Several years ago, my wife’s wonderful nonagenarian Scotch-Irish American grandfather passed away in the Deep South. At the funeral home our then tiny daughter belted out her best “This Little Light Is Mine” for the mourners, and we celebrated his long life with great pride, humor, and joy.
The fact that we, a large extended family of mostly Democrats, are still here fighting the good fight, trying to do our part to keep the people’s light on in the heart of darkness that is the Bible Belt, is in significant part because of him—although, good Rotarian that he was, I am not sure he would be up to being the opening focal point in an anti-capitalist essay.
His eldest child, my wife’s aunt, composed his obituary. She used the word “populist” to describe him—as well as member of General Patton’s Army, raiser of cattle, etc. He was indeed a devoted FDR Democrat to his last breath. He was also, at least for his time, quite racially-inclusive. (His lifelong allegiance to the Boston Red Sox, the last Major League Baseball team to integrate, arguably signaled less than full enlightenment.)
With the election of Donald Trump as a so-called “populist” candidate, my wife’s poor aunt has recently expressed to me twice how troubled she is with her use of the term in his obituary. She is adamant that I help to tell the next generation of our family that Granddaddy was not a populist as the term has been associated with Trump and most especially not deserving of any white nationalist/racist connotation. Rather he was a populist in the sense of what, somewhat ironically in light of the 1896 McKinley campaign, as will be explained below, also came to be known as a southern progressive.
I have assured her that the true story of U.S. populism is, at least in its first generation, largely something to be enormously proud of. It is centered on a radical late 19th Century egalitarian agrarian movement that we do not accurately learn about in school, to the extent it is even mentioned. It flourished in much of the agricultural south and west and is the opposite of Trump, what he stands for, and what he does. It was, at least at its best, multi-racial in political approach, with a potentially fearsome voting block of working class whites and blacks that had to be stopped by the ruling class by any means necessary. This movement planted very good seeds of economic and racial justice that still sometimes rise to the surface today as a vestigial brother and sister movement to, not the thorn in the side of, the civil rights struggle that reached its zenith with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
However, the dialectics of U.S. populism include not only a major long-covered beacon of light in the countryside but also a dire warning signal. The fact that in the U.S. the word populist was so easily co-opted by a Trump, especially in regard to rural America, is because where good populism, the democratic variety, was crushed 121 years ago, the demagogic kind did and does quickly and readily grow up like noxious weeds. Within years, not decades, many of the former democratic populists did in fact become demagogic populists, in many cases providing the personnel for the early twentieth century reemergence of the KKK.
If we are to nurture and even replant the good seeds of democratic populism we must be aware that the bad seeds of demagogic populism are ever in our midst, heavily fertilized and well-watered. They have been the dominant seeds emerging down here and spreading all across the rural heartland for over a generation, since Ronald Reagan let the remaining mass of small American farmers go bankrupt.
There is no longer the bloody shirt of the Union to wave even in rural areas of the north. The propagators of divide and rule have always been not only quite tolerant of but also quick to sow and nurture the seeds of racial division. Unfortunately, misery can easily attract hate especially where it can’t be overcome with love, cooperation, and mass democratic power.
Please note in brief introduction to what comes below: I am not going to be able to begin to do justice to the rich democratic variety of late 19th Century agrarian populism in America. However, some attempt is necessary as a prequel to the third and final part of the ACM series I am doing on the need for a humane socialist U.S. agriculture policy. (Here are parts 1 [www.dailykos.com/...] and 2 [www.dailykos.com/...] of the series.) The best thing that I can do is to highly recommend Lawrence Goodwyn’s 1978 classic, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. (www.amazon.com/...) Without reopening the book, for to reopen it is to have too rich a quoting resource at my disposal, one fully capable of overwhelming my limited time and ability, below is my thumbnail sketch of the good professor’s account. When, not if, I make errors, it is entirely because my understanding and memory have failed not that Goodwyn did.
After the Civil War, not only in Texas and the Deep South but also all the way up to the northern reaches of the grain belt made accessible by the genocide and expulsion of Native Peoples, the building of railroads, and homesteading legislation, literally decades of major rural economic depression took place. For generations the story was the same. Farmers and their families were ironically often nearly starving. They were producing agricultural commodities to the best of their abilities but gradually getting deeper and deeper into debt. They were completely beholden to town merchants and bankers who held their crop liens and mortgages. Great numbers of farmers were gradually becoming, if not always forced to be, tenant farmers. They could only get through the year by owing overwhelming amounts of money to stores that supplied much of their basics. This applied not only to African American sharecropping families at the bottom of the social hierarchy but also over time to most of the white farming families as well.
Beginning in the early 1880’s, a mass cooperative movement which came to be known as the Farmers Alliance emerged, beginning in Texas, but soon spreading across most of the country outside of the northeast. Although blacks were effectively excluded from the Farmers Alliance, they knew they were in even worse shape than the poorest whites under the status quo, so they formed a major and substantially parallel movement known as the Colored Farmers National Alliance. In some senses, it is fair to say that there was an Alliance movement that, while segregated, certainly was embraced by great masses of agricultural families in major stretches of the country outside of the northeast.
Sophisticated cooperative efforts were tried, often on a local but sometimes on an extremely large scale and even statewide. These heroic efforts focused both on what farmers were buying and what farmers were selling. Over and over, despite some successes, which were sources of great encouragement, the problems of lack of access to major sources of credit on favorable terms defeated the ability of cooperating farmers to overcome the local supply monopolies, the transportation monopolies of the railroads, and the creditors who demanded their crops be sold often at times when the farmers would get the least for the crop. Brokers were the grim reapers who told the desperate farmer how little he and sometimes she would be getting for a year of back-breaking work and near starvation.
Some of the problems also were associated with how the nation’s money came into existence and what it constituted, especially with the effectively privately-controlled currency, and moreover, the re-adoption after the Civil War of the gold standard. Lenders who held public and private debt, including debt for fiat currency-backed loans that floated the Union Army during the Civil War, demanded that they be repaid in gold-backed currency. Even silver-backed currency was not acceptable to the banks.
But the members of the Farmers Alliance were generally far too sophisticated to believe that silver-backed currency alone would be the answer to their problems. It would improve the money supply some but not nearly to provide the relief the farmers needed, including in relation to money. They believed that a flexible expanding fiat currency must be the new norm, building on an earlier movement known as the Greenback movement, which had emerged in the 1870’s as a political party. The Alliance members believed that the greenbacks should be reasonably inflationary so that their loans would be easier to pay back. And moreover, and much more radically, they eventually came to believe that a complex and quite comprehensive nationwide rural economic system known as the sub-treasury system needed to be put in place to assure that farmers could sell their crops when they could get good prices and while they were waiting be able to get by without crushing debt.
This posed a real political problem, and not simply an economic problem. For years the effort had been at building a mass non-political cooperative movement. Farmers were active politically, if at all, through the political parties of their heritage or racial group based on the aftermath of the Civil War, e.g., in the south, for whites, the Bourbon-dominated and then highly racist Democratic Party and, for blacks, the Republican Party, which had for a time supported Reconstruction only to abandon the effort; and in the north, the Republican Party, which “waved the bloody shirt” to appeal to Union nostalgic sentiments when voting. Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party would be willing to challenge the nation’s basic economic structure, which hedged its bets. They served to varying degrees somewhat competing coalitions of the capitalist rich and their economic mercenaries down to the crop lien-holding town merchants and brokers.
The capitalist/banker/merchant establishment was already crushing the cooperatives. It was certainly not going to allow the “decadence” of flexible greenback currency much less the seemingly system-changing sub-treasury system. So most in the Farmers Alliance realized by the early 1890’s that they were going to have to get into politics in a big way that was true to their egalitarian economic agenda. Getting into politics soon involved formation of a new national political party, the People’s Party, which also came to be known as the Populists. The People’s Party in many places became a major threat to the dominant local and state party, which reacted with great hostility, and, where necessary, great duplicity, including sometimes giving pretense to adopting some of the Populist platform.
In the South, where blacks typically were disenfranchised by lynchings and other forms of direct and indirect voter intimidation, large numbers of blacks mysteriously were said to have voted for the racist Democratic tickets. Importantly, this is where and when U.S. democratic populism was at both its moral high point and greatest threat to divide and rule, because in many places in the south white populists and their candidates began to stand up for the rights of black voters. They began to endorse women’s suffrage too.
Not only would the Populists face harsh reaction from without—i.e., from the economic establishment and its parties. The Populists also would face opportunists and betrayers within. The Populists made a decent showing in the 1892 presidential election, which combined with congressional, state, and local performances showed that they were a force to be reckoned with in many places. Between 1892 and 1896, a shadow movement emerged, often supported by silver mining interests, which began to effectively bankroll and in some cases pay off the least committed and egalitarian-principled Populist leaders. In some states, such as Nebraska, where the cooperative movement was never strong in most places, Populism soon came to be co-opted as being a mere “good government” party, but even this was not enough watering down for the silver mining interests, which wanted “Free Silver” to be the sole battle cry.
The Democratic Party’s nominee, William Jennings Bryan, who was not actually a Populist at all and wanted to destroy the People’s Party, had decided that the mantra of “Free Silver” was the way to get himself elected. He ran on that simplistic but for-a-time catchy platform in 1896, and the internally-sabotaged People’s Party endorsed him. Bryan was defeated by William McKinley, with Mark Hanna running for him the first truly professional, slickly “modern,” mass-advertised “patriotism”-themed campaign, funded by the country’s major business elite. The campaign attached to the gold standard all that is just and right for hard-working, boot-straps America.
Thus, with the Bryan nomination, even before his general election loss, democratic populism died in America, killed within and without—and for no good reason other than Bryan’s ambition and the shameful acts of certain well-connected Populists themselves. The dire problems the People’s Party could have, if successful, addressed remained, unaddressed and creating panic in nearly every tenant and small-holder rural family.
“The People” had lost out to “the Progressive Society” defined along narrow Republican commercially-attractive lines. That created a new economic status quo, in some ways same as the old one, a status quo that by and large remains in effect today. It has only briefly and partially been interrupted and never threatened, even by the relatively timid aspects of democratic populism that began to reemerge with FDR.
But that is only half the populist story. With the loss of the only political avenue for seeking economic justice, most southern whites began to cling once again to their race prejudice, as embodied through the party of their fathers. Along with passing Jim Crow legislation, opportunistic Bourbon Democrats repaid the favor in many places by passing poll taxes on working class white voters. Demagogic populism emerged on the fertile soil of crushed democratic hope.
America has never gotten over the loss of democratic agrarian populism. Agrarian working class voters who might have united multi-racially and, through respected leaders like Eugene V. Debs, with urban workers, have generally gone their separate ways. America has, since 1896, shifted the political conversation to be perpetually narrow, within the confines that are acceptable to the people with the money, who define the money, and hold the money, of, by, and for themselves, the better to buy elections with my dear. And segments of the working class occasionally cry wolf the only way they are allowed to cry out, by helping to elect a right wing demagogue who will not threaten economic elites but who will give the appearance of doing so, all the while pointing a well-manicured finger, perhaps on a small hand, at the PoC who are once again threatening good ol’ white American workers.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, except cruder, more “populist” even.