Ignatius Donnelly,
The Omaha Platform of the People’s Party, 1892
In 1892, farmers and their supporters from all over
the United States joined in Omaha, Nebraska to
form a third political party—the People’s Party, or
the Populists. The People’s Party had its roots in
the financial struggles of Western and Southern
farmers against Eastern banks and railroads. The
Omaha Platform presented the new party’s views
and goals. Its ringing preamble was written by
Ignatius Donnelly, a radical lawyer, farmer,
politician, novelist, and newspaper editor from
Minnesota. The Populists were lampooned by their
enemies as wild-eyed cranks or backwards hicks,
but many of their specific proposals—including
graduated income tax, secret ballots, and the eighthour work day—seemed like forward-looking
reforms when they were proposed and achieved by
others in the decades to come.
We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of
moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the
ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even
the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized; most
of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the
polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery.
The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public
opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with
mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating
in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied
the right to organize for self-protection, imported
pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling
standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to
shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into
European conditions. 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 those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty.
From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we
breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires. …
We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a
century the struggles of the two great political parties for
power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been
inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the
controlling influences dominating both these parties have
permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop
without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither
do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have
agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every
issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a
plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the
tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings,
trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver and the
oppressions of the usurers may all be lost sight of. They
propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the
altar of Mammon, to destroy the multitude in order to secure
corruption funds from the millionaires.
Assembled on the anniversary of the birthday of the
nation, and filled with the spirit of the grand general and
chief who established our independence, we seek to restore
the government of the Republic to the hands of “the plain
people,” with which class it originated. We assert our
purposes to be identical with the purposes of the National
Constitution; to form a more perfect union and establish
justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common
defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the
blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
We declare that this Republic can only endure as a
free government while built upon the love of the whole
people for each other and for the nation; that it cannot be
pinned together by bayonets; that the Civil War is over, and
that every passion and resentment which grew out of it must
die with it, and that we must be in fact, as we are in name,
one united brotherhood of free men. …
We believe that the power of government—in other
words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of
the postal service) 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. …
We declare, therefore—
First.—That the union of the labor forces of the United
States this day consummated shall be permanent and
perpetual; may its spirit enter into all hearts for the salvation
of the Republic and the uplifting of mankind.
Second.—Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and
every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is
robbery. “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The
interests of rural and civic labor are the same; their enemies
are identical.
Third.—We believe that the time has come when the
railroad corporations will either own the people or the
people must own the railroads…
FINANCE.—We demand a national currency, safe,
sound, and flexible, issued by the general government only
… without the use of banking corporations. … We demand
free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold … We demand
that the amount of circulating medium be speedily increased
to not less than $50 per capita. We demand a graduated
income tax. We believe that the money of the country should
be kept as much as possible in the hands of the people.
TRANSPORTATION—Transportation being a means
of exchange and a public necessity, the government should
own and operate the railroads in the interest of the people.
The telegraph, telephone, like the post-office system, being a
necessity for the transmission of news, should be owned and
operated by the government in the interest of the people.
LAND.—The land, including all the natural sources
of wealth, is the heritage of the people, and should not be
monopolized for speculative purposes, and alien ownership
of land should be prohibited. All land now held by railroads
and other corporations in excess of their actual needs, and all
lands now owned by aliens should be reclaimed by the
government and held for actual settlers only. …
RESOLVED, That we cordially sympathize with the
efforts of organized workingmen to shorten the hours of
labor, and demand a rigid enforcement of the existing eighthour law on Government work…
RESOLVED, That we regard the maintenance of a
large standing army of mercenaries, known as the Pinkerton
system, as a menace to our liberties, and we demand its
abolition…
RESOLVED, That we oppose any subsidy or national
aid to any private corporation for any purpose.
Tom Watson,
“The Negro Question in the South,” 1892
Southern farmers were among the first to join the
Populist crusade of the 1890s. As the farmers
entered the political fray, however, they had to
confront the issue of race. Historically, poor whites
and blacks had never cooperated. The former
believed they were superior to the latter, a belief
white planter elites had carefully cultivated to
block unrest. In the 1890s, Tom Watson, a Georgia
populist and the People’s Party’s vice-presidential
nominee in 1896, addressed the issue of race head
on. Watson’s father had owned slaves before the
Civil War, but the family was ruined after the war,
and Watson grew up in poverty. He urged poor
white famers to shed their prejudices and to join
forces with poor black farmers against the
industrial interests that exploited them both.
Historians friendly to Watson have called his fight
for racial cooperation “courageous,” and
“democracy in its purest form and vision.” Watson
denounced lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and fought
to protect black voting rights. At populist rallies, he
made his white listeners raise their hands and
pledge to defend the constitutional rights of their
black neighbors. This call for class unity across
racial lines was not an easy one to make in the
1890s. Watson and his supporters—especially his
black supporters—faced violent persecution. Some
were killed. When white mobs threatened the life
of Seb Doyle, a black preacher who often spoke on
Watson’s behalf, Watson took him into his home.
Dozens of white farmers stood on guard for several
nights to protect Doyle from lynching—a rare event
in 1890s Georgia.
The Negro Question in the South has been for nearly
thirty years a source of danger, discord, and bloodshed. It is
an ever-present irritant and menace. … In brief, the end of
the war brought changed relations and changed feelings.
Heated antagonisms produced mutual distrust and dislike—
ready, at any accident of unusual provocation on either side,
to break out into passionate and bloody conflict. … In the
clashing of interests and of feelings, bitterness was born.
Quick to take advantage of this deplorable situation,
the politicians have based the fortunes of the old parties
upon it. Northern leaders have felt that at the cry of
“Southern outrage” they could not only “fire the Northern
heart,” but also win a unanimous vote from the colored
people. Southern politicians have felt that at the cry of
“Negro domination” they could drive into solid phalanx
every white man in all the Southern states.
Both the old parties have done this thing until they
have constructed as perfect a “slot machine” as the world
ever saw. Drop the old, worn nickel of the party slogan into
the slot, and the machine does the rest. You might beseech a
Southern white tenant to listen to you upon questions of
finance, taxation, and transportation; you might demonstrate
with mathematical precision that herein lay his way out of
poverty into comfort; you might have him “almost
persuaded” to the truth, but if the merchant who furnished
his farm supplies (at tremendous usury) or the town
politician (who never spoke to him excepting at election
times) came along and cried “Negro rule!” the entire fabric
of reason and common sense which you had patiently
constructed would fall, and the poor tenant would joyously
hug the chains of an actual wretchedness rather than do any
experimenting on a question of mere sentiment. …
Now consider: here were two distinct races dwelling
together, with political equality established between them by
law. They lived in the same section; won their livelihood by
the same pursuits; cultivated adjoining fields on the same
terms; enjoyed together the bounties of a generous climate;
suffered together the rigors of cruelly unjust laws; spoke the
same language; bought and sold in the same markets;
classified themselves into churches under the same
denominational teachings; neither race antagonizing the
other in any branch of industry; each absolutely dependent
on the other in all the avenues of labor and employment; and
yet, instead of being allies, as every dictate of reason and
prudence and self-interest and justice said they should be,
they were kept apart, in dangerous hostility, that the sordid
aims of partisan politics might be served!
So completely has this scheme succeeded that the
Southern black man instinctively supports any measure the
Southern white man condemns, while the latter almost
antagonizes any proposition suggested by a Northern
Republican. … That such a condition is most ominous to
both sections and both races, is apparent to all. …
Having given this subject much anxious thought, my
opinion is that the future happiness of the two races will
never be assured until the political motives which drive
them asunder, into two distinct and hostile factions, can be
removed. There must be a new policy inaugurated, whose
purpose is to allay the passions and prejudices of race
conflicts and which makes its appeal to the sober sense and
honest judgment of the citizen regardless of his color.
The white people of the South will never support the
Republican Party. This much is certain. The black people of
the South will never support the Democratic Party. This is
equally certain. … As long as there was no choice, except as
between the Democrats and the Republicans, the situation of
the two races was bound to be one of antagonism. The
Republican Party represented everything which was hateful
to the whites; the Democratic Party, everything which was
hateful to the blacks.
Therefore a new party was absolutely necessary. It
has come, and it is doing its work with marvelous rapidity.
… The People’s Party will settle the race question.
The white tenant lives adjoining the colored tenant.
Their houses are almost equally destitute of comforts. Their
living is confined to bare necessities. They are equally
burdened with heavy taxes. They pay the same high rent for
gulled and impoverished land. They pay the same enormous
prices for farm supplies. Christmas finds them both without
any satisfactory return for a year’s toil. Dull and heavy and
unhappy, they both start the plows again when “New
Year’s” passes.
Now the People’s Party says to these two men, “You
are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your
earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that
hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial
despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and
blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism
perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.”
This is so obviously true it is no wonder both these
unhappy laborers stop to listen. … Their every material
interest is identical. The moment this becomes a conviction,
mere selfishness, the mere desire to better their conditions,
escape onerous taxes, avoid usurious charges, lighten their
rents, or change their precarious tenements into smiling,
happy homes, will drive these two men together, just as
their mutually inflamed prejudices now drive them apart.
Suppose these two men now to have become fully
imbued with the idea that their material welfare depends
upon the reforms we demand. Then they act together to
secure them. Every white reformer finds it to the vital
interest of his home, his family, his fortune, to see to it that
the vote of the colored reformer is freely cast and fairly
counted. …
Why should the colored man always be taught that
the white man of his neighborhood hates him, while a
Northern man, who taxes every rag on his back, loves him?
Why should not my tenant come to regard me as his friend
rather than the manufacturer who plunders us both? Why
should we perpetuate a policy which drives the black man
into the arms of the Northern politician?
Let us draw the supposed teeth of this fabled dragon
by founding our new policy upon justice—upon the simple
but profound truth that, if the voice of passion can be
hushed, the self interest of both races will drive them to act
in concert. …
To the emasculated individual who cries “Negro
supremacy!” there is little to be said. His cowardice shows
him to be a degeneration from the race which has never yet
feared any other race. … I have no words which can portray
my contempt for the white men, Anglo-Saxons, who can
knock their knees together, and through their chattering
teeth and pale lips admit that they are afraid the Negroes
will “dominate us.”
The question of social equality does not enter into the
calculation at all. That is a thing each citizen decides for
himself. No statute ever yet drew the latch of the humblest
home, or ever will. Each citizen regulates his own visiting
list, and always will.
The conclusion, then, seems to me to be this: the
crushing burdens which now oppress both races in the
South will cause each to make an effort to cast them off.
They will see a similarity of cause and a similarity of
remedy. They will recognize that each should help the other
in the work of repealing bad laws and enacting good ones.
They will become political allies, and neither can injure the
other without weakening both. It will be to the interest of
both that each should have justice. And on these broad lines
of mutual interest, mutual forbearance, and mutual support
the present will be made the stepping-stone to future peace
and prosperity.
Source: Thomas E. Watson, “The Negro Question in the
South,” Arena 35 (1892): 540-550.
Source (next article): Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine,
November 1907.
Tom Watson, “The Negro Question,” 1907
Watson was devastated by the failure of the
People’s Party in 1896, and convinced that wealthy
Republicans and Democrats had used “the Negro
question” to foil the Populist uprising. By 1907, his
views on race and politics were much darker and
more convoluted. Which was the real Watson?
When I was a boy the Negroes were slaves. Living on
the farm with them, I came to know them well … It certainly
never occurred to me then that the black race was a menace
to the white. I came to know them afterwards from the point
of view of a man as poor as the poorest Negro—a wanderer
in search of work, without home, money, or anything else
save the clothes on my back and the hopes in my heart. And
here again I knew the Negro and found him very human—
sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes indifferent. …
Who called the Negro back into active political life?
Speaking for Georgia, I can answer without hesitation: “We
Southern white people did it.” … And ever since that time
we have had the Negro question on our hands. Who told the
blacks in 1880, and in the years following, told them in
speech and editorial, that no race had ever made such
progress in civilization, in the same length of time, as theirs?
We Southern whites did it--some certain ones of us-meaning well, no doubt. God! What a blunder it was! …
When the People’s Party sprang into life, the Negro
question was the most perplexing one which confronted us.
What should we do? If we ignored him entirely, he would
become a balance of power to destroy us. Neither of the
opposing parties would hesitate to use him to defeat us.
Would it not be best to invite him to our meetings, give him
political education, take his guidance into Southern hands,
and cultivate his confidence? …
My deliberate conviction is that we offered the best
method of completely harmonizing the two races, restoring
the old ties of mutual good-will and confidence which the
carpet-bagger had disturbed. My purpose was to release the
South from the dangers of the Negro question, and thus
liberate her from the dictation of the Northern and Eastern
Democrats who compel her to accept platforms and
candidates repugnant to her principles and interests. With
the Negro question controlled by the South … to the full
satisfaction of the Negro himself, we could then have allied
ourselves to the West, elected a truly democratic president,
and accomplished some truly democratic reforms. Under
our present Tammany and Wall Street politicians, there is
absolutely no chance for Jeffersonian Democracy.
Of course, I believed that the Populists would absorb
the great bulk of the whites of the South. … The great
alliance of the agricultural South with the agricultural West
would have peacefully and gloriously revolutionized our
Government. Before the united men of the South and those
of the West, the Negro question would have vanished. The
reforms which we would have effected would have given
him … solid, beneficent proofs of our right to rule.
So it seemed to me then—so it seems now. God
knows how sincere I was in the faith. Yet it may be that I
was wrong. The question is too complicated for dogmatism.
If I erred, it was a grievous blunder, and grievously have I
paid for it as was just. But was I wrong? …
What do we really intend to do with the Negro? If the
South proclaims that the Negro shall not vote, and at the
same time lavishes her millions in educating him, will she
not be pouring out her treasure, wrung from her white
taxpayers, to increase the number of those Negroes to whom
the denial of the franchise is an intolerable wrong? The more
you educate the Negro, the more completely you Booker
Washingtonize him, the greater his desire for the privileges
of full citizenship, the more unendurable the exclusion from
political power.
This must be obvious to all thinkers, and yet the
South is developing two radically antagonistic policies: she
is doing all she can to elevate the Negro to the height where
he will be wretched without the ballot, and at the same time
she is throwing up barriers to keep him away from the polls!
What statesmanship is there in this? What sanity is in it? …
How are these perils to be met? By colonization? I do
not think so. By restoring the ballot indiscriminately to all
the blacks? By no means—that tree must now lie where it
fell. By granting the franchise to a limited number, to the
educated blacks? They will not thank you for what you
concede, and will hate you for what you withhold. You
would simply be putting a deadly weapon into their hands,
after having given them a provocation which they could
never forgive.
My opinion is that, since the South has gone so far,
she cannot take a step backward. Her own safety now
demands that she make good the position she has taken. Let
us say frankly that self-preservation requires that we disarm
the black of his ballot, and close the door of office to him, as
far as lies within our power. Social equality is something we
will fight to the death. …
But let it also be your consistent policy to protect the
law-abiding Negro from the lawless white man. Make his
home as sacred from trespass as your own. Defend him in
his freedom of worship, in his liberty of speech, conscience
and conduct. Give him absolute, ungrudging justice in the
courthouse. Enforce all contracts made with him, and
compel him to abide by those he freely makes. Punish
swiftly, harshly, the white man who follows him to his
cabin, to his church, to his social or business gatherings, and
there does him violence. Keep the drunken white rowdy out
of the Negro car on the railroad; punish the white vulgarian
who wantonly insults him, his wife or his daughter. Let us
deal honestly and justly by him, paying him what we
promise, and doing for him, in every relation of life, just
what we promise to do. …
Should a consistent policy along these lines be
adopted and enforced, the great mass of the Negroes would
gradually reconcile themselves to the condition of a
recognized peasantry—a laboring class—within whose
reach, as human beings, is every essential of happiness. The
Negro politician would migrate; the over-educated Negro
gravitate to the other side of Mason and Dixon’s line; the
more ambitious and restless of the race would leave the
South; and their places could be taken by desirable white
immigrants.
Those of the Negroes who would remain, would
know upon what terms they did so; would occupy the
position of laborers, simply; and thus the Negro would cease
to be a peril.
Tom Watson, “The Voice of the People is the
Voice of God,” 1915
By the 1910s, Watson’s public remarks were
riddled with racial prejudice and paranoia. He filled
his speeches and publications with long
denunciations of Catholic, Jewish, and Negro
conspiracies, often with sexual themes. He warned
of the “hideous, ominous, national menace of
Negro domination,” and spoke at length about the
danger of blacks molesting white women. He also
accused Catholic priests of raping women in the
confessional and holding Protestant women in
convents and asylums against their will. The
following piece applauds the violent lynching of
Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager accused on
flimsy evidence of raping and murdering Mary
Phagan, a young woman in his employ. (It is quite
tame compared to much of Watson’s writing from
this period.)
Also in this period, Watson rejoined the
Democratic Party, once his bitter enemy, and
enjoyed more electoral success than at any prior
point in his career. He was elected to the United
States Senate in 1920, two years before his death.
If democracy does not mean just that, let us abandon
our Republican form of Government, kiss the Pope’s foot,
and ask him to appoint a “divine right” king to rule over us!
Give us one of the Hohensollerns who bought his crown the
House of Hapsburg; or give us a Hapsburg who bought his
from a Medieval Pope. If we have got to abandon
democracy, let us go the whole hog, and have a monarch
who is a partner to the Pope and the Almighty.
Democracy means, that ALL POWER IS IN THE
PEOPLE!
The right to establish government, choose rulers,
make laws, found institutions, reward merit, and punish
crime, is in the People. The People delegate these powers, but
never surrender them.
Our highest law declares that the People cannot
surrender these inherent, inalienable powers. Just like any
other principal who appoints an agent, and is betrayed by
that agent, the People may ignore the act of a recreant agent, and
do FOR THEMSELVES what the agent failed to do.
The Sheriff gets his authority to hang a man from the
Law, but the Law got it from the People.Therefore, the
power remains in the People, who have only delegated it to
an agent. When the Sheriff kills, it is not his act, it is the act of
the People, performed through their statutory law. Look at
your Bible, and see whether this has not been so, from of old.
Let our rulers try to remember that, under our form of
government, the People rule, BY AGENTS. Let those agents
have a care! Let them not usurp powers which the People
have not delegated. If they want more power than is given
them by Law, let them ask their masters for it.
Their masters are THE PEOPLE!
And let us labor under no mistake as to what
happened in Georgia. It was this: A Vigilance Committee,
instead of a Sheriff, carried out a sentence which remained in
full force and effect.
Source: The Jeffersonian, August 26, 1915.