by Jill Lepore
The populist revolt began when farmers started banding together and calling for cooperative farming and regulation of banks and railroads and an end to corporate monopolies. Nearly a million small farmers in the South and the Midwest flocked to an organization called the Grange. On July 4, 1873, they issued a Farmers’ Declaration of Independence, calling for an end to “the tyranny of monopoly,” which they described as “the absolute despotism of combinations that, under the fostering care of government and with wealth wrung from the people, have grown to such gigantic proportions as to overshadow all the land and wield an almost irresistible influence for their own selfish purposes in all its halls of legislation.”52
Finance capitalism had brought tremendous gains to investors and created vast fortunes, inaugurating the era known as the Gilded Age, edged with gold. It spurred economic development and especially the growth of big businesses: big railroad companies, big agriculture companies, and, beginning in the 1870s, big steel companies. (Andrew Carnegie built his first steel mill in 1875.) But to poor farmers like Mary Lease and to the farmers who joined the Grange, finance capitalism looked like nothing so much, as Lease put it, as “a fraud against the people.”53
It looked that way to wage laborers, too. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 and with seven hundred thousand members by the 1880s, crusaded against the kings of industry. “One hundred years ago we had one king of limited powers,” the head of the Knights of Labor said. “Now we have a hundred kings, uncrowned ones, it is true, but monarchs of unlimited power, for they rule through the wealth they possess.”54 The laborers who raised their fists against the new uncrowned kings also hoped to crush beneath their feet the new peasants. No group of native-born Americans was more determined to end Chinese immigration than factory workers. The 1876 platform of the Workingmen’s Party of California declared that “to an American death is preferable to life on par with a Chinaman.”55 In 1882, spurred by the nativism of populists, Congress passed its first-ever immigration law, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigrants from China from entering the United States and, determining that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to people of Chinese ancestry, decreed that Chinese people already in the United States were permanent aliens who could never become citizens.
The National Farmers’ Alliance, formed in Texas in 1877 to fight for taxing of railroads and corporations and for the establishment of farm cooperatives and the removal of fences from public lands, soon spread into the Dakotas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, and Kansas.56 Populists, whether farmers or factory workers, for all their invocation of “the people,” tended to take a narrow view of citizenship. United in their opposition to the “money power,” members of the alliance, like members of the Knights of Labor, were also nearly united in their opposition to the political claims of Chinese immigrants, and of black people. The Farmers’ Alliance excluded African Americans, who formed their own association, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. Nor did populists count Native Americans within the body of “the people.”
The long anguish of dispossession and slaughter that had begun in Haiti in 1492 opened a new chapter in the 1880s, on the eve of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage. Since the era of Andrew Jackson and the forced removal of the Cherokees from their homelands, the federal government’s Indian policy rested on treaties that confined native peoples to reservations—“domestic dependent nations.” This policy had led to decades of suffering, massacre, and war, as many people, especially on the Plains, where the Cheyenne and Sioux stood their ground, had resisted forced confinement. Plains warfare ended in 1886, when Geronimo, of the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apaches, became one of the last native leaders to surrender to the U.S. Army.57 And still the conquest continued.
In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, under whose terms the U.S. government offered native peoples a path to citizenship in a nation whose reach had extended across the lands of their ancestors. The Dawes Act granted to the federal government the authority to divide Indian lands into allotments and guaranteed U.S. citizenship to Indians who agreed to live on those allotments and renounce tribal membership. In proposing the allotment plan, Massachusetts senator Henry Laurens Dawes argued that the time had come for Indians to choose between “extermination or civilization” and insisted that the law offered Americans the opportunity to “wipe out the disgrace of our past treatment” and instead lift Indians up “into citizenship and manhood.”58
But in truth the Dawes Act understood native peoples neither as citizens nor as “persons of color,” and led to nothing so much as forced assimilation and the continued takeover of native lands. In 1887 Indians held 138 million acres; by 1900, they held only half of that territory. From the great debate at Valladolid in 1550 between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, debate about the morality of conquest had continued all but unabated across hundreds of years, during which each generation of Europeans and Americans who had confronted what by the middle of the nineteenth century they called the “Indian problem” had fallen short of their own understanding of justice.
POPULISTS’ GRIEVANCES WERE many, and bitter. Their best-founded objection was their concern about the federal government’s support of the interests of businesses over those of labor. This applied, in particular, to the railroads. In 1877, railroad workers protesting wage cuts went on strike in cities across the country. President Hayes sent in federal troops to end the strikes, marking the first use of the power of the federal government to support business against labor. The strikes continued, with little success in improving working conditions. Between 1881 and 1894, there was, on average, one major railroad strike a week. Labor was, generally and literally, crushed: in a single year, of some 700,000 men working on the railroads, more than 20,000 were injured on the job and nearly 2,000 killed.59
The lasting legacy of this battle came in the courts. When state legislatures tried to tax the railroads, as California did, federal judges eagerly entertained arguments that such taxes were unconstitutional—even going so far as accepting the argument that such laws violated the rights of corporations as “persons.” In 1882, Roscoe Conkling represented the Southern Pacific Railroad Company’s challenge to a California tax rule. He told the U.S. Supreme Court, “I come now to say that the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and its creditors and stockholders are among the ‘persons’ protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”60
Conkling, aside from having been a senator and a presidential candidate, had twice been nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court (he’d declined, unwilling to bear the loss of his income as a corporate attorney). In offering an argument about the meaning and original intention of the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment, Conkling enjoyed a singular authority: he’d served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that had drafted the amendment and by 1882 was the lone member of that committee still living. With no one alive to contradict him, Conkling assured the court that the committee had specifically rejected the word “citizen” in favor of “person” in order to include corporations. (A legal fiction that corporations are “artificial persons” dates to the eighteenth century.) It’s true that “the rights and wrongs of the freedmen were the chief spur and incentive” of the amendment, Conkling allowed, but corporations had been on the minds of its drafters, too. A New York newspaper, reporting that day’s oral arguments, headlined its story “Civil Rights of Corporations.”61
Much evidence suggests, however, that Conkling was lying. The record of the deliberations of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction does not support his argument regarding the committee’s original intentions, nor is it plausible that between 1866 and 1882, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had kept mysteriously hidden their secret intention to guarantee equal protection and due process to corporations. But in 1886, when another railroad case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, reached the Supreme Court, the court’s official recorder implied that the court had accepted the doctrine that “corporat
ions are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.”62 After that, the Fourteenth Amendment, written and ratified to guarantee freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, became the chief means by which corporations freed themselves from government regulation. In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, “only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.”63 Rights guaranteed to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations.
III.
“MAN IS MAN,” Mary E. Lease liked to say, but “woman is superman.” Populism gave vent to the grievances of farmers and laborers against business and government. But the movement was built by women—women who believed they were morally superior to men.64
Lease entered politics by way of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a federation of women’s clubs formed in Cleveland in 1874 and itself an outgrowth of a campaign against saloons known as the Woman’s Crusade. She first spoke in public at a WCTU rally in Kansas, delivering a hair-raiser called “A Plea for the Temperance Ballot for Women.”65 Lease argued that, to end the scourge of alcohol—which, for women, served as shorthand for husbands who beat their wives and children and who spent their wages on drinking, leaving their families to starve—women needed the right to vote.
This argument reshaped the nation’s political parties. In 1872, the Prohibition Party became the first party to declare itself in favor of women’s suffrage. Seven years later, the WCTU, under the leadership of Frances Willard, adopted “Home Protection” as its motto. The indefatigable Willard, who’d been president of a women’s college and the first female dean of Northwestern University, lived by another motto: “Do Everything.” When the Republican Party failed to support either Prohibition or suffrage, Willard defected from the GOP and founded the Home Protection Party, which in 1882 merged with the Prohibition Party. “Then and there,” Willard wrote, American women entered politics, “and when they came they came to stay.”66
Like Lease, Sarah E. V. Emery, a devout Universalist from Michigan, rose to prominence as a speaker and writer through the WCTU, the Knights of Labor, and the Farmers’ Alliance. The Farmers’ Alliance sold over 400,000 copies of Emery’s anti-Semitic tract Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People. “It is within the memory of many of my readers when millionaires were not indigenous to American soil,” Emery wrote. “But that period has passed, and today we boast more millionaires than any other country on the globe; tramps have increased in a geometrical ratio; while strikes, riots and anarchists’ trials constitute an exciting topic of conversation in all classes of society.” Emery blamed this state of affairs on a conspiracy of Jewish bankers.67
To advance their causes, both populists and suffragists, rejected by the major parties, turned to third-party politics. If the Republican Party had turned its back on equal rights for women, the Democratic Party had still less interest in the cause. Susan B. Anthony hoped to deliver a speech at the 1880 Democratic National Convention, calling on the party “to secure to twenty millions of women the rights of citizenship.” Instead, Anthony was left to look on, in silence, while her statement was read by a male clerk, after which, the New York Times reported, “No action whatever was taken in regard to it, and Miss Anthony vexed the convention no more.”68 Marietta Stow, a newspaper publisher, declared that it was “quite time that we had our own party” and ran for governor of California in 1882 as a candidate of the Woman’s Independent Political Party. Two years later, Belva Lockwood, a DC attorney, campaigned as the presidential candidate of the Equal Rights Party. In 1886, Emery spoke on behalf of suffrage planks at both the Democratic Party and Prohibition Party conventions. But Judith Ellen Foster, who’d helped found the WCTU, condemned third parties at a Republican rally. Far from honoring woman, a third party only “appropriates her work and her influence to its own purposes,” Foster warned. In 1892, Foster founded the Woman’s National Republican Association. “We are here to help you,” she told the party’s male delegates at its convention that year, and, she added, echoing Willard, “we have come to stay.”69
By then, Lease had helped found not a women’s club or a women’s party but a People’s Party, which joined with a movement led by a California newspaperman named Henry George. A character straight out of a Melville novel, George, born in Philadelphia in 1839, had left school at fourteen and sailed to India and Australia as a foremast boy, on board a ship called the Hindoo. Romantics wrote about India as a place of jewels and jasmine; George was struck, instead, by its poverty. Returning to Philadelphia, he became a printer’s apprentice, a position that many radicals before him had taken into politics. (Benjamin Franklin had been a printer’s apprentice. So had William Lloyd Garrison.) Enticed by the West, he joined the crew of a navy lighthouse ship sailing around Cape Horn in 1858 because it was the only way he could afford to get to California. In San Francisco, he edited a newspaper; it soon failed. By 1865, married and with four children, he was begging in the streets to feed his family.70
He finally found work, first as a printer and then as a writer and editor, with the San Francisco Times. From the West, when the railroad had nearly crossed the continent, George wrote an essay called “What the Railroad Will Bring Us.” His answer: the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. In a Fourth of July oration in 1877, he declared, “No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.”71
In Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Causes of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, published in 1879, George argued that the very same technological progress that brought so many marvels brought wealth to the few and poverty to the many. “Discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor,” he wrote. He devised an economic plan that involved abolishing taxes on labor and instead imposing a single tax on land. Tocqueville had argued that democracy in America is made possible by economic equality; people with equal estates will eventually fight for, and win, equal political rights. George agreed. But, like Mary Lease, he thought that financial capitalism was destroying democracy by making economic equality impossible. He saw himself as defending “the Republicanism of Jefferson and the Democracy of Jackson.”72
George believed that the problem of inequality could not be solved without reforming elections. Suffragists suggested that the solution to corrupt elections was for women to vote, and some suggested it would be better to retract the franchise from poor white men (and give it to wealthier white women instead). But George, while granting that elections had become a national scandal, resisted the conclusion “that democracy is therefore condemned or that universal suffrage must be abandoned.”73 He didn’t want poor white men to lose the right to vote, and he supported women’s suffrage (though he vehemently opposed extending either suffrage or any other right of citizenship to Chinese immigrants or their children). He wanted white men to vote better.
In the age of popular politics, Election Day was a day of drinking and brawls. Party thugs stationed themselves at the polls and bought votes by doling out cash, called “soap,” and handing voters pre-printed party tickets. Buying votes cost anything from $2.50, in San Francisco, to $20, in Connecticut. In Indiana, men sold their suffrages for no more than the cost of a sandwich.74 Prohibitionists argued that the best way to battle corruption was to get alcohol out of elections. George argued for getting money out. In 1871, after the New York Times began publishing the results of an investigation into the gross corruption of elections in New York City under Democratic Party boss William Magear Tweed, George, who had spent considerable time in Australia and had married an Australian woman, proposed a reform that had been introduced in Australia in 1856. Un
der the terms of Australia’s ballot law, no campaigning could take place within a certain distance of the polls, and election officials were required to print ballots and either to build booths or hire rooms, to be divided into compartments, where voters could mark their ballots in secret. Without such reforms, George wrote, “we might almost think soberly of the propriety of putting up our offices at auction.”75
To promote the Australian ballot, George created a new party, the Union Labor Party. Mary Lease joined the party in Kansas. In 1886, George, having moved east, ran for mayor of New York on the Union Labor ticket. The Democratic candidate, Abram Hewitt, won, but George beat the Republican, twenty-eight-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, a young man who only six years before had written a senior thesis at Harvard titled “The Practicability of Equalizing Men and Women Before the Law.” Three years later, Henry George and Mary Lease helped to form the People’s Party. “We are depending upon the votes of freemen for our success—votes of men who will not be bought or sold,” Lease said at the party’s Kansas convention in 1890. “Let our motto be more money and less misery.”76
As the suffering of farmers and wage workers grew, so did the ranks of the People’s Party, which became the most successful third party in American history. Between 1889 and 1893, the mortgages on so many farms were foreclosed that 90 percent of farmland fell into the hands of bankers. The richest 1 percent of Americans owned 51 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the poorest 44 percent owned less than 2 percent. Populists didn’t oppose capitalism; they opposed monopolism, which Lease called “the divine right of capital,” predicting that it would go the way of “the divine right of kings.” If they weren’t quite socialists, they were certainly collectivists. “Henry George is not the representative of any political party, clan or ‘ism,’” Lease said. “In the great struggle now going on between the millions who have not enough to eat and the plutocratic few who have a million times more than their craven bodies deserve; in the great struggle between human greed and human freedom, Henry George stands as a fearless exponent and defender of human rights.”77
