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THE FIRST ITEM in the bill of charges against populism is that it is nostalgic or backward-looking in a way that is both futile and unhealthy. Among the many public figures who have seconded this familiar accusation is none other than the president of the United States, Barack Obama, who in 2016 criticized unnamed politicians for having “embraced a crude populism that promises a return to a past that is not possible to restore.” What he was taking aim at was obviously Trump’s slogan: “Make America Great Again,” which implied that the country’s best days lay in the past. 14
Obama’s understanding of “populism” as a politics of pointless pining for bygone glories is unremarkable, but a more accurate noun for this sentiment would be “conservatism”—the political philosophy that defends traditional ways. The agrarian radicals of the late nineteenth century did no such thing. Populism called for radical reforms that would have put this country on an entirely different trajectory from the finance-capital road we followed.
Indeed, the Populists believed in progress and modernity as emphatically as did any big-city architect or engineer of their day. Their newspapers and magazines loved to publicize scientific advances in farming techniques; one of their favorites was a paper called the Progressive Farmer . For all their gloom about the plutocratic 1890s, the Populists’ rhetoric could be surprisingly optimistic about the potential of ordinary people and the society they thought they were building. 15 This did not mean, however, that the Pops simply welcomed whatever happened as an improvement on what had happened the day before. It was not a step forward to pack the nation’s wealth into the bank accounts of a handful of people who contributed nothing; real progress meant economic democracy as well as technological innovation.
Anti-populism is similarly misleading on the crucial matter of international trade. In a 2017 paper about the “populist backlash of the late nineteenth century,” the Hoover Institution historian Niall Ferguson tells us flatly that hostility to free trade has always been one of the signature issues that define populism, because populism, as he puts it, is always a “backlash against globalization.” Lots of other scholars say the same thing: William Galston of the Brookings Institution, for example, tells us that populism has always been “protectionist in the broad sense of the term”; that all forms of populism stand “against foreign goods, foreign immigrants, and foreign ideas.” 16
When applied to Gilded Age America, these arguments are almost entirely upside-down. If you look up where the parties stood on the then-important issue of tariffs, you find that the great champions of protectionism were in fact big business and the Republicans. The man responsible for crushing Populism first rose to fame as the author of the “McKinley Tariff,” the very definition of a backlash against free trade. It was William Jennings Bryan’s Democrats who were the true-believing free-traders of the period. *
It’s also worth remembering that agrarian organizations in America have nearly always supported free trade, for the simple reason that American farmers export huge amounts of food and because many of the things that farmers consume can be purchased more cheaply overseas. And sure enough, among the various manifestos of the Farmers’ Alliance is found the following: “We further demand a removal of the existing heavy tariff tax from the necessities of life, that the poor of our land must have.” Indeed, the Populists were so passionate about encouraging trade that a number of their legislators enlisted in a scheme to build a publicly owned railroad running from the Great Plains to the Texas Gulf Coast, which would theoretically allow farmers to export directly to the world without having to pay the high freight rates imposed by private railways. That’s how actual Populists regarded protectionism—in precisely the opposite way from what modern scholars assure us populism always does. 17
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CONTEMPORARY EXPERT S FURTHER inform us that populists feel an “instinctual antagonism” to government agencies, particularly of the sort that are insulated from politics. 18 While this is certainly true of modern-day conservative Republicans (who despise regulation of business) and of Brexit supporters in the United Kingdom (who fear the unaccountable bureaucracy of the European Union), it is almost precisely the opposite of the viewpoint of American Populists.
In point of fact, the Pops came out of the reform tradition that invented the modern independent regulatory agency, * and historians generally acknowledge that the People’s Party was the first to call for large-scale government intervention in the economy—by which I mean, intervention on behalf of ordinary people, not corporations. Their 1892 Omaha Platform spelled it out clearly: “We believe that the powers 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.”
The Populists wanted the government to own and operate the nation’s railroads, to manage the currency, to take possession of land owned by speculators, to set up postal savings banks, and a dizzying list of other interventions. The third party’s hopes for government assistance were one of the things that made Populism seem so sick and twisted to men of respectability at the time. “The Populist faith in the ‘Gover’ment’ is supreme,” observed one of the earliest students of the movement, in 1893.
The Government is all-powerful and it ought to be all-willing. When a Populist debtor is approached by a creditor his reply is actually often in these words: “I can’t pay the debt until the Government gives me relief.” This intervention or saving grace of the Government is a personal influence to him, a thing of life. What shall minister to a mind diseased like the Populist’s? Only constitutional remedies. 19
Yes, ordinary, working-class people once demanded that government get bigger and take over vast chunks of the economy. That was what American liberalism was all about, once upon a time, and it started with Populism.
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AUTHORITARIANISM IS A grave danger that always attends the rise of populism, modern-day scholars assure us. The menace of “authoritarian populists” is one of the important themes in Yascha Mounk’s book, The People vs. Democracy . Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, meanwhile, argues that populists “weaken” democracies by “undermining the norms that sustain them,” thus raising the specter of authoritarianism. “When populists win elections, they often assault democratic institutions,” he warns in his best-selling book, How Democracies Die . 20
Now, there is no doubt that Donald Trump is a norm-violating, would-be autocrat. And attributing his authoritarianism to his “populism” draws on the long-running scholarly tendency to find that virtually all working-class movements are tyrannies-in-waiting. 21
If the original 1890s Populists were authoritarians, however, they were some of history’s most ineffectual tyrants. Discipline was always poor in the People’s Party: the organization could never shake what the historian Charles Postel calls its “nonpartisan and anti-party origins”; it started splitting into factions soon after it got going. The Pops were even lousy at selling out. After endorsing the Democratic presidential candidate in 1896, they were unable to convince the Democrats to reciprocate and accept the Populist choice for the vice presidency.
Then: the Pops and their Sunday-school hero William Jennings Bryan were torn to pieces in one of the most brutal demonstrations of military-style politics ever seen in this country, a coldly efficient electoral massacre organized by William McKinley and Mark Hanna, the tycoon warlord of the Republican Party. The GOP is estimated to have outspent the Democrat/Populist campaign by twenty or thirty to one that year. To this day, by one standard of measurement, the Republican effort of 1896 still holds the record for the most expensive presidential campaign of all time. 22 To study that famous contest and announce that the Populists were the authoritarian team in the match would be a pants-on-fire outrage.
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IN ONE OF the more distorted charges, virtually ev
eryone who writes on the subject nowadays agrees that populism is “anti-pluralist,” by which they mean that it is racist or sexist or discriminatory in some other way. The source of this sin is said to be populism’s love of “the people,” a concept that always supposedly excludes big parts of the population for being inauthentic or ethnically different. Populism’s hatred for “the elite,” meanwhile, is thought to be merely a fig leaf for this ugly intolerance. 23
Something like this is true in today’s world: The leader of the Republican Party denounces elitists in what he calls the “global power structure” and also sets nativist hearts a-thumping with his promises of a wall along the Mexican border. And so, liberal intellectuals conclude, the two must be connected. Movements that criticize elites in the name of the people are by definition opposed to the colorful mosaic of complex modern societies; intolerance is encoded in populism’s very DNA.
It’s a funny thing, though: the example of Populism once inspired intellectuals as they went about attacking racism. C. Vann Woodward, the legendary historian of the American South, writes in his memoirs that he was drawn to the subject of Populism as a young man because it “compelled reconsideration” of the racist shibboleths of the South’s Democratic Party elite: “progress, prosperity, peace, consensus, white solidarity, black contentment.…” The young Woodward meant to shatter these stupid, stifling complacencies, and when he discovered the South’s Populist past as a graduate student in the 1930s, he thought he had found the weapon with which to do so. 24
This is because attacking racist shibboleths was something that certain Populist leaders famously did during the movement’s brief career. The South in the 1890s was filled with poor farmers both white and black, and keeping these two groups at each other’s throats was virtually the entire point of the region’s traditional politics. “A generation of white-solidarity indoctrination,” as Woodward called it in his classic Origins of the New South , ensured poverty for both groups but unchallenged power for the “Bourbon” Democratic elite.
Populism’s strategy for taking on the region’s one-party system, as Woodward described it, was to organize “a political union” between white and “Negro farmers and laborers within the South,” a shocking affront both to racist tradition and to the interests of the local moneyed class. 25 The Pops, Woodward continued, “ridiculed the clichés of Reconciliation and White Solidarity.”
The bolder among them challenged the cult of racism with the doctrine of common action among farmers and workers of both races. The very existence of the third party was, of course, a challenge to the one-party system as well as to white solidarity. 26
In 1892, the Populist leader Tom Watson of Georgia declared in a national magazine that “the People’s Party will settle the race question” by addressing the common economic interests of black and white farmers. Watson then spoke to those farmers directly: “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.” 27
This is not to say that white southern Populists were racial liberals or that they practiced what they preached; they weren’t and they didn’t. What they did do, however, was defy the Bourbon Democrats of the South, for whom white solidarity and the suppression of African Americans were the monolithic first principles of political consciousness. Populism’s very existence was an attack on these doctrines.
At times, the People’s Party appeared to be making progress toward its stated ideal of class-based political action across the color line. Charles Postel reminds us that the marchers of Coxey’s Army deliberately violated segregated norms and that they were often helped along the road to Washington by black churches. In some southern states, the Pops struck fusion deals with local Republicans, the party to which many blacks were still loyal. By this device, for example, the Pops and the Republicans were able to defeat the Democratic Party of North Carolina and take over the government of that state for several years. 28
“Poverty has few distinctions among its victims,” observed Hamlin Garland in an 1897 novel set amidst the rise of Populism. Describing a protest of Kansas farmers, he wrote, “The negro stood close beside his white brother in adversity, and there was a certain relation and resemblance in their stiffened walk, poor clothing, and dumb, imploring, empty hands.” The spectacle, Garland continued, was “something tremendous, something far-reaching. The movement it represented had the majesty, if not the volcanic energy, of the rise of the peasants of the Vendee.” 29
The Colored Farmers’ Alliance was the name of the group that organized black farmers alongside the whites-only southern Farmers’ Alliance. Leaders from the Colored Alliance were essential in launching the People’s Party; in some respects they were well ahead of their white brethren in calling for a third party. 30 But Black Populism, as it is now called, was ultimately a fruitless effort. Everywhere in the South, the Pops hit the wall of violence and vote fraud that blocked the progress of anyone who challenged white solidarity. When the new party made its debut in southern elections in 1892, black voters were attacked and a number of them were murdered, a direct reflection, according to a recent study of Black Populism, of “the political threat posed to the Democratic Party by the coalition of black and independent white voters.” Violence of this kind continued here and there across the South until Populism was completely vanquished. 31
Nor was the commitment to equality professed by many white Populists truly sincere. Some of them turned out to be just as committed to white supremacy as were the Southern Democrats they meant to defy. Many others thought racism and segregation were grounded in science. 32 And later on, once Populism had begun to weaken, the same Tom Watson who wrote such admirable words in 1892 reemerged as one of the nation’s most notorious racists, producing (according to the historian Woodward) a stream of “tirades against his onetime allies of the Negro race that were matchless in their malevolence.” 33
The point here is not some precise accounting of the Populists’ record on race—summary: they meant well but didn’t deliver. The critical thing to understand, for present purposes, is that the Populists were not the great villains of the era’s racist system. That dishonor went to the movement’s archenemies in the southern Democratic Party, leaders who were absolutely clear about their commitment to white supremacy. 34
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THE MODERN-DAY ASSOCIATION of populism with “anti-pluralism” misses the historical target in several other crucial ways. For example, the Pops were the only party of their time to feature women in positions of leadership. In Kansas, the movement was singularly identified with the outrageous adventures of one Mary Elizabeth Lease, a dynamic orator who traveled around the state in 1890, damning Republican politicians and (according to legend) advising her audiences to “raise less corn and more hell.” A quieter, more executive role was played in that same state by the journalist Annie L. Diggs, whom a Kansas City newspaper once called the “unqualified dictator of the Kansas Populists … the first woman boss in American politics.” 35 Again, not all Populists supported women’s suffrage, but enough of them did to secure women the right to vote in several of the western states where the party was strong.
On the question of immigration, which was just as controversial then as it is today, the People’s Party was of two minds. Its 1892 Omaha Platform—like the platforms of the two major parties—opposed “pauper” immigration on the grounds that it “crowds out our wage-earners.” The man the party chose as its presidential candidate, however, was a forthright supporter of open immigration, demanding in stormy Populist style:
Are we still an asylum for the oppressed of all nations, or are we about to become a policeman for the monarchs and despots of the old world—a despicable, international slave-catcher, under a world-wide fugitive slave law—engaged
in the business of arresting and returning to their cruel task-masters the poor slaves who are fleeing hither to become citizens and to escape from hopeless conditions? 36
Toward immigrants themselves the People’s Party was remarkably open. A granular investigation of the attitudes of Kansas Populists toward immigrants found precisely the opposite of what present-day theorists insist is always the case with populism. Kansas in the 1890s was a state filled with just-arrived people, and the Populists competed vigorously for their votes; Populist officeholders, meanwhile, came from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and so on. 37
As it happens, there was an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic hate group at work in the 1890s. But it wasn’t called Populism. It was the American Protective Association (APA), and the political organization through which it preferred to do its work was that norm-defending organization known as the Republican Party. Here is how the Populists of Kansas regarded the APA, as laid down in a resolution adopted (“nearly unanimously,” according to the historian who discovered it) at the party’s state convention in 1894:
Resolved , That the People’s party, as its name implies, is the party of the people, and hence the enemy of oppression and tyranny in every form, and we do most emphatically condemn such conduct as un-Christian, un-American, and as totally opposed to the spirit of the Constitution of our country and we pledge our best efforts to defeat such organizations and to protect as far as we are able every individual of every nationality, religious creed and political belief in his sacred right to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience. 38
This is curious, is it not? So many denunciations of populism for its “anti-pluralism,” and yet here are the Populists themselves loudly attacking intolerance and anti-pluralism.
The People, No Page 4
