Populism
We tend to think the global market is new, but in fact farmers in
the late 19th century faced a world market that placed their
cherished values of independence and control of their lives at risk. Prices for
farm crops, especially wheat and cotton, fell precipitously in the late 19th
century. As farm yields rose faster than demand from the American population,
farmers sought to export, but found themselves in intensified competition from
India, Austalia and Russian wheat, and this brought the price of the crop even
lower. This competitive world market contributed to falling prices and periodic
panics. Farmers found the cost of producing crops higher than the price at
which they could sell them. Farmers didn’t think that it was an “invisible hand
of the market”, however, that caused their plight. Their experiences told them
a different story: that their woes, the loss of farms, their intense insecurity
was brought about not by an invisible hand, but by the hands of railroads and
merchants and especially bankers, who, they argued, did not work to produce the
crops but still made money from their labor. While they did the labor and grew
poorer, the wealthy controlled the market and benefited from it. Railroads for
instance had exclusive agreements with grain elevators, which usually had a
local monopoly—farmers had to sell only to one elevator merchant, who
determined the quality of the grain and its price. Farmers had to pay what they
called “usurious” [the term usury comes from the Bible, meaning an immoral
exorbitant interest rate] prices to
borrow money from merchants and banks for supplies and equipment, which caused
them to fall into debt, and this debt often led to the loss of their farm.
Nationwide, 1/3 of farmers were tenants or sharecroppers by 1890. In the south
and west, where the crop lien system was prominent, the figure was over 50%,
and it was in these sections that the populist movement was strongest.
Farmers used their own experiences, their own values, to reject
the idea that the economy should be built solely around greed and acquisitive
individualism. The populist movement rejected the idea that more freedom and
equality came from markets. Their own experience had taught them otherwise. The
game was rigged, and they weren’t free actors. The populist movement grew out
of this discontent.
As you read the following materials, consider these questions: How
did the farmers build their movement? What, if anything, was radical about
their demands? How is populism similar or different from the labor movement and
the ideologies of socialism and anarchism that you read last week? Compare
Iton’s and Goodwyn’s views on the populist movement and its meaning for the
present. What was the role of race and gender issues in the fate of the
movement? Why did populism fail? What do you think of the role of electoral
politics in this movement? Do you think there is merit in the appeal of current
movements to the legacy of populism? Why or why not?
Note: These questions are intended to give focus to your readings
and are a starting point for our discussion. You do not have to answer all of
them in your journal.
In this package:
Overview of Populist movement from Who Built America?
Primary Documents:
My Country ‘Tis of Thee—song/poem from populism
Populist Platform, 1892
Mary Lease speech
Tom Watson speech
Alliance on cooperation
Black Farmers Alliance in the Cotton Pickers’ Strike of 1891
Historical analysis of the
movement:
Essay by Lawrence Goodwyn, author of Democratic Promise on
populism
Excerpt from Solidarity Blues
Excerpt from Women and American Socialism
Perspectives on the contemporary meaning of populist movement,
1989, by Lawrence Goodwyn and William Greider
Recommended websites for populism
“POPULISTS AND THE POLITICS OF PROTEST” --from American Social History Project, Who Built America? Cd-rom
In 1893, a leading journalist posed a prophetic question:
"Are we perhaps," he asked, "on the eve of another political
uprising similar to that of 1886, though on a grander, a more national scale?"
The answer was yes. The People's Party, commonly known as the Populists,
mounted one of the most potent challenges to the two-party system that America
has ever seen.
Populism's roots were
planted in the cooperative crusade of the Farmers' Alliance, which began in
Texas in the late 1870s. Headed by Charles Macune, the Alliance published a
widely read journal, the National Economist, which promoted the organization's
simple message: "The Alliance is the people and the people are
together." This message was communicated by an army of lecturers at small
local meetings, larger county gatherings, and massive Fourth of July
encampments. The Alliance took action
first in Texas, where farmers challenged the market system through cooperative
buying and selling. They began by "bulking," selling their crops as a
group instead of individually: one bulk sale in Fort Worth brought
participating farmers a crucial 5percent more than those who sold their crops
as individuals. The tactic proved successful despite deep opposition from local
merchants and manufacturers.
Alliance organizers
also formed hundreds of suballiance chapters committed to other cooperative
functions: recovery of stray animals; the use of vigilante methods to protect
farmers from thieves and ranchers hungry for grazing land; and support for poor
agriculturalists victimized by land company agents who used fraudulent methods
to steal settlers' land.
As the Alliance gained
momentum in the early 1880s, it spread throughout the South and across the
Great Plains. In Minnesota, for example, the Alliance grew to 15,000 members by
1889, spurred by the stump oratory of the lecturer, utopian novelist, and
aspiring politician Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly's widely read novel Caesar's
Column, published in 1889, communicated the mixed ideological signals of the
farmers' crusade. Anticlerical and strongly opposed to eastern commercial
interests, the novel also lapsed into scapegoating and crude anti-Semitism. At
its peak the Alliance claimed hundreds of thousands of members and supporters
nationwide. Approximately one-quarter were the
wives or daughters of farmers.
The Farmers' Alliance
nonetheless exhibited crucial weaknesses that would continue to haunt farmer
protest into the 1890s, flaws that held the democratic impulses of rural
agitation in check. First, he Alliance drew on diverse groups of farmers,
merging the interests of dirt farmers and large planters. Second, the
cooperative program of the Alliance spoke primarily to those who still owned
their land and marketed their crops. It did not address the problems of
wage-earners or landless rural people, however much the rhetoric of Alliance
lecturers might appeal to such dispossessed people. Third, the Alliance
excluded African-Americans from membership. The deep racism of most southern
Alliancemen, whose fathers had often been in direct competition with
slaveholding planters, led them to oppose any efforts to organize black
sharecroppers or rural laborers.
By keeping blacks out,
the Alliance excluded nearly half of the agriculturalists of the South, failed
to challenge the deepening white supremacy of the new South, and undermined its
own goal of building solidarity among all producers. A separate Colored
Farmers' Alliance did emerge in the 1880s and by 1890 probably encompassed
250,000 members. It made considerable headway with its white counterpart and
was accepted as an ally by some white farmers. But large numbers of
African-Americans in the southern countryside
continued to place their trust in the Republican Party as the vehicle of their
liberation, fearing that the growth of the Alliance would actually intensify
their oppression by strengthening the small white producers who habitually
subjected them to racist jibes and direct assault.
None of these
weaknesses was fully apparent during the 1880s. When members of the Southern
Alliance met in 1889 with a parallel organization from the Great Plains in St.
Louis to discuss a merger, the future looked bright. Though the meeting did not
lead to a united body, there was a general consensus on the need to nationalize
the railroads, prohibit large landholding companies, abolish national banks,
and institute a graduated income tax.
But the St. Louis
gathering did produce a new idea: Charles Macune's innovative plan for a
federal subtreasury that would provide farmers with storage space for their
crops in government-owned warehouses until prices climbed to acceptable levels.
While the crops piled up, farmers were to receive state loans of up to 80 percent
of the current market price for their crop, the loan to be repaid when the
price rose to the point that a sale might be undertaken. Over the next few
years the subtreasury plan captured the
imagination of farmers across the nation.
In 1890, farmers
plunged directly into the political fray, capturing local Democratic parties in
the Southwest and forming independent parties of their own in the Plains
states. The level of involvement by the rural poor astonished America. Sixteen
hundred wagons pulled up for one meeting at Hastings, Nebraska. Rural Kansas
typically had open-air rallies of 25,000 people. The summer of 1890 would long
be remembered in the Midwest as "that wonderful picnicking, speechmaking
Alliance summer."
The farmers' movement
spawned a group of extremely effective orators. "Sockless" Jerry
Simpson, a Kansas farmer whose poverty earned him his nickname, spoke a
language in perfect pitch with that of his followers. Mary Elizabeth Lease, who
urged the movement to place woman suffrage at the heart of its agenda, was the
most effective of all. An Irish-born lawyer, Lease delivered hundreds of
speeches across Kansas in 1890, arguing that women "should be heart and
hand in this Farmers' Alliance movement."
This political upsurge
produced dramatic results. In the South, the Alliance elected four governors
and more than forty congressmen and took control of eight legislatures. Great
Plains farmers made gains as well, electing state legislators and congressmen
in Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Many farm activists reasoned that if
such results could be secured in the absence of effective party machinery, the
possibilities for a well-organized third party seemed limitless.
The People's Party,
founded in February 1892, held its first convention in July in Omaha, Nebraska.
Here 1,300 delegates adopted a platform that combined a biting attack on
economic and social conditions with a hopeful call to action. "We meet in
the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material
ruin," declared the preamble to the Omaha platform. "The fruits of
toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few,
unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn,
despise the Republic and endanger liberty."
The Populist Party's
demands-for free coinage of silver, which would increase the amount of circulating currency (thereby aiding
cash-poor farmers); a graduated income tax; government ownership of railroads
and telegraph lines; and establishment of the cooperative-inspired subtreasury
system-spoke most immediately to the needs of farmers. Other planks in the
Populist program-direct election of U.S. senators (who were at this time still
elected by state legislatures), restriction of presidents to a single term, and
use of the democratic participation in decision-making on major issues-had
broader appeal. Finally, the call for a shorter working day and for immigration
restriction represented attempts to speak to the concerns of organized labor.
In the 1892
elections, the Populists garnered over one million votes and elected governors
in Kansas and Colorado. Nevertheless, the electoral results failed to live up
to the high hopes of the party's supporters. Urban workers did not vote for the
People's Party, despite massive efforts to bring them into a farmer-labor
alliance. Furthermore, the party remained virtually unknown in much of the
nation in 1892.
Helped by the 1893
depression, the Populist vote in the 1894 election increased by one-half over
1892, passing the 1.5 million mark. As a result, the party had to be taken
seriously: the Democrats, in order to win back their supporters, began
selectively to endorse parts of the Populist program.
By 1894, it had
become clear to Populist leaders that their movement had reached its maximum
strength in the countryside; if the party was to push forward, it would have to
find ways of attracting urban working people. The potential power of a
farmer-labor alliance was central to the producer ideology of the Gilded Age's
reform milieu, but AFL leaders did not give it much support. Samuel Gompers
dismissed working-class efforts to ally with the People's Party as
"unnatural," explaining that "composed, as the People's Party
is, mainly of employing farmers without any regard to the interests of the
employed farmers of the country districts or the mechanics and laborers of the
industrial centers, there must of necessity be a divergence of purposes,
methods, and interests."
But however logical
Gompers's position might have been, it was contradicted by political
experience. Workers in the mountain West who supported Populist candidates in
large numbers in 1892 had little cause for regret. Colorado, where miners
helped put Populist Davis Waite in the governor's mansion, rapidly became one
of the most prolabor states in the nation. Waite sent in the state militia to
protect miners from their employers' private army in an 1894 strike, publicly
supported the Pullman strike, and defended the rights of Coxey's followers to
make their way across the state.
In the November 1894
elections, proponents of the farmer-labor alliance focused their attention on
Illinois. Here leaders of the Chicago labor movement and the state's agrarian
activists sought to overcome their ideological differences and launch a united
movement. With the intellectual reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd pointing the way
and trade unionists embracing the cause, the Illinois movement hoped for a
substantial victory.
On election day many
Illinois coalminers and railroad workers did indeed follow their union leaders
in voting Populist. But many other urban workers cast their lot with a party
that appealed directly to their narrow economic interest and their ethnic
loyalties. Republicans, not Populists, fared best in the "distinctively
workingmen's districts." Proclaiming "a full dinner pail" for
all, the party won over many workingmen to the notion of a protective tariff on
foreign goods as the key to renewed prosperity. This was an acute reminder that
a farmer-labor coalition was always a fragile entity and that political reform
could easily take a backseat to the lure of a quick economic fix.
The story was much
the same in other parts of the nation. In some areas-Milwaukee, the Ohio Valley
coal communities, and in the Irish Catholic mining regions of the
West-Populists succeeded in turning working-class disgust with the Democrats
into votes for the People's Party. But the Republicans were the decisive
winners among workers. In the biggest victory in the history of Congress, the
Republicans gained 117 seats. In New England and the Midwest the Democrats were
overwhelmed; they even lost ground in the South. The 1894 elections broke
through the deadlock of two-party competition and stalemate that had dominated
American politics since the close of the Civil War. The Republicans became the
clear-cut majority party.
At the AFL's convention
in Denver one month later, these Republican victories set the stage for a
crucial debate over the political course of the AFL. For a year prior to the
convention, socialist trade unionists
led by Socialist Labor Party member and Chicago Populist Thomas J. Morgan had
canvassed the national unions affiliated with the AFL on behalf of a broad program
of independent farmer-labor action and social and political reform. The
socialists' program, which was based on the platform of the British Independent
Labour Party, called for compulsory education; inspection of mines and
factories; abolition of sweatshops; municipal ownership of streetcar systems
and gas and electric utilities; nationalization of telegraphs, telephones,
railroads, and mines; and collective ownership by all the people of all means
of production.
Many trade
unionists-the mineworkers, cigarmakers, tailors, brewery workers, painters,
electrical workers, and machinists-responded favorably to the socialists'
program. But at the AFL convention in Denver in December 1894, Morgan and his
allies were outmaneuvered. While the delegates did embrace most of the
socialist platform, Gompers and his allies were able to prevent ratification of
two crucial planks: the call for social ownership of the means of production
(socialism), and outright endorsement of independent political action.
To defeat these two
planks, Gompers forged an alliance with "racketeers" such as William
Columbus Pomeroy (well known for extracting "subsidies" from the
Republicans and the Democrats) and conservative business unionists. The
socialists retaliated against Gompers by denying him reelection to the AFL
presidency, the only break in his nearly forty-year tenure as the leader of the
AFL.
Thus, while the Denver
AFL convention demonstrated the depth of worker disenchantment with the
industrial order, it did not further the cause of the most potent challenger to
that order: independent political action in the form of Populism. But the
biggest blow to the People's Party was yet to come. With the 1896 elections
approaching and the Democratic Party facing almost certain defeat, its rank and
file moved to adopt as their own one of
the most appealing planks in the Populist platform: free silver.
Free silver was only
one aspect of the Populists' program. At the 1892 Omaha convention, delegates
had given the demand for government ownership of the railroads much heartier
approval than that for free silver. Still, prosilver sentiment ran deep in the
country at large. Especially after the Panic of 1893 and the sharp deflation
that followed, Populists emphasized this issue as a way of attracting support
among western silver miners and credit-starved farmers unattracted by other
aspects of their program.
This emphasis on
silver, however, proved to be the Populists' undoing. In their party convention
of 1896, Republicans nominated Ohio governor William McKinley and held fast to
their hard-money theories, which linked
the dollar's worth to a rigid gold standard. Democrats, however, confounded all
predictions by endorsing the unlimited coinage of silver and nominating a young
Nebraska journalist, William Jennings Bryan, as their presidential candidate.
Bryan lashed out at the Republican advocates of hard money, declaring,
"You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
The Populist movement
now literally tore itself apart on the issue of whether to endorse
"fusion" with Bryan and the Democrats or maintain political
independence. In the end the former road was chosen, and Bryan received the
official nomination of the People's Party. Although some Populist leaders, such
as Henry Demarest Lloyd, vigorously dissented from this wholesale desertion of
the broad reform program enshrined in the Omaha platform, there was little they
could do in the face of fusion sentiment.
Despite the fervor
of the campaign, which one commentator said "took the form of religious
frenzy," McKinley overwhelmed Bryan. The Republican's margin of victory
was the most lopsided in twenty-five years.
Though the People's
Party lived on for twelve years after 1896, it put its worst face forward to
the public, lapsing into vile racism and supporting the movement to take the
vote away from African-Americans. Populism as a force in American life, and as
an attractive possibility for workers, was dead. With its demise, an alliance
of the producing classes of town and country was tarnished for a generation and
more.
*****************
Populist
version of
My
Country ‘Tis of Thee
"My
country, 'tis of Thee,
Land
of lost Liberty,
Of Thee we sing.
Land
which the Millionaires,
Who
govern our affairs,
Own
for themselves and heirs,
Hail to thy King.
Land
once of noble braves,
But
now of wretched slaves,
Alas! too late!
We
saw sweet Freedom die,
From
letting bribers, high,
Our
unpriced suffrage buy,
And mourn thy fate"
**********
Transcript from Great Issues
in History Vol 2, Edited by Richard Hofstadter, Vintage Books
-from website: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/8569/omaha.html
"The Omaha
Platform"
This preamble to the
Populist Platform, adopted by the People's Party at its first national
convention in Omaha on July 4, 1892, was composed by Ignatius Donnelly, a
former Lieutenant Governor and Congressman as a Lincoln Republican from Minnesota
who later became a Granger and populist reformer.
The conditions which
surround us best justify our co-operation; we meet in the midst of a nation
brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption
dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the
ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized; most of the states have been
compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal
intimidation or bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled;
public
opinion silenced; business
prostrate, our homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished and the land
concentrating in the hands of
capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for
self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their labor; a hireling
standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and
they are rapidly disintegrating to European conditions. The fruits of the toil
of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in
the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and
endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we
breed the two great classes--tramps and millionaires.
The national power to create
money is appropriated to enrich bond-holders; a vast public debt payable in
legal-tender currency has been funded into gold-bearing bonds, thereby adding
millions to the burdens of the people ...
We have witnessed for more
than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties
for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the
suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both
these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop
without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise
us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming
campaign, every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a
plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that
capitalists, corporations national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the
demonetization of silver, and the oppression of usurers, may all be lost sight
of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of
mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the
millionaires.
Assembled on the anniversary
of the birthday of the nation, and filled with the spirit of the grand general and
chieftain who established our independence, we seek to restore the government
of the Republic to the hands of the "plain people," with which class
it originated. We assert our purposes to be identical with the purposes of the
National Constitution; to form a more perfect union and establish justice,
insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the
general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our
posterity.
We declare that this
Republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the
people for each other and for the nation' that it cannot be pinned together by
bayonets; that the Civil War is over, and that every passion and resentment
which grew out of it must die with it, and that we must be in fact, as we are
in name, one united brotherhood of free [men]. ...
We believe that the powers
of government--in other words, of the people--should be expanded (as in the
case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an
intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end
that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land. ...
********************
The
Alliance on Community -1891(sorry, I’ve misplaced citations for the following 4
documents)
...
These ideas have gained such a hold upon public opinion, that they bid fair to
cause a complete change in our form of government, as far as its industrial
conditions are concerned, during the next quarter of a century. It looks as
though, before that period was passed, the government would assume control and
ownership of all means of transportation in the form of railroads; that the
government would adopt a system of issuing money to the people without the aid
of banking institutions, and that a larger volume per capita would be in
circulation than ever before in the history of any government in the world;
that the local governments of cities and towns would assume control and
complete ownership of all street railroads, gas and water works, In fact, it
bids fair to be a radical revolution in the industrial affairs of government.
It looks as though the days of individualism and corporations were doomed, and
that the next step in the line of human advancement would be the adoption of
the socialistic state of society.
****************
Tom
Watson, 1892 speech:
...
The Corporation is a convenient cloak for the rascality of the individual. It
is also his protection. His share in the profits has no limits save the amount
of the profits; while his share of the losses is confined to the stock he
subscribed for . . . These Corporations
are the Feudal barons of this Century. Their Directors live in lordly Palaces
and Castles. Their Yachts are on the sea; their Parlor Cars on the rails. They
spread feasts that would feed a starving factory town. They throw away on the
decorations of a Ball Room enough to clothe the children of a city. They keep
bands of Militia to do their fighting. In Pennsylvania it is called the
"Coal and Iron Police." In New York and Illinois it is called 'The
Pinkerton Detective Agency." At the word of command these hireling
assassins shoot down men, women and children. Time and again they have made the
streets run red with the blood of innocent people. The murderers are never
punished. They are spirited away on the trains. Not only do the Corporations
keep armed Retainers: they keep oily and servile Courtiers to do their bidding
in other walks of life. Their paid Lobby bribes the voter. Their paid editor
feeds the public with lies. Their corrupt Lawyers and judges peddle out justice
to the highest bidder. Their Attorneys go on the Bench or into Senates to vote
the will of their Masters. The ambitious young men fear them: their power is so
terribly great. The pulpit fears them: for the plush-covered Pew is the seat of
the millionaire. To restore the liberties of the people, the rule of the
people, the equal rights of the people is our purpose; and to do it, the
revolution in the old systems must be complete....
The hot-beds of crime and vice to-day
are at the two extremes of Society. One is among the class who have all the
work and no money; the other is with the class who have all the money and no
work. The one class is driven to crime and vice by hard- ships, despair,
desperation. The other class chooses crime and vice because of their surplus of
money, their lack of purpose, their capacity to live in idle- ness and gratify
sensual pleasures....
Any system which increases the Moneyed
Class where there is all money and no work, debauches Society.... Any System
which increases the class where there is all work and no money debauches and
endangers Society. Any system which will add to the great Middle Class where
there is reasonable work and fair reward, secures to Society the best results
of which humanity is capable. Every principle advocated by the People's Party
seeks that end and logically leads to it.
Why
the Third Party is Necessary in the South
1.
A third party is absolutely necessary in the South because, under present
conditions, neither of the old parties can afford our people any relief. The
Republican Party is composed of a few whites and the negroes. They hate the
name of Democrat. Under the present organization of their party, no aid can
come from them because they are absolutely controlled from the North under a
platform and un- der a leadership which repudiates our demands for reform. The
Democratic party, on the other hand, is composed of the whites and a few
negros. They hate the name Republican. Under the present organization no aid
can come from them because they are likewise controlled from the North under a
platform and a leadership which repudiates our demands for reform....
2.
The Southern people were always supporters of the Jeffersonian theory of
government. They al- ways believe in preserving the rights of the individ- ual
citizen and the maintenance of civil equality. They always dreaded the
Hamiltonian idea of a moneyed aristocracy with national banks, unbridled
corporations and the class rule of the few....
3.
It offers the only solution of the color question. Under our generous treatment
of the negro in the South he is becoming rapidly educated. He can fully
appreciate an argument addressed to his interest as a farmer and as a laborer.
I have found them quick to understand the reform measures we advocate. As a
body they are laborers, not capitalists. What is more natural than that they
should feel a deep personal interest in this movement. They do feel it. They
will as a rule vote with us on it, leaving their party for the very same
reasons that we leave ours. Thus the two races will dwell side by side in
political harrnony instead of political discord. nere are those who profess to
see great danger of negro supremacy. I do not share in this alarm. I cannot see
how the colored people can be more dangerous to us when they agree with us and
vote with us than when they differ from us and vote against us. We assume a
singularly absurd attitude when we say that white people shall never have good
laws just because the colored people are going to help us get them.
4.
Because it is the death of sectionalism....
*******************
J.
H. Turner, National Secretary-Treasurer of the National Farmers Alliance and
Industrial Union, 1891:
... The white farmers of the South, while they
are more reluctant to cut loose from party, are perfectly willing and ready to
take the negro by the hand and say to him- We are citizens of the same great
country; we have the same foes to face, the same ills to bear; therefore our
interests as agriculturists are one, and we will co-operate with you, and
defend and protect you in all your rights. In proof of the above, I will simply
submit the agreement entered into by the National Farmers' Alliance and
Industrial Union and the Colored Na- tional Farmers' Alliance and Co-operative
Union, at their meetings in the city of Ocala, Florida, on the second day of
December, 1890, which is as follows:
Your
committee on above beg leave to report that we visited the Colored Farmers'
National Alliance and Go-operative Union Committee, and were received with the
utmost cordiality, and after careful consultation it was mutually and
unanimously agreed to unite our orders upon the basis adopted December 5, 1890,
a basis between the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union and the
Farmers' Mutual Benefit Association; ... and hereby pledge ourselves to stand
faithfully by each other in the great battle for the enfranchisement of labor
and the laborers from the control of corporate and political rings; each order
to bear its own members' expense on The Supreme Council, and be entitled to as
many votes as they have legal voters in their organization. We recommend and
urge that equal facilities, educational, commercial, and political, be demanded
for colored and white Alliance men alike, competency considered, and that a
free ballot and a fair count will be insisted upon and bad, for colored and
white alike, by every true Alliance man in America. We further recommend that a
plan of district Alliances, to conform to district Alliances provided for in
this body, be adopted by every order in confederation, with a district
lecturer, and county Alliances organized in every county possible, and that the
lecturers and officers of said district and counties co-operate with each other
in conventional, business, educational, commercial, and political matters.
**************
The Texas Colored Alliance and the Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891
From Herbert Aptheker, Documentary History of the Negro People
(New York, 1951)
The
colored cotton pickers in Texas have agreed not to pick cotton after September
20 for less than $1 per hundred pounds and board. This organization of cotton
picers has been perfected through the Colored Alliance, and now numbers more
than half a million, with thousands being added every day throughout the
Southern states. Col. R. A. Humphrey,
general superintendent of the Colored Alliance. . .[said] it had been induced
by organizations some time ago, of planters and merchants in certain sections,
notably Memphis and Charleston—to reduce the price for picking to a very low
standard, and that the colored picerks had combined to protect themselves from
this dictation, and he thought they would be able to do so. It is learned that a
circular has been mailed at Houston, Texas, to every colored sub-alliance
throughout the country, fixing the date when the strike of the pickers will be
simultaneousl.y inaugurated, and how it shall be conducted.
*******************
Mary
Elizabeth Lease, Speech to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, in Joan M.
Jensen, With These Hands: Women Working on the Land (Old Westbury, N.Y.:
The Feminist Press, 1981), 154-160."
Mary
Elizabeth Lease is best known for her injunction to farmers to “raise less corn
and more hell” (though now historians suggest that she actually didn’t say
this). But in this 1890 speech to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in
1890 discusses how women carved out a prominent role in the Populist movement.
Madame
President and Fellow Citizens: –
If God were to give me my choice to live
in any age of the world that has flown, or in any age of the world yet to be, I
would say, O God, let me live here and now, in this day and age of the world’s
history.
For we are living in a grand and wonderful
time – a time when old ideas, traditions and customs have broken loose from
their moorings and are hopelessly adrift on the great shoreless, boundless sea
of human thought – a time when the gray old world begins to dimly comprehend that
there is no difference between the brain of an intelligent woman and the brain
of an intelligent man; no difference between the soul-power or brainpower that
nerved the arm of Charlotte Corday to deeds of heroic patriotism and the
soul-power or brain-power that swayed old John Brown behind his death dealing
barricade at Ossawattomie. We are living in an age of thought. The mighty
dynamite of thought is upheaving the social and political structure and
stirring the hearts of men from centre to circumference. Men, women and
children are in commotion, discussing the mighty problems of the day. The
agricultural classes, loyal and patriotic, slow to act and slow to think, are
to-day thinking for themselves; and their thought has crystallized into action.
Organization is the key-note to a mighty movement among the masses which is the
protest of the patient burden-bearers of the nation against years of economic
and political superstition.
The mightiest movement the world has
known in two thousand years. . . is sending out the gladdest message to
oppressed humanity that the world has heard since John the Baptist came
preaching in the wilderness that the world’s Redeemer was coming to relieve the
world’s misery. We witness today the most stupendous Peter the Hermit led the
armies of the East to battle against the Saracens in the Holy Land.
The movement among the masses today is an
echo of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, an honest endeavor on the part of the
people to put into practical operation the basic principles of Christianity:
“Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.”
In an organization founded upon the
eternal principles of truth and right, based upon the broad and philanthropic
principle, “Injury to one is the concern of all,” having for its motto, “Exact
justice to all, special privileges to none,” – the farmers and laborers could
not well exclude their mothers, wives and daughters, the patient burden bearers
of the home, who had been their faithful companions, their tried friends and
trusted counselors through long, weary years of poverty and toil. Hence the
doors of the Farmers’ Alliance were thrown open wide to the women of the land.
They were invited into full membership, with all the privileges of promotion; actually
recognized and treated as human beings. And not only the mothers, wives and
daughters, but “the sisters, the cousins and the aunts,” availed themselves of
their newly offered liberties, till we find at the present time upward of a
half-million woman in the Alliance, who, because of their loyalty to home and
loved ones and their intuitive and inherent sense of justice, are investigating
the condition of the country, studying the great social, economic and political
problems, fully realizing that the political arena is the only place where the
mighty problems of to-day and tomorrow can be satisfactorily fought and
settled, and amply qualified to go hand-in-hand with fathers, husbands, sons
and brothers to the polls and register their opinion against legalized robbery
and corporate wrong.
George Eliot tells us that “much that we
are and have is due to the unhistoric acts of those who in life were
ungarlanded and in death sleep in unvisited tombs.” So to the women of the
Alliance, who bravely trudged twice a week to the bleak country schoolhouse,
literally burning midnight oil as they studied with their loved ones the
economic and political problems, and helped them devise methods by which the
shackels of industrial slavery might be broken, and the authors of the nation’s
liberties, the creators of the nation’s wealth and greatness, might be made
free and prosperous – to these women, unknown and uncrowned, belongs the honor
of defeating for reelection to the United States Senate that man who for eighteen
years has signally failed to represent his constituents, and who during that
time has never once identified himself with any legislation for the oppressed
and overburdened people.
Three years ago this man [John James]
Ingalls [Republican Senator from Kansas] made a speech on woman suffrage at
Abilene, Kan., in which he took occasion to speak in the most ignorant and
vicious manner of women, declaring that “a woman could not and should not vote
because she was a woman.” Why? She was a woman, and that was enough; the
subject was too delicate for further discussion.
But we treasured up these things in our
hearts, and then his famous, or rather, infamous interview in a New York paper
appeared, in which he declared that: “It is lawful to hire Hessians to kill, to
mutilate, to destroy. Success is the object to be the world has outgrown its
Christ and needs a new one.” This man, said the law-abiding God fearing women,
must no longer be permitted to misrepresent us. So we worked and waited for his
defeat. And the cyclone, the political Johnstown, that overtook the enemies of
the people’s rights last November, proves what a mighty factor the women of the
Alliance have been in the political affairs of the nation.
I overheard yesterday morning at the hotel
breakfast table a conversation between two gentlemen in regard to Ingalls. “I
consider his defeat,” said the first speaker, “to be a national calamity.”
“Your reasons,” said the second. “Why, he is such a brilliantly smart man,” he
replied. “True,” said the other; “but he must needs be a smart man to be the
consummate rascal he has proven himself to be.” And I thought as I heard the
remarks, “Our opinion is also shared by men.” You wonder, perhaps, at the zeal
and enthusiasm of the Western women in this reform movement. Let me tell you
why they are interested. Turn to your old took the place of the sod shanty, the
log-cabin and the humble dug-out.
Yet, after all our years of toil and
privation, dangers and hardships upon the Western frontier, monopoly is taking
our homes from us by an infamous system of mortgage foreclosure, the most
infamous that has ever disgraced the statutes of a civilized nation. It, takes
from us at the rate of five hundred a month the homes that represent the best
years of our life, our toil, our hopes, our happiness. How did it happen? The
government, at the bid of Wall Street, repudiated its contracts with the
people; the circulating medium was contracted in the interest of Shylock from
$54 per capita to less than $8 per capita; or, as Senator [Preston] Plumb [of
Kansas] tells us, “Our debts were increased, while the means to pay them was
decreased;” or as grand Senator [William Morris] Stewart [of Nevada] puts it,
“For twenty years
the
market value of the dollar has gone up and the market value of labor has gone
down, till to-day the American laborer, in bitterness and wrath, asks which is
the worst – the black slavery that has gone or the white slavery that has
come?”
Do you wonder the women are joining the
Alliance? I wonder if there is a woman in all this broad land who can afford to
stay out of the Alliance. Our loyal, white-ribbon women should be heart and
hand in this Farmers’ Alliance movement, for the men whom we have sent to
represent us are the only men in the councils of this nation who have not been
elected on a liquor platform; and I want to say here, with exultant pride, that
the five farmer Congressmen and the United States Senator we have sent up from
Kansas – the liquor traffic, Wall Street, “nor the gates of hell shall not
prevail against them.”
[At this point many women in the audience
were severely shocked, and the orator explained that the phrase “gates of hell”
was a quotation from the Bible.]
It would sound boastful were I to detail
to you the active, earnest part the Kansas women took in the recent campaign. A
Republican majority of 82,000 was reduced to less than 8,000 when we elected 97
representatives, 5 out of 7 Congressmen, and a United States Senator, for to
the women of Kansas belongs the credit of defeating John J. Ingalls; He is
feeling badly about it yet, too, for he said to-day that “women and Indians
were the only class that would scalp a dead man.” I rejoice that he realizes
that he is politically dead.
I might weary you to tell you in detail
how the Alliance women found time from cares of home and children to prepare
the tempting, generous viands for the Alliance picnic dinners; where hungry
thousands and tens of thousands gathered in the forests and groves to listen to
the words of impassioned oratory, ofttimes from woman’s lips, that nerved the
men of Kansas to forget their party prejudice and vote for “Mollie and the
babies.” And not only did they find their way to the voters’ hearts, through
their stomachs, but they sang their way as well. I hold here a book of Alliance
songs, composed and set to music by an Alliance woman, Mrs. Florence Olmstead
of Butler County, Kan., that did much toward moulding public sentiment.
Alliance Glee Clubs composed of women, gave us such stirring melodies as the
nation has not heard since the Tippecanoe and Tyler campaign of 1840. And while
I am individualizing, let me call your attention to a book written also by an
Alliance woman. I wish a copy of it could be placed in the hands of every woman
in this land. “The Fate of a Fool” is written by Mrs. Emma G. Curtis of
Colorado. This book in the hands of women would teach them to be just and
generous toward women, and help them to forgive and condone in each other the
sins so sweetly forgiven when committed by men.
[Here the gavel announced that the time
was up, but the speaker begged for and received a short extension.]
Let no one for a moment believe that this
uprising and federation of the people is but a passing episode in politics. It
is a religious as well as a political movement, for we seek to put into
practical operation the teachings and precepts of Jesus of Nazareth. We seek to
enact justice and equity between man and man. We seek to bring the nation back
to the constitutional liberties guaranteed us by our forefathers. The voice
that is coming up to day from the mystic chords of the American heart is the
same voice that Lincoln heard blending with the guns of Fort Sumter and the
Wilderness, and it is breaking into a clarion cry to-day that will be heard
around the world.
Crowns will fall, thrones will tremble,
kingdoms will disappear, the divine right Colorado. This book in the hands of
women would teach them to be just and generous toward women, and help them to
forgive and condone in each other the sins so sweetly forgiven when committed
by men.
Historical Analysis:
**************
Historian Lawrence
Goodwyn’s 1976 study, Democratic Promise: The Populist
Moment,
revised the negative vision of Populism put forth by Richard Hofstadter in his
1955 book, The Age of Reform. In the following essay, published in 1988,
Goodwyn summarizes some of his key arguments.
Lawrence Goodwyn,
“Populism,” in Howard H. Quint, Dean Albertson, and Milton Cantor, Major
Problems in American History, vol 2, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing
Company, 1987), 54–65.© 1987 by Wadsworth Publishing Co.)
For a
movement that appeared only briefly on the American political horizon in the
1890s before disappearing forever from view, Populism has proved remarkably
enduring. Generation after generation of historians – in the Progressive Era
before World War I, during the great depression of the 1930s, and in the
turbulent 1960s – have found parallels in their own time that seemed to recall
the world of the Populists. So again and again scholars have returned to the
1890s, using new research techniques and uncovering new sources in an effort to
make sense of the agrarian revolt and thus place it properly in the framework
of the ongoing American experience.
This seems a surprising historical fate
for the Populists, especially considering the fact that their movement not only
failed to come within close range of national power, but never gained full
legislative and executive authority in a single American state. Why should
modern Americans, a predominantly urban people, care about the long-ago
protests of western and southern farmers? What is there about Populism that
made it a fixture of the American historical landscape and enabled it to draw
the sustained attention of contemporary observers of the American scene?
The most obvious reason turns on the
conjunction of two circumstances: the visible continuing influence of large
corporations on the American economy and on political life and the fact that
Populism represented a large-scale popular protest against corporate influence.
Unresolved questions of corporate politics versus popular democracy ensure that
the Populist precedent will always interest students of American life. In the
1880s and 1890s, agrarian reformers warned that “concentrated capital” had
begun to alter the shape of American politics in ways that seemed fundamentally
to undercut the democratic hopes of such founding fathers as Thomas Jefferson.
They warned that corporate money could not only hire lobbyists to influence
legislation, but that this folkway could function with such efficiency as to
undercut the democratic process itself. Populists were not at all persuaded
that the nation’s press could adequately protect the society from such incursions
by business, because the press itself was a business that largely reflected
business attitudes. Under such constraints, the laws passed by
business-dominated legislatures increasingly worked to insulate the society
from popular governance.
The end result, the reformers argued, was
a corporate state rather than a democratic one. The Populist conclusion: the
very rules of the game were being changed and American society was becoming
increasingly corporate and hierarchical. The average citizen, whether a farmer,
a worker, or the proprietor of a small business, was being subjected to
patterns of exploitation that were inherently unfair.
The questions raised by the agrarian
reformers thus went beyond the particular controversies of their own day to
encompass issues of freedom and equity that concern every generation of
Americans. The fact that the Populist indictment was so broad constitutes the
essential reason their movement has proved so interesting to succeeding
generations. The agrarian critique seemed to address the very shape of American
culture itself, raising troubling and enduring questions about the impact of
industrialization upon inherited democratic forms. Is industrial society
necessarily so highly organized, so stratified, and so intricately influenced
by powerful economic forces that commonly held ideas about fairness and equity
no longer can find effective political expression? Is the engine of the
two-party system truly oiled by corporate money? Are politicians unresponsive
to the general welfare not so much because they are individually “corrupt” or
“greedy” but simply because they need to be careful not to alienate the
corporate funders who finance their reelection campaigns? Has politics, in its
broadest outlines, become compromise restricted to very narrow options within
an overall pro-corporate framework? Have the very concepts of a citizen
democracy, of popular government, and of an American commonweal been rendered
obsolete by the ceaseless march of industrialization?
In their own time, the Populists answered
these questions with a yes and a no. “Yes,” the hour was late. But “no,” time
had not run out on the idea of a popular movement to rebuild the nation’s
democratic underpinnings.
Before sketching some of the details of
the Populist effort, it seems prudent to emphasize that their basic presumption
as to what constituted “serious politics” was different in one fundamental
respect from the presumptions most modern Americans bring to their political
activities. As the Populists assessed the raw evidence coming from their state
legislatures and from the national Congress in Washington, it seemed clear that
most elected officeholders, whether they called themselves Republicans or
Democrats, voted “for the people” when they could. But – as Populists never
tired of pointing out – most issues divided citizen needs from business needs
so that politicians had to make a choice between popular aspiration and
corporate aspiration. As Populists dissected the parliamentary evidence from
every decade since the Civil War, the choice made by most of the functionaries
of both major parties was unmistakably corporate. From a popular perspective,
the very art of running for office consisted of finding a way to make a public
speech that sounded pro-people while keeping one’s voting record pro-corporate.
Such “shams” and “deceptions” had become the standard fare of American
political life, the rhetorical engine that ran the ship of state. Moreover, the
structure of legislative and congressional committees, grounded in encrusted
patterns of seniority and political patronage of all kinds, ensured that the
two parties would remain synchronized with the corporate managers who provided
the campaign funds, journalistic support, and cultural credibility conducive to
long-term electoral success. In a word, the parties had ceased to be
expressions of popular intent. Populists therefore did not believe serious
political reform was possible if one worked through either of the two major
parties. If the two business-oriented parties constituted the essence of the
political system, there was not much point in working through “the system.”
Trying to achieve reform through unreformed institutions was a fruitless
enterprise. All who didn’t understand this fundamental fact of American
political life were fated to waste their time going through motions of
political reform that could produce no real result. The only possible remedy
was for the citizenry itself to create a new party – a People’s party. To the
Populists, then, realpolitik consisted of public actions leading to the
creation of this new party. Any other kind of politics was pointless.
Whether in the 1890s or today, most
Americans don’t think about politics in quite this fashion. True, there is a
general presumption in the popular culture that a certain bias toward the
wealthy exists in the American political system. It is implicit in the popular
saying: “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
Similarly, there is the widespread
supposition that powerful forces manipulate public decisions in a way that
leaves the average person little room for maneuver: In the popular refrain,
“You can’t fight city hall.” But such views constitute parlor wisdom, or, more
often, barroom wisdom. As such, they represent a private intuition rather than
a guide to public conduct. At an operative level, the phrase “You can’t fight
city hall” is a statement of resignation: things may not be ideal, but there is
nothing to be done about it. This is a core belief of contemporary culture and
because it is, Populism as a historical event is hard for modern Americans to
grasp. This is so for the simple reason that Populism was grounded in the
unresigned belief that something could, in fact, be done. The People’s party was
a public assertion rather than a barroom anecdote. Whether one characterizes
such a belief as “romantic” or “provincial,” or sees it as a straightforward
manifestation of autonomous activity, the belief itself is transparently an
essential starting point,
for
democratic politics. That is to say, not much is possible in terms of
democratic self-activity in the absence of such intention.
Populism surfaced in the generation after
the Civil War when the clear outlines of an Industrial society first became broadly
visible. It was an era of freewheeling Gould – a period dubbed by late
historians as the era of the Robber Barons who built giant industrial “trusts”
that drove out competition and established effective oligopolies and monopolies
in all the nation’s basic industries. From the Populist perspective, the claims
of the industrial and financial tycoons that their efforts represented the
essence of “progress” for America was nothing more than hollow and self-serving
propaganda. Rather, said the agrarian reformers, the untrammeled power of the
robber barons, far from being “progressive,” resulted in gouged customers,
underpaid workers, and the corruption of the political process itself. In
short, where others saw growth and expansion, Populists saw the narrowing of
individual possibility. Where others hailed technological change as
undifferentiated proof of “modernization,” the Populists detected new forces of
social control that warred against diversity and opportunity. In raising
warning after warning about the long-term implications of business
concentration of economic life and business control over the political process,
the Populists saw themselves as defenders of what they called “the plain people
of the republic.”
It was the sweep of the Populist analysis
and the audacity of their proposed remedies that so startled their fellow
countrymen of the 1890s and have fascinated historians ever since. Indeed, if
one were to begin by describing the Populists’ culminating political creed –
their famous “Omaha Platform” of 1892 – the sheer scope of its intention, not
to mention the vigorous and sometimes purple prose of its lengthy preamble,
would land the modern student in the midst of so many complex economic, social,
and political issues that it would be quite easy to lose sight of the Populists
themselves.
In an era when U.S. senators were elected
by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, the evidence of business
lobbying was sufficiently transparent and persuasive as to provide immediate
relevance to basic components of the Populist critique. So much so, in fact,
that after the turn of the century, other American reformers succeeded in
achieving direct election of senators in the hope of containing at least the
most visible of corporate lobbying tactics. Indeed, such successful reform
proposals as the direct election of senators and the introduction of the
Australian or secret ballot led some casual observers to conclude that though
Populism itself was defeated, the essence of the Populist program eventually
was enacted. In this reading, the Populist “sin” was not that Populists were
wrong, but rather that they were just a bit ahead of their time.
Such a conclusion would not have made much
sense to the original Populists. Their interest in electoral reform was not
perceived as an end in itself but as a means to a more democratic structuring
of the economy. It was the economic reform of “concentrated capital” to which
they devoted their central attention. The organic problem historically afflicting
agriculturalists the world over was both stark and simple: lack of capital to
live on. No one would think of asking salaried employees to finance their own
food and shelter for six months before getting a paycheck; they wouldn’t have
been able to, had they been so asked. But farmers had to find a way to live
while their crops grew. Farm families planted in the spring, harvested in the
fall, and had to eat in the meantime. Through the ages, whether in societies
that functioned under feudalism, early mercantilism, or capitalism, people who
worked the land borrowed the money or money equivalent necessary to sustain
them. Their only equity was their crop which, under whatever system, they, in
effect, mortgaged. The price they paid was usurious whether rendered to the
lord of the feudal manor, to rural moneylenders who provided supplies, or to
post-Civil War mortgage companies of various kinds. Indeed, in this basic
exchange relationship reposed what can be called an organic law of
city-building and, indeed, of “civilization” itself. The way societies acquire
“capital” to build “capitols” is universal: it involves a measure of more or
less orderly exploitation of the agricultural class by an urban class. This
process of creating capital has been characterized as “primitive accumulation.”
In the Populist phrase, the process can
euphemistically be described as “farming the farmers. “ In both cases,
the effect is to siphon the profit from agricultural production out of the
countryside to the city. Throughout history, most so-called “peasant uprisings”
and “agrarian revolts” have had their origin in this simple and enduring
dynamic: farmers paid usurious rates of interest for the credit they needed to
buy food and supplies during the growing season. In mortgaging their crops to
acquire needed credit, they routinely lost control over the sale of their
produce. The people who benefited economically from agricultural production
were not those who worked the land but rather those who provided credit. It was
the latter who ended up owning the land; the actual farmers were merely
temporary residents upon the land: tenants.
The great promise of America, and the
cornerstone of American democracy, was the presence of free land which worked
against the formation of a landed gentry and a titled nobility along European
lines. A subsistence or barter economy facilitated the maintenance of a “yeoman
democracy” and the Jeffersonian ideals that provided such a social vision with
political substance.
But the coming of industrialization in the
second half of the nineteenth century brought into being a market economy to
replace the subsistence economy. In the post-Civil War American South, farmers
increasingly found themselves enmeshed in what came to be known as “the
crop-lien system.” They acquired food, seed, and fertilizer from rural
suppliers who “furnished” these essentials in exchange for a mortgage or lien
on the crop. These “furnishing merchants” charged such exorbitant rates of
interest that at the end of the harvest time the farmers’ income from his crop
rarely equaled his accumulated debt. Having failed to “pay out,” the yeoman
faced the coming winter without funds. The furnishing merchant thereupon agreed
to “carry him” through until the next harvest, taking a new crop lien as
security. Through the 1870s and 1880s, the lien system was polished in practice
and codified into laws until it came to define the economic relationships of
millions of Southerners. Farmers discovered that the interest they were paying
on everything they consumed limited their lives in a new and terrible way; the
rates imposed were frequently in excess of 100 percent annually, sometimes over
200 percent. The crop-lien system had subtle ramifications that made this
mountain of interest possible. At the heart of the process was a simple two
price system for all items – one price for cash customers and a second and much
higher price for credit customers. Interest of 25 to 50 percent would then be
charged on this inflated base. An item carrying a “cash price” of ten cents
would be sold on credit for fourteen cents and at the end of the year would
bring the merchant, after the addition of, say, 33 percent interest, a total of
nineteen cents – almost double the standard purchasing price. Once a farmer had
signed his first crop lien he was in bondage to his merchant as long as he
failed to pay out. The farmer rarely was even aware of the disparity between
cash and credit prices for he usually had no basis for comparison. As a
contemporary explained, “many of the merchants did a credit business so
exclusively they set no cash prices.” The furnishing merchant and his ledger of
debt became the farmers’ sole significant contact with the outside world.
Across the South, he was known as “the furnishing man,” or “the advancing man.”
To black farmers he became, simply “the Man.”
Virtually the only way to escape the lien
system was to pull up stakes and head west to the new lands in Texas. But
there, too, the furnishing merchant awaited. Doubly frustrated, some new migrants
in Texas bound together in 1877 to form an “alliance” of farmers. After some
years of experimentation in various forms of cooperative marketing, the
alliancemen devised some adventurous schemes in an effort to circumvent the
credit monopoly of the supply merchants. They formed trade stores where they
could purchase supplies collectively and various “bulking” arrangements in
which they pooled their cotton in their own Alliance warehouses where they
could attract faraway buyers who might pay more than the local supply
merchants. By 1885, the Texas Alliance had achieved some marginal successes and
the word went out that the new organization meant what it said about helping
“the dirt farmer.” Alliance spokesmen, such as S. O. Daws and William Lamb, became
skilled at isolating and describing the commercial foes of farmer cooperatives
town merchants and cotton buyers. Eventually, they focused on the national
banking system which encouraged a contracted currency that kept money scarce
and interest rates high. Efforts at economic cooperation had led the growing
movement to new political insights into how an industrializing economy
exploited farmers. Linked in suballiances of thirty or so farmers (as many as
2,000 suballiances in a single county) and joined by a chain of county
“lecturers” into a vast statewide organization, the Texas cooperative movement
enrolled 250,000 members by 1887. Alliance lecturers had acquired a story to
tell and, in that year, they set out across the South and West to tell it.
The message to farmers was simple, direct,
and powerful as a recruiting mechanism: join the cooperative, work together to
build your own warehouses, create your own pooling arrangements, your own trade
stores, and in so doing, free yourselves of the peonage of the crop-lien
system. By the thousands, and then by the hundreds of thousands, farmers heard
the message and joined. By 1891, the cooperative movement, formally calling
itself the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, had reached into
forty-three states and territories and recruited almost two million members.
Lurking beneath these statistics,
impressive though they are, were more subtle political and cultural realities
that need to be specified in order to make clear the democratic impulses
animating Populism. Tactically, the rise of the Alliance was traceable to the
recruiting power of the cooperative movement. But in a deeper psychological and
political sense, the Alliance was
experimenting in a new kind of popular autonomy. As such, it was engaged
in a cultural struggle to redefine the form and meaning of social life and
politics in America. Out of the individual sense of self of spokesmen such as
S. O. Daws and William Lamb, the Alliance had begun to develop a collective
sense of purpose symbolized by the ambitious strivings of increasing thousands
of farmers who were anxious to show the world why they intended to “stand
united.” Inexorably, the mutually supportive dynamics inherent in these
individual and collective modes of a behavior began to produce something new
among the huge population that Alliancemen called “the plain people.” This
consisted of a new way of interpreting society, a way of thinking that
represented a shaking off of inherited forms of deference.
The achievement was not an easy one; if it
were, history would record far more democratic movements than it has. It is
proper to take a moment to specify the agrarian organizing achievement.
Alliance farmers had spent much of their lives in circumstances of insecurity and,
even, humiliation. Political resignation was the normal result. What the
Alliance offered was a way to counterbalance resignation with hope. The lessons
of the cooperative experience opened farmers’ eyes to the working of the
commercial world. It helped explain – and thus to “demystify” – such arcane
subjects as the national banking system. It offered, in short, a new way of
looking at things that engendered in heretofore deferential people a tangible
political purpose. This, at root, was what Populism meant to its individual
participants; it increased one’s scale of thought by offering the prospect of
changing one’s basic situation in society.
Unobtrusively, in ways city people had
difficulty perceiving, a new folkway appeared across the South and West in the
late 1880s – self-help farmer cooperatives. There were all kinds, loosely
grouped in two forms as marketing
co-ops
and purchasing co-ops. The co-ops also materialized in different sizes, local,
state, and regional. The largest, geographically, was in the Midwest where a
multistate livestock marketing co-op was constructed under the leadership of
the Kansas State Alliance. The largest in terms of members was the Texas
Alliance Exchange which attempted in 1888 to market the entire cotton crop of
the 250,000 member Texas Alliance. There were also different kinds of local
trade stores, some owned by Alliance members, and others in which local
suballiances signed an agreement with one merchant to purchase supplies at
discount prices.
These economic endeavors constituted the
functioning heart of the agrarian movement. Though the co-ops were diverse in
structure, all had the same essential purpose: to achieve, collectively, what
farmers acting individually could not achieve – access to equitable rates of
credit. While southern farmers labored to escape the furnishing merchant and
the croplien system, western farmers attempted to escape high-interest chattel
mortgages as well as the monopolistic pricing margins levied by grain elevator
terminals and high freight rates charged by railroads.
The midwestern livestock cooperative
succeeded for one year in marketing part middlemen. Unfortunately, the same
middlemen had great power. The Chicago Livestock Commission delivered a fatal
blow by refusing the farmers access to the commission’s trading center. The
merchant traders of the Windy City blandly explained that the farmer
cooperative, in distributing profits to its members, violated the “anti-rebate”
rule of the commission. In such ways did the commercial institutions of the
society combat the “business methods” of the Alliance. Possessing firm control
of railroad links necessary for the transporting of crops, of the grain
elevator terminals and, above all, of the sources of bank credit, commercial
America was well placed to block the Alliance effort. The huge cotton marketing
effort in Texas in 1888 was thwarted when regional financial banks refused to
offer credit to farmers seeking to use collective “joint notes” as collateral.
Credit, the problem of individual farmers, was also the collective problem of
the Alliance.
In the aggregate, large-scale credit
cooperatives constituted an adventurous and even ingenious system for
agricultural production in a rapidly industrializing society. If an orderly and
systematic flow of credit could be obtained, the cooperative plans of the
Alliance were eminently workable. But the potential sources of such credit –
the nation’s commercial institutions – were precisely the one’s engaged in the
practice of “farming the farmers.” The stark reality was a simple one: the
agrarian cooperatives were attempting fundamentally to alter the power
relationships between farmers on the one hand, and merchants, bankers, traders,
and railroads on the other. The latter saw no need to participate in new credit
arrangements that fundamentally undercut the profits to be made in marketing
the nation’ s agricultural production.
The Alliance movement’s leading exponent
of large-scale cooperatives was Charles Macune. As president of the Texas
Alliance, he had devised the 1888 “joint note” plan for collateral that banks
had refused to honor. Brooding over this impasse, Macune devised in 1889 an
organic structural solution: necessary credit would come from the federal
government. Macune’s “Sub-Treasury Land and Loan System” was the culminating
economic innovation of the agrarian movement. His plan called for government
warehouses to be erected in every county in the nation that annually yielded
over $500,0000 worth of agricultural produce. Through these “sub-treasuries,”
farmers could store their crops to await higher prices before selling. They
were to be permitted to borrow up to 80 percent of the local market price upon
storage, and could sell their subtreasury “certificates of deposit” at the
prevailing market price at any time of the year. Farmers were to pay interest
at the rate of 2 percent per annum. Wheat, corn, oats, barley, rice, rye,
tobacco, cotton, wool, and sugar were included in the marketing program.
The Sub-Treasury plan carried far-reaching
ramifications for the farmer, the nation’s monetary system, the government, and
the citizenry as a whole. It shattered the existing system of agricultural
credit and permitted farmers to avoid the rock-bottom prices prevailing at
harvest. It also gave the farmers desperately needed flexibility in the selling
of their certificates. Above all it ended the practice of siphoning off the
farmer’s basic profit through excessive interest charges. In effect, Macune’s
system replaced the high-interest crop lien and chattel mortgage with a plan
that mortgaged the crop to the federal government at low interest. It placed a
permanent floor underneath the cooperatives, thus providing the nation’s
farmers, once and for all, with a means of regaining a measure of real control
over their own economic lives.
The political fate of the Sub-Treasury
proposal provided the final “educational” lesson that turned Alliancemen into
Populists. When the movement’s national spokesmen went before Congress in 1890
with their proposal, they got a cold reaction from lawmakers in both parties.
Congressmen, it turned out, had received forceful “briefings” on the
Sub-Treasury Plan from their most influential constituents – bankers, and
lobbyists for railroads, mortgage companies, grain traders, and the like. The
Sub-Treasury was denounced as “impractical” and “unworkable” by business
spokesmen. The New York Times pronounced the new monetary system “one of the
wildest and most fantastic projects ever seriously proposed by sober men.” It
was, as a matter of fact, nothing of the sort. As a monetary system, the Macune
plan has passed muster with disinterested modern economists who have analyzed
it. It abruptly ended the long contraction of the currency that had confined
the society – both its commercial and its agricultural sectors – since the end
of the Civil War. In providing a flexible currency in which the volume of money
in circulation would rise with population growth and with the increasing
productivity of the nation, the sub-treasury system would have facilitated
economic growth in a manner markedly superior to the narrow, gold-based system
then in effect. Above all, the sub-treasury system structurally provided a much
more democratic monetary system. In boosting agricultural income without adding
to consumer costs, it redistributed income from creditors to debtors in a way
that would have vastly stimulated consumer purchasing power. The practical
results would have been very good for business as well as for farmers.
This was not understood at the time. The
“gold standard” was more than a political belief. It was an article of faith –
a central economic dogma fervently believed in by the banking community and
supported by “sound” (i.e., orthodox) economists in the nation’s universities.
As nineteenth-century conventional wisdom had it, the gold standard meant a
“sound dollar” while the “fiat” dollars injected into the economy through the
government sub-treasuries were “funny money.” At bottom, the nation’s bankers
argued that the sub-treasury system was “immoral.”
In 1890, the agrarian movement reached its
crossroads. The cooperative mobilization had attracted the farmers of the
nation’s granary and the nation’s cotton belt. They had built a vast structure
of self-help that counted over 40,000 suballiances from coast to coast. Every
suballiance had its “business agent” for cooperation and each had its
“lecturer” who not only helped spread the good news of the movement but who
also helped interpret the reasons behind the political opposition to it.
But the Alliance movement became more than
an idea; it became something of a culture as well. Alliance summer encampments
brought thousands to huge festivals of cooperation. The Fourth of July was
designated as “Alliance Day” and twilight meals were served to huge throngs who
heard platoons of agrarian orators denounce the “money barons” and the
“railroad monopolies” who pursued self-interested policies that kept the
nation’s producers in peonage.
Through such dynamics, a cooperative
economic movement became a full-scale political revolt. The politicians of both
“old parties” were pilloried for being in league with business lobbyists. The
sequence of cause and effect led inexorably from economic innovation to
political insurgency: although the cooperatives were the hope of the future,
the lack of credit seemed to doom them; the Sub-Treasury Plan offered a way
out, but both major parties opposed it; the Alliance, then, had to organize the
American people into a new party. Its name was obvious: it would be called the
“People’s Party.”
The Kansas Alliance led the way in 1890.
An “Alliance ticket” was put into the field against both the Democrats and
Republicans. The vast internal machinery of the cooperative movement was mobilized
for political insurgency. The lecturers of""cooperation simply became
political lecturers. Indeed, the most renowned lecturers headed the Alliance
ticket as candidates for statewide office and for the national Congress. To the
familiar forms of speech making and rallies, the Alliance added a new
ingredient – a wagon parade of itself. Wagon trains from suballiances combined
with those from other suballiances, county wagon trains combined with those
from other counties and the resulting spectacle was literally miles long. Some
industrious soul counted, or said he counted, 7,886 persons and 1,500 vehicles
in one six-mile long procession through the city of Wichita. Public life in
Kansas became a “pentecost of politics.”
Alliance politics on “the living issues”
was countered by old-time sectional
politics
that dated from the Civil War. When the 1890 Alliance national president, L. L.
Polk of North Carolina, came to Kansas, Republican newspapers “waved the bloody
shirt” and denounced the Alliance movement as a plot by
“ex-Confederates.”
Polk was wildly (and erroneously) described as an “ultra-secession Democrat”
who had shot down federal prisoners in cold blood at Gettysburg and had
practiced barbarous cruelties on Union soldiers while
commandant
of Salisbury prison – a post, it might be noted in passing, he never held. The
Wichita Capital, a Republican newspaper, circulated the story that “the old
soldiers of Wichita” were threatening to tar and feather “The Escaped
Prison-Hell Keeper.” Other vintage artillery was also unlimbered to repel the
reform cannonading on the monetary system. Jerry Simpson, an Alliance
congressional candidate, was variously described as “unpatriotic” and a
“swindler.” For the religious-minded, he was “an infidel” and an “atheist.” As
a politician, he was an “anarchist,” and as a human being, he had “simian”
characteristics. Worst of all, he had “hellish influence.”
In normal political times – periods
without a popular movement – such tactics might have persuaded rank-and-file
voters. But the farmers of the Alliance had their own interior lines of
communication in their far-flung lecturing system, and they had reform
newspapers all over Kansas. On election day, a political earthquake hit Kansas.
The Alliance candidate for governor was narrowly defeated, but hardly any other
reform candidate lost. Of 125 state representatives in the Kansas legislature,
96 would be Alliancemen. Additionally, five Alliancemen were elected to
Congress. In Washington, Republican President Harrison described the result as
“our election disaster.” “If the Alliance can pull one-half of our Republican
voters,” he said, “our future is not cheerful.”
Through the months of 1891-92, the
Alliance movement across the South and West slowly endeavored to mobilize
itself for the new People’s Party. In many places, the cultural wrenching was
difficult, especially in the South. There, the Democratic party was more than
just the ancient party of Jefferson and Jackson; it was the party of “The Lost
Cause,” the party of “the fathers.” It was also the party of white supremacy. A
vote against the Democratic party was perceived as a fundamental act of
cultural subversion. Down South, one had to turn one’s back on a number of
inherited loyalties to become a Populist.
To
counter this kind of cultural politics, the Alliance unleashed its lecturing
system to educate the nation on the new Sub-Treasury system. Schools were set
upon the issue and scores of lecturers briefed on the intricacies of the new
democratic monetary system. The word went down from the state alliances, to
congressional districts, to the counties, to the suballiances. The Alliance, in
effect, was treating itself to a new kind of politics in America – a vast
popular plebiscite on the nation’s economic relationships.
In the summer of 1892, delegates gathered
in Omaha to formally consolidate the new third party, write a platform, and
nominate a presidential ticket. The platform was a formal codification of
previous Alliance pronouncements, formulated first in Texas in 1886 and 1888,
and polished in National Alliance Conventions in St. Louis in 1889, at Ocala,
Florida in 1890, and at Indianapolis in 1891. The “Omaha Platform” of Populism
simply tracked these documents. The national banking system was to be replaced;
the railroads were to be government owned; U.S. senators were to be elected by
popular vote rather than by lobby-controlled state legislatures. The People’s
party intended, its spokesmen declared, to bring a democratic “new day” to
America. In a transparent effort to combat sectional politics (Democratic
advocates of “The Lost Cause” in the South and Republican wavers of “the bloody
shirt” in the North), the Populists selected Union and Confederate generals to
head their national ticket. The presidential nominee was James Baird Weaver of
Iowa. The vice presidential candidate was James G. Field of Virginia. Both set
forth to talk about economic democracy and political reform, rather than about
the war.
Populism’s maiden voyage in 1892 was impressive
for a new political institution. The third party gathered over a million votes
and Weaver received twenty-two electoral votes for president. The agrarian
insurgency reorganized
regional
constituencies in unpredictable ways. One result was the Democrat Grover
Cleveland replaced the Republican Harrison. Another result was that both major
parties, somewhat shaken by Populism, began paying more attention to
economic
issues in an effort to refurbish their public image.
The need for such altered tactics became
demonstrable after 1893 when the severely contracted currency precipitated a
financial panic that culminated in nationwide depression. With the ranks of the
unemployed swelling, the Populist
appeal
took on added relevance.
The People’s party made dramatic gains in
the South in the 1894 elections, despite Democratic party claims that
defections to Populism would split the white vote and lead to “Negro
domination.” In frantic efforts to divert popular attention from economic
matters, the race issue was uniformly employed against the new party throughout
Dixie, sometimes with visible effect. Nevertheless, substantial Populist
inroads upon old Democratic constituencies, particularly in Georgia, Alabama,
Texas, and North Carolina, convinced many Democrats that their party, too, had
to address the “financial question.” A new faction of “Silver Democrats”
developed in the party. They called for more silver coinage to increase
currency volume. Such a palliative could not provide the structural undergirding
of the cooperatives that the Sub-Treasury system offered, but it gave the
Democrats a much more attractive appearance before the electorate. To a lesser
extent, Republicans began to have their silver advocates, too. In such ways,
Populism altered the national political dialogue, even in urban areas where the
reform party had sunk few roots before 1892.
The Populists failed, organizationally, to
achieve their ultimate dream – which was to create a North-South, urban-rural,
black-white, coalition of farmers and workers. Sectionalism was a problem, race
was a problem, and so was religion. The last divided urban Catholic workers
from rural Protestant farmers. Above all, the reform movement never developed
in the cities a recruiting appeal that remotely matched the impact of the
cooperative movement on agricultural districts. Populists learned a basic rule
of politics: one had to gain access to potential new recruits before they could
be “talked to” and converted. The co-ops had attracted Democratic farmers in
the South and Republican farmers in the North and the subsequent experiences
inside the co-ops had altered the economic and political perspectives of all
concerned. But the process had taken years. In America’s urban centers, the new
party had to start from scratch. It possessed the rhetorical appeal of the
Omaha Platform, but little else. Movement-building, Populists learned, was a
very complicated process. And unless a movement was built in each locale,
rank-and-file citizens made political choices on the basis of inherited
sectional, religious, and racial loyalties.
Populism effectively came to an end in the
1896 election. The Democrats, badly shaken by Populist gains in 1894, nominated
William Jennings Bryan on a platform of “free silver.” Bryan’s emotionally
effective “Cross of Gold” speech denounced the existing monetary system in ways
that made him almost seem a Populist.
The third party, meeting after Bryan’s
nomination, faced a dilemma. As the depression deepened, it seemed that almost everybody
in America had begun to talk about “the financial question.” Unfortunately for
the reformers, few knew enough about monetary systems to employ the “greenback”
theoretical sweep that was organic to Populist analysis. Worried that the
silver issue would attract a sufficient number of impoverished but relatively
uninformed citizens, the Populists faced the prospect of a divided reform
constituency. Many decided the best way out was for the Populists to nominate
Bryan so as to provide a united front against orthodox “goldbug” Republicans.
This view prevailed, to the consternation of Populism’s hardcore of cooperators
and lecturers who had originally organized the movement. The latter, schooled
for years on greenback monetary analysis, denounced Bryan as a demagogue. But
to no avail. In a stormy, divided convention, Bryan received the Populist
nomination.
The resulting contest between Bryan and
William McKinley was something of a landmark in American politics. It certainly
was regarded so at the time. The 1896 campaign was called “The Battle of the
Standards” as McKinley upheld the gold standard against Bryan’s advocacy of
silver coinage. The deeper issues of Populist economic reform got lost in the
din. The loss of the third party’s identity through “fusion” with the Democrats
robbed the reform movement of its momentum and demoralized its most dedicated
activists. The election day triumph of McKinley over Bryan was a culminating
blow.
For a time, it seemed the agrarian
movement might alter the nation’s political landscape, but in the end,
inherited patterns of major party politics prevailed. Without structural reform
of the monetary system, large-scale agricultural credit cooperatives could not
survive. And without the co-ops, the agrarian movement had no organizational
base. Suballiances lost their members and lecturers fell silent. Without a
co-op, there was no prospect of a “new day” to lecture about.
For generations thereafter, the “financial
question” disappeared as an issue in American politics. Although agricultural
specialists repeatedly demonstrated that the American family farm was a
uniquely efficient unit of production, the small farmer virtually vanished as
consolidation of landownership became a permanent trend in the economy. The general
explanation for this development was that corporate farmers were more
efficient. Only specialists understood that “economies of scale” in agriculture
are very low and that the ascendancy of
“agribusiness”
was more a product of special interest tax and farm subsidy policies than a
product of size.
In recent years, the enormous rise in
Third World debt has focused the attention political crisis of the 1890s in
America and what may well become the global financial and political crisis of
the 1990s. Third World countries, relying heavily on agricultural sales for
foreign earnings, have found themselves trapped in a cycle of high-interest
debt and low commodity prices. Such countries, in short, face a debt crunch
remarkably similar to the one that gave rise to American Populism.
Unfortunately, the financial relationships between wealthy lender nations and
agrarian sectors of developing nations are scarcely any better understood today
than when the Populist case was placed before the nation a century ago. As a
result of such self-insulation, the popular aspirations of the peoples of the
Third World have easily become as threatening to many modern Americans as the
revolt of our own farmers was to goldbug bankers in the late nineteenth
century. Though American foreign policy and American weapons have defended
anachronistic feudal and military hierarchies in South America, Africa, and
Asia, such actions being justified at home as necessary to the “defense of
democracy,” neither the policy nor the justification has proved notably
pervasive to the non-Americans
who
are the mass victims of such hierarchies. the resulting unpopularity of America puzzles Americans. Since the passing
of populism, the subtleties of monetary systems and commodity exchange remain
outside the normal range of
political
discussion. Under such constraints, the ultimate political price that Americans
may be forced to pay for their narrowed cultural range in the twentieth century
has emerged as a question of sobering dimension. Populism, in short, was not
merely an interesting political movement in the American past. The issues of
Populism remain singularly relevant to the American future.
*************
….sustaining leftist
movements involves a difficult and delicate balancing act. The traditional
left/ Marxist project has historically been an economically oriented affair,
focused on using the modern state as a means of transforming and transcending
class differences. Beyond contesting the attractiveness of the market's appeals
to individual consumers, it is now clear that the left must be as concerned
with cultural issues (e.g., religious and moral attachments, different ethnic
experiences) as it has been with the bread-and-butter issues associated with
life in the material realm. The events of the last seventy years have provided sufficient
evidence that the attempt to mobilize peoples to address their economic
alienation while ignoring or even encouraging their cultural alienation (as it
can be argued many orthodox Marxists have) is ultimately bound to produce
tension and a dissipation of support.
This problem was evident in Europe between the world wars,
when the left found itself under attack from constituencies that felt alienated
by the cultural aspects of Marxism (and liberalism for that matter), a disaffection
that was often energized by anti-Semitism. It was in this context that leftist
ideals were easily absorbed and co-opted by movements of the so-called right,
especially as many early-twentieth-century Marxist movements had struck
Faustian deals with the state and nationalist ideologies. Accordingly, Italy's
left gave birth to Benito Mussolini and the Fascist Party; the founder of the
British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley, was a former Labourite, and France's
Georges Sorel, with his characteristic attachments to the nation as primary
subject and to violence as a necessary means to change, made the leap from
orthodox Marxism to voluntarism and anti- Semitism. In a similar manner,
German-born Roberto Michels, Belgian Hendrik DeMan, and France's Marcel Deat
moved from the socialist camp toward the right. It was also against this
backdrop that Adolf Hitler nationalized socialism in Germany.
Although clear distinctions existed between the left and the
"far right" in this era, particularly regarding the significance of
cultural traditions, their economic orientations were similar. An emphasis on
the nation (volk) provided a foundation for most of the various leftist
movements after the First World War and the different corporatist experiments
(which, at their extreme, include Mussolini's Italy, France's Vichy
administration, and Hitler's Germany). These movements were not supporters of
unrestricted property rights, and along with their counterparts on the
conventional left, they sought to resist the institutionalization of
free-market capitalism and liberal individualism. In Canada during the same
period, the uncertainties unleashed by the depression produced the corporatist
(and occasionally anti-Semitic) Social Credit Party and the socialist Co-
operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the predecessor of the contemporary
New Democratic Party. Both movements emerged in opposition to liberalism and
the free market and were suffused with Christian ideals. While potential
leftist constituencies were splitting in the Canadian West- where both Social
Credit and the CCF were rooted -the overall strength of the national left was
reduced by the inability of Protestant anglophone socialists to make their
movements attractive to francophone voters in the largely Catholic province of
Quebec. The weakness of the left in Canada was also connected to the CCF’s clear preference
for a strong federal government, whereas Quebecers had traditionally been wary
of a strong central state (Quebec itself presents an interesting example of the
ongoing nationalization of potentially socialist support and the conflation of
class and nationalist interests). Overall, the conventional left has been
hampered in its competition with individualism and the free market by the
tendency of its natural constituencies to divide over the significance and
treatment of cultural issues (and the perception that there is a necessary
conflict between cultural tradition and modernity), as well as the problems
involved in making a singular political community out of di- verse ethnic
groups. Over the last three decades, this last issue has become serious in
Europe and Canada, as concern over (non-European) immigration has again
depressed support for the left and energized parties such as the National Front
in France (where the anti-immigration issue was first put into play by the
Communist Party), Belgium's Vlaams Blok, Austria's Freedom Party, the German
Republican Party, the Italian Social Movement, and, to some extent, Canada's
Reform Party. Thus the left, clearly weakened and on the defensive, faces the
twenty-first century aware that it cannot phrase its goals in purely
materialistic terms. Nevertheless, in Western Europe and in Canada, it can
point to certain achievements in the area of public policy, and at the least,
the conventional left may not be thriving, but it still survives.
….The weakness of leftist organizations in the United States
can be understood, to a large extent, as a reflection and result of the
nation's ongoing decisions to prioritize racial and ethnic identities and
difference. Racial conflicts and factors have affected or been reflected in
leftist outcomes in the United States in three ways. First has been the consistent
division of leftist activists over the issue of whether organizations should be
interracial, segregated, or separate but coordinated. ..;.The second means by
which the race issue has prevented the left from remaking society in a
collectivist mold is through the popular rejection of those movements which
have pursued interracial alliances (and the related tendency to associate
interracialism with "communism’)….Beyond divisive tensions within the
left, extramural pressures and attacks have held back movements that have
sought to organize across races. This stigmatization has extended, at times, to
all leftist movements regardless of their orientation on racial issues (i.e.,
leftism itself has been seen as an implicit threat to the racial status quo and
accordingly rejected). Third, for some leftists the race issue has just been a
problem to be solved at some future date or a matter of numbers - of
accepting or neglecting 10 percent of the population (e.g., AFL’s belief
that trying to force its affiliates to drop their color bars would lead to an
overall weakening rather than strengthening of the union movement). While
nonwhite peoples constitute a numerical minority within the context of
United States, they have been distributed in such a way that their numbers had
a crucial impact on American politics. Given the various psychocultural
understandings and misunderstandings that have governed the relationship among
races in the United States, the symbolic role of nonwhites-especially African
Americans-in American politics also should not be underestimated. Furthermore,
nonwhites have been concentrated in those socioeconomic classes that one would
naturally expect to support leftist activity. Finally, the South has played a
key role in weakening leftist efforts. Consequently, the decisions by labor
unions and other related institutions to dismiss the importance of challenging
the racial mores that underpin southern conservative power have had significant
implications. This is not to suggest that the outcomes would have been any rent
if, somehow, American leftists had paid more attention to the issue of race.
They did not, and that choice reflected the extent to which leftists did not
consider the ramifications of not challenging the racial status quo and the
degree which race and the South, as presences in American life, had become natural-
and unremarkable commonplaces.
These three factors -- the division of the left on race, the
popular pressures to reproduce or reinforce society's racial codes, and the
tendency of the left to overlook racial and cultural factors -- help explain
the weakness of the conventional n the United States. . . .[I]n this chapter I
focus on the political parties that have been identified with the left in the
United States -the Populists, the Socialists, and the Communists -and their
attempts to reconcile the issues of race and class.
The primary dividing line in
American politics for much of the nation’s history has been that which
separates the North and the South. While it is common to speak of the resilience
of the two-party system in American politics, the reality has more resembled a
series of regional one-party systems (e.g., the Democratic Solid South) with
the main axis running from east to west. From the Compromise Of 1877 that
marked the end of Reconstruction to the civil rights era, there was very little
true competition between the Democrats and the Republicans.
This sectionalism was based on the disparity between those
states and regions dependent on slave labor and those dependent on free labor
and was directly related to the distribution of Africans in America? One of the
first movements to experience the difficulties associated with sectionalism was
the American or Know-Nothing Party. Nativism and its publications (such as the
various Native American newspapers) drew support in both the North and
the South, especially in those cities and states where immigrant populations
were relatively high, such as New York, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and St. Louis
and Kentucky, Virginia, Louisiana, Maryland, and Texas.' The nativists saw
these new immigrants, primarily Irish and German, as paupers, criminals, and
radicals, threatening to overload or overturn the already-established American
way. Although nativist sentiment and violence had been a constant presence
since the beginning of the century, the Know-Nothing Party was not formed until
1854 (incidentally the same year the Republican Party was established). Given
the timing of its emergence and the general rush toward fragmentation that had
been fed by Andrew Jackson’s unique combination of personality and pork-barrel
politics, it is not altogether surprising that the Know-Nothing Party was
fractured by the same tensions that were soon to rupture the Union itself. At a
time when sectional issues were predominant, few voters in the North or the
South felt they could afford to support a party that was not committed in terms
of its regional affiliations. Of course, the narrowness of the Know-Nothing
platform - essentially the reduction or elimination of immigration -also
restricted its potential popularity.
The Civil War, its establishment of the Republican Party as
the dominant national party, and Reconstruction and Redemption in the South led
to a slightly adjusted status quo in American national politics. The 1877
compromise gave Rutherford B. Hayes and the Republicans the electoral college
votes necessary to maintain the presidency and left the fate of Africans in the
South to be decided by local custom. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the deal
is also significant in that it effectively marginalized labor and its
interests. As the Republican coalition abandoned blacks, the remade Democratic
Party was dominated by southern conservatives who had little interest in the
concerns of the party's northern and western working-class constituencies.
After the end of Reconstruction, then, the country was left with what was to
become the foundation of "Southern Politics." In the North, the
Republicans were firmly established as the representatives of industry, whereas
most labor and immigrant interests and votes remained within the Democratic
camp. In the South, the Republican Party was gradually reduced to the party of
southern blacks after the "scalawags" (poor southern whites),
"carpetbaggers" (transplanted northern whites), and those whites
seeking elected office were gradually drawn away. As the party lost its voting
constituency with the institutionalization of Jim Crow, it became an alienated
body that focused on the election of national officers at the party's
conventions.
Following the end of Reconstruction and the rehabilitation of
the Democratic Party, partisan competition virtually disappeared in the South.
Given its distribution of land and power, one would have expected the South to
produce politicians and movements that questioned the economic status quo. V.
0. Key Jr. argued in Southern Politics that "the South ought, by all the rules of political
behavior, to be radical. A poor, agrarian area, pressed down by the colonial
policies of the financial and industrial North and Northeast, it offers fertile
ground for political agitation." But radical politics rarely took root.
Instead, southern politics has characteristically sacrificed class politics to
racial politics. While there have always been grounds for class conflict, these
tensions have never managed to overcome the impact of race and the politics of
black and white. As Key noted, "In its grand outlines the politics of the
South revolves around the position of the Negro. It is at times interpreted as
a politics of cotton, as a politics of free trade, as a politics of agrarian
poverty, or as a politics of planter and plutocrat. Although such
interpretations have a superficial validity, in the last analysis the major
peculiarities of southern politics go back to the Negro. Whatever phase of the
southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail
of inquiry leads to the Negro."
The mechanics of the process by which southern politics shaped
national politics until the civil rights era was rather simple. The South was
usually divided into two camps, one populated by whites, usually small or
tenant farmers and their descendants (the hill counties), and a second
populated by blacks, wealthier whites, and their descendants (the delta). Under
"normal" circumstances the voting power of each individual would be
roughly equal, but after Reconstruction and certainly by the turn of the
century, the elimination of the black vote through violence, trickery, and
various legal manipulations gave those whites in "black-belt"
counties disproportionate influence. The elite manipulation of electoral
boundaries further increased the disproportionate voting influence of the
whites in the black-belt counties. Simple and effective appeals to white
solidarity and supremacy helped prevent remaining poorer whites from pursuing
their class interests. In other words, once black voters were removed from the
electorate, a small number of relatively wealthy and increasingly
business-oriented whites could control state politics. The actions of this
class across the South could then present a united front - in the shape of the
Solid South - to the nation and hold up any legislation or proposals that might
threaten the interests of the southern upper class, especially because southern
incumbents were rarely challenged and seniority, pre-Watergate, meant
guaranteed access to the exercise of power in Congress This arrangement (which
I discuss in more detail in Chapter 4) lasted well into the 1960s.
National movements seeking to challenge this political
status quo have either been solidly rejected in the South, have seen their
programs compromised to comply with southern mores, or have accepted truncation
(i.e., written off the South), mistakenly believing that national politics
could be significantly reoriented without challenging southern cultural
relations and understandings. But the key to the Solid South was the relative
willingness of economically disadvantaged whites to trade economic and
political gains for racial solidarity. Thus non-status quo politics have had to
be attractive enough to challenge the racial attachments of these individuals.
The story of the first significant post-Civil War movement to test those ties
is ultimately one of failure.
After Reconstruction,
pressure on whites to preserve southern unity resulted in the gradual
elimination of all but the Democratic Party. As one individual moving from the
Republicans to the Democrats in this period explained, "No white man can
live in the South in the future and act with any other than the Democratic
party unless he is willing and prepared to live a life of social isolation and
remain in political oblivion." Many whites did not have the luxury of
philosophizing about the reasons for their actions, which were a response to
the threat of violence on top of "social isolation and ... political
oblivion."'
Throughout the early years of Reconstruction and until the
1890s, a series of movements sought to shake the prevailing political
alignments in the South with little or no success. Among these, the Granger
movement, the Greenbackers, and the National Labor Union all failed to make any
significant impact on the status quo. The first movement to have some success
was the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union (or Southern Farmers'
Alliance), founded in Texas in 1877. There were actually two separate Farmers'
Alliances: the larger and more aggressive Southern Alliance and, north of the
Ohio River, the more moderate Northern Farmers' Alliance. The Farmers' Alliance
reportedly had 3 million members at one point, but it is more significant as a
precursor of the People's Party, or Populists. Although the southern wing was
more radical in its pursuit of banking, monetary, and railroad reform, it
rejected attempts by its northern counterpart to draw it into third-party
politics because it was content with the Democrats and believed it could
achieve its goals inside the larger party without challenging white
supremacy. Accordingly, the Southern
Alliance refused to organize and involve blacks directly, although blacks and
whites alike were faced with the same fiscal constraints and economic
circumstances and even though blacks represented roughly half the individuals
involved in agriculture in the South. Alliance members actually went so far as
to harass and threaten Knights of Labor organizers looking to include black
farmers in their movement. Eventually, the Colored Farmers' National Alliance
and Cooperative Union was formed in December 1886. Like the Southern Alliance,
the Colored Alliance had its roots in Texas and was overseen by a white
missionary and former Confederate soldier named R. M. Humphrey. While some of
the state Colored Alliances had white leaders (e.g., Texas, Alabama, and
Kentucky), in other states the head organizers were blacks (e.g., Georgia,
Mississippi, and Louisiana). By 1891 Humphrey was claiming 1.2 million
members, a number thought to be grossly overinflated." The numbers
involved are nonetheless remarkable, because the Colored Alliance had to
withstand the threats of violence by Democratic forces, on the one hand, and
the arguments of black Republicans, on the other, who contended that the
Farmers' Alliance was too risky a venture to consider dividing black energies.
Consequently, black participation in the alliance had to be covert, resulting
in a dearth of records of its activities and ambitions.
Overall, few white members saw the contradiction between the
Southern Alliance's goals and its continued refusal to question seriously
American racial etiquette. Ironically, in a Farmer's Alliance publication it
was solemnly stated that 'the materialism of today does seggregate [sic] human
lives.... The tendency of the competitive system is to antagonize and
disassociate men." These same conflicts and contradictions were to mark
the Populist movement. The year 1892 represented the high tide of
independent Populist politics. Standing on the shoulders of the Farmers'
Alliance movements, the People's Party, which had been officially launched the year before
in Cincinnati, drew support away from the Democrats in the South and the
Republicans in the North. The voting returns that year resulted in Populist
administrations in Kansas, North Dakota, and Colorado and elected at least
eight members to the House of Representatives. The leader of the party's
ticket, former Greenbacker James B. Weaver, attracted over a million voters,
making the Populists the first third party since the Civil War to gain
electoral college votes."
The rise of the Populists certainly did not signify the
emergence of traditional Marxist politics in the American context. Populist
philosophy was never as rigorous or as pointed in its analysis of the development
of American capitalism. Nevertheless, some similarities exist between the two
critiques in that they both emphasized the alienating effects of
industrialization, as well as the tendency of modern capitalism to concentrate
power in the hands of the few. On the whole, no one could mistake the attack by
the People's Party on the banking, railroad, and monetary systems as Marxist in
the European sense or even in the American sense, but Populism -like its
Canadian counterpart that was to lay the foundation for the Cooperative
Commonwealth Federation and subsequently the New Democratic Party -did
represent a preleftist formation of sorts. The party's 1892 platform called for
free silver at a ratio of sixteen to one, a graduated income tax, government
ownership of the railroads, the direct election of the Senate, and an end to
banks of issue.” As one North Carolinian
Populist contended, "Both the cannibal and the grinding employer are
living on human flesh, the ignorant one devouring it outright and the
intelligent one wearing it out for his benefit."' The Populists also
adopted women's suffrage as an issue, and Barton C. Shaw suggests that
"Populism seems to have softened some men's ideas about women. If a man's
wife worked in the fields alongside her husband, it was difficult to argue that
she was too delicate for politics."
This greater sensitivity could also be politically risky given the
common linkages between gender, race, and class. One southern paper described "the
sight of a woman travelling around the country making political speeches ...
[as) simply disgusting" and warned that "Southern manhood revolts at
the idea of degrading womanhood to the level of politics."
On the issue of race, Populist attitudes predictably varied
according to region. While the northern and border state Populists were
generally in favor of including blacks - there were fewer blacks in their
states - black political participation was an explosive subject in the states
with larger black constituencies and where the Democratic Party and its
supporters equated voting the ticket with maintaining the race. Dismissing the
economic issues in the Populist platform, the Richmond Dispatch made
clear the need for whites to support the Democrats, stating "the present
Democratic party in Virginia was formed ... for self-protection against sectional misrule
-and without any reference to economic questions."" Similarly, the Atlanta
Constitution offered this analysis: "The old issue of sectionalism is
confronting the South and White Supremacy is more important than all the
financial reform in the world." Claiming to speak for southern
farmers, the Raleigh News and Observer argued that the appeals of the
Populists would prove fruitless in the South: "Are the honest, manly White
Southern farmers ready to receive their lessons in political science from such
sources? Can they acknowledge as their leader a foreign-born fanatic like
[William Alfred] Peffer [a Populist senator from Kansas], or any Southern White
man who hears his degrading race principles and still associates with him? We
answer no. The farmers of the South will not follow such men. The chivalry of
Anglo-Saxon manhood, reverence for the virtue of Southern women, and respect
for ancestral and race pride, all condemn and repudiate such self-confessed
demagogues."" The Greensboro Daily Record chimed in on August
19, 1892: "The Democratic Party of the South is something more than a mere
political organization striving to enforce an administrative policy. It is a
white man's party, organized to maintain white supremacy and prevent a
repetition of the destructive rule of ignorant negroes and unscrupulous
whites.... The safety of the South ... as well as the conservation of free
institutions on these shores, depend upon the strength, unity and perpetuity of
the Democratic Party." " It was not merely with words that Democratic
unity and white supremacy were maintained. While the nineteenth-century western
frontier is often taken as the epitome of American lawlessness, it surely is
rivaled if not surpassed by the unrestrained violence that marked southern
politics and life in this period. Violence was used to terrorize blacks and
dissuade them from voting, as well as to keep whites within the Democratic
Party."
For southern Populists the situation was clear.
Anticipating V. 0. Key's analysis of the essence of southern politics, in
August 1892 Georgian Populist leader Tom Watson editorialized in
the People's Party Paper.- "The argument against the independent
political movement in the South may be boiled down into one word – NIGGER!
Fatal word! Why, for thirty years before our war, did the North and South hate
each other? NIGGER. What brought disunion and war? NIGGER. With what did Abraham Lincoln break the backbone of the
Confederacy? NIGGER. What impeded Reconstruction? NIGGER. How did the Republicans rule
the South for years after Appomattox? NIGGER. What has kept the South in a cast iron straight jacket? NIGGER. What will
be the slogan of our old politicians until Gabriel calls them home? NIGGER. Pious Southern people never
dreaded death as much as they do now. They fear that when they knock at the
pearly gates of the New Jerusalem St. Peter will peep through the key-hole and
say: 'You can't come
in.’ ‘Why?’ ‘NIGGER!"' The
Populists, then, were quite aware that to question the political status quo, to
test the power of the white upper class, was to encounter directly the issues
of race and white supremacy. Referring to those white Southerners who joined
the Populist cause, John Hicks suggests that perhaps only a Southerner can
realize how keenly these converts ... must have felt their
grievances.""' Indeed, evidence shows that white southern Populists
were, at times, as race obsessed as their fellow countrymen. In a July 4 speech,
Tom Watson made it clear that he did not seek to undermine white supremacy:
"I yield to no man in my pride of race. I believe the Anglo-Saxon is
stronger, in the glorious strength of conception and achievement, than any race
of created men.... Socially, I want no mixing of the races." ' In the same speech he went on to
question the faith of those whites who believed that blacks could threaten
white supremacy: "I despise the Anglo-Saxon who is such an infernal coward
as to deny legal rights to any man on account of his color for fear of 'Negro
domination.' 'Dominate' what? 'Dominate' how? 'Dominate who? It takes intellect
to dominate; haven't we got it? It takes majorities to dominate; haven't we got
them? It takes wealth to dominate; haven't we got it? It takes social,
financial, legislative, military, naval, ecclesiastical and educational
establishments to dominate; haven't we got them?""' Yet in 1896 the
Georgian Populist platform did take a stand against lynching at a time when the
state was leading the nation in terms of victims of vigilante
"justice"; Watson, who saw the party as "offering to white and
black a rallying point which is free from the odium of former discords and
strifes," in one instance personally offered refuge to a black Populist
who had been threatened with lynching.
From the black viewpoint, while the franchise was gradually
being taken away by means of fraud, violence, and, starting in Mississippi in
1890 law, the logic of supporting the Populists against the Democrats
collided with the lingering appeal of Republicanism and the hope that soon
Redemption might be reversed. Blacks in this period had trouble distinguishing
white Populists from other whites. They could not easily forget the violent
nature of their past interactions with the poorer whites who supported the
Populist cause and were not reassured of the party's good intentions given its
rejection of federal supervision of the voting process. The testimony of
William Oxford, a white Populist, at an 1896 congressional committee hearing
helps explain this distrust: "Q. Who whipped Calvin joiner [a black
Democrat]? A. I did. Q. Did you ever whip any Negro before you did Calvin? A.
Yes, sir, I have whipped a heap of them. I whipped them before I be- came a
Populist and since too."211 in some areas, though, the Republicans and
Populists coordinated their efforts successfully (North Carolina being the
preeminent
example). The downside of these alliances was that Democrats could then paint
the Populists as threats to local customs and puppets of the northern
carpet-baggers. While the nomination of William Jennings Bryan to head the
Democratic ticket in 1896 is often seen as the high tide of Populist influence
on national politics, by that point Populism had been reduced to little more than
silverism (that is, monetary reform that would involve moving from the gold
standard to silver)." Fusionism - the movement to bring together the
Democratic Party and the Populists - symbolized the deradicalization of the
People's Party potential and its pursuit of electability over program. By this
time, the South was well on its way to institutionalizing Jim Crow: South
Carolina followed Mississippi's example in 1895, Louisiana introduced
the grandfather clause three years later, and by 1901, Alabama and North
Carolina had contrived legal means of restricting the black vote. Indeed the
Populist experiment seems to have had two consequences in the South: it
accelerated the drive to find permanent means of excluding blacks from formal
politics, and it forced the Democratic Party to become more responsive to
disgruntled whites." In somewhat the same manner that pro-union
legislation was to freeze blacks out of the skilled ranks and benefit white
workers, the replacement of the convention system with the "progressive'
open primary system was of little benefit to disenfranchised southern blacks,
but it did increase the access of lower-class whites to the political system to
some extent. Nevertheless, the benefits poorer whites gained were constrained
and compromised by their adherence to and continued promotion of white
supremacist politics. As Key writes, the primaries did not go a long way toward
lessening the objective material and political "cleavage between the
planters of the Delta and the rednecks of the hill."" During the
first decade after the election of 1896, the populist agenda was
transformed into a white progressivism and ultimately no progressivism at all.
It was the politics of race, as practiced by the likes of future anti-New
Dealer Carter Glass in Virginia, that were to represent the Populist legacy in
the South despite the primary innovation. Watson came to believe that
Populism's success in the South depended on the elimination of blacks from the
region's political life and lent hi support to the negrophobic politics of such
individuals as Georgia's Hoke Smith.
Why did Populism fail? In Revolt of the Rednecks, Albert
Kirwan offers a number of reasons: "mismanagement, lack of enlightened
leadership, the comparative conservatism of its program, returning prosperity,
and the national split resulting from the nomination of Bryan." But he
concludes that "most important was probably the race question.""
John Hicks argues that the "unexpected and disastrous defeats in Alabama
and Georgia and the generally poor showing of populism in the South can be
fully understood only by taking into consideration what happened to the negro
vote." Given the unwillingness of southern whites to risk negro
domination" by abandoning the Democratic Party -an attachment that
prompted one black Texan Populist to remark that "the South loves the
Democratic Party more than it does God" - the ability of the People's
Party to challenge the national status quo successfully was seriously reduced.
As former Populists returned to the Republican Party in the North and the
Democratic Party in the South, it was not clear that much had changed."
**************
from
Mary Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1983), 82-90
Women's position in Populism had been
prepared by decades of participation in agrarian movements, particularly the
Patrons of Husbandry. Organized in the late 1860s as a secret society devoted
to cooperation, the Grange invested womanhood with a mystical significance
rooted in ancient lore. The founders described the Eleusinian mysteries wherein
male and female cult members worshipped the goddess of agriculture, Ceres.
Modern-day Grangers continued to revere women. 'Like a bright star in the dark
pathway of life,' as a Minnesota Worthy Master said to a Grange convention in
1879, woman guided human existence, her 'purity, tenderness and delicacy"
an inspiration for the Patrons of Husbandry. Support for her cause 'more than
all else,' he added, was destined to 'make our Order live forever."'
On a more mundane level, Grangers
considered women a necessary element in rural association. Because the Grange
emphasized the unity of the family, women served jointly with their husbands. A
local assembly, for example, could acquire a charter only by demonstrating that
at least four women as well as nine men were ready to enroll. Women possessed
full voting rights, had access to any office, and enjoyed special posts created
for women's affairs. In a majority of assemblies the lecturer who directed its
programs was female, as were the leading officials of several state
organizations. At picnics, processions, banquets, concerts, and other social
events, women took the more familiar role of preparing refreshments and caring
for children. Often relegated to positions of nominal equality, especially in
southern assemblies, women gained at the minimum a sense of participation
comparable to that of German-American women in the Socialist fraternal network.
But in many Midwestern Grange chapters women shaped the social character of
local institutions along more egalitarian lines and won support for both
temperance and woman suffrage campaigns.
In its first years the Grange served to
strengthen the western woman's movement. By the mid-1870s, when the
organization had grown to nearly 25,000 chapters and three-quarters of a
million members, its geographical center was the Ohio River Valley and
adjoining states where the WCTU [Women’s Christian Temperance Union] gained its
first ground. The temperance crusade profited directly as the Patrons of
Husbandry placed itself squarely on the side of the WCTU. The Grange required a
vow of abstinence for admission and included temperance instruction in its
ritual. In Ohio, home of the woman's crusade, the first links between the
Grange and the WCTU were established. While the state Grange met in Xenia,
woman's crusaders struck at a local tavern and forced the owner of the 'Shades
of Death' to empty his kegs. The Grange voted unanimously to join the ceremony,
the State Master delivering a temperance speech atop the empty whiskey barrel.
The sentiment spread rapidly among Grangers, pushed to such an extreme that the
Illinois order officially condemned the use of tobacco as well as spirits. WCTU
activists could find among their Grange friends across the Midwest and Plains
states ready listeners and collaborators in their sacred vigil."
The Grange also became a force for
woman suffrage. As early as 1876 one Granger predicted that their assemblies
would 'prove a more powerful organization for the inauguration of Woman
Suffrage than even the Woman Suffrage organizations themselves."' In
western Kansas some of the ablest lecturers routinely presented woman suffrage
arguments; one claimed that the 'nation's safety lies in the political
advancement of Woman."' The southern sector obstructed any uniform
position until 1885, when at a national convention the Patrons of Husbandry
finally passed a resolution recognizing the equality of the sexes as one of the
order's cardinal principles. Grangers avowed they were 'therefore prepared to
hail with delight, any advancement of the legal status of woman, which may give
to her the full rights of the ballot box, and an equal condition of
citizenship. Grangers subsequently reaffirmed this policy, blessed the WCTU for
its salvational roles, and established a special committee to accelerate
programs on women's behalf Admittedly the southern delegates continued to
harbor more conservative opinions, and committee work often relegated women to
traditional pastimes, such as kitchen duty. Despite these limitations, many
women used their Grange experiences to prepare for wider political roles. Some
rank-and-file women actually became locally notorious in the i 88os when
they initiated the first discussions of the forbidden political issues. During
the severe rural recession of 1887-88, when the political taboo became
impossible to enforce, women in states ranging from Texas to Michigan,
Minnesota, and Nebraska to Colorado and California rallied to the banner of
Populism."
Although the most militant sector of
the Populist movement at large originated among farmers in the South and
Southwest, it was not surprising that women organized as a distinct force where
they had struck the deepest roots. True to its woman's rights heritage
stretching back to the bloody strife of the 1850s, the historic woman suffrage
campaign of 1867, and the early temperance victories, Kansas became the
organizational epicenter for Populist women. Residents of the state's growing
commercial centers, urban women likewise found an opportunity to participate in a
far-flung movement not merely agrarian---contrary to belief common at the time
and since-but profoundly radical.
The most prominent Populist
women-Fanny Randolph Vickery, Marion Todd, Sarah Emery, Mary E. Lease, and
Annie Diggs-had gained their spurs in a variety of antimonopolist movements
foreshadowing Populism. Significantly, none had been a lifelong resident of a farm.
Mary E. Lease, for example, before calling upon farmers to raise less corn and
more hell, lived as a housewife in Wichita, where she cared for her family, handled
the usual household chores, and took in laundry to supplement the family
budget; her first political act upon moving to Wichita had been the
organization of a women's discussion club. Women like Lease displayed an acute
awareness of the plight of the urban working class, particularly its female
component. They typically had helped organize institutions for workingwomen and
often joined the Knights of Labor in recognition of its pledge to equal wages
for equal work. Observing the intensification of urban woes most especially
among women fresh off the farm, these experienced activists felt a strong
kinship with their rural sisters and served as their voice within the
movement's leadership."
Populist women in cities or on farms
shared a common aspiration. Transcending all differences was foremost a
universal commitment to women's enfranchisement that found its ideological and
organizational base for women of varying backgrounds within the WCTU. Annie
Diggs, for example, had begun her career in Lawrence, Kansas, as a pollwatcher
in a prohibitionist campaign, later to become vice-president of the state
suffrage organization. Sarah Emery, known as the 'Elizabeth Cady Stanton of the
Michigan Home Crusade,' served as national superintendent of the WCTU's
department on temperance and labor. Mary E. Lease claimed a half-million
"white-ribboners' in the Populist ranks, and WCTU officials reciprocated,
blessing the Farmers' Alliance as a major temperance ally in the struggle to
abolish the liquor traffic and unearned wealth." This sense of shared
perceptions created an ideological continuity, from the WCTU to Populism,
almost precisely parallel to that between the urban-based woman's movement and
Nationalism. Women had moved in their own ways from self-interested causes to
broader radical concerns.
Populist ideology reflected vividly
the sentiments put forth by the WCTU, especially as thousands of alliance women
helped revive the struggle for temperance and woman suffrage in the late 1880s.
But even more as symbols, temperance and woman suffrage conveyed the special
signficance the WCTU had invested in the concept of womanhood. The rhetoric of
Populism alone was testimony to this fact. Womanhood embodied, as Grangers had
likewise insisted, the moral imperative against evil.
If Nationalist women found their
desires expressed in Looking Backward, Populist women located their own
literary idol in master politician Ignatius Donnelly, whose sequel to the
famous Caesar's Column (1890) tells the story of the reconstruction of a
new order along feminine lines. The Golden Bottle (1892)
incorporated the popular faith in the power of womanhood to purify the
civilization and to guide the entire process of reconstruction. The great
struggle is led in unison by two characters, Ephraim Benezet and his wife,
Sophie. Ephraim, a Plains state lad who discovers a liquid that turns base
metals into gold, uses his rapidly accumulating fortune to secure a place for
himself as reform demagogue, finally to become president of the United States.
From his position Ephraim directs a worldwide revolution. In weaving this tale,
Donnelly suggests only a faint blueprint of the future political order but
provides massive details on how the revolutionary struggle is to be waged. He
exalts the concept of womanhood as symbol of morality and political wisdom.
In many respects it is not Ephraim but
Sophie who emerges as the major protagonist. After a close call with the
ultimate degradation brought about by a forced move to the city, Sophie is
awakened at a tender age to the reality of women's powerlessness and sagely turns
to political action. She first organizes the women of Omaha into a grand
sisterhood. She speaks to the middle-class women and explains the horrible
plight of farm families, the desperation which allowed farm parents to send
their daughters off to the cities in search of work. The family, Sophie
explains, was being destroyed, crushed under the tolling rock, the Sisyphine
weight of interests, of taxes, of monopolized markets, of cruet trusts, of
every form of human selfishness and cunning. 'The poor country girl is thus
driven into the 'great wicked city" to find work or to perish. But even if
she does find work, it is usually of some unhealthy type paying only starvation
wages. This girl, Sophie explains further, 'becomes a merciless hunter of men,
armed with the poison darts of disease and death' as she turns to the only
good-paying occupation available. Having moved her audience to tears, Sophie
pleads with these women to recognize their duty to their sisters and to aid
them in some substantial way.'
The women of Omaha form the Woman's Cooperative Association,
a self- help society gathering both middle- and working-class women and
spreading to every ward of the city. The association erects a splendid building
to house workingwomen, to provide fine reading and music rooms as well as large
halls for dancing and lectures. These establishments were, Sophie remarks,
'little paradises on earth."' The project succeeds so well that the
workingwornen are uplifted from their abject misery and the entire city is
transformed into a pure and moral place.
Sophie then builds upon her initial
success and forms a national society, the Woman's League of America, which
pledges to buy no goods made by women except from women themselves. Then the
'race rose with the elevation of the matrix of the race; for the river
of humanity cannot ascend above the level of its fountain--woman.... The earth
became beautiful, peaceful, happy, hopeful; full of all kindness and goodness.'
Rich women were released from enforced idleness and dissipation and walked hand
in hand with their sisters of one blood.' The solution was 'Not charity, but
justice. Not stealing from the poor and giving them back part of it, with many
airs and flourishes and ostentation; but stopping the stealing, and permitting
industry to keep the fruits of its own toil.
As the quintessential Populist novel
of social reconstruction, The Golden Bottle focuses clearly on woman's
role in transforming the industrial order into the cooperative-Commonwealth. There is,
notably, no nostalgia for the pre-industrial past, no backward glance at
domesticity. Rather the inequities and degradation of modern life are met head
on, their eradication premised upon a collective solution to economic problems
with women taking a major part in the effort. At the conclusion of the novel, a
grand finale indeed, the readers follow Sophie's triumph as, mounted on a white
horse, she gallops across the Russian steppes leading the masses out from under
czarist oppression and dark- ness, completing the last chapter in the
revolutionary purification of the world.
Behind the gripping action of
Donnelly's tale, his depiction of womanhood has a ring of familiarity. Like
Bellamy, he drew on the sentiments of his milieu and rendered them a literary
device of far-reaching significance. As in the case of Looking Backward, The
Golden Bottle owed much of its popularity to the seedwork of the woman's
movement in creating a female audience eager to accept its political message.
At rank-and-file levels the positive images of womanhood which women leaders
put forward and Donnelly converted into a literary metaphor became Populist
icons.
This praise of women's role could prove
deceptive in certain respects, for women did not share leadership or gain a
consistent leverage region by region. The Farmers Alliance and its electoral
arm, the People's party, did not provide women with as much organizational
space as did the Grange. Whereas the Grange viewed itself as a cooperative and
fraternal order, Populism spread like wildfire as a protest movement.
Cooperative marketing, widespread agitation, and electoral activity directed
against the railroads and other monopolies launched the agrarian movement
almost overnight as a major regional political force. By 1890 the alliance
appeared to many observers to lack only urban allies in its campaign to take
control of American society. But a price had been paid, better understood by
women than by their brother comrades. The family-based and socially oriented
activities familiar to the Grange had given way to an apparatus more like that
of a traditional political movement. Populists abandoned the dual
representation of men and women in its internal offices, jettisoned much of the
elaborate ceremony that ensured women's centrality, and relegated voteless
women to an ancillary role. "'
Yet women re-emerged near the
movement's center by virtue of their energy and self-organization, the
authority they wielded as wives and mothers, and the ideological position they
gained in the Populist articles of faith. At the local level especially,
individual women participated as chapter secretaries, stump speakers, newspaper
writers, and editors. As groups they inevitably took in hand the social
services that kept the movement alive and thriving. Like the German- American
Socialists' summer outings but larger and more dramatic, massive tent meetings
reached across the southern and western states in the late 1880s, adapted both
from the educational Chautauqua meetings and from the revivalist gatherings
common to the region. Through their own initiatives in the national organization and
with the hope of forging a far-reaching political alliance, Populist women
pushed the movement to its limits.
Especially in states where women were
well organized, Populist agitators could turn their demands for the ballot and
equal wages into a wider program. Writers in the local and regional press thus
hammered away at the fact that woman's sphere was not, properly speaking, the
home. The movement's female base was, of course, the 'farmer's wife,' and the
primary description of the home still reigned as the 'sacred refuge of our
life."" But essayists frequently addressed the largest fact of rural
domestic existence: drudgery. They commonly implored women to resist the
temptation of excessive cleanliness and order, to let their household chores
slip by the wayside if necessary, and to make more time for themselves and
their loved ones.
Ordinary Populist women developed
their own strategy along lines paralleling the cooperative politics of the
Grange and the Farmers Alliance: the cooperative household. With home care
shared systematically by all family members, they argued, women would be freed
from their bonds and capable of doing anything they chose. As one woman wrote,
'Some people think it is acutely funny if a woman anywhere is not devotedly
attached to making biscuits and darning socks. And yet men have been known who
preferred other occupations to plowing and cleaning sewers, and no one seemed
to think they were monstrosities.""'
Years of devotion in the WCTU had,
necessarily, instilled in Populist women a great respect for women's
traditional roles, but they affirmed the goodness of woman innate to herself
rather than to her current drudgery The fate of civilization rested in the
hands of those who had gained moral sensibility as guardians of the family,
they believed. But to exercise that
power, women had to be housewives. Thus
Bettie Gay gave a Populist gloss to the sentiment the WCTU had done so much to
make popular:
What
we need, above all things else, is a better womanhood, a womanhood with the
courage of conviction, armed with intelligence and the greatest virtues of her
sex, acknowledging no master and accepting no compromise. When her enemies
shall have laid down their arms, and her proper position in society is
recognized, she will be prepared to take upon herself the responsibilities of
life, and civilization will be advanced to that point where intellect instead
of brute force will rule the world. When this work is accomplished, avarice,
greed, and passion will cease to control the minds of the people, and we can
proclaim, 'Peace on earth, good will toward men."-"
Much
like their sisters in other sectors of the :Oman's movement, Populist women
named men's political hegemony as a major cause of civilization's decline. Only
as women assumed their rights would the republic return to its proper course.
So well entrenched in the philosophy
of the woman's movement and committed to women's prerogatives, Populist women
sought alliances with other women reformers. They dispatched delegates to suff-rage conventions, to
WCTU meetings, and to the National and International Councils of Women. In 1890
a group of Topeka, Kansas, women took a portentous step further. They
established a newspaper with the expressed purpose of fostering a new, national
women's reform coalition. The monthly Farmer’s Wife, emblazoned with the
time-tested motto 'Equal Rights to All, Special Privileges to None,' urged
women to communicate with one another and to promote the 'natural unity' of
temperance, suffrage, labor, and agrarian radicalism.
In September, 1891, Populist
women founded the National Woman's Alliance with presiding officers Fannie
McCormick, a Kansas 'foreman' in the Knights of Labor, and Emma D. Pack, Farmers
Wife editor and honored women's club leader in Topeka. Women in twenty-six
states served as vice- presidents, and the adopted charter carried the
signatures of Annie Diggs, Mary E. Lease, Sarah Emery, Marion Todd, and other
leading Populist women. The 'Declaration of Purposes," a representative
document of Gilded Age woman's reform, read:
In view of the great social,
industrial, and financial revolution now dawning upon the civilized world, and
the universal demand of all classes of our American citizens for equal rights
and privileges in every vocation of human life, we, the industrial women of
America, declare our purposes in the formation of this organization as follows,
viz.:
1st. To study all questions relating to
the structure of human society, in the full light of modern invention,
discovery and thought.
2nd. To carry out into practical life the precepts of
the golden rule.
3d. To recognize the full political equality of the
sexes.
4th. To aid in carrying out the principle of
co-operation in every department of human life to its fullest extent.
5th. To secure the utmost
harmony and unity of action among the Sister- hood, in all sections of our
country.
6th. To teach the principles
of international arbitration, and if possible, to prevent war.
7th. To discourage in every way possible the use of
all alcoholic liquors as a beverage, or the habitual use of tobacco or other
narcotics injurious to the human System.
The thirst for enlightenment, the demand for equal
political rights, and the faith in women's regenerative power rendered the
Woman's Alliance the logical successor to the WCTU and women's clubs, Far from
the rural paranoia often attributed to Populists, the Farmers Wife, as
official organ of the National Woman's Alliance, carried column upon column of
news and encouragement from countryside and urban areas alike. The federated
plan of organization accommodated various possible models, from the Illinois Woman's
Alliance that the paper publicized, to the Woman's Christian Alliance of
Lufkin, Texas, which was launched after an alliance organizer toured the area.
"'
T'he success of the National Woman's
Alliance would depend upon a favorable response from allies in the urban
woman's movement and from the Populist leadership itself Organizers therefore
asked Populist politicians to lend their official endorsement to woman suffrage
and to women's rights as laborers. They asked, too, for statements of
encouragement. Pungent epigrams in the Farmers Wife expressed better
than any theoretical treatise the weight Populist women placed upon a positive
response:
Give our women encouragement and victory is
yours. Be as true to the women as they are to you. Don't give us taffy; we are
too old for that. Give the women a suffrage plank: you may have the rest.
Rule the women out and the reform movement is
a dead letter. Put women lecturers in the field and revolution is here.
This
buoyant sentiment fed expectations of cataclysmic change, no less for women
than for men. The Populist political momentum, gaining steadily since the late
i 88os, seemed to need only an urban counterpart to become the major force in
the nation. That necessity required in turn the kind of alliance women prided
themselves in having pioneered and which could evidently become whole only
through their participation.
The
women who rose to prominence in the major radical movements of the late 1880s
and early 1890s--in the 'Americanized' sections of the Socialist Labor party,
Bellamy Nationalism, and the Farmers' Alliance-carried with them certain
articles of faith from earlier involvements. They clung to a romantic notion
of womanhood expansive enough to encompass
a vision of women organized as the ultimate force against corruption. As
principal organizers, renowned orators, or activists of regional standing,
women began to seek alliances with various elements of the nascent protest
movement, and they endowed this new endeavor with distinctive qualities
transferred from their own organizations. Decades of preparation in the
independent woman's movement had firmed their faith. As Mary E. Lease announced
at the peak of the People's party campaign in 1892: 'Thank God we women are
blameless for this political muddle you men have dragged us into.... Ours is a
grand and holy mission, a mission as high and holy as ever inspired the heart,
fired the brain, or nerved the sinew ... ours the mission to drive from our land
and forever abolish the triune monopoly of land, monopoly, and transportation.
Ours is the mission to place the mothers of this nation on an equality with the
fathers. . . ."" Women's accession to political and economic power
was, in this perspective, not merely a desirable goal but the prerequisite for
the establishment of the Cooperative Commonwealth.
*************
==remarks
presented on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Populist Sub-Treasury
Plan for financial reform, Dec. 9, 1989
Copyright 1990, the Southern Finance Project of the Institute for
Southern Studies
from
the Populist-Progressive website, visit it:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/8569/Goodwyn.Greider.html
Introduction by Tom Schlesinger Director, Southern
Finance Project
It was a resigned, plaintive-sounding
analogy but it spoke volumes about the roaring '80s. "I don't think it is
healthy to have this dramatic concentration of financial power,"
investment banker Felix Rohatyn told the New York Times in 1988. "But it's
just like the nuclear age, you can never uninvent the atomic bomb any more than
you can uninvent these astronomical capital markets."
Maybe
so. But Mr. Rohatyn's financial world, for all its explosive effects on
American society in the past decade, has proven to be eerily fragile as well as
inordinately powerful. In fact, that world is no more permanent than those
created by the crop lien system in the 1880s or stock watering in the 1920s.
To
reckon with a system that appears to have spun so majestically out of control,
it helps to consider America's historical record of financial disorders -- and
of ordinary citizens organizing themselves to "uninvent" the problem.
There's no more telling example than the Gilded Age and the biracial agrarian
firestorm it provoked called Populism.
The
Populist movement built itself on a model of economic cooperation intended to
combat the two sources of financial pressure that plagued farm communities 100
years ago -- vise-like credit conditions and a pinched, inflexible currency.
By
the end of the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of Americans had been drawn to Populism's
organizational seedbed, the Farmers Alliance, through its cooperatives and
vibrant system of grassroots education.
In
December 1889, Alliance representatives met in St. Louis along with leaders of
the Knights of Labor in an attempt to coalesce the great urban and rural
organizations of America's "producing classes." That gathering knit
the ties that would underpin Populism's insurgent moment on the stage of
national politics in 1890 and 1892. But what made the St. Louis convention memorable
was the report of its Monetary Committee, an audacious program for financial
reform authored by Texas Alliance leader Charles W. Macune. Macune's Sub-Treasury plan, based on years
of cooperative experience, was both visionary and intensely practical . It proposed
that the federal government establish a warehouse to store crops after harvest
in every county that raised at least $500,000 of farm produce each year. These
"sub-treasuries" would become the instrument of money creation – a
way for farmers to borrow against their crops and land at low interest or to
sell those crops at market value and be paid in a new national currency. Money
supply would rise or fall flexibly, in tandem with the nation's productive
capacities. The cost of credit would shrink as farmers borrowed through their
own national government rather than a restrictive private banking system. And
agricultural prices would rise from their crushingly depressed levels.
Macune's
plan to harness the monetary authority of the nation on behalf of its citizens
formed the centerpiece of Populism's battle for economic opportunity.
Conventional minds derided it mercilessly -- "the wildest idea conceived
by sober man" sniffed the New York Times. But broader thinkers like
Richard Ely, founder of the American economics Association, and John Maynard
Keynes applauded its viability. Indeed Macune's ideas anticipated Keynes'
commonsense premise that monetary policy must support production of real goods.
Though they were watered down, even twisted, in execution, Macune's notions
also informed the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 and the
New Deal's farm programs two decades later.
Today's
collective memory of the nineteenth century populists and their financial
reform efforts is fuzzy at best. "Populism" itself has become a
debased currency, pasted at random by all manner of labelers on all manner of
political figures and phenomena. Alexander Cockburn in the Nation and Alexander
Haig in the 1988 New Hampshire primary agree that "populism" means pandering
to popular prejudices. Pundits across the ideological map decree that Lee
Atwater, chairman of a party committed to enhancing the fortune of creditors,
is a "populist" -- perhaps because his proper upper-middle class
upbringing occured in South Carolina instead of Georgetown or Sutton Place.
After
being subjected to so much reflex sneering and romanticism, so much
journalistic laziness and political confusion, the "P" word, for all
practical purposes, may be unsalvageably disconnected from its roots. But if
populism can still be about anything real today it must surely be about
democratic money.
In
1990, America is not a nation of small agricultural producers. But we are more
than ever a nation of debtors --families, businesses and governments in hock at
record-high real interest rates that have transferred staggering amounts of
wealth from borrowers to creditors and magnified the hazards of recession and
even higher interest rates.
We
don't have a crop lien system or an inelastic currency, either. However, after
a decade of unbridled financial dominance of the real economy, America is a
land rich in "highly confident" letters and land-flipping expertise
but poor in manufacturing innovation and in affordable housing. Financial firms
claim a growing portion of our public resources—like the S&L bailout
(savings and loan bailout, which repaid wealthy investors’ bad investments
through a politically nefarious arrangement-RF) --and provide pitifully little
of public benefit in return.
Despite
the depth of our financial wounds, a smug orthdoxy rules the intellectual,
journalistic and political roost just as complacently as it did 100 years ago.
However, beyond this ruling myopia, many Americans are ready to challenge our
nation's financial status quo and repair the damage it has inflicted. A century
after Charles Macune unveiled his
sub-treasury plan, two dozen leaders of farm, labor and civic groups convened
in St. Louis to discuss a contemporary program for financial reform. Nearly all
the participants came to the meeting through their involvement in the Financial
Democracy Campaign, a grassroots effort that came together seeking a fair and
sensible solution to the savings and loan collapse.
As
Congress deliberated the S&L bailout, hundreds of organizations
representing millions of citizens joined the Campaign. So did thousands of
individuals who tuned in to radio and tv talk shows, signed petitions in
churches, shopping malls and conferences. What attracted them was the
Campaign's insistence that the beneficiaries of financial
deregulation
ought to pay for its ruinous consequences. It also insisted that any solution
to the S&L mess had to be a solution to the nation's housing problem -- the
very need S&Ls were created to address.
Eventually
grassroots pressure helped convince Congress to add provisions to the bailout
that reduce mortgage borrowing costs for many average citizens and give many
more a first option to acquire or rent foreclosed homes in the burgeoning
federal inventory. The legislation also made it more difficult for lenders to
arbitrarily redline borrowers.
Despite
this silver lining, most Americans took a licking in the bailout. Taxpayers
were handed the bulk of a $300 billion-plus damage bill inflated by deceptive
and unnecessary financing schemes. Meanwhile, wealthy individuals and financial
firms received a treasure chest of benefits. The lasting lesson of the
Financial Democracy Campaign was that citizens have a long way to go in
assembling the themes, strategies, policies, projects, intellectual wherewithal
and sustained political energy to broadly change the customs, laws and
practices -- both domestic and international – that define the marketplace for
credit, capital, currency and other financial products.
Real
financial reform isn't likely be realized quickly; it probably won't be
accomplished at all without an appreciation of its rich antecedents in American
history. So to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Populists' St. Louis
convention, we presented a panel discussion of "Democratic Money: Past and
Future" at the end of last December's
strategy
session.
The
featured speakers were historian Lawrence Goodwyn and journalist William
Greider, two writers who through their tenacity, investigative skill and
independence, share the rare distinction of persuading American culture to
think twice about some embedded habits of thought.
Lawrence
Goodwyn is professor of history at Duke University where he co-directs the Oral
History Program. A native of Texas, Goodwyn was an editor of the Texas Observer
and a member of U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough's staff.
In
1976, Goodwyn published his landmark history of the Populist movement, Democratic
Promise. The book shattered a one-dimensional historical consensus that had
written off Populism as a reactionary hayseed campaign for free silver. By
showing the Farmers Alliance as a complex and sophisticated insurgency,
Goodwyn's book set a new standard for understanding social movements in
America.
William
Greider is national affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone and a correspondent
for PBS' Frontline documentary series. For many years a reporter and assistant
managing editor at the Washington Post Greider has written several books
including The Education David Stockman. With the 1987 publication of Secrets
of the Temple, Greider singlehandedly revived, enlivened and deepened a
dormant public discussion about one of America's most powerful public
institutions, the Federal Reserve System. Cutting through the familiar bromides
and expert fogs that obscure monetary policy, Greider's book painstakingly
casts light on the Fed's political roles and the consequences of its economic
decisions on citizens' daily lives.
Lawrence
Goodwyn:
Let
me say that in my profession, you get acquainted with error. Historians study
error. You might even say we study the continuity of error. It is a very
sobering occupation. We discover that it is more consoling to develop a long
angle of vision. If you focus just on one generation you may not find enough there
to warm the spirit. Better to have four or five hundred years in your gaze and
be judiciously selective within that period.
All
kidding aside, there are certain rhythms that become clear over the long view.
First of all, in all human societies, almost all the people, have deep,
substantial grievances. That's rhythm number one.
Rhythm
number two is that despite this universal sense of loss and injustice and
injury, the number of large-scale social movements that exist in human history
is very small. In our country the CIO mobilization of the '30s and the Agrarian
movement of the 1890s -- Populism -- were the only movements after the
Revolution that achieved genuine scale, if one measures movements by their
level of internal organization.
It's
possible to say, "my goodness, the history of agriculture in America has
been one of a systematic exploitation of people on the land by people who lend
them money and by people who sell their products." Can it be that only in
the 1890s farmers got together to try to do something? How about the 1870s or
the 1840s, or what about 1924 or 1935?
Looking
back over the history of workers in America, one encounters an absolute agony
in the industrial heartland from the end of the Civil War through the Great
Depression. Is it only in the 1930s that "workers got mad" and
decided to do something about it?
How
do we explain the fundamental disjunction in human history between the
widespread existence of grievance and the very rare collective assertion that
we find? The answer to this is appallingly simple: Large-scale movements happen
when they're organized. They happen no other way. And the reason that they're
not organized more often -- we have people in the audience whose lives will
verify this--is that large-scale movements are agonizingly difficult to put
together. The entire culture of a society is arrayed against the idea of
large-scale collective assertion.
The
first duty of a revolutionary when he comes to power is to put down his gun --
that is to say, his immediate objective is to proceed with the business of
creating a society where he can put his gun down. The first step is to take
control of the past and use it to justify the revolution. American history in
that sense begins with the Declaration of Independence. There are 32 paragraphs
in that document and 29 of them denounce King George III as a tyrant. It is a
classic historical justification of a revolution.
We
can look back on this and say, "You know, among European monarchs in the
eighteenth century, old George was pretty benign. How about the Hohenzollerns?
How about the Bourbons?" Well revolutionaries are not in the business of
judicious distinctions. In 1776, in the name of the social objectives of the
Revolution George III is a tyrant, 29 times a tyrant.
The
second duty of a revolutionary is to create a culture in which ideas beyond
those of the revolution are impossible to have, a culture in which it becomes
difficult for people to imagine structural change. If this condition is not
achieved, those who rule need lots of guns and secret police to keep everybody
in line. Social space evaporates and society
becomes
rigid. Of course those in power don't look at it this way; they prefer to name
the result "stability."
Rigidity
can also be the governing reality in societies without ubiquitous secret police
forces, in societies that pride themselves on their flexibility and openness.
Future historians will look back and see much more of this rigidity in the
societies of the twentieth century than we ourselves can summon the poise to
see. They will see enormous systems of centralized bureaucracy atop an economic
structure of large-scale production, and they will say, "What a narrow
century the twentieth century was. It was the least creative political century
of the last three."
Future
historians will be able to say that for most of the twentieth century, until
around 1990, there were only two ways to think. One was either a communist,
whatever that meant, or one was a capitalist, whatever that meant. The highly
stratified industrial societies of the twentieth century were characterized by
anxiety, deep brooding anxieties that intruded into and suffused the lives of
hundreds of millions of people. They wore social masks to conceal their private
anxiety. Publicly, people announced that they lived in the best society in the
world, that they were "practicing democracy" or "building
socialism." But privately they said, "You can't fight city hall ...
the rich get richer and the poor get poorer...all politicians sell out,"
or (with their teeth considerably more grimly set when they said it) "You
can't fight the Party...the Party gets all the goods...the Party's
corrupt."
I
do not suggest for a minute that the social distinctions between life in a
Leninist party state and life in a corporate-dominated state are
inconsequential. As a result of long centuries of political struggle
culminating in the Revolution of 1776, one has a Bill of Rights that has
authentic cultural meaning in the daily lives of the citizenry and the
other
does not. But it is also necessary to say -- as future historians will be at
pains to point out -- that these differences, while vastly important, do not
mean that one society has achieved democratic social relations while the other
had not.
Congratulating
ourselves for past achievements is not helpful if such folkways have the
practical effect of blinding us to the political implications of the alienation
that pervades our daily lives. Observe
what happens if we put aside public pretense and apply serious democratic
standards to twentieth century life. Democratic social relations: can we
conceptualize a democratic marriage? A democratic workplace? Can we
conceptualize a democratic system of money, credit and exchange at the heart of
all our material relations, operating not for the benefit of bankers but for
the benefit of society?
Judging
by the politics of the twentieth century up to now, future historians will have
to conclude that these concepts were not politically admissible within the received
culture of American democracy. People did not act politically as if they
thought they were admissible.
So
it's a very narrow century, politically speaking. Well, 112 years ago, a small
group of people, not very different from the people in this room, met together.
At their first meeting, they had seven people. Despite the fact that they had a
number of deep economic anxieties, they had a sense of self and they talked to
each other about trying to do something about their lives and their plight. They
created what they called the Farmers' Alliance. And in due course they titled
it (they were Texans and that introduces certain regional malfunctions)
"The Grand State Farmers' Alliance." I think they
got
the word "grand" in the title because they were so weak.
Now
the opportunity they possessed 112 years ago was that they could talk about the
society and the system of finance. There was an existing literature called the
Greenback doctrine. But they had a recruiting problem. This is sort of a big
kitchen that we're in today, and we're sitting around the kitchen table
analyzing American society. We're grumbling about the Republican Party and the
Democratic Party and the local institutions that are not functioning. We could
say such things to ourselves as, "Well, there are three institutions in
America that house American workers. The Roman Catholic Church, the black
church, and the American trade union movement. Those three institutions, plus
us, are victimized by structures of hierarchy in the United States that
systematically transfer income from the very poorest to the very richest. And
the name of this structure is American democracy."
Sitting
around the kitchen, we may tell ourselves that these three institutions that
house victims are not internally organized to do anything about it. They're not
quite sure who stole the goods. It's sort of awesome to say that both major
parties stole the goods. It's sobering to think that something called
"Wall Street" stole the goods. We wouldn't
want
to speculate that that great reform institution -- a product of populist
agitation but certainly not anything the populists wanted -- the Federal
Reserve System now persists as an instrument of stealing the goods. We can't
have people who donate money to the Episcopal Church and then pay their taxes
and wear proper top hats and coats being
part
of the structure of stealing the goods.
The
reason we don't want to make this indictment is that it's too sweeping. It
breaks the paradigm in which we are trained to think. It produces speculations
that are not culturally admissible around dinner tables or even kitchen tables.
To the extent that we can create a conversation in a room like this and develop
a level of candor, of analysis; to the
extent
that we think there's nothing we can speculate about that would be subversive
or unpatriotic; to the extent that we can create intellectual space to be
serious about our society -- then two contradictory things occur. Number one,
we're enhanced by the sheer authenticity of the conversation. Second, we're
depressed by the discovery; if what we know is true, how are we going to
persuade those people out there, otherwise known as the Americans, to think
seriously about the state of the Republic?
We
have a recruiting problem. Here we are in the kitchen, sitting around the
table, talking, and out there are the suffering multitudes. What is the
connecting link between us? Well, let us go back to 112 years ago. Their
situation is perfectly analogous to ours. They looked for a recruiting device
and they found one. The collective problem of farmers was lack of access to
credit they could afford. They were paying 30, 40, 60, 80 percent -- sounds
unbelievable, but you might be paying more for credit today than you know; we
may have reached the Biblical level of usury some time ago.
In
any case, these co-ops they created were going to try to do for the farmers
collectively what they could not do individually: gain access to credit. People
joined the Alliance Co-op and the Alliance grew. In a county there would be
hundreds of suballiances of 20-50 people each. And each one had a lecturer who
would help them analyze the world.
And
there were 250,000 members in Texas and 140,000 in Kansas and 130,000 in North
Carolina. Eventually the Alliance penetrated into 42 states and there were 2
million people who, in effect, developed a new way to think.
Along
the way, in their struggle to get large-scale co-ops functioning, they
discovered that the banking community in America did not cooperate. They
discovered, too, that that the problem of the Alliance was the problem of
individual farmers: lack of access to credit. One of their number, Charles
Macune, felt the pressure of this failure more acutely than anyone else,
because as spokesman for the Alliance he had made projections for people --
"join us, and collectively we'll try to change the way we live." And
he was not able to deliver on his promise. He'd tried a thing called the joint
note plan and it hadn't worked; again the bankers wouldn't cooperate.
So
in the summer of 1889, brooding about the political trap he was in, brooding
about the plight of the nation's farmer, brooding about the structure of the
American economic system, he came to the Subtreasury Plan -- which doesn't need
to be explained in detail here. What needs to be suggested is the Plan's one
compelling breakthrough, which is just as logical and humanitarian and
democratic now as it was then. He thought you could mobilize the capital assets
of the nation in an organized way to put them at the disposal of the nation's
people. That is a democratic conception that is not on the stage of
contemporary debate. It is too broad; it is beyond our imagination. That is not
on the agenda of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. In fact, we're in
an era where those tiny pieces of the capital assets of the nation that somehow
were smuggled to sectors of the society that are not rich are slowly being
shipped away. Since 1980, the lowest 20 percent of the American people in
income have had a real income drop of 9 percent. And the top 20 percent of the
American people in income have had a real income gain of 19 percent. And the
top 10 percent of that 20 percent have had a real income gain of 29 percent.
In
the last nine years we have witnessed the largest redistribution of income in
American history; that is, from the very poorest to the very richest. And
there's no institution of large scale in the country that says this central
economic fact of our decade should be at the center of public discussion.
Now
that's stability. That is the creation of a culture so narrow that no one in
the seats of the mighty need tremble because some serious people have gathered
in a union hall in St. Louis on a Saturday morning to speculate on the
possibilities of a democratic society. They are not nervous on Wall Street this
morning. And if they are it's because of
their
concerns about their own actions, not ours. . .
What
if we were to suggest to the American people that we can't do anything about
the homeless, we can't attack the crisis in the cities, we can't do anything
about the inability of the children of unionized workers to own a home of their
own because America has been sold to foreign creditors, because it's being
de-industrialized -- we can't do anything
about
any of these matters if we don't democratize the financial system in this
country? In other words, we can't do anything until we get back to being as
advanced as we were in 1889 in this city when the subtreasury system was first
introduced.
We
can't suggest it because that idea is too much. It's too advanced; it's not
properly modest. "Why, you people sound as if you're as crazy as those
people in Eastern Europe who want to overturn the leading role of the
Party." But if you have the long-distance view, if you say,"Give
ourselves 20 years. Let's see if we can begin the process of educating
ourselves and the American people about the idea of a democratic system of
money that will save what is left of the American family farm, that will pump
life into the cities, that will permit the young to dream that they might own a
home of their own, that might somehow begin to chip away at the culture of
corruption that is now the norm in public life..."
If
we can do that, if we can say what we know clearly and endeavor to act quickly
and firmly on what we say, then I think we're living a valid political life. We
may not change the world. But then again we might. Some Polish shipyard workers
offer us an intelligent guide to authentic politics. The choice -- to speak
clearly, to act -- is ours alone. As for
result,
we'll let future historians judge that. Our work is now.
William
Greider:
We
sat in this room, about 25 of us, for the last two days looking at those words
"democratic money" and talking about exactly what they mean. Pat
Barry from Seattle said, "Well, I know democratic money; it's money I can
put my hands on!" And you know, that's not bad for a shorthand definition.
It
is perfectly plausible for the financial system of this country to put money into
people's hands, to make credit available for ordinary Americans at rates they
can afford. The economy could be managed prosperously and equitably, serving
all groups -- not perfectly, but with some sense of justice that we would all
recognize.
There
is no physical reason in economics why that can't happen. There are huge,
intimidating political reasons why it did not happen in our history. In fact,
at the very center of our politics is this subject, called "money and the
regulation of credit, that we have been told we can't talk about.
We
are, all of us, literally educated into ignorance on this subject. We are told
we don't have the credentials, the expertise, the language to talk about these
things. A few minutes ago, I spoke with two people in the back of the room who
told me things about the St. Louis economy and asked questions about monetary
policy that were right on the
money.
But both of them felt the necessity to say, "I'm not an economist."
Let me turn that around: We are all economists, in the true sense of the word.
What
stymies us is the notion that there is some great economy in the sky. There's a
larger economic calculus that, even though it doesn't work for us, somehow
works for society as a whole. It's just that we don't understand, or
appreciate,
its
superior logic.
Finance
isn't simple. It'd be silly to pretend otherwise. But everybody in this room,
if they had the time and the commitment, could understand the conceptual
structure of our financial system or how the Federal Reserve functions. If you
can understand pro football, you can understand monetary policy.
As
practicing economists, what do you bring to the discussion of money and credit
that the experts often don't? Each of us has our own sort of native values,
common sense, what we learned from the Bible as children, what we learned from
our mothers about what's right and wrong. Those are all economic ideas, though
the way economics is organized all of those things are excluded. However if you
bring what you already know to the subject of finance, it will lead you to the
conclusion that this system is not only not functioning in our interest, but it
really offends our deepest values in profound, continuing ways.
Let's
look at an example. We have a housing crisis in this country. It's on the
streets of every city and town in America. And it cuts across the broad middle
class because the younger generation is literally being priced out of owning a
home. In the last decade, the so-called "baby boomers" entered the housing
market and we fell way, way short of housing to accommodate them. The results
have pushed every way through the society, up and down.
Nobody
got up and asked, "Shall we abandon the commitment to home ownership this
country made after World War II?" It just happened, mainly through the
deregulation of finance and the Federal Reserve tromping on the economy for 10
years. You haven't read it in your local newspaper or in the Washington Post or
the New York Times, but the
chairman
of the Federal Reserve has confirmed in open testimony that the interest rates
of this decade in real terms -- that is, when discounted for inflation -- are
the highest of this century. To most of you that probably sounds
counterintuitive. You've been told over and over that after Jimmy Carter left
town, interest rates plummeted and everything was OK. Literally the opposite is
true.
By
pushing real interest rates up, the government -- through its policies, without
debate -- is worsening the housing crisis. High interest rates drive people out
of homes and suppress the demand for housing construction. Homeowners and
homebuilders can't carry the load. Even the barriers to credit that bankers
have erected for have-nots -- "You don't
have
enough cash, you don't have a reliable income"--are just another way of
saying, "You can't afford these interest rates."
Where's
the debate on these issues? As the Federal Reserve raises rates and the housing
industry sinks, the only discussion is among economists haggling, "If the
housing industry is off by 25 percent, is that a recession? No, that's not a
recession because it was much worse in 1982. And besides, most of the people
who want houses already have bought one."
Take
another example. We need an economy expanding at a pace that creates jobs and
allows real wages to rise instead of fall. We all know wages in real terms have
been falling for the last ten years and more. But at a certain level of our
society -- namely, at the Federal Reserve and Wall Street investment houses and
other places I've been as a
reporter
-- the decline of real wages is cited as one of the triumphs of the 1980s.
Those who are less subtle will say,
"Those
workers in Pitttsburgh and Detroit and St. Louis all have three cars. They're
going to be fine."
Others
will say, more sympathetically, "It's a shame that real wages have to
decline, but that's the only way for this country to get through the next 25
years." And they're not joking about the next 25 years. They believe that
American workers must adjust to world wage standards driven by the labor market
in Bangladesh. I say to them, as the
bleeding-heart reporter, "Do you have any idea what that's doing to people
in this country? Have
you
been to any of the places where the most visible consequences of your actions
are playing out in lives? And whether you care about those lives or not, don't
you see yourself setting up a really ferocious political fight in this country
when people finally wake up to what the game is?"
And
their answer is: "Well, it's been going on now for 15 years. We keep
electing Republicans and everything seems to be holding together pretty well.
In fact, the American people have been real grown up about this. They've
absorbed the
decline
without much of a squabble."
You
know what? They're right, on that political point. I still believe that their
day of reckoning is coming; but I have to concede it ain't here yet.
Meanwhile,
the real policies our government sets -- and I distinguish the real policies
from the rhetoric of political debate -- is making this problem worse at this
very moment. A year ago, I was talking to a United Auto Workers group and said
with total confidence, "You are going to get layoffs in the summer and
fall. You're heading into a big contract seasonand you're going to be in the worst
possible position because of what the Federal Reserve is doing right now. And
you're not even privy to a debate over the Fed's decisions." Now we are
seeing the prediction fulfilled.
The
reason I knew that was quite simple. The Fed was deliberately pushing up rates
in 1988 and into early 1989; once they've pushed up short-term interest rates
to a certain point, the experience is predictable. The consequences feed
through the economy and hit those industries -- particularly manufacturing and
agriculture -- that are very sensitive to
interest
rates. They retreat from the marketplace. They don't have any choice; they
literally get priced out of the market by their own government.
That's
what the Fed wants to happen. They have a long, elegant argument as to why
that's good for all of us. But if the government is going to do this to people
-- and do it to certain sectors with considerable harshness -- in a democracy
do we not at least owe those people fair notice? Is that too much? Couldn't
these various parties who are about to be victims of government economic policy
at least be told that certain things make this necessary?
Now,
of course, the opposite is the case. The Fed understands perfectly well that if
it announced what it was doing, it would set off certain reactions. People
would say, "Hey, wait a minute, let's go back and look at your reasons a
little more closely. We know what's happening to us. Let's sit down at the
table and argue a little bit about what's really good for the American economy."
That
debate, like the others I mentioned, does not occur in any place, in any form.
And that's not an accident. Once you recognize that this great big ball in the
sky called economics is in fact politics, you recognize it's an argument that
in a democracy has to occur among different perspectives, different interests,
different levels of wealth and status.
There
are many places where the argument can be joined. The closest thing that exists
in America to a public debate over the Federal Reserve and monetary policy is
the credit markets column in the back of the third section of the Wall Street
Journal. Unfortunately the only people in the debate are bond traders on Wall
Street. If you follow that column,
one
of the things you read repeatedly is, "The economy is too healthy, the
economy is too healthy. We're in danger of too much growth. Unemployment is
falling!" They're talking to themselves. None of us are listening, right?
Well,
what if you called up the reporters who write that column and say, "Hey,
you know what the sheetmetal workers think about monetary policy?" I
guarantee you, they would say, "Well, gee, why do you care?" Then you
could explain it for them; since they're decent human beings, they'd listen to
you. They might even quote you in the credit markets column.
Those
of us who believe in the idea of democracy are confident that once a large
number of informed citizens join the financial debate, we'll get a profoundly
different outcome than the one we have now.
What
would democratic money look like? For starters, we need to re-regulate the
financial system. That means reinstating limits and controls on financial
institutions--not just S&Ls but commercial banks, investment houses and all
the other players.
Those
rules would do two things. First of all, they would impose some safety and
soundness so we don't have to keep bailing out these guys time after time. We
want a sound financial system, nobody's quarreling with that, but it's out of
control because of deregulation. The smart people on Wall Street know that.
Second,
the rules would reassert principles that were alive in this country 30 or 40
years ago. Finance is a part of the social fabric of this country. It is not a
free marketplace that allows accumulation on one side at the utter ruin of the
other side. In a democracy, the financial system has to reflect national
priorities and social values.
Exactly
what are those priorities? I mentioned housing. If you're familiar with the
housing industry, you know that from World War II on, S&Ls and limits on
interest rates were designed with a social purpose--to stimulate housing
construction. The goal was to make home ownership as universal as possible. And
for 40 years it worked.
It
is not complicated to adjust the financial system today to make sure there's
enough capital available for housing. You do it by driving down interest rates
for first-time home buyers and by building a lot of housing in cities so that
we get homeless folks off the streets. Those things are all quite doable.
We
can also design a new set of controls to curb inflation without punishing the
wrong people. The system we have now literally scapegoats certain sectors in
the society--manufacturing, labor, farmers, oil, a few others--when somebody
else is inflating their prices. Attacking inflation selectively, in the
appropriate areas of our economy, also is very doable.
Those
are the simplest kind of social goals but there are many others -- industrial
redevelopment, community development. We could all make a fairly lengthy list
of our priorities for this society and design the ground rules that compel the
financial system to serve these priorities rather than subverting them.
Finally
at the core of this, I mentioned the Bible. Larry mentioned usury. The evolution
of capitalism involved societies overcoming their moral inhibitions and
convincing themselves that lending at interest is a creative process. That's
what they argued about in the Middle Ages.
For
several generations, we've been taught by economists that usury is an archaic
word that has no real meaning in economics. Their view is that usury is a crime
without victims. "If somebody wants to lend me money at 100 percent
interest, I'm a free citizen; I can take it or leave it. If I go blooey, nobody
gets hurt but me."
The
reality of our economy, of course, is that most people don't have a choice. In
the 1880s, farmers didn't have a choice of whether they would pay 35 percent,
or 50 percent or 100 percent to plant their crops. Not paying the interest rate
meant not farming.
Our
society is organized very much in the same terms. Not only at the individual
level but within corporations, where most of us live. For most enterprises, the
decision to accept or reject the interest rates of this decade is really a
decision of shall they continue in business or shall they throw in the towel.
Most individuals and most businesses, not surprisingly, choose to go on and
take their chances. Many were destroyed.
Here's
an illustration of how this works across the economy. If the level of real
interest rates that everybody is paying every year on their borrowed money is
running at five percent, and the economy -- everybody's return and output—is
growing year after year at, say, three percent, there's a two percent gap.
We've got to reach in our pockets as a nation, every year, and pay an extra two
percent out of our savings to make up that gap. To cover those lost savings, we
then have to borrow again the next year at five percent and our return--that
is, the growth of the economy--will once again only reach three percent. Year
after year, you have to come up with more money to pay the interest. That's why
America's assets are being sold to foreign investors.
The
farm crisis in the 1980s was a classic case of what I'm describing.
Corporations that have been taken over in highly leveraged transactions are up
to their ears in debt, and every month they've got to pay the banker. They
don't have any choice, any more than you or I have a choice. How do they pay
the banker? They cut costs. What does that mean? It means close the factory,
sell the equipment and send the workers home. And go borrow more money.
So
the coporation is getting smaller and less productive in order to keep up with
its lender. Sure, there are some corporations, just as there are some
individuals, who stay ahead of the game. But if you do that long enough across
a whole society, the economy will sink under the burden.
That's
literally what's been happening in this decade. It's an inexorable process. If
it continues, we will continue to see financial crises, failures, recessions
either regional or national in scope and all the other deleterious effects as
more debtors fail. I think that's an inescapable formula. Most economists,
while they would have a much rosier view than
mine,
would not dispute the logic. But I have a better authority than them. If you
strip away the different definitions of usury advanced by Judaism, Christianity
and Islam, the essence of each is that it's immoral to allow an ongoing credit
transaction which is guaranteed to doom the borrower. Roughly speaking, that's
what we are permitting now. It's happening in a less distinct way than in the
1880s, so people have a much harder time seeing it. But like most of the great
moral principles articulated in the Old and New Testaments, this one is
grounded in social reality. A society cannot endure under such a self-devouring
regime.
Reason
would tell us we've got to find a way out of that regime. Unfortunately, you
can't very easily go to a congressional committee and make the usury argument
in the words I have used. If you tried, it would fall on utterly opaque minds,
because they are also very ignorant. And I say that with some sympathy;
politicians are trapped in this system as much as anyone else, and they too
have been educated into ignorance. They don't see the way out either.
Most
people at the very top of our government -- presidents, their economic
counselors, the Congress--are utterly innocent of how this system works. As a
reporter I've seen that again and again. The closer you get to the inner room,
the more you see human confusion, error, misguided intentions. They're as
fallible as the rest of us. At most three dozen members of the House and Senate
genuinely understand monetary policy. The system is designed that way.
Constituents will come to their representative's office and say, "The Fed
is closing our plants, it's crushing our farmers," and he'll say,
"That's terrible, I'm with you." Then he'll take to the floor of the
House and denounce the Federal
Reserve
in the most flamboyant language. Well, the Fed understands that part of its
role in the system is to be the public scapegoat occasionally for doing things
politicians would get un-elected if they did.
Most
members of Congress are quite unconscious of how they play out these charades.
As soon as the Fed changes course and a recession begins to subside, the
Congress falls silent and nothing has been changed. They haven't reformed the
Fed, they haven't democratized it, they haven't pursued any of the questions
their constituents wanted pursued. Until the next recession when they make the
same speech again.
I
don't think our political leaders are going to see their way out, frankly, by
reading my books, or Larry's, or by listening to our speeches. The only way you
can educate them is to begin humbly in places like this by convincing average
people that they're perfectly capable of taking this stuff on if they trust
their own common sense and values and have the guts to assert them. If enough
people begin to do that, you'll then have a voice that can speak to the system
with the logic of truth.
I
don't think I'm revealing anything when I say that reformers wading into this
turf put themselves up against the most powerful political interests in this
country. As Larry said, you look at the reality and you get depressed. Amen.
That is the first reaction, but there is this counterweight.
If
you ventured round the country, you would realize you are not alone -- that
there are many different interests, not just trade unions, workers or poor
people but corporate CEOs, homebuilders, insurance agents who share your views.
There's a world of people out there that if presented the same six facts, would
agree with you on five of them, maybe six.
That's
the counter to entrenched political power. It may sound naive, but I read
Larry's history books and I believe
them: if you can tell the truth about these things, that can become
power.
The
solution to this crisis is not complicated: Build a lot of homes. But in order
to accomplish that, we've got to rearrange the priorities of the financial
system to spark a demand that will get homebuilders and developers building
enough housing to reverse the trend.
*************
Two
websites that inherit the left traditions of populism:
Programs
on Corporations, Law and Democracy: http://www.poclad.org/
--see
articles section on this website for interesting perspectives
Jim
Hightower is probably the best speaker in the left populist style. Here’s an
example of one of his populist style speeches on the WTO:
http://www.populist.com/99.12.hightower.globaloney.html
There
is a populist farmers movement today. See their platform
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/8569/Ames.Platform.html