How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt)
“How to Stop Populism’s Carnage” (Blair)
Human Rights Watch
Hutton, E. F.
Ibsen, Henrik
Illinois
immigration
In Defense of Elitism (Stein)
Ingersoll, Robert
Intellectuals and McCarthy, The (Rogin)
Iowa
Irish immigrants
Italian immigrants
Italy
“It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up” (Traub)
Jackson, Andrew
Jackson, Henry
Jackson, Jesse
Japanese Americans
Jefferson, Thomas
Jews
Jim Crow
Johnson, Lyndon B.
Josephson, Matthew
Judge
Jung, Carl, 128n-129n
Justice Department
Kaltwasser, Cristobal Rovira
Kansas
Kansas City Star
Kansas Populism (Clanton)
Kansas Populists
Kansas State Agricultural College, 155n-56n
Kaus, Mickey
Kazin, Michael
Keillor, Garrison
Kemp, Jack
Kennedy, Ted
Kerner Commission
King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Kipling, Rudyard
Knights of Labor
Kristof, Nicholas
Kristol, Bill
Ku Klux Klan
Kuttner, Robert
labor
La Follette, Robert
Landon, Alf
Lasch, Christopher
Laughlin, J. Laurence
Learning Class
Lease, Mary Elizabeth
Le Bon, Gustave
Lenin, V. I.
Le Pen family
Leslie’s Weekly
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans)
Leuchtenburg, Wiliam
Levitsky, Steven
Lewis, Anthony
Lewis, John
LGBTQ
liberal consensus
liberalism
Life
Limbaugh, Rush
Lincoln, Abraham
Lindsay, John
Lipset, Seymour Martin
Little Blue Books
London Observer
Long, Huey
Lords of the Press (Seldes)
Los Angeles Times
Louisiana
lynching
MacLeish, Archibald
Madison, James
Maine
Man, the Unknown (Carrel)
Mar-a-Lago
Marchand, Roland
March on Washington
1894
1932 (Bonus Army)
1963 (Jobs and Freedom)
1968 (Poor People’s)
Marcotte, Amanda
Marx, Karl
May, Todd
McCarthyism
McGovern, George
McKinley, William
McKinley Tariff
McNamara, Robert
Meet John Doe (film)
Memphis sanitation workers strike
Merchants of Death (Englebrecht)
Michigan
Miller, James
Minneapolis
Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party
Mississippi
Missouri
monopolies
“More Professionalism, Less Populism” (Rauch and Wittes)
Morgenthau, Henry
“Most Lamentable Comedy, A” (White)
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Mudde, Cas
Mü ller, Jan-Werner
multiculturalism
Murdoch, Rupert
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NAACP
NAFTA
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National Association of Manufacturers
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Negro’s Contribution to American Culture, The (Little Blue Book)
Netherlands
Neville, William
New Deal
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New Left
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New York University
New York World’s Fair (1939)
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Nixon, Richard
Nock, Albert Jay
Norris, George
North, Oliver
North Carolina
white supremacy campaign
North Carolina Populists
NRA
Obama, Barack
Obamacare
Occupy Wall Street
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Oh Yeah? (Angly)
Oklahoma
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Omaha Platform of the People’s Party
O’Reilly, Bill
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Orwell, George
Paine, Thomas
Palin, Sarah
Panama Canal
“Paranoid Style in American Politics, The” (Hofstadter)
Parrington, Vernon L.
Peffer, William
Pennsylvania
Pentagon protests
People, Yes, The (Sandburg)
People’s Party
People’s Pocket Series
People’s Program for 1944, The (pamphlet)
People’s Theatre
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Perkins, Frances
Perkins, William R.
Philippine immigrants
Philippines
Phillips, Kevin
Platform of Anarchy, The (Hay)
Pollack, Norman
Poor People’s Campaign
Popocracy
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democracy vs.
early history of
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future of
liberal consensus and
origin of
power of
pseudo, of 1970s
Right and
segregation and
“Populist Dreams and Negro Rights” (Goodwyn)
Populist Manifesto, A (Newfield and Greenfield)
Port Huron Statement
Postel, Charles
Prague Populism Conference
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Prudential Insurance
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Puck
Pullman strike
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railroads
RAND Corporation
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Rauch, Jonathan
Reagan, Ronald
recession of 1893
recession of 1970s
Republican National Convention
of 1980
of 1992
repudiation
Reuther, Walter
Review of Reviews
Revolt of the Masses, The (Ortega y Gasset)
Reynolds, Burt
&
nbsp; Rivera, Diego
Rizzo, Frank
Robeson, Paul
Rockefeller, Jay
Rogin, Michael P.
Romney, Mitt
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Roosevelt, Theodore
Rotary clubs
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Sanders, Bernie, 4i
Santelli, Rick
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Seldes, Gilbert
Selma to Montgomery March
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Share Our Wealth
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Slate
Smith, Al
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Standing Rock protests
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Stanford University
“Global Populisms Project”
State Department
Stayton, William H.
steel strike of 1937
Steelworkers Union
Stein, Joel
Stinchfield, Frederick
stock market crash of 1929
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Sweden
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SXSW
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Teamsters Union
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Teen Vogue
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This Is Your America (pamphlet)
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Tillman, Ben
Time
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Tractorcade (1979)
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Trump, Donald
Tuck, Dick
Twelve Million Black Voices (Wright)
Twitter
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Voices of Protest (Brinkley)
Volcker, Paul
Voltaire
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Wagner, Robert
Wallace, Henry
Wallace, George
Wall Street Journal
War Bonds
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Washington, George
Washington Post
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Watson, Tom
Wealth and Poverty (Gilder)
Weaver, James B.
Welles, Orson
Welles, Sumner
What Is Populism? (pamphlet)
What Must We Do to Save Our Economic System? (Carver)
White, Andrew Dickson
White, Walter F.
White, William Allen
White Man’s Union
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Whitman, Walt
Willamette University
Willkie, Wendell
Wilmington College
Wilmington race riot
Wilson, Woodrow
Winston & Strawn
Wisconsin
Wisconsin Progressive Party
Wittes, Benjamin
women’s rights
Woodward, C. Vann
working class
Works Progress Administration (WPA)
World Bank
World Economic Forum
World War II
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Yale University
You Have Seen Their Faces (Caldwell and Bourke-White)
Zola, É mile
ALSO BY THOMAS FRANK
Rendezvous with Oblivion
Listen, Liberal
Pity the Billionaire
The Wrecking Crew
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
One Market Under God
The Conquest of Cool
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THOMAS FRANK is the author of Listen, Liberal; Pity the Billionaire ; The Wrecking Crew; and What’s the Matter with Kansas? A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper’s , Frank was also the founding editor of The Baffler . He lives outside Washington, D.C. You can sign up for email updates here .
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Introduction: The Cure for the Common Man
1. What Was Populism?
2. “Because Right Is Right and God Is God”
3. Peak Populism in the Proletarian Decade
4. “The Upheaval of the Unfit”
5. Consensus Redensus
6. Lift Every Voice
7. The Money Changers Burn the Temple
8. Let Us Now Scold Uncouth Men
Conclusion: The Question
Photographs
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Thomas Frank
About the Author
Copyright
T HE P EOPLE, N O. Copyright © 2020 by Thomas Frank. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 120 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10271.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design and illustration by Emmanuel Polanco
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Frank, Thomas, 1965– author.
Title: The people, no: a brief history of anti-populism / Thomas Frank.
Description: First edition. | New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020009048 (print) | LCCN 2020009049 (ebook) | ISBN 9781250220110 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250220103 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Populism—United States—History. | Political culture—United States—History. | Social movements—United States—History. | Democracy—United States—History.
Classification: LCC E183 .F715 2020 (print) | LCC E183 (ebook) | DDC 320.56/620973—dc23
LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009048
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009049
First Edition 2020
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected] .
* Before the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution (1913), senators were chosen by state legislatures.
* Yascha Mounk, in The People vs. Democracy , suggests that “one of the earliest populists to rise to prominence” was Jörg Haider, an Austrian rightist whose heyday was in the 1980s and ’90s (p. 114). Similarly, the home page of the Stanford Global Populisms Project tells us that populism was “initially associated with Latin America in the 1990s” before migrating to the United States and giving us President Donald Trump. This seems like the place to mention that the founder of Stanford University, California senator Leland Stanford, was briefly considered as a Populist presidential candidate in 1892 (Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmer’s Alliance and the People’s Party [University of Nebraska Press, 1959 (1931)], p. 234).
† The saga of the People’s Party is related briefly in Populism: A Very Short Introduction by Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser (Oxford University Press, 2017), but the details of the movement are weirdly garbled. For example, the authors explain the rise of Populism by pointing out that “economic changes, such as the coining of silver, affected the rural areas particularly hard.” As we have seen, Populists actually supported the coining of silver as a way of relieving rural hardship.
* Only one of the present-day populism experts openly acknowledges that the 1890s Populists do not fit the current, voguish definition. This is Jan-Werner Müller of Princeton University, who writes that “the one party in US history that explicitly called itself ‘populist’ was in fact not populist,” by which he means, the people who invented the word were not the racist, authoritarian demagogues Müller wishes to associate with the word (What Is Populism? [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016], p. 85). This is admirably forthright of Müller, to be sure, but it somehow doesn’t lead him to do the obvious thing—stop using the word “populist” to describe racist, authoritarian demagogues. Instead he gives us an entire book doing exactly that and then exempts the 1890s Pops from his critique. If historical reality conflicts with fashionable political theory, I guess, it is reality that must give way.
* For the record, here is the statement on trade from the Democratic Platform of 1896, on which Bryan ran for the presidency: “We denounce as disturbing to business the Republican threat to restore the McKinley law, which has twice been condemned by the people in National elections and which, enacted under the false plea of protection to home industry, proved a prolific breeder of trusts and monopolies, enriched the few at the expense of the many, restricted trade and deprived the producers of the great American staples of access to their natural markets.” See more at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1896-democratic-party-platform .
The People, No Page 29
