations swelling
until it swallows governmental power whole. Money takes precedence over all other
aspirations; it commands allegiance over every other inclination, forcing the producers
to work and toil in order to enrich the few who have money.
Almost immediately after this picture of the despair of the world, Caesar’s
Column offers a counter vision, the Populist utopia, through the mouth of the hero of
the book, not so subtly named “Gabriel”:
I should do away with all interest on money…I would set to work to make a list
of all the laws, or parts of laws, or customs, or conditions which, either by
commission or omission, gave any man an advantage over any other man; or
which tended to concentrate the wealth of the community in the hands of a few.
118
Hicks, The Populist Revolt, 162—163, 235, 258.
119
Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, ed. Nicholas Ruddick. (1890;
repr., Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), xvi.
120
Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 77—78.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 67
And having found out just what those wrongs were, I would abolish them
instanter [sic].121
This is as good a short summary of Populism as is to be found anywhere. Find the
things that create the control of the wealthy over the producers, and get rid of those
things. That does not mean simple redistribution of wealth, as Donnelly is quick to
point out: “differences in men are fundamental, and not to be abolished by
legislation…it is only in their excess that they become destructive.”122 Caesar’s Column
does not propose to redistribute or equalize wealth; it proposes to limit its
accumulation in excess. As a means to that end, the character Gabriel proposes limiting
land (or productive property) and abolishing corporations.123 This solution, while
clearly not laissez faire, falls short of socialism as well.
Donnelly takes the opportunity afforded by the fictional nature of his work to
propose some more radical things than the rest of the Populists would likely support
(legal limitations on wealth and property ownership). However, Caesar’s Column
provides a neat summary of the Populist attitude: they are intent on abolishing
artificial inequalities of any kind. Donnelly returns to more specific and firmly Populist
ground in The American People’s Money.
Donnelly opens The American People’s Money with, appropriately, a lengthy
discussion of the money supply, arguing that the money supply had been unduly
contracted by the efforts of bankers and corporations, and that this contraction was
causing producers to suffer.124 This discourse is punctuated by a lengthy polemic
against the Supreme Court for exceeding its power and providing a defense for the
corporations and bankers.125 Later in the volume, Donnelly launches a full fledged
rhetorical assault on accumulations of money:
“That [the idea that gold is real wealth] is the poisonous nonsense which is
poured into the ears of the sleeping Hamlet—the people. But test it. Take one of
these wordiferous [sic] editors…and put him down on a desert island, with
$100,000 in gold pieces and nothing else…wealth consists of those things which
are necessary for man’s life, and that gold is a mere conventional symbol, with
no value save what the common consent of society gives it… [farmers and
laborers] add to the wealth of the world, for they produce those things without
121
Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 80, 82.
122
Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 82.
123
Donnelly, Caesar’s Column, 83.
124
Ignatius Donnelly, The American People’s Money (1896; repr., Westport: Hyperion Press, 1976)
chapters 1—2.
125
Donnelly, The American People’s Money, 54—60.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 68
which civilization could not endure. But the man who brings money into the
country simply makes slaves.126
Donnelly argues that money is a creation of convention, and that there is no reason to
consider it valuable except as it is of use to mankind, and that therefore there can be no
objection to increasing the supply of it. He contends that the people who produce
actual goods are the ones who should be applauded and taken care of. Money is no
important thing, and people who get caught up with money bring slavery. Donnelly
explains what he means by slavery toward the end of his book: “He is a slave the
product of whose toil goes to enrich another without any just equivalent to himself.”127
Donnelly considers it a form of slavery if a person is subjected to work for the benefit of
someone else without a just recompense. This is the situation in which he sees the
producing classes of farmer and laborer.
Donnelly closes his book with a discussion of the income tax, and calls the
Founders to his defense in his conclusion. “Our fathers dreamed that they could
establish on this western continent a nation dedicated to equality, liberty and human
happiness…they saw, as in a vision, a mighty brotherhood—none poor, none greatly
rich.”128 Donnelly also invokes Andrew Jackson and his fight against the national bank
in the 1830s.129 Having made his arguments, he is careful to buttress them with
historical precedent, and let that be the last thing in the reader’s mind.
Donnelly presents a picture of Populism slightly radicalized. His proposals for
legally limiting the acquisition of wealth and property go beyond the Populist
platforms, and would likely have been rejected by the rest of the Populists. However,
his vivid imagery of slavery was entirely fitting with what has been seen of the
Populists. The idea that the banks and the corporations were using their economic
power to subjugate the producers of the country appears in every other aspect of
Populism heretofore examined. Donnelly also touches on the idea of institutional
governmental reform with his attack on the Supreme Court, though, oddly, he
mentions nothing of the direct election of senators. Ignatius Donnelly presents us with
a picture of Midwestern Populism quite in step with the rest of the party. The next
region to be examined is the Great Plains, where Populism had a large following.
Plains Populism: William Peffer, Lorenzo Lewelling, William Allen
William Peffer, like Tom Watson, was a lawyer and former teacher, elected to the
Senate from Kansas in 1890, and known as “one of the most resourceful” of the
126
Donnelly, The American People’s Money, 133—134.
127
Donnelly, The American People’s Money, 169.
128
Donnelly, The American People’s Money, 184.
129
Donnelly, The American People’s Money, 186.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 69
Populists.130 Lorenzo Lewelling, also a Kansan, was elected governor in 1892.131 William
Allen was a former lawyer and judge, elected to the Senate from Nebraska in 1893.132
The governor and two senators provide a good sampling of the mindset of the Populists
of the Plains.
Senator Peffer wrote in 1891 a book entitled The Farmer’s Side. In this volume,
Peffer set out to give a broad study of how the farmer (and, despite the title, the laborer
too) was doing currently, how he had been doing previously, and how he might be able
to do better.133 Peffer spends the first four chapters of the work statistically laying out
the present condition of farm and labor, and insisting on the distinction between farm
and labor as producers and the rest of the economy (merchants, etc.).134 The next few
chapters are devoted to the assertion that the distress of farm and labor is due to the
combinations of the banks, contraction of the currency, ill management of public
lands, etc.135 Peffer then finally moves in his third section to “The Way Out.”136
The major issue that Peffer identifies is the issue of money; he considers it the
overriding issue of current politics:
The great thing, the essential matter, that overshadowing all others, and before
which everything else pales, is the money power…not that there is any
disposition on the part of farmers or any considerable portion of the working
masses to take away from any man his property, or to distribute the existing
wealth of the country among the people…but simply that the influence of money
as a power in society must be neutralized in some way.137
The Populists do not want to seize anyone’s property, or redistribute wealth. However,
they feel that they must in some way control the influence of money, and wealthy men,
in America. As one means of doing this, Peffer proposes a limitation on the amount of
interest that can be charged on a loan.138 The above quote contains another helpful
summary of the Populist philosophy: the main danger for the Populist was the amount
of control that money had over the processes of life. That power seemed unjust as it
was concentrated away from the producers of real wealth. The Populist aimed to fix the
130
Hicks, The Populist Revolt, 179.
131
Hicks, The Populist Revolt, 274—275.
132
Hicks, The Populist Revolt, 282.
133
William Peffer, The Farmer’s Side: His Troubles and Their Remedy (1891; repr., Westport: Hyperion
Press, 1976) 1—9.
134
Peffer, The Farmer’s Side, Part I.
135
Peffer, The Farmer’s Side, Part II.
136
Peffer, The Farmer’s Side ,Part III.
137
Peffer, The Farmer’s Side, 145.
138
Ibid.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 70
problem, not by any forced redistribution of wealth, but by less invasive measures of
legislation that would preserve economic freedom for the majority of the people.
Lorenzo Lewelling expounds on this in his inaugural address as governor of
Kansas in 1893:
The problem of to day is how to make the State subservient to the individual,
rather than to become his master. Government is a voluntary union for the
common good. It guarantees to the individual life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. The government then must make it possible for the citizen to enjoy
liberty and pursue happiness. If the government fails in these things, it fails in
its mission…If old men go to the poor house and young men go to prison,
something is wrong with the economic system of government.139
Lewelling takes Peffer’s concern with the money power and weaves it into the historical
context of the Declaration of Independence. If the task of government is to guarantee
and protect the rights of its citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then
that guarantee and protection must stand against all powers, whether political or
economic. The government must find some way to defend its citizens against an
economic assault that the Populists expended much breath and many statistics to prove
was real. However, the government must not defend its citizens by making them
dependent; the government was to serve the citizens, to provide them with the
opportunity and liberty to pursue happiness, not try and hand it out to them wholesale.
Senator Peffer addresses the last point in The Farmer’s Side. “It is common,” he
says, “for persons to use the word “Government” in these connections as if it
were…some great power wholly disconnected from the people…in truth it is simply the
agent of the people.”140 The Populists viewed government as precisely that: the agent of
the people. Government was never fundamentally untrustworthy for the Populist; it
might be hijacked or bought off by the money power, but it was always just an election
away from correction and recall to its original masters, the people.
Senator Allen of Nebraska joined with Senator Peffer in his concern over the
money issue. In the first year of his term in the Senate, Allen tried to sway the Senate
into expanding the money supply by coining silver. “I can understand how a few men,
controlling the volume of gold in the world, can hire the closest financiers of this
nation” to oppose the idea of coining silver, he snarked.141 In 1896, on behalf of the
Populists, he offered the party nomination to Democratic nominee William Jennings
Bryan on the basis of the money issue alone:
139
Lorenzo D. Lewelling, “Inaugural Address,” in The Populist Mind, ed. Norman Pollack (New York:
Bobbs—Merrill Company, 1967), 52—53.
140
141
Peffer, The Farmer’s Side, 173—174.
William Vincent Allen, Remonetization of Silver: Speech of William V. Allen of Nebraska in the Senate
of the United States, Saturday and Wednesday, October 7 and 11, 1893, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1893), 5.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 71
Your nomination by the People's Party was not, therefore, made with any
thought that you were a Populist, or that you accepted all the doctrines declared
by the St. Louis platform. It was due largely to the fact that the money question
is the overshadowing political issue of the age, and because you have at all times
been an unswerving, able and fearless advocate of the free and unlimited
coinage of silver and gold on terms of equality at the mints of the United States
at the ratio of 16 to 1. It was thought also that the observance of a patriotic duty
required a union of all reform forces.142
Allen was so concerned with the money issue that he considered it important enough to
join nominees with one of the two major parties for the sake of getting something done
on the issue at a national level.
The picture of Populism in the Plains is a picture of people concerned with
economic power, primarily monetary power. They were concerned that control of
money would enable oppression that would sap the powers of the American people.
The Plainsmen set this concern in historical context as well, referring it back to the
Founding and the Declaration of Independence. If government was supposed to secure
the rights of the people, they said, it had to secure those rights against economic power
as well as physical and political power. Their concerns were shared by the
representative of the final region of Populism: the Far West.
Western Populism: John Rankin Rogers
John Rankin Rogers served as Governor of Washington State from 1897—1901.143
Rogers was something of a philosopher, publishing in 1899 a discourse on human
nature and endeavor with the rather ambitious title Life. He also published in 1900 a
pamphlet entitled The Inalienable Rights of Man.
Rogers, unsurprisingly for a Westerner, puts a deeply individualist spin on his
thought. In Life, Rogers writes deploringly of a growing “dependency” among
Americans: “Dependence upon others, upon society, upon government, is increasing.
The young men in our educational institutions, as a result, are quite generally looking
forward to a time when they may enter the service of the Government, of some
corporation.”144 Rogers doesn’t want people to be dependent on anyone, either the
government or a corporation. Entering the service of the government makes you a
dependent of the taxpayers. Entering the service of a corporation makes you dependent
upon the head of the corporation, who gives you your job and salary. Rogers wants
142
Arthur M Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L. Israel, David J. Frent, eds., “Bryan Becomes Populist Candidate,”
Election of 1896 & The Administration of William McKinley (January 2003): 72. History Reference Center,
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=khh&AN=10277922&site=ehost-live <accessed February
22, 2012>.
143
Bicha, Western Populism, 21—22.
144
John Rankin Rogers, Life (San Francisco: Whitaker & Ray Company, 1899), 21.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 72
people to be independent of both. He wants that so much that he begins to see that
independence in the character of a right, and argue for it as included in the right to life
of the Declaration of Independence.
Rogers resembles Governor Lewelling of Kansas in that he places his thought in
direct dialogue with that Declaration. His pamphlet, The Inalienable Rights of Man,
takes the form of a close commentary on the Declaration of Independence, studded
with quotations of other earlier political figures, from Thomas Paine to Charles Sumner
to Stephen Douglas. Governor Rogers puts the Populist argument thus:
If each for himself is possessed of certain inalienable rights; rights which enable
him to live, to make a living, and be happy in the enjoyment of life; if these are
inalienable, if they are rights of which he cannot be divested, of which he cannot
by even his own permissive act be permanently divested; if this is the case, then,
wealth and pride see drawn a plain limit to their power. Their coercive force over
the laborer is gone. At bottom the end and aim of all so called riches is power
over men. Unless riches are able to give this, they fail of their object.145
According to Rogers, the fact that a person has an inalienable right to life gives him the
upper hand over the wealthy banker or corporation. Rogers reads that right to life as
more than a right to bare existence, but also a right to make a reasonable living. If a
man is guaranteed that, no one else can have a great deal of power over him; certainly
no economic being can.
Rogers comments directly on how the right to life involves more than a right to
bare existence a little later in the pamphlet:
At the present time, the right to life, as an example, is practically made to
depend on the ability of its holder to defeat the attempts, constantly made upon
every side, to limit his ability to procure the essentials to life, without which he
is unable to prolong an existence. Food, clothing and shelter are necessary to life
and yet unnumbered influences are constantly at work, and protected by law,
whose sole aim is to increase the difficulty of obtaining these essentials by the
unaided laborer.146
Rogers’ argument turns upon the meaning of the fabled phrase of the Declaration of
Independence, that all men possess the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.” He argues that the right to life implies the right to earn those
things which are the reasonable support of life. This is what the money power is
preventing farm and labor from doing, in his view, as they seek to increase their
influence and dominance. This is what he wishes to fight.
145
John Rankin Rogers, The Inalienable Rights of Man (Olympia: Printed for the Author, 1900), 4—5.
Emphasis in original.
146
Rogers, The Inalienable Rights of Man, 16.
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 73
Rogers gives a picture of Western Populism that is not unexpectedly
individualist. He opposes dependence on either government or corporation. He wants
men to be able to support themselves by their own effort. However, he sees a money
power intent on preventing that. He grounds his opposition to the money power in a
tightly reasoned interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. Like the other
regions of Populism, the West wishes to be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labor,
which they contend ought to be guaranteed by the government as a fundamental right,
following the theory of the Declaration of Independence.
Conclusion
Each region in Populism reveals slight differences in government theory. The
South refrained from talking institutional changes in government and glued its theory
to Jeffersonian tradition. This was in keeping with the generally traditionalist mindset
that has dominated the South then and since. The Midwest, gaining in urban industrial
population at the time, talked radical limitations on the ability to acquire wealth and
the means of production. The Plains were focused intensely on the money question;
being farmers, they needed a loose money supply. The West brought a hefty dose of
individualism to the movement. Nonetheless, each region held to a similar thought
process that tied them into the national party, a thought process echoed in the party
platforms, the party songs, and the writings of the party’s political representatives.
The historical debate about Populism has revolved around the question of what
category to fit Populism into. As noted earlier, Hicks and Woodward wished to put the
Populists in the category of Progressives. Richard Hofstadter, less kindly, put the
Populists in the category of nativism. Later, Lawrence Goodwyn, Robert McMath Jr.,
Worth Robert Miller, and Charles Postel each asked the question of whether the
Populists were capitalists or socialists, and as noted in the literature review, each
produced a different answer. Worth Robert Miller argued that the Populists were
neither capitalist nor socialist, but (small “r”) republicans. The research of this paper
confirms that conclusion. The truth is that the Populist movement represented
something more basic than capitalism or socialism; it represented the oldest of
American dreams: a desire for personal freedom.
This desire is found throughout the Populist documents. It is found in the
previously noted comments of the party platforms, such as that “the railroad
corporations will either own the people or the people will own the railroads,” and that
“plutocracy has…been enthroned upon the ruins of democracy.” It is found in the
songs, which lament that the United States, “once land of liberty” is now “land of the
millionaire;” the men working for a looser currency are the men working for liberty. It
is found in the rhetoric of the Populist leaders, in their attacks on the concentration of
wealth, and especially in the calls of Governors Lewelling and Rogers to guarantee to
the people the rights of the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 74
of happiness. The Populists had come to think that economic conditions could make
the attainment of those rights impossible; even more, that the concentration of
economic power in the hands of a few citizens could have results as oppressive as a
similar concentration of political power. Seeing this, the Populists decided that because
American government is supposed to guarantee to its citizens their rights and freedom,
the American government should protect its citizens from that concentration of
economic power. It was the job of the government, they said, to preserve the rights and
freedoms of the people against whatever threat. In the Populist mind, concentration of
economic power was a threat to those rights and freedoms, therefore the government
ought to break it up.
The Populists, therefore, were neither truly capitalist nor truly socialist. They
wished to strictly limit certain economic abilities which they felt would threaten
freedom, specifically that ability to concentrate wealth and the means of production
which is the heart of capitalism. However, they did not propose to hand the entire
structure of the economy over to the government as a socialist would, for that would
also threaten freedom. The Populist program would impose strict government controls
on capital and corporations, but leave the rest of the economy to do as it would.
In the final analysis, then, it is a mistake to try and fit the Populists into any one
specific category. They were a group of people who took the deep historical and
political tradition of American self determination and applied it to the economics of
their time. The economic program that this application produced does not fit neatly
into one category or another, nor did the Populists particularly care if it did. Neither an
economic ideology nor a specific occupation made a Populist. What made a Populist
was the desire that ordinary Americans be in control of their own fate, economically as
well as politically.
This desire may provide a help to modern Americans as they attempt to navigate
the politics of another recession economy. Voices are heard on every side, giving all
sorts of advice. The Populists have provided us with a test both for evaluating that
advice and for evaluating the situation into which we have been put. What preserves
the economic freedom of the ordinary American? What gives him the most ability to
determine his path? Are there accretions of economic power that have a stranglehold
on the economy (also known as organizations “too big to fail”)? Let them be broken up.
Are there abuses of the public trust? Let them be stopped. Is there systemic fraud in the
banking system? Let it be assailed. It was noted in the beginning of this paper that
many politicians bear the label “populist.” Let them earn that title. Let them fairly win
and fairly wear the sobriquet “representatives of the people.”
Sutherland Journal of History and Social Sciences 75
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