The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  * * *

  SOCIAL CLASS WAS essential to how the Populists understood their situation, and they talked often about what they called “the producing class.” But the phrase they favored above all others when speaking of the toilers was “the people.” As in: “We the People.” As in: “Of the people, by the people, for the people.” That was the struggle as they saw it: the “plain people” versus the power.

  It is common to cast Populism as the end of something, as the farmer’s last political stand or the terminus of nineteenth-century radicalism. With a slightly wider focus, the arrival of Populism looks a lot more like the shock of the new. “A new way of looking at things,” in the words of historian Lawrence Goodwyn; “a mass expression of a new political vision.” 5 This was the first movement in American politics that demanded far-reaching government intervention in the economy in order to benefit working people, and contemporaneous accounts of the movement often describe its arrival as a sort of epiphany, a “Pentecost of politics,” a moment of sudden, mass enlightenment. Consider this description of a gathering of Texas Populists:

  For a whole week they literally lived and breathed Reform: by day and by night they sang of Populism, they prayed for Populism, they read Populist literature and discussed Populist principles with their brethren in the faith, and they heard Populist orators loose their destructive thunderbolts in the name of the People’s Party. 6

  In truth, that vision was manifesting all over the world in those days. The Pops won the support of a significant chunk of the emerging American labor movement, and in some places the People’s Party was basically a labor party. As such, Populism was part of a great wave of working-class political movements then rising up in the industrialized countries. The British Labour Party was founded at about the same time, and Populists on occasion looked to it for inspiration. The Australian Labor Party, for its part, actually considered adopting the name “People’s Party” in homage to what then looked like a powerful new force in the United States. 7

  Like these other groups, the Pops concentrated their efforts on economic issues and the closely related matter of electoral reform. By and large, they stayed away from the culture-war issues of the day. This surprises the modern-day student of the movement: the Populists may have had a churchly way of speaking, but for the most part they refrained from denouncing ordinary people for their bad values. Questions like prohibition, for example, threatened to break the Populist coalition apart and therefore had to be avoided despite the distaste of many Pops for liquor and saloons. With their singular focus on economics, they regarded many of the controversies of the day as traps or distractions.

  Populist rhetoric oscillated between passionate denunciations of injustice and methodical, even boring exegeses on complicated economic problems. “Starvation stalks abroad amid an overproduction of food,” roared a typical Populist j’accuse of 1891; within a few sentences, however, it had gone from hot to cold, calling on readers to

  calmly and dispassionately examine the facts which we are prepared to submit in support of our claims.… [I]f the facts and arguments we present can be refuted we neither ask nor expect your support.

  These were peculiarly math-minded reformers. Look over introductions to the reform cause like the 1895 pamphlet What Is Populism? , and you will find a detailed, plank-by-plank exposition of the party’s economic program: its demands for a government-controlled currency, for government control of the railroads, for rooting out political corruption … and precious little else. 8

  Many of Populism’s causes are familiar to us today: the regulation of monopolies, the income tax, the initiative and referendum, the direct election of senators, * and so on. They are familiar because they have largely been achieved.

  One item on the list of Populist grievances requires a lengthier explanation today, however. For many Americans of the late nineteenth century, currency deflation was the single greatest issue facing the nation. At that time, the worth of the dollar was fixed to the value of gold: the “gold standard.” As a result, the amount of dollars in circulation could not increase unless the government’s reserves of gold—a scarce metal—increased as well.

  One consequence of the gold standard was painful, constant deflation . Since the population and the economy were both growing explosively, and since the number of dollars in circulation could not grow with them, dollars became scarcer every year and constantly increased in value. If you were a banker, this was a fantastic situation. If you were a debtor—and farmers were debtors—the gold standard was dreadful. It meant you had to repay what you had borrowed using dollars that were now far more valuable than they had been when you took out your loan. Debt of this kind was not something you paid off easily; it was a condition in which you struggled all your days, a form of servitude, almost.

  “Fiat currency” was the hard-core Populists’ proposal for solving this problem. It would have authorized the government simply to print the nation’s medium of exchange however it chose and then to establish its value by administrative pronouncement, without any reference to precious metals. (This is the system we have today, incidentally.) The other remedy Populists embraced was “free silver”: simply replacing the limited reserves of gold with a more plentiful supply of silver. Since silver was being mined all the time in America, the money in circulation under a silver standard would stand a better chance of keeping up with the economy’s growth.

  “Free silver” proceeded to catch the imagination of certain classes of Americans in a way that is difficult to understand today. Silver became the object of a sort of crusade in the 1890s, a symbol that made everything fit together. Silver would not only solve the problem of deflation, people thought; it would humanize capitalism. Silver would bring back fairness. Silver represented democratic virtue and workerist authenticity. Gold, meanwhile, came to stand for aristocratic privilege and deathly inequality. As the silver craze swept America, the Populists saw their fortunes ascend with it—ascend so rapidly that eventually free silver came to crowd out everything else the party stood for.

  * * *

  IN 1893 THE national economy went into one of its periodic recessions—this time it was sharp and painful. Banks and businesses failed all over America and especially in the West. Unemployment came close to 20 percent, with millions thrown out of work. Homeless people roamed the country. There were of course no federal programs in place for relief or stimulus or recovery; the crisis response of the Grover Cleveland administration in Washington consisted of an aggressive campaign of … buying gold.

  The plight of the unemployed was of little concern to the country’s economic authorities. But the confidence of bankers and investors was a different matter: such people had to be assuaged. They had to be convinced of the government’s unswerving devotion to economic orthodoxy, meaning the gold standard. And this the Democrat Cleveland set out to do. To stave off a panicked run on the nation’s gold supply, he stockpiled gold and then he stockpiled more gold. He made deals with bankers, keeping them happy with guaranteed profits, so that they wouldn’t withdraw that precious yellow stuff. He worked hard to restore their confidence. Above all, he stockpiled that gold.

  Before long, outrage was no longer confined to farm country; all over America working people were learning what the Populists had figured out a few years previously. In the summer of 1894, a local strike at the Pullman passenger-car plant in Chicago blew up into a vast national conflagration. In solidarity with the workers at Pullman, the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, refused to handle trains with Pullman cars attached. Rail traffic throughout the country quickly came to a standstill. President Cleveland took a break from stockpiling gold to order the U.S. Army into Chicago; his Justice Department tossed Debs in jail for obstructing the mail.

  An even more spectacular event occurred that same year when one Jacob Coxey, a Populist from Ohio, conceived of the idea of “a petition in boots”—an army of unemployed men that would march to Washington, D.C., to make pl
ain the miserable economic conditions in the hinterlands. From all over the country, jobless people joined up with Coxey’s Army and, several weeks and a few borrowed train rides later, they arrived in the nation’s capital: the first-ever mass protest march on Washington. Their demand was that the government hire unemployed people to build roads and other infrastructure, paying for it with deficit spending. Respectable Washingtonians laughed at the cockeyed suggestion and at the dirty tramps who supported it: what a bunch of cranks! D.C. police tossed Coxey in jail for walking on the Capitol lawn.

  The Populists seemed perfectly positioned to take advantage of these dreadful developments. They were, after all, the self-proclaimed party of working people and economic grievance. They loudly deplored the methods used by the Cleveland administration to smash the Pullman strike in the streets of Chicago, and after the strike was over the Pops embraced Eugene Debs as their newest hero. 9

  Meanwhile, as the hard times deepened and the Democratic administration did its grotesque favors for the banking community, the mania for silver grew and grew. Both of the old parties remained committed to the gold standard, leaving only the Populists standing outside this tidy consensus of the orthodox and the comfortable. Never before had the reformers’ charge that the two parties ignored the real issues seemed more obvious, more self-evident. Populism was going to ride the silver escalator to the top. Reform was on the march; Populism was unstoppable.

  Then something crazy happened. As the recession deepened, the Democratic Party began to turn against its sitting president, the banker-coddling Grover Cleveland. When the Democrats gathered for their convention in Chicago in the summer of 1896, pandemonium broke loose. Not only did the party denounce its own president, but it declared its intention to toss the gold standard itself overboard. Then they nominated for the presidency the virtually unknown William Jennings Bryan, a thirty-six-year-old free-silver advocate from Nebraska who talked as much like a Populist as did anyone from the Cornhusker state.

  Eastern respectability reeled as it beheld one of the country’s two traditional parties apparently captured by radicalism. The actual radicals in the People’s Party, meanwhile, reckoned with the very different problem of seeing a powerful rival swipe the idea upon which they had strategically placed all their hopes. Meeting right after the shocking Democratic convention, the Populists felt they had little choice but to throw in their lot with Bryan. Fusion had been a successful strategy for the party at the state level, and now Populist leaders hoped to follow it into the executive branch in Washington.

  The gamble was a painful one for certain Populists, however. Not only did it mean selling out their far-reaching reform program in favor of one issue, but many among the party’s southern and black contingents had risked their lives to make a stand against the Democratic Party. For them to come crawling back because their colleagues wanted to endorse Bryan was a humiliating prospect. 10

  Still, the wager was done. The crusade was launched. It was free silver against the gold standard, with Populists and Democrats standing more or less united to defeat the plutocracy. When Bryan proceeded to lose to Republican William McKinley, Populism fell mortally wounded.

  The People’s Party struggled on for a few more years, but after the catastrophe of the 1896 election its fate was sealed. The party immediately broke into squabbling factions. Its conventions, scheduled for large auditoriums, were attended by embarrassingly small crowds. At length the economy recovered, even for farmers. Agricultural prices rose and, thanks to various technological advances, the global production of gold increased enormously, finally erasing the problems of deflation.

  Meanwhile, the two big parties slowly came around to the Populist innovations. Populist voters gradually made their way back to their previous partisan homes, while a chunk of the leadership joined the Socialist Party. By the first few years of the twentieth century, the third party’s grievances and its evangelical style seemed dated and easy to forget.

  * * *

  POPULISM’S LIST OF demands, however, did not perish. It lived on and met with success. The direct election of U.S. senators, for example, was secured through the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913. Railroads were regulated and so was the telephone system. Other monopolies were broken up. Women got the vote. Rich people got the income tax. Beginning in the 1910s, farmers got a whole host of programs designed to protect them from speculators and middlemen and the ups and downs of the market. Putting unemployed people to work on infrastructure eventually became a standard element of economic policy.

  In monetary policy, Populism also won in the end. The country finally came off the gold standard in 1933. Ultimately the United States moved to adopt the most radical Populist demand of them all, a managed or “fiat” currency—although we didn’t do it fully until 1971, some eighty years after Populism first came thundering over the prairies.

  These items make up “The Populist Contribution,” a phrase that a long-ago historian used to describe this list of belated triumphs. 11 For scholars of that generation, Populism was a chapter in the story of democracy’s advance, part of a long-running drama in which the American people faced off against aristocratic financial interests. The movement aimed “to make of America a land of democratic equality and opportunity,” wrote historian Vernon L. Parrington in 1930—“to make government in America serve man rather than property.” Populism showed that egalitarian aspirations lived and were capable of prevailing even in the country’s most corrupt, most plutocratic period. 12

  The ideology of Populism was not a difficult thing for historians in 1930 to identify. Its signature ideas—equality, hostility to privilege, anti-monopoly—were part of a radical nineteenth-century tradition that could be traced to Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. One reason that historians knew this was because the Populists said so all the time. The Jefferson the Pops admired is easy to pinpoint—it was the Jefferson who declared that banks were “more dangerous than standing armies,” who believed that the natural divide between political factions fell between “aristocrats and democrats,” who once urged a friend not to be intimidated by “the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people.”

  Understood in this way, Populism is not only a radical tradition, it is our radical tradition, a homegrown Left that spoke our American vernacular and worshipped at the shrines of Jefferson and Paine rather than Marx. We may have lost sight of the specific demands of the Populists’ Omaha Platform, but the populist instinct stays with us; it is close to who we are as a people. We may gag at political correctness, but populism endures; populism is what ensures that, even though we bridle against the latest crazy radical doings on campus, we also hate snobs and privilege with the core of our collective democratic being.

  * * *

  OVER THE LAST century , observers called countless movements and politicians “populist” because they were reminiscent in some way of the original. The People’s Party, however, was one of very few movements to apply that word to itself, to proudly call itself “Populist.” For decades after its brief flowering, it remained virtually the only example of the species, the number one definition of the word in English-language dictionaries.

  It is therefore surprising that modern-day thinkers who assail what they call populism only rarely bother to consider the movement that invented the word. Of the contemporary anti-populists I describe in this book, almost every single one is employed by an American news outlet, university, or think tank, and yet they attach the term far more frequently to the deeds of the Le Pen family in France or the rhetoric of South American politicians than to the group that revolutionized U.S. politics in the 1890s. Some of these experts seem unaware that the People’s Party existed. * Others mention it only casually and in passing. †

  Still, in their characterization of populism as a threat to democracy—an “ism” as insidious in its own way as communism used to be—these present-day thinkers are doing far more than calling into question various racist demago
gues: they are also attacking the American radical tradition. That is ultimately what’s in the crosshairs when such commentators insist that populism is a “threat to liberal democracy”; when they announce that populism “is almost inherently antidemocratic”; when they declare that “all people of goodwill must come together to defend liberal democracy from the populist threat.” 13

  These are strong, urgent statements, obviously intended to frighten us away from a particular set of views. Millions of foundation dollars have been invested to put scary pronouncements like these before the public. Media outlets have incorporated them into the thought feeds of the world. They are everywhere now: your daily newspaper, if your town still has one, almost certainly throws the word “populist” at racist demagogues and pro-labor liberals alike.

  When we fact-check the claims of this anti-populist onslaught, however, we find that they miss the reality of the original Populist movement as well as the many subsequent expressions of the populist credo. Again and again, upon investigation, the hateful tendencies that we are told make up this frightful worldview are either absent from genuine populism, or are the opposite of what it stood and stands for, or else more accurately describe the people who hated populism and who have opposed it since back in the 1890s. *

  I do not point all this out merely as a historical corrective; that is just the starting point. This book has larger ambitions. As we shall see, anti-populism always serves as a tool for justifying unaccountable power. As such, it is a doctrine worth exploring in its own right. But the immediate and urgent task before us is to rescue from the anti-populists the one radical tradition that has a chance of undoing the right-wing turn.