by H. W. Brands
Third: We believe that the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads.… The government should own and operate the railroads in the interest of the people.
Other platform planks and supporting resolutions called for a national currency “safe, sound, and flexible, issued by the government only” and restored to its earlier magnitude by the “free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the present legal ratio of 16 to 1”; a federal “subtreasury plan” allowing farmers to borrow against crops stored in government warehouses, thus releasing them from dependence on banks and adding flexibility to the money supply; a graduated income tax; public ownership of telephone and telegraph companies; confiscation by the government of land held by railroads and other corporations “in excess of their actual needs,” which land would be made available to “actual settlers”; shorter hours of labor for industrial workers; abolition of the “large standing army of mercenaries known as the Pinkerton system”; a single term for the president and vice president; the secret ballot; popular election of senators; and such techniques of direct democracy as the initiative and referendum. The platform went on to condemn the current policy of essentially unlimited immigration, “which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world,” and to demand the rigid enforcement of the existing eight-hour law for government labor.20
To carry the message to the country and make the fight on the people’s behalf, the convention nominated James Weaver, the erstwhile Iowa Greenbacker. “Serene while others are in tumult; clear while others are confused; secure in his orbit while others are erratic—these characteristics make him a man of value second to none in a great epoch like the present,” one of Weaver’s supporters said of the nominee. “A person of such symmetrical, harmonious development that each excellent trait is balanced by all others.” But just to balance the ticket further, the convention nominated former Confederate general James G. Field of Virginia for vice president.21
SERENITY AND BALANCE at the top of the ticket appealed to the Populists—as the members of the new party were christened by one who remembered his Latin—not least because serenity and sometimes balance were wanting among others who spoke for the movement. Mary Elizabeth Lease was the daughter of Irish refugees from the great famine; her parents settled in Pennsylvania, and her father and brother died in the Civil War. The circumstances of her father’s death—at the prison camp at Andersonville—made her, like James Blaine, an inveterate foe of Democrats. After the war she moved to Kansas and married a pharmacist, whose practice failed in the depression of the 1870s. The family relocated to Texas, where two children died in infancy. As the other children (including the youngest, Ben Hur Lease, named for the protagonist of the best-selling novel of the same name by Lew Wallace) matured, Mary grew active in the woman suffrage and prohibition movements. After a return to Kansas she studied law, was admitted to the bar, and joined the labor wing of the Farmers’ Alliance. When the alliance spawned the People’s party, she became a charter member.
Her passion for popular democracy, against the plutocracy of big capital, made her a Populist favorite. “Wall Street owns the country,” she declared.
It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are prostrate before the manufacturing East. Money rules.… Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.… There are thirty men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars; there are half a million looking for work.…
We want money, land, and transportation. We want the abolition of national banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out. Land equal to a tract thirty miles wide and ninety miles long has been foreclosed and bought in by loan companies of Kansas in a year. We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.
Her opponents called her shrill and corrupted her middle name to Ellen, so they could dub her “Mary Yellin’.” She may never actually have said “What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more hell,” but she didn’t disavow it when it was attributed to her.22
Jeremiah Simpson was another Easterner radicalized by hard times in Kansas. A New Brunswick, Canada, native, Simpson moved to upstate New York with his parents as a child. He became a Great Lakes sailor and eventually a lake boat captain, and then a partner in a Chicago sawmill. After the Panic of 1873 he moved to Kansas to raise cattle, with scant success. He blamed railroads, banks, and speculators in land and commodities. “Man must have access to the land, or he is a slave,” he said. “The man who owns the earth owns the people, for they must buy the privilege of living on his earth.” Government must guarantee access to land, and it must protect those who worked the land from those who gambled on the product of the farmers’ labor. “If the government had protected the farmer as it protects the gambler, this would not have happened,” he said after one speculative raid that left his Kansas neighbors empty-handed while the brokers grew rich. In an 1890 race for Congress, Simpson branded his Republican opponent, James Hallowell, “Prince Hal” and accused him of wearing silk stockings. A Simpson opponent stabbed back, saying that Simpson wore no stockings at all. Simpson became “Sockless Jerry,” an image he played to full political effect. “Jerry Simpson was not a sockless clown,” fellow Kansan William Allen White later observed. “He accepted the portrait which the Republicans made of him as an ignorant fool because it helped him to talk to the crowds.… The real Jerry Simpson profited by his own effigy.”23
Ignatius Donnelly profited by an alter ego, too. Irish like Mary Lease and likewise from Pennsylvania, Donnelly traveled northwest to Minnesota before the Civil War and became, in sequence, a Republican, a Liberal Republican, a Granger, a Greenbacker, and a Union Laborite. A Minnesota reform meeting without Donnelly, Charles Dana’s New York Sun remarked, would have been “like catfish without waffles in Philadelphia.” Donnelly held audiences rapt by his oratory, but his fame spread far beyond his voice on account of the novels and essays he wrote. Some of the essays were abstruse and literary; he devoted two volumes to demonstrating that Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon. His novels were filled with blood and polemic. The most popular, the dystopian Caesar’s Column, grimly recounted a despotism that emerged upon the ruins of democracy (the column of the title was a giant tomb containing the bones of a quarter million of the victims). Readers presumably recognized the literary license Donnelly employed in telling his dark tale; more directly applicable to the politics of the present were certain images he conjured of current government policies. “Take a child a few years old; let a blacksmith weld around his waist an iron band,” Donnelly wrote, with reference to the hard-money policies of Benjamin Harrison’s administration.
At first it causes him little inconvenience. He plays. As he grows older it becomes tighter; it causes him pain; he scarcely knows what ails him. He still grows. All his internal organs are cramped and displaced. He grows still larger; he has the head, shoulders and limbs of a man and the waist of a child. He is a monstrosity. He dies. This is a picture of the world of to-day, bound in the silly superstition of some prehistoric nation. But this is not all. Every decrease in the quantity, actual or relative, of gold and silver increases the purchasing power of the dollars made out of them; and the dollar becomes the equivalent for a larger amount of the labor of man and his productions. This makes the rich man richer and the poor man poorer. The iron band is displacing the organs of life. As the dollar rises in value, man sinks. Hence the decrease
in wages; the increase in the power of wealth; the luxury of the few; the misery of the many.
Donnelly drafted the preamble to the Omaha platform of the People’s party and won the support of some of the delegates for the party’s presidential nomination. But a skeptic pricked the balloon by circulating a likely epitaph for Populism should the idiosyncratic author become the party’s standard-bearer:
Forbear, good friend, to touch these bones,
For underneath these piled stones
Lies party third, ne’er to awaken,
Killed by Ignatius Donnelly Bacon.24
Tom Watson would become more controversial than any of the other Populists, largely because he outlived nearly all of them and much of what they—and he—had stood for. But as he campaigned for the party in Georgia and across the South in the early 1890s, he drew attention chiefly for his belief that poor whites and poor blacks should make common cause against the capitalists and gentry who oppressed them. This view wasn’t unheard of in the South, even in the wake of Redemption, but it was sufficiently unusual that Watson took pains to justify it. Watson contended that the wealthy and well placed in the South had for years employed the race issue to keep the lower classes divided. “Both the old parties have done this thing until they have constructed as perfect a ‘slot machine’ as the world ever saw,” he said.
Drop the old, worn nickel of the “party slogan” into the slot, and the machine does the rest. You might beseech a Southern white tenant to listen to you upon questions of finance, taxation, and transportation; you might demonstrate with mathematical precision that herein lay his way out of poverty into comfort; you might have him almost persuaded to the truth. But if the merchant who furnished his farm supplies (at tremendous usury) or the town politician (who never spoke to him except at election times) came along and cried “Negro rule!” the entire fabric of reason and common sense which you had patiently constructed would fall, and the poor tenant would joyously hug the chains of an actual wretchedness rather than do any experimenting on a question of mere sentiment.
Watson didn’t rely on the generosity of whites, or for that matter of blacks; instead he appealed to their self-interest. “Suppose two tenants on my farm; one of them white, the other black. They cultivate their crops under precisely the same conditions. Their labors, discouragements, burdens, grievances, are the same.” The white tenant decided the Democratic party was ignoring him and decided to join the People’s party. Why? Because its principles and policies seemed more likely to remedy the ills that afflicted him. “Now go back to the colored tenant. His surroundings being the same and his interest the same, why is it impossible for him to reach the same conclusions?” In fact it was not impossible, Watson said, or even remarkable. It just took some getting used to. “Cannot these two men act together in peace when the ballot of one is a vital benefit to the other? Will not political friendship be born of the necessity and the hope which is common to both? Will not race bitterness disappear before this common suffering and this mutual desire to escape it?”25
THE ISSUES the Populists pushed ran the gamut of comprehensibility from the transparent to the mystical. Government ownership of the railroads was self-explanatory, if socialistic. A graduated income tax meant the wealthy would pay at a higher rate than the poor (who ideally wouldn’t pay at all). Popular, or direct, election of senators would take control of the upper house of Congress away from the state legislatures and confer it upon the people.
The Populists’ so-called subtreasury plan was more complicated, not least because it attempted to achieve multiple goals. Farmers hated having to borrow operating funds when interest rates were highest—that is, when everyone else was borrowing—and having to sell their crops when prices were lowest, when everyone else was selling. Moreover, they despised the bankers from whom they had to borrow and the brokers to whom they had to sell. The subtreasury scheme would allow them at once to circumvent the bankers and the brokers and get lower rates on loans and higher prices for crops. The farmers would store their crops in government warehouses and receive Treasury notes for up to 80 percent of the current market value of the crops. The farmers would decide individually when to sell their stored crops, based on their needs and their expectations regarding prices. In this way the gluts that accompanied each harvest and depressed farmers’ incomes would be diminished. Meanwhile the Treasury notes would circulate essentially as money, freeing farmers further from the grip of the banks.
If the subtreasury scheme took paragraphs to explain—the practical details added layers of complexity—the Populists’ currency program required chapters. “Free coinage of silver at 16 to 1” was the standard shorthand; often this reduced to “free silver.” The words meant both more and less than they appeared to, and they required some history to comprehend. From the establishment of the federal government in 1789 the United States government had attempted to operate a bimetallic money standard of gold and silver. A single metal, preferably gold, would have been more manageable, but there wasn’t enough gold in the United States to keep the gears of commerce from seizing up. In fact there wasn’t enough gold and silver together, which was why various forms of paper—bank notes, letters of credit, and, during and after the Civil War, greenbacks—were summoned into service. But gold and silver were the currency of choice for those to whom money was owed, precisely because they were scarce (and therefore valuable). The difficulty of bimetallism, aside from the collective shortage of the two metals, was that the ratio of gold to silver varied over time, depending on discoveries of new mines and of new uses for the two metals. From the 1790s until the 1830s silver was comparatively plentiful and accordingly cheap, prompting debtors to hoard gold and pay their debts with silver. During much of this period ordinary people never saw gold; in effect the United States operated on a silver standard. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 and elsewhere during the following decades flooded the economy with gold, driving silver into hiding. The country shifted, in effect, to a gold standard (supplemented by the Civil War greenbacks). In 1873, as part of an effort to tidy up the currency, Congress passed a Coinage Act that dropped the silver dollar from the list of coins the U.S. mint would produce. At the time the measure seemed little more than prudent financial hygiene, an acknowledgment of an existing state of affairs.
Subsequent events cast a different light on the subject. The American money supply had always been part of the global money supply (until 1848 the United States was utterly dependent on foreign countries for its gold and silver), and the same influences that drove silver from circulation in America did so elsewhere. As a result, several European countries dropped silver from their currencies at about the same time the United States did, in favor of a formal or informal gold standard. Unwanted silver sloshed across the Atlantic, dismaying silver producers in the American West, who watched the demand for their favorite metal fall, and arousing the suspicion of American farmers, who suffered from slumping crop prices and reasoned, accurately enough, that if silver were still being minted their prices would recover. These strange bedfellows—the silver capitalists and the farmers—looked back and detected conspiracy in the Coinage Act, which they dubbed the “Crime of ’73.” They demanded the fell deed be undone and silver restored to the currency.
They succeeded partially. The Bland-Allison Act of 1878, passed over Rutherford Hayes’s veto, mandated the minting of between $2 million and $4 million of silver monthly. This amount was considerably less than the ardent silverites wanted but more than suited the goldbugs. In practice the measure did little to stem the long-term slide in prices that underlay the demands of the farmers, whose complaints continued through the 1880s. The silver chorus added voices at the end of the decade with the admission of the new states of North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Washington, all of which produced silver or angry farmers or both. “I wish this free coinage of senators would stop,” President Benjamin Harrison lamented. Under the influence of the enlarged silver ca
ucus, Congress approved the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which roughly doubled the amount of silver the federal government committed to purchase and coin.26
The silverites cheered but the goldbugs shuddered. “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver,” Treasury secretary William Windom warned the New York Board of Trade, and collapsed on the spot of a fatal heart attack. The omen spooked the financial markets and inspired Republicans to seek an early opportunity to repeal the Sherman Act. Not even John Sherman himself stood by it. The Ohio senator and former Treasury secretary explained that the measure had been a prophylactic against full-blown silver mania. “I voted for it, but the day it became law I was ready to repeal it, if repeal could be had without substituting in its place absolute free coinage.” The opportunity appeared in 1893, when a new financial panic seized international markets and caused a massive loss of confidence in the dollar. Amid a political panic of their own, American legislators repealed the Sherman Act, thereby terminating Treasury purchases of silver.27
SUCH WAS THE situation when William Harvey broke a story that astonished the millions who read it in the months after its 1894 publication. Harvey, a self-trained economist of Populist persuasion, recounted a series of speeches—lectures, actually—given by a mere slip of a man in the auditorium of the Art Institute of Chicago during May of that year. The young fellow—he seemed scarcely more than a boy—went by the single name of Coin, which suited his topic well enough. “My object,” he told his audience in the first lecture, “will be to teach you the A, B, C of the questions about money that are now a matter of everyday conversation.” Coin’s background was blurry, but his command of the subject soon quieted most doubts regarding his expertise. He traced the history of American currency to the early years of the republic—“the days of Washington and Jefferson and our revolutionary forefathers, who had a hatred of England and an intimate knowledge of her designs on this country,” he said significantly. He reminded his listeners that in 1792 Congress had defined the dollar as consisting of 371¼ grains of pure silver. Silver, he stressed, not gold, had been the basis for the dollar. Silver, he said, had remained the basis of the dollar, and hence of the American currency, until 1873. During that time the people had come to embrace silver as the money of the common man. The rich dealt in gold, the rest in silver.
