The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  *   The world’s first modern independent regulatory agencies were midwestern state railroad commissions, set up at the behest of the Granger movement in the 1870s. The Grangers were the direct ancestors of the Farmers’ Alliance, which became the People’s Party. See Chester McArthur Destler, American Radicalism, 1865–1901 (Quadrangle, 1966 [1946]), p. 10.

  *   These were the two favorite scare words of 1896. “Anarchy” because the Democratic platform denounced the way the federal government crushed the Pullman strike and was thus supposedly in favor of lawlessness. “Repudiation” because, in seeking to take the country off the gold standard, Democrats were allegedly proposing that debts be repaid in dollars that were worth less than when the debts were incurred; thus they were supposedly “repudiating” those debts.

  *   Bryan reprinted his New Haven speech in his memoir of the 1896 campaign, The First Battle (W. B. Conkey, 1896), along with a resolution adopted by a joint meeting of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes the next day. It read as follows:Resolved, that we contemplate with deep regret the recent insulting treatment of William J. Bryan by students of a college in the land of the boasted white man’s civilization, and we admonish all Indians who think of sending their sons to Yale that association with such students could but prove hurtful alike to their morals and their progress toward the higher standard of civilization (p. 487).

  *   In private, Hay’s contempt was more ironic. Writing to his friend Henry Adams, Hay described Bryan’s speeches as boring: “He simply reiterates the unquestioned truths that every man who has a clean shirt is a thief and ought to be hanged:—That there is no goodness or wisdom except among the illiterate and criminal classes—That gold is vile:—That silver is lovely and holy.” Letters of John Hay , vol. 3 (Gordian Press, 1969), p. 74.

  *   Populism + Democracy = Popocracy. The allegory of the cartoon went like this: the lady represented the gold standard; the two policemen represented a breakaway faction of gold Democrats; and the caption (“Well Protected”) was a nod to McKinley’s protectionism.

  *   This was a page 1 image of what can only be described as an editorial sculpture, one in a series of efforts mocking Bryan. These were the work of the sculptor Max Bachmann and were somewhat famous in their day. Others in the series depicted Bryan as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, as a would-be slayer of the American eagle, and as a chick hatching from an egg marked “Anarchy.” Several of them are collected here: https://john-adcock.blogspot.com/2013/01/max-bachmann-political-cartoonist-in.html?m=1 .

  † John P. Altgeld, the Democratic governor of Illinois in 1896, had pardoned the surviving Haymarket anarchists and opposed President Cleveland’s military intervention in the Pullman strike, which was led by Eugene Debs. Altgeld was frequently depicted as the real force behind the Bryan campaign. The passage is from the New-York Tribune editorial, “Good Riddance” (November 4, 1896, p. 4).

  *   One historian who has written about the ironic reversal of the antagonists of the 1890s is Richard Hofstadter, who in a 1963 essay mulled over the curious problem of “yesterday’s crank” turning out to be right and “yesterday’s accepted spokesman” turning out to be wrong. However, the historian derived no larger lesson from this, just noted it and moved on. It certainly didn’t soften Hofstadter’s views of Populism, a movement he persistently characterized as one of the main villains of American history.But this reversal deserves to be taken more seriously. If the “crank” of the 1890s was right, he wasn’t a crank after all; if consensus orthodoxy of that period was wrong, maybe we should reconsider our respect for consensus orthodoxy today.

  Richard Hofstadter, “Coin’s Financial School and the Mind of ‘Coin’ Harvey,” his introductory essay to Coin’s Financial School (Belknap Press, 1963), p. 45.

  *   “The world will not be made better,” White wrote on the last page of his Populist novella, by “a movement too weak to conquer its own bigotry.”

  *   A similar incident took place a short time later in a county in east Texas where Populists, with the support of black voters, had been able to prevail in elections until 1900. Populism was finally beaten there by a vigilante organization called the White Man’s Union. Black Populists were murdered, black voters were intimidated, and then, at the climactic moment, the white supremacists took on the local biracial Populist constabulary in a gunfight. The Pops lost the shootout and Populism disappeared from that part of Texas forever. See the essay by Lawrence Goodwyn, “Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study,” American Historical Review , December 1971.

  *   Many who write about the Depression today describe Coughlin and Long as “populists”; indeed, in some accounts these two spectacular demagogues were the only populists of the decade. It is important to remember, however, that neither of them ever applied that word to themselves or acknowledged any debts at all to the tradition of agrarian reform. In the case of Huey Long, at least, that debt was real enough, since his rhetoric often echoed that of the 1890s. In other ways, though, Long was one of a kind, a man who played the American political game ruthlessly and with uncanny ability. (On this, see historian Alan Brinkley’s account, Voices of Protest [Vintage Books, 1983], chapter 7.) A more accurate term for Coughlin and Hearst and the man who took over Long’s movement would be “pseudo-populist.”

  *   Elsewhere I have commented on the weird way this movie predicted the relationship between Fox News and the pseudo-populist Tea Party movement. What Frank Capra imagined in 1941 was reproduced for real by tycoon Rupert Murdoch and the everyman announcer Glenn Beck in 2009–10, with the ultimate result being the election of TV tycoon Donald Trump to the presidency.

  *   This is, roughly speaking, the definition proposed in a study of demagoguery by the veteran journalist Raymond Gram Swing called Forerunners of American Fascism (J. Messner, 1935). In chapters about Coughlin, Long, Hearst, and a handful of others, Swing described them not as fascists proper but as the kind of leader that comes just before fascism, a bridge to the brown-shirted future.

  *   The quotation comes from onetime undersecretary of state Sumner Welles in his wartime book The Time for Decision (Harper & Brothers, 1944), p. 298. Fighting a world war against Nazi racism in which we bailed out the racist empires of our allies and ignored the official racism of our own southern states was obviously a grievous contradiction in this philosophy, a contradiction that Welles never resolved except with evasive banalities about postwar organizations that would fix everything and give everyone national determination, etc.

  *   Because DuPont was preeminent in the explosives business, the company had been targeted in congressional hearings on war profiteering and criticized in detail in a popular 1934 book by H. C. Englebrecht called Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry (Dodd, Mead, 1934).

  *   Another achievement for which E. F. Hutton gained renown in his lifetime was the construction of a fabulous mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, named Mar-a-Lago.

  *   In an election-eve radio address, a former secretary of state named Bainbridge Colby described FDR as “swept headlong by hysterical resentment; shaken by the intensity of his hatreds.” Colby proceeded to quote the famous psychologist Carl Jung:I have just come [from] America where I saw Roosevelt. Make no mistake, he has the most amazing power complex, the Mussolini substance, the stuff of a dictator absolutely.

  Colby was quoting from an interview with Jung that ran in the London Observer . The Swiss psychologist, it seems, was a full-blown anti-populist, perceiving commonalities between (as he put it) “Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, yes, and Roosevelt.” Jung was also a hard-money man, complaining about the “fake money” that governments were producing under the guise of “devaluation.” After declaring that “nature is aristocratic,” Jung continued as follows: “Communistic or socialistic democracy is an upheaval of the unfit against attempts at order.” Furthermore: “A decent oligarchy—call it aristocracy if you like�
��is the most ideal form of government.” I draw these quotations from a reprint of the Jung interview that appeared in the Washington Post on December 11, 1936. Bainbridge Colby’s remarks appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune , November 3, 1936, p. 10.

  *   If we turn to Alexis Carrel’s then-celebrated, now-forgotten book, we find that the passage Stinchfield quoted continues as follows: “The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education. It is absurd to give them the same electoral power as the fully developed individuals. Sexes are not equal. To disregard all these inequalities is very dangerous. The democratic principle has contributed to the collapse of civilization in opposing the development of an élite.”Of course races were not equal, either. Elsewhere in Man, the Unknown , Carrel speculates that “the most highly civilized races” had the fairest complexions while “the lower races” lived in places that were hot and sunny. Man, the Unknown (Harper & Brothers, 1935), pp. 271, 214.

  *   “In the Western world,” pronounced Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Free Press, 1962), “there is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism. In that sense, too, the ideological age has ended” (pp. 402–3).

  *   Hofstadter gives no source for this assertion. “Although many writers cite Populist interferences with academic freedom,” writes political theorist Michael P. Rogin,“in point of fact there is only one example. In Kansas, the Populists ignored academic tenure in reorganizing the Kansas State Agricultural College. This was not, it should be pointed out, because they were suspicious of ‘overeducation’; they rather had a somewhat naïve faith in what education could accomplish. In Kansas, they desired to introduce a liberal arts curriculum into an exclusively agricultural college. In this case the interference with academic freedom resulted not from anti-intellectualism but from enthusiasm for education.” Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy , pp. 180–81.

  It is important to note that the University of Kansas and Kansas State are not the same institution. Also: once Republicans had beaten Populism down in Kansas, they orchestrated a retaliatory mass firing at the same college. See Clanton, Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (University Press of Kansas, 1969), pp. 205–6.

  *   Hofstadter later described his generation’s contribution to scholarship as “the rediscovery of complexity in American history.… The Progressive scheme of polarized conflict has been replaced by a pluralistic vision in which more factors are seriously taken into account.” The Progressive Historians , p. 442.

  *   For example, at the beginning of the chapter of The Torment of Secrecy (Free Press, 1956) on the subject of populism, Shils provides the names of two supposedly admirable representatives of the species—George Norris of Nebraska and Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. It is true that both of these men were prominent progressives from the Midwest, but neither of them was actually an affiliate of the People’s Party. The closest Shils gets to the movement itself is when he name-checks William Jennings Bryan several pages later.

  *   “Emulating the labor movement, we in the South have embraced mass actions,” King said to the National Maritime Union in 1962, “boycotts, sit-ins and, more recently, a widespread utilization of the ballot.” Martin Luther King Jr., “All Labor Has Dignity ,” ed. Michael K. Honey (Beacon Press, 2011), p. 70.

  *   Although King didn’t mention it on this occasion, another factor bringing clarity was the international context in which those coarse sheriffs did their brutal thing. In the competition with the Soviet Union for the nonaligned nations of Africa and Asia, TV footage of police dogs attacking children in the streets of Birmingham made good propaganda for those denouncing the American way.

  *   Fifty years later, as the commission’s last surviving member, Harris often commented on its legacy. See, for example, the op-ed that he co-authored for the New York Times , “The Unmet Promise of Equality,” February 28, 2018.

  *   Oddly enough, Phillips seemed to be aware of this. In the course of his famous book, The Emerging Republican Majority , Phillips used “populist” both in the original sense, describing the destruction of the biracial People’s Party at the hands of the southern elite, and also in the completely opposite sense, as a shorthand for racist southern demagogues—which is to say, the people who destroyed it.

  *   Among other things, Buchanan’s victory in the New Hampshire primary in 1996 triggered a remarkable anti-populist outburst from conservative intellectual Bill Kristol. Republicans, Kristol griped, had shown “almost too much concern and attention for, quote, the people—that is, the people’s will, their prejudices and their foolish opinions. And in a certain sense, we’re all paying the price for that now.… After all, we conservatives are on the side of the lords and barons.” Quoted in Lloyd Grove, “The Castle Storms Back,” Washington Post , February 23, 1996, p. C1.

  *   Bannon expressed this idea to Robert Kuttner in an amazing interview published in the left-wing magazine the American Prospect on October 6, 2017. Bannon said it again to the Guardian in an interview published on December 17, 2019. Donald Trump himself has said almost exactly the same thing. See the story by Josh Green, “How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built,” Bloomberg Businessweek , May 26, 2016.

  *   Of course, there were no motion-picture cameras on hand to record the get-togethers of the Populists, but other farmer protest movements (for example, the Farm Holiday strike of 1932 or the nationwide Tractorcade of 1979) were lavishly photographed, and yet they, too, are always overlooked in documentaries of this kind.

  *   Here is an actual headline of a Daily Kos story that ran about a month after the 2016 election: “Be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance. They’re getting exactly what they voted for.”

  *   The exceptions to this tend to prove the rule. In early 2017, the liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof began urging his readers to show empathy toward certain kinds of Trump voters, specifically the marginal ones who were struggling with difficult economic situations. “Tolerance is a liberal value,” Kristof reminded his audience. A few weeks later, the columnist recounted the outpouring of rage he had received since making this suggestion, writing that “Nothing I’ve written since the election has engendered more anger from people who usually agree with me than my periodic assertions that Trump voters are human, too.”

  *   A celebrated study published in 2016 showed that talking to someone about their prejudice against trans people was an effective method for reducing that prejudice. (See David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, “Durably Reducing Transphobia,” Science 352, no. 6282 [April 8, 2016]: 220–24.)

  *   He was born Emanuel Julius but in 1916, when he married Marcet Haldeman, also a writer of note, they merged their surnames.

  *   On a happier note, the Little Blue Book series also carried important contributions from W.E.B. DuBois and NAACP leader Walter F. White, whose 1928 study of the Harlem Renaissance was published under the title The Negro’s Contribution to American Culture: The Sudden Flowering of a Genius-Laden Artistic Movement.