THE
POPULISTS
America's
farmers found themselves at their wits' end by 1883. Most of the
nation's people still made their living off the land, but they
found themselves boxed into peonage by nearly every other element
of society.
The
monopolistic pricing practices of merchants and railroads ate
up their profits. They were hamstrung by the federal government's
decision to return to the gold standard after the Civil War, and
the capricious demands of Wall Street that drained money not only
out of rural banks but entire regions. They were bedeviled by
the conundrum that the harder they worked, the more they produced,
the less they had to show for it.
Every
year, thousands of farmers found themselves sinking into a European-style
serfdom. An early attempt to band together and do something for
themselves, called "The Farmer's Alliance," began in Lampasas
County, Texas in 1877, and spread quickly to Kansas, but now seemed
to be running out of steam.
Enter
the first Populist, a 36-year old, former tenant farmer from Mississippi.
It was Daws' brainstorm to make the Alliance an overtly political
organization, with its own "People's" or "Populist" platform,
candidates, and party structure, but his real genius lay in his
dazzling oratory, and his grasp of tactics.
Daws
got the Alliance to appoint him "Traveling Lecturer," and he spread
the word by mouth and by foot, moving about the country, telling
his fellow farmers what they had to do. He found a ready convert
who had even more, a 34-year old Tennssean named William Lamb,
who had all of 25 days of formal education but an unsurpassed
talent for organization.
Together,
Daws and Lamb were the spark the Alliance had been wanting, using
the sweeping executive powers the farmers granted to them to bring
hundred of thousands of new recruits into the fold. All told,
they reached some 2 million people in 43 states—an accomplishment
their leading historian, Lawrence Goodwyn, characterized as the
most massive organizing drive of any citizen institution in nineteenth-century
America.
Yet
the Populists were never about their leaders. Like the corn, more
seemed to spring up from the earth every year. They were about
an idea—or rather, many idea, anything that might enable men to
make a living off the land without losing every shred of human
dignity. Over the years, they have been derided as nativist boobs,
and worse, in part because of latter-day imitators, but at their
best, at the beginning, they were staunchly anti-racist, and brought
a firestorm of new idea into what had become a moribund American
political system.
The
Populists' political program included government ownership of
railroads and utilities, a graduated income tax, a new money system,
direct election of U.S. senators, the secret ballot, laws to protect
union organizing—and above all, some kind of regulation of the
agricultural markets, to ensure farmers a decent return on their
labors. Many of these ideas, of course, were taken up by subsequent,
progressive movements and eventually adopted.
Time
and fate worked against the Populists. They were undermined by
an increasingly industrialized America—by an even greater trend,
born of necessity and boredom, under which farmers streamed in
off the land for centuries, all over the Western world. After
running their own candidate for president in 1892, and winning
numerous state, local, and even congressional elections, they
were folded into William Jennings Bryan's silver wing of the Democratic
Party.
Their
real legacy lived on in a thousand other ways, both more and less
tangible. Here were men and women capable of standing in the hot
sun for hours, listening to speeches about the ever-normal granary,
and the sub-treasury system. Here were people willing to form
collectives, cooperative stores, credit unions, and whatever other
innovations it took to stand up to the faceless money men who
would determine their fate.
"How
is a democratic culture created?" asked Goodwyn, surveying the
Populists' massive rallies out on the lonely plains of Kansas
and Texas.
"Apparently
in such prosaic, powerful ways. When a farm family's wagon crested
a hill en route to a Fourth of July 'Alliance Day' encampment
and the occupants looked back to see thousands of other families
trailed out behind them in wagon trains, the thought that 'the
Alliance is the people and the people are together' took on transforming
possibilities. Such a moment—and the Alliance experience was to
yield hundreds of them—instilled hope in hundreds of thousands
of people who had been without it."
American
Greats Edited by Robert A. Wilson & Stanley Marcus
Public Affairs Press, a member of the Perseus Group
