That populism is at war with intellect, that it is an offense to meritocracy—this lasting axiom can also be traced to the original Democracy Scare, when Populism threatened to level both the hierarchy of money and that of established expertise. The institution where these two hierarchies came together was the gold standard, the bedrock of both classical economics and the banking system. For the Populists, as we have seen, the elites’ faith in gold was a favorite target for mockery. But for establishment figures like John Hay, the only legitimate way to settle the currency question was “by the investigations of the leading economists of the world,” gathered in solemn contemplation. The conclusion of such a gathering was certain: one couldn’t adopt a silver standard in just one country and hope to succeed. America’s economy was locked in an international system regulated by responsible expertise, Hay intoned, and upon this reasoning everyone who was anyone agreed. “All the intelligent bi-metallists of America …; all those of England …; all the German scholars … agree in this.” 25
A funny thing about that proud, scholarly consensus of the 1890s: it was wrong. As we now know, the gold standard was an archaic system that needlessly ruined millions of lives. Americans eventually replaced it with a fiat currency, just as the Populists advocated. In this most consequential Democracy Scare of them all, the cranks turned out to be right and the experts to be wrong. *
* * *
SUPPOS E YOU KNEW with utter certainty, however, that the reformers had it wrong and were pursuing an absurd and dangerous doctrine. How would you explain this mass enthusiasm for a false idea? Why, you would turn to what John Hay called the “mental constitution” of the person who believed in it: “You do not want to argue with him; you want to feel of his phrenological bumps.”
Decades later, the historian Richard Hofstadter would famously assert that what Populism reflected was status anxiety and even a “paranoid style.” His larger insight, which revolutionized social science in the 1950s and which persists in the anti-populism of our own day, was that mass protest movements in general could be understood as a reaction of maladjusted minds to the advance of modernity.
In truth, however, Hofstadter’s discovery had already been made back in 1896, when Populism was repeatedly diagnosed as a form of mental aberration. 26 In September of that year, as the exciting presidential campaign unfolded, the New York Times announced the alarming discovery: William Jennings Bryan appeared to be clinically insane. It began with a letter to the paper from an anonymous “Alienist,” or psychologist, who examined Bryan’s heredity, his heretofore mediocre career, and his behavior on the campaign trail, and concluded “without any bias” that “Mr. Bryan presents in his speech and action striking and alarming evidence of a mind not entirely sound.” Proof: the candidate was “an apostle of an economic theory without ever having a training in economics.”
It was a scary situation, the alienist continued. After all, having “a madman in the White House” would not only be dangerous, but it would also damage democracy itself, since it “would forever weaken the trust in the soundness of republics and the sanity of the voting masses.” The letter evidently caused a sensation, and the Times proceeded to mine the story for all it was worth, interviewing other professional psychologists and debating whether Bryan’s obvious brainsickness was that of a “mattoid” or a paranoid. 27
Economists concurred in this diagnosis. J. Laurence Laughlin of the University of Chicago analyzed the “Agricultural Unrest” for the Atlantic Monthly and quickly turned for his explanation to the minds of the Populists themselves. The reason they didn’t understand their true economic situation was because of a peculiar malfunction of their “mental processes,” Laughlin concluded. “Once the single-ideaed [sic ] brain has been occupied by a theory, or craze,” he announced, “the gate to all other ideas is thereby closed.”
In a brain incapable of economic and judicial reasoning, the one idea now in possession engenders prejudice, and even, in an emotional nature, frenzy. This class of minds may not always have the same craze, but, in its undereducated way, it is sure to have one of some sort. The subject of the fanaticism may change in time, but with the fanaticism we must always reckon so long as the undereducated class exists and wields a large political power. 28
Moreover, the problem of “the undereducated man, capable of holding but one idea at a time” was made worse, Laughlin charged, by the problem of the demonic manipulator, who sees in hard times an opportunity to mislead the gullible. “And the skill of the tempter is satanic,” he continued. “I doubt if ever in our political history we have had more adroit manipulation and strategy than have been displayed by the managers of the silver party.” The professional economist proceeded to blame the whole Populist uprising on “the great silver conspiracy, the equal of which has never been recorded.” 29
* * *
“ A MO ST LAMENTABLE Comedy” was the title that small-town newspaperman William Allen White gave to the anti-Populist novella he published in 1901. A thinly disguised account of insurgent politics in Kansas, White’s novella is completely forgotten today. Once upon a time, however, it was highly regarded: it was quoted in history textbooks and recommended to curious foreigners by President Theodore Roosevelt. 30
In White’s telling, Populism was a form of mass hysteria, a “mental epidemic” that swept the region west of the Missouri River and that “held the people in a grip as vicious as a bodily distemper.” His novella incorporates virtually the entire list of frightful characteristics that pundits of the day attributed to Populism: democracy gone haywire; the people transformed into a mob; churches and schools and other beloved institutions of small-town American life subverted by a demonic force.
It was a fanaticism like the crusades. Indeed the delusion that was working on the people took the form of religious frenzy.… At night, from 10,000 little white school-house windows, lights twinkled back vain hope to the stars. For the thousands who assembled under the school-house lamps believed that when their Legislature met and their Governor was elected, the millennium would come by proclamation. They sang their barbaric songs in unrhythmic jargon, with something of the same mad faith that inspired the martyrs going to the stake.
As for Populism’s so-called issues, they all arose from what White called the “chief hallucination of the mania,” which was “that the people owed more than they could pay; or in justice should be asked to pay.” Times were hard; farmers were in debt—but so what? For the farmers’ crisis White’s sympathy was close to zero.
White describes the farmers holding their meetings, singing their stupid protest songs, and “cursing wealth for its iniquity.” Their rebellion against the successful was so profoundly misguided that White calls it a rebellion against mind itself: “Reason slept and the passions—jealousy, covetousness, hatred—ran amuck, and who ever would check them was crucified in public contumely.”
In this climate, the right order of things had been inverted. “Persons with reason were in disfavor.” Losers prospered; the learned were ignored; the old leaders were cast out and professionals were replaced by cranks: “The doctor, lawyer, merchant and chief, were shoved aside for the horse-trader, the sewing-machine agent, the patent right pedler [sic ], the itinerant preacher, the tenant farmer, the lawyer without clients, the school teacher without pupils.”
White’s novella tells the story of one of these cranks, a “town infidel” given to socialist politics and street-corner oratory who somehow becomes the leader of a local chapter of the Farmers’ Alliance and is then swept by the lunacy of the moment into the governor’s office. This character’s one real talent is public speaking, which he has sharpened and perfected into a form of hypnosis, and in describing his performance at the state Populist convention White’s horror transcends his prose:
The speech could not be reported any more than the gyrations of a serpent charming a bird may be put in words.… As the wind makes billows in the prairie grass, Dan Gregg, who was not Dan Gregg, but a mag
ician, swayed the great crowd at his whim. The delegates laughed, they cried, they shuddered; they clinched their fists; they cheered and knew it not, and orators and auditors, chained together by a common frenzy that each produced upon the other, went out of reason together.
This passage shows the obvious influence of the French social theorist Gustave Le Bon, whose book The Crowd William Allen White acknowledges having read and admired when it first appeared in English in 1896. Le Bon’s most famous assertion, which White here applies to his fictional Populists, was that ordinary people, when gathered in crowds, became psychologically subhuman, akin to a person under hypnosis. Le Bon, who was no fan of democracy, also charged that crowds were irrational, impulsive, suspicious of progress, and fond of authoritarian leaders—precisely the bill of accusations that later generations of American social theorists would use to blast what they called “populism.” 31
Give the plain people a say, this kind of thinking holds, and by some deep, irrational instinct they will try to smash the social order and to topple the highly educated people who administer it, bowing down instead before what White elsewhere called “the lazy, greasy fizzle, who can’t pay his debts.” Now, as then, populism is the word we apply to this imagined war of madness against reason, of entropy against order, of the poor against the rich, of the unthinking rabble against society’s brains.
* * *
EVERYTHING I HAVE mentioned so far in this chapter has shown the continuity between the anti-populism of the 1890s and that of the present day. On the important matter of populist intolerance, however, there is a surprising divergence. It is true that one of the words William Allen White and others favored when describing the mental failures of reformers was “bigotry,” * but what they meant by that word seems to have been something very different from what we mean by it today.
In his winding account of the madness of reform, White gives no examples of Populist racism or Populist hatred of Muslims or any other form of Populist intolerance. What tainted Populism with “bigotry” was its supposed antipathy to the successful: the movement, White writes, was “a wave of emotion which has jealousy of the poor for the rich and envy of the strong for the weak for its impulse.” The problem was the unthinking hatred of the lower orders for their betters.
Today, however, the bigotry of populism—its racism and its nativism—is by far its most prominent feature, with the word “populist” itself having become shorthand for “racist.”
As we have seen, the Populists were not enlightened racial liberals by modern-day standards. Many of them were indeed racists and anti-Semites. Yet in all my reading of anti-Populist material of the 1890s, I came across no New York newspaper editorials or political cartoons that attacked the movement for its racial intolerance. This particular charge, so ubiquitous in our own day, seems largely to have gone missing back then.
How come? One reason, surely, is that the establishment publications of the time were themselves so frequently racist it would hardly have occurred to them to charge somebody else with the sin. For example, Life magazine, a relentless adversary of Populism, also gloried in publishing cruel stereotypes of blacks and Jews, often right alongside their cruel mockery of agrarian reformers. Judge magazine was pretty much the same, only in color. Flipping through its pages today is like walking through a beautifully appointed home where the dog has been permitted to defecate all over the floor, leaving you to step gingerly between the stinky cartoons, one after another, of grabby men with hooked noses.
Anti-populists did not hesitate to use racist images when they thought they might injure reformers by so doing. Caricatures of Populist senator William Peffer as the Jewish hypnotist Svengali were commonplace at one time, for example, and it’s hard even to look at the anti-Semitic rendering of a pawnbroker that appeared on the cover of Leslie’s Weekly one day in 1896 over the caption, “A Sure Winner If Bryan Is Elected.” 32
Speaking of Bryan, Judge magazine seemed to be on a sort of quest to publish the most poisonous imaginable image of the Nebraska idealist. The artist who depicted Bryan as Satan also thought to draw a centerfold cartoon labeling Bryan an “Assassin” who has just killed the creamy white maiden “U.S. Credit” with a long knife named “Repudiation.” For this murderous occasion, the illustrator fitted Bryan out with a swarthy complexion and dressed him in the kerchief, earring, and leggings that the stereotypes of the day attributed to immigrants from southern Italy. (Four years later, when Bryan opposed American imperialism, the same cartoonist in the same magazine thought to call Bryan “The American ‘Boxer,’ ” as in the Boxer Rebellion; now the Nebraskan is drawn in Chinese costume, his hair in a queue, a ferocious scowl on his face, and, of course, another gigantic knife in his hand.) 33
Anti-Populist racism was not just a cartoon joke. In the South, where Populism once made a daring bid for transracial class solidarity, race hate was literally the third party’s undoing. As we have seen, southern Populists initially bid for black votes by arguing that the class interests of black farmers were similar to those of white farmers, and that if the two came together politically they could improve their lot in life. Even more important was Populism’s refusal of white solidarity, the keystone of the one-party rule of the Bourbon Democrats.
To put down the revolt, those Bourbon Democrats eventually turned to their one great weapon—insanely exaggerated racial anxiety. North Carolina furnishes the most outrageous example of how it worked. This was the state where Populism—in “fusion” with the local Republican Party—actually captured the government in 1894 and ’96 and then made reforms that allowed blacks to sometimes gain political power in places where they were in the majority. It was also in North Carolina that the Democrats’ racist campaign against the “Fusionists” grew so hot that it spilled over into murder, mob action, and the armed overthrow of a legitimate city government.
The name for that notorious episode is the “white supremacy campaign,” an 1898 effort planned and mounted by the North Carolina Democratic Party to use antiblack hysteria to defeat forever their political rivals. The supremacist leaders played in particular upon the nightmarish threat black empowerment supposedly posed to white women. Amply funded by the state’s business class, they issued an amazing assortment of racist cartoons, newspapers, and pamphlets. They brought in the South Carolina demagogue Ben Tillman to stoke the flames of racist hysteria even more. Then they used paramilitary gangs of so-called red shirts to intimidate Populist and Republican voters. 34
North Carolina Populists claimed in response that white supremacy was a bogus issue and warned that any move to eliminate “the poor negro as a political factor” (which the Democrats promised to do) would ensnare “the poor white man” as well. The true aim of the white supremacy campaign, the Pops claimed, was to distract voters from the real issues—to elevate property over humans and to see to it that “the dollar is greater than the man.” 35 It was to no avail.
At the conclusion of this campaign of vicious race hate and mob violence, North Carolina’s ancestral Democratic rulers rode back to power over their Populist and Republican foes. In the city of Wilmington, they went even further. After the election was over, white Democrats armed themselves, formed ranks, and proceeded into the black parts of town, shooting, killing, and burning. The mob destroyed the offices of the city’s black newspaper, dethroned the city’s Republican mayor, removed its Populist police chief, threatened to lynch other politicians, and then saw their deeds effectively ratified by a federal government that declined to act. *
Is there is anything other than horror to be taken away from the story of this racist mob action of long ago? The civil rights historian Michael Honey tells us that “not ‘Negro domination,’ but too much democracy, through the fusion of Republicans and Populists, set off the white supremacy campaign.” 36 The events that followed the white supremacy campaign certainly suggest that this interpretation is right—that the problem was democracy itself.
After winning their fanatical
white-supremacy campaign, North Carolina Democrats set about reversing the reforms passed by the previous legislature. Then they moved to make their victory permanent by stripping the vote from blacks and poor whites. In the face of this final onslaught, the state’s Populists vacillated and dithered and before long they were finished as a political force. A similar mania for disenfranchisement swept other southern states at about the same time—a movement that historians have attributed, in part, to elite fears aroused by the Populist threat to white solidarity. In North Carolina, at least, that was definitely the case, and disenfranchisement solved the problem … the problem of democracy itself. 37 And so the Populist revolt came to an end.
* * *
AFTER THE WHITE supremacists had worked their will in North Carolina, an anonymous black woman wrote to President McKinley, imploring him to do something about what the press had begun to call the Wilmington “race riot.” “There was not any rioting,” she wrote; “simply the strong slaying the weak.” 38
It is about as compact a summary of this chapter’s themes as we will find anywhere. Anti-populism is always about the powerful lording it over the weak; the credentialed and the high-born reminding the world that the definitions of goodness and justice and truth are whatever they determine.
From 1896 to the present, anti-populists have polished an elegant archetype: The “undereducated class,” as the economist Laughlin called them, are different from you and me. They are obsessive and suggestible and given to fanaticism. They fall for demagogues; they join the mob; they rise up against the experts who direct the system. Economics is beyond them, as are most forms of higher reasoning. And the weakness of democracy is that it is at the mercy of such people. This is the imagined threat that Populism presented and the threat that what is called “populism” will always present to the enlightened few who know how things should be run.
The People, No Page 7
