In fact, the Populist revolt against the two major parties would turn out to be even more momentous than that grandiose passage implied. Populism was one of the first of the great political efforts to tame the capitalist system. Up until then, mainstream politicians in America had by and large taken the virtues of that system for granted—society’s winners won, those politicians believed, because they were better people; because they had prevailed in a rational and supremely fair contest called free enterprise. The Populists were the people who blasted those smug assumptions to pieces, forcing the country to acknowledge that ordinary Americans who were just as worthy as bankers or railroad barons were being ruined by an economic system that in fact answered to no moral laws.
* * *
NOT EVERYBODY THOUGHT Populism was such a wonderful invention, however. Kansas Republicans—whose complacent rule over the state had been interrupted by the People’s Party—insisted that a better term for their foes was “Calamityites,” because they complained all the time. 11 The Kansas City Star , an influential regional paper, surveyed the Cincinnati convention where the third party was born and sneered that it “bore a much closer semblance to a mob than to a deliberative assembly.” What’s more, the Star ’s editorialist continued, “The conference, from beginning to end, was distinguished for its intolerance and extreme bigotry,” words the paper used to describe the way a heavy-handed leadership faction steered the proceedings according to its own preferences. 12
The judgment of the Topeka Capital , the leading voice of Republican rectitude in Kansas, was even harsher than that. The paper’s lively page 1 news story on the gathering of reformers in Cincinnati was headed as follows:
THIRD PARTY!
Cincinnati Rapidly Filling Up with the Disgruntled Ravelings of the Old Parties
KANSANS TO THE FORE
In Large Numbers and Making Themselves Ridiculously Conspicuous by Their Gab
…
HAYSEED IN THEIR HAIR
Kansas Alliancers Proclaim Their Politics by the Uncouthness of Their Personal Attire 13
This is how the establishment welcomed the Populist revolt into the world, and this is pretty much how the establishment thinks about populism still.
From the very beginning, then, populism had two meanings. There was Populism as its proponents understood it, meaning a movement in which ordinary citizens demanded democratic economic reforms. And there was Populism as its enemies characterized it: a dangerous movement of groundless resentment in which demagogues led the disreputable.
The specific reforms for which the People’s Party stood are largely forgotten today. But the insults and accusations with which Populism was received in 1891 are alive and well. You can read them in best-selling books, watch them flashed on the PowerPoint at prestigious foundation conferences, hear the words of the Kansas City Star and the Topeka Capital mouthed by people who have never heard of Topeka, Kansas: Populist movements, they will tell you, are mob actions; reformers are bigots; their leaders are blatherskites; their followers are mentally ill, or ignorant, or uncouth at the very least. They are cranks; they are troublemakers; they are deplorables. And, yes, they still have hayseed in their hair.
* * *
DO THE ORIGINS of words matter? Does it make any difference who invented the word “populist” and what they meant by it? After all, the meaning of words evolves all the time. Mutability is part of the nature of language. Merely figuring out the intentions of the people who coined a given word doesn’t tell us a whole lot.
In this case I think it does matter. For one thing, “populist” is not a word that fell conveniently from the sky, empty of signification and ready for pundits to use however they want: it was consciously invented to denote a particular group with a particular purpose. And though the People’s Party is no more, the political philosophy that the Populists embodied did not die. The idea of working people coming together against economic privilege lives on; you might say it constitutes one of the main streams of our democratic tradition.
The populist impulse has in fact been a presence in American life since the country’s beginning. Populism triumphed in the 1930s and 1940s, when the people overwhelmingly endorsed a regulatory welfare state. Populist uprisings occur all the time in American life, always with the same enemies—monopolies, banks, and corruption—and always with the same salt-of-the-earth heroes.
When we use the word to describe demagogues and would-be dictators, we are inverting that historic meaning. Populism was profoundly, achingly democratic. The Kansans who invented the term were referring to something that by the standards of the time was anti-demagogic; that was pro-enlightenment and pro-equality. In its heyday, and alone among American political parties of the time, Populism stood strong for human rights. Populism had prominent women leaders. Populists despised tyrants and imperialism. Populism defied the poisonous idea of southern white solidarity.
In these days of feverish anti-populism my mind often goes back to a 1900 speech by one of the very last Populists in Congress, a Nebraska lawyer named William Neville. His subject was America’s then-new policy of imperial rule over the Philippines, and the Populist spelled out his party’s opposition. But first he deplored Southern Democrats for trying to “exclude the black man from the right of suffrage,” and he denounced Republicans for “shooting salvation and submission into the brown man because he wants to be free.” And then Neville said this:
Nations should have the same right among nations that men have among men. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is as dear to the black and brown man as to the white; as precious to the poor as to the rich; as just to the ignorant as to the educated; as sacred to the weak as to the strong, and as applicable to nations as to individuals, and the nation which subverts such right by force is no better governed than the man who takes the law in his own hands. 14
Of course, scholars and journalists have a right to ignore such statements and to divorce any word they choose from its original meaning. It’s legitimate for them to take this particular word back to its Latin root and to start all over again from there, to pretend that the train from Kansas City never arrived and the farmer’s revolt never happened and to define “populist” just however they please.
But why would someone do that? Why use such a fine, democratic word to mean “racist,” to mean “dictator,” to mean “anti-intellectual”?
Before we begin on that story, let me make clear that I strongly approve of studying racist, right-wing demagogues and figuring out what can be done to defeat them. I have spent my adult life engaged in exactly this project. Calling such figures “populists,” however, is a mistake if defeating them is really our purpose. Opponents of the Right should be claiming the high ground of populism, not ceding it to guys like Donald Trump. Indeed, this is so obvious to me that I am flabbergasted anew every time I see the word abused in this way. How does it help reformers, I wonder, to deliberately devalue the coinage of the American reform tradition?
It is my argument that reversing the meaning of “populist” tells us something important about the people who reversed it: denunciations of populism like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays arise from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation. And it is that pessimism—that tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn—that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly.
The name I give to that pessimistic tradition is “anti-populism,” and as we investigate its history, we will find it using the same rhetoric over and over again—in 1896, in 1936, and today. Whether it is defending the gold standard or our system of healthcare-for-a-few, anti-populism mobilizes the same sentiments and draws the same stereotypes; it sometimes even speaks to us from the same prestigious institutions. Its most toxic ingredient—a highbrow contempt for ordinary Americans—is as poisonous today as it was in the Victorian era or in the Great Depression.
* * *
ONE NAME SCHOLARS have applied to t
his tradition is the “elitist theory of democracy.” It holds that public policy should be made by a “consensus of elites” rather than by the emotional and deluded people. It regards mass protest movements as outbreaks of irrationality. Marginalized people, it assumes, are marginalized for a reason. The critical thing in a system like ours, it maintains, is to allow members of the professional political class to find consensus quietly, harmoniously, and without too much interference from subaltern groups. 15
The obvious, objective fact that the professional political class fails quite frequently is regarded in this philosophy as uninteresting if not impossible. When anti-populists have occasion to mention the elite failures of recent years—deindustrialization, financial crisis, opioid epidemic, everything related to the 2016 election—they almost always dismiss them as inevitable or unpredictable, episodes no one could possibly have foreseen or managed more successfully. 16
On the subject of elite failure, there is no international program of inquiry as there is with populism. There are no calls for papers, no generous foundation grant program, no Stanford global elitisms project, no incentives at all to discover why experts keep blundering. Indeed, anti-populists find it harder to criticize their colleagues for fouling things up than they do to deride the voting public of America for being angry over those foul-ups. If the choice is between admitting that professionals often fail or determining that popular democracy must be reined in, anti-populists will choose the latter every time.
If only it were possible, they sigh, to dissolve the people and elect another.
1
What Was Populism?
Populism was the first of America’s great economic uprisings, a roar of outrage from people in the lower half of the country’s social order. It was a quintessential mass movement, in which rank-and-file Americans came to think of the country’s inequitable system as a thing they might change by common effort. It was a glimpse of how citizens of a democracy, born with a faith in equality, can sometimes react when the brutal hierarchy of conventional arrangements is no longer tolerable to them.
Populism was also our country’s final serious third-party effort, the last one to stand a decent chance of breaking the duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats. In the 1890s the two main parties were still basically regional organizations, relics of the Civil War; Populism transcended that system by making an appeal based on class solidarity, aiming to bring together farmers in the South and the West with factory workers in northern cities. “The interests of rural and civic labor are the same,” proclaimed the famous 1892 Omaha Platform of the People’s Party, and “their enemies are identical.” By which the Pops meant those who prospered while producing nothing: bankers, railroad barons, and commodity traders, along with their hirelings—corrupt politicians who served wealth instead of “the people.”
This was, of course, a time of unregulated corporate monopolies, of in-your-face corruption, and of crushing currency deflation—and it was also a time when everyone agreed that government’s role was to provide a framework conducive to business and otherwise to get out of the way. That was the formal ideal; the execution was slightly uglier, a matter of smoke and exploitation, bankruptcy and foreclosure, of cabinet seats for sale and entire state legislatures bought with free-ride railroad passes.
Against this backdrop came the Populist revolt. The rightful subject of the government’s ministrations, populism insisted, was not business at all but the People.
It all began in the 1880s when farmers started signing up by the thousands for a cooperative movement called the Farmers’ Alliance. America was still largely an agricultural nation, and in the places where Populism eventually took root farmers made up overwhelming majorities of the population.
They were not particularly affluent majorities, however. In the South, farmers tended to be desperately poor, borrowing against future crops to buy food and necessities. The merchants from whom they borrowed took pains to ensure not only that the farmers never got out of debt but that they took the merchants’ dictation on what to grow and how to grow it. What to grow always turned out to be cotton, and as the southern farmers produced crop after bumper crop of the stuff, the price only sank.
Farmers in the West, meanwhile, found themselves at the mercy of a different set of middlemen—local railroad monopolies and far-off commodity speculators. Like their brethren in the South, they worked and borrowed and grew and harvested; they watched as what they produced was sold in Chicago and New York for good prices; and yet what they themselves earned from their labors fell and fell and fell. In 1870, farmers received forty-three cents a bushel for corn; twenty years later in eastern Kansas it sold for ten cents a bushel, far less than what it cost to grow. Accounts from the period describe corn lying around on the ground with no takers; corn burned in stoves for heat. 1
To such people the Farmer’s Alliance made a simple proposition: Let’s find out why we are being ruined, and then let’s get together and do something about it. Education was the first order of business, and the movement conceived of itself as a sort of “national university,” employing an army of traveling lecturers. Chapters of the movement ran lending libraries; radical rural newspapers (of which there were many) sold cheap books about agriculture and political reform. 2
The movement also promised real results for farmers, by means of rural cooperatives and political pressure. And the Farmers’ Alliance spread like a wildfire. By the end of the 1880s it had millions of members, mainly in the South; the Colored Farmers’ Alliance (the southern Alliances were segregated) represented a million more; similar farm groups in the northern states brought additional millions into the radical fold. News reports marveled at the enormous audiences that would turn out to hear Alliance speakers—crowds of the size typically found at modern-day football games, gathering in a pasture somewhere. A novel published at the time describes the way American minds began to change:
People commenced to think who had never thought before, and people talked who had seldom spoken.… Little by little they commenced to theorize upon their condition. Despite the poverty of the country, the books of Henry George, [Edward] Bellamy, and other economic writers were bought to be read greedily; and nourished by the fascination of novelty and the zeal of enthusiasm, thoughts and theories sprouted like weeds after a May shower.… They discussed income tax and single tax; they talked of government ownership and the abolition of private property; fiat money, and the unity of labor; … and a thousand conflicting theories. 3
At first, the political program of the Farmers’ Alliance focused on a handful of big issues: the regulation of railroads, federal loans to farmers, and currency reform of a kind that would help debtors. The Alliance developed positions on a whole host of other matters as well: it supported free trade, for example, and votes for women, and secret ballots on Election Day. Thanks to the movement’s vast numbers, conventional politicians in every farm state began to pay attention, promising to act on the farmers’ demands.
But somehow the politicians never delivered. The power of business over the state legislatures always turned out to be too great to overcome. The same thing on a larger scale was obviously true of Congress in Washington, D.C. And while the politicians triangulated, the farmers’ position worsened.
Something profound had taken place, however. The farmers—men and women of society’s commonest rank—had figured out that being exploited was not the natural order of things. So members of the Farmers’ Alliance began taking matters into their own hands. In Kansas and a few other western states they went into politics directly, styling themselves as the People’s Party, a new organization with a new agenda. In the fall of 1890 they challenged and in places overthrew the dominant local Republicans, turning out old-school senators and representatives and replacing them with leaders from their own movement.
Over the next few years, the party organized itself nationally, and at their gathering in Omaha in the summer of 1892 they formally announced their program
to the world. By this time the Knights of Labor and a number of other unions were on board, along with most of the reform-minded farm groups of the era, and so the People’s Party declared itself to be “the first great labor conference of the United States and of the world,” bringing together “the producers of the nation” from both the country and the city. They denounced “capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts,” and they declared that “the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads.” In that heyday of American inequality, that golden age of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, the Populists alone saw things clearly:
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. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires. 4
In 1892 the Populist presidential candidate, a Civil War general from Iowa named James B. Weaver, won 22 electoral votes, and by following a strategy of “fusion” or coordination with local Democrats, the party managed to elect governors in several western states ordinarily controlled by the Republicans. In the South, where the dominant group was the conservative “Bourbon” Democrats, the Populist revolt met with disaster. The party of white supremacy casually cheated the Pops out of victories that should have been theirs. The only southern state where the third party prevailed was North Carolina, where fusion with the local Republicans brought Populism into power in the middle of the decade. To this subject we shall return anon.
The People, No Page 2
