On Populism

You want to know something that really bothers me about how the liberal/left remembers American history? It’s how we think about the Populists. Of course we filter our understanding of the past through contemporary politics. We’ve always done that. This is why you see changes in the views of particular political figures, such as the overnight transition of Ulysses S. Grant being a shockingly underrated president to a completely overrated one. So when we think about the Populists today, or really any time in the last decade or two, we filter it through what we see among whites in the rural Midwest and South today, i.e., Trump voters. Because the political term “populist,” which I think is so amorphous as to be useless and thus I never discuss “populism” in my writing about contemporary politics, is associated with white racists who might be anti-corporate but not so much as to put aside racism over it, we project that back to the 19th century Populists. And not completely without reason since that is more or less what happened to that political movement. But we need to take a big step back and reconsider this movement, not so much for the lessons it has to teach us today, but to put it in context with the movements we do think we can learn from.

I finally read Charles Postel’s 2007 book The Populist Vision this week. It had been on the reading list for a long time but you know how that goes. Anyway, Postel is the last major Populist overview that I’m aware of. And it’s a good one precisely because he’s reacting very strongly to the most influential view of the Populists that still dominates public perceptions of them among liberals. I’m talking of course about Richard Hofstadter’s hack job on them in The Age of Reform. Hofstadter basically portrays the Populists as scary rural racists looking backwards to a simpler America and ready to demonize their opponents in ways that reminded that historian of McCarthyism. But the real value of Hofstadter’s description is as an example of mid-century urban elite condescension toward rural Americans. It’s a terrible description of the Populists.

Over the years there have been many good books on the Populists. Lawrence Goodwyn’s work is probably the best overview and does much to redeem them from Hofstadter. But what Postel does is specifically go after our public view of the Populists. Perhaps the most critical insight he makes is that the biggest incident in how we view of the Populists is the Scopes Trial, because of the role of William Jennings Bryan. There are two problems here. First, the Scopes Trial was in 1925, a full 29 years after the Populists were co-opted by Bryan and the Democrats. That’s a completely different world than that of the Populists. Second, there was only one player in the Scopes Trial who was a Populist stump speaker. His name: Clarence Darrow.

This fact gets at Postel’s larger points. The Populists were not backwards and they weren’t seeking a simpler past. He discusses how these were extremely modern people who wanted the developments of Gilded Age capitalism to work for them. Ideas such as the Farmers Alliance cooperatives were intended to replicate the monopoly capitalism of the period, but make it work for farmers. The Populists were up on the latest scientific ventures. Many were not religious fundamentalists, but free thinkers often attacked by churches and right-wing elements in their home states. They were modern consumers, living through the catalogs and railroad delivery that transformed their lives, although their poverty limited that transformation. They gave unprecedented political roles to rural women, who took advantage of them to press for larger issues of women’s rights, including the suffrage. They attracted a huge variety of reformers, from Charles Macune to Darrow and Eugene Debs. This was a complex movement that influenced and was influenced by ideas such as Bellamyism, the Single Tax, greenbackers, and the rest of the panoply of intellectual responses to the rapid growth of an uncontrolled capitalism in the Gilded Age. Populism was one response on how to deal with these issues.

And yes, they were racist and anti-Semitic. There’s obviously no getting around this point, despite the early attempts at tenuous alliances with African-Americans who had formed the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. Liberals often completely dismiss the Populists as useful based around this point. That would be fine–except that there really wasn’t any difference between the Populists and the Progressives (or even many New Dealers) on racial issues and we don’t completely dismiss the Progressives today. Ultimately, what is the difference between the racists in the Populists and Theodore Roosevelt? TR gets a lot of play for meeting with Booker T. Washington, but not only did he openly regret that meeting, his own actions with the black soldiers in Texas who were nearly lynched and then punished for defending themselves was utterly reprehensible. Not to mention that Roosevelt and his friends were pushing the boundaries of scientific racism. It was TR’s good bud and fellow conservationist Madison Grant who wrote The Passing of the Great Race after all. That doesn’t make Roosevelt and Grant any worse than, say, Mary Lease, who in addition to telling farmers to “raise less corn and more hell” was also writing insane tracts about white supremacy and the need for Americans to expand and take overseas colonies. But it also doesn’t make them any better. The difference is in the ways we think about these movements. We can’t dismiss one movement based on racism and not the other; or we can, but that we do says much more about us than them.

None of this is to defend the Populists on race. It’s to contextualize them with the way we think about past social and political movements in the present. That we damn the Populists and find the Progressives useful (or even lionize them in some cases) is very much about our own Hofstadter-esque disdain for rural white people. And I mean, damn the politics of today’s rural whites if you want, but at the very least cut the Populists as much slack as we do other past social movements.