The People, No
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27. Tom Watson, “The Negro Question in the South,” in Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 370, 371–72.
28. Coxey’s Army: See Postel, The Populist Vision , p. 258.
29. Hamlin Garland, A Spoil of Office (D. Appleton and Company, 1897), p. 358.
30. See Omar H. Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900 (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), p. 76.
31. The quotation is from Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth , p. 80.
32. The two extremes are captured by Walter Nugent in The Tolerant Populists: Kansas, Populism and Nativism (University of Chicago Press, 1963) and Charles Postel in chapter 6 of The Populist Vision .
33. Woodward, Origins of the New South , p. 393.
34. Especially disturbing is the story of the white supremacy campaign in North Carolina in 1898, which not only destroyed Populism in that state but led to the armed overthrow of the municipal government of Wilmington. See Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chapter 8; Woodward, Origins of the New South , pp. 277, 348, 372, etc.
35. “Or should we say bossess, bosserina, or bossy?” The Kansas City Journal , quoted in Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Summary of the Press Throughout the World , August 9, 1900, p. 166.
36. On the Populists’ inclusion of the “pauper immigration” plank, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (Atheneum, 1978), p. 346, note 13. The Populists’ candidate in 1892 was James B. Weaver; the quote is drawn from his campaign memoir, A Call to Action: An Interpretation of the Great Uprising, Its Source and Causes (Iowa Printing Company, 1892), p. 281. From the Democratic Platform of 1892: “We heartily approve all legitimate efforts to prevent the United States from being used as the dumping ground for the known criminals and professional paupers of Europe; and we demand the rigid enforcement of the laws against Chinese immigration and the importation of foreign workmen under contract,” etc. From the Republican Platform of 1892: “We favor the enactment of more stringent laws and regulations for the restriction of criminal, pauper and contract immigration.” The parties’ platforms can be found at the website of the American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu .
37. Walter Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (University of Chicago Press, 1963).
38. The anti-APA resolution is quoted on page 163 of Walter Nugent, The Tolerant Populists .
39. Neil Swidey, “If the Elites Go Down, We’re All in Trouble,” Boston Globe Magazine , October 5, 2017. David Brooks, “The Rise of the Resentniks and the Populist War on Excellence,” New York Times , November 15, 2018. Tom Nichols, “How America Lost Faith in Expertise,” Foreign Affairs , February 13, 2017. To his credit, Nichols acknowledges in this essay that experts often make mistakes. To his discredit, he quotes Richard Hofstadter as an expert on populism without acknowledging the overthrow of Hofstadter’s views on that subject.
40. Rauch and Wittes, “More Professionalism, Less Populism,” Brookings, May 2017. The final quote is from political scientist Bruce Cain.
41. See Postel, The Populist Vision , chapter 2; “progress through education” occurs on page 48. Lawrence Goodwyn estimates the number of Alliance lecturers at forty thousand in The Populist Moment , p. xxi. The university founded by a Populist leader was North Carolina State; the Populist in question was Leonidas L. Polk.
42. The Appeal ’s list of books, in their issue for December 14, 1895, included titles by Karl Marx, Henry George, William Morris, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the economist Richard T. Ely, in addition to the usual Populist favorites.
43. Postel, The Populist Vision , p. 281.
44. T. C. Jory, What Is Populism? , p. 4.
45. Postel, The Populist Vision , p. 286.
2. “BECAUSE RIGHT IS RIGHT AND GOD IS GOD”
1. These and many other amusing details of the 1896 campaign are found in Karl Rove’s account, The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters (Simon & Schuster, 2015), pp. 330, 339.
2. Sun (New York), July 10, 1896, p. 6.
3. “The Duty of Democrats,” Sun (New York), July 12, 1896, p. 6. John Hay, The Platform of Anarchy (N.P., 1896), p. 8
4. “A Few Points,” Sun (New York), July 14, 1896, p. 6. Godkin: Untitled editorial item, Nation , October 8, 1896, p. 259. On the unanimity of the press, Godkin gloated: “There never was a Presidential campaign in which one of the two great parties received so little support from the press of the country” as that of 1896. “Every independent journal in the United States was opposed to Bryan, and throughout the East all the old established and influential Democratic newspapers were outspoken against him. In the Western metropolis he got as little backing from the press as in the Eastern, not one Chicago journal of the first class advocating free coinage, and hardly any of the lower classes.” Unsigned editorial, Nation , November 5, 1896.
5. The Methodist bishop was John P. Newman. See “Political Incident at Asbury Park,” New York Times , July 27, 1896, p. 1. The “incident” made nationwide headlines. As the Times continued the story, “Instantly a man in the rear of the hall jumped up and shouted: ‘Bryan is a good American.’ The man tried to propose three cheers for the Democrat-Populist candidate for President, but his voice was drowned by the music of the choir.”
The last two examples are both taken from Bryan’s own account of the 1896 campaign, The First Battle , pages 471 and 474. The society preacher was Robert S. McArthur; the second was none other than Thomas Dixon Jr., who was later the author of The Clansman .
6. Fifteen university presidents: Nation , October 8, 1896, p. 259. White’s pamphlet, titled An Open Letter to Sundry Democrats , was extensively quoted in the New York Times for July 16, 1896, p. 1. Here is the amazing headline that the Times applied to its account of his intervention: “Duty Now of Democrats / Andrew D. White Advises Voting for Mr. McKinley. / The Chicago Convention, He Says, Was Made Up Not of Democrats but of Anarchists, Socialists, Populists, Speculators, and Sectionalists—Outlines Further Steps in the Policy of Confiscation and Spoliation.” White was also the author of the libertarian favorite Fiat Money in France: How It Came, What It Brought and How It Ended (D. Appleton and Company, 1896), which was reissued in 1896 with a new introduction denouncing “so-called ‘Democrats,’ ” “their candidate and his Populist supporters.” White later became McKinley’s ambassador to Germany.
7. Josephson, The Politicos , p. 693.
8. Ibid., p. 698.
9. Ibid., p. 705. Karl Rove, in The Triumph of William McKinley , asserts that all rumors of economic coercion were false. However, there is plenty of evidence that coercion or something like it took place. In his biography of Bryan, A Godly Hero (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), Michael Kazin shows that coercive threats were widespread and commonplace. Examples are easy enough to find in published documents from the era. In an article in Sound Currency for September 1, 1896, Louis Ehrich (a supporter of the gold standard) reports that “within this very week two prominent bankers of Colorado have assured me that they would at once loan out 25 per cent more of their deposits if they were absolutely sure of Bryan’s defeat.” The cover of Judge for September 26, 1896, describes a “Free Silver Scare” that was threatening to close down factories with “thousands thrown out of employment.” Matthew Josephson, in The Politicos , gives many more examples of threats and other inducements to workers and farmers as they were reported in the press of the day. “ ‘Men, vote as you please,’ the head of the Steinway piano works is reported to have said, in terms which were repeated throughout the country, ‘but if Bryan is elected tomorrow the whistle will not blow Wednesday morning’ ” (p. 704).
11. The Platform of Anarchy is dated October 6, 1896, and claims to record “An Address to the Students of Western Reserve University,” but according to one of Hay’s biographers, no speech ever took place. Hay believed “address” could include a pamphlet printed for the occasion. See Tyler Dennett, John Hay: From Poetry to Politics (Dodd, Mead, 1933), pp. 178–79.
12. This verdict is delivered in the course of a profile of Tom Watson, the Populists’ choice for the vice presidency. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Three Vice-Presidential Candidates,” Review of Reviews , September 1896.
13. The story is called “A Walking Delegate”; Kipling published it in the Century magazine in December 1894 and collected it in The Day’s Work a few years later. My quotes are drawn from the latter version, published by Doubleday & McClure in 1898. That the story referred to Populism was clearly understood in those days; in 1894 Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend and asked him to tell Kipling how the story was urged—hilariously—on William Peffer, the Populist senator from Kansas, who apparently did not find it amusing. See Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time: Shown in His Own Letters (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), vol. 1, p. 56.
14. Puck , September 2, 1896.
15. Sumner, “Cause and Cure of Hard Times,” in The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (Yale University Press, 1919; originally published in Leslie’s Weekly , September 3, 1896), p. 153.
16. “The Chief of Blatherskites,” New York Evening Post , July 10, 1896, p. 4. This is just a few columns over from an editorial denouncing “the Populistic, anarchistic Chicago platform.”
17. “Since [1860] the size of the buildings has been increasing pretty steadily, and as a consequence the deliberative character of the conventions has steadily decreased until the present point has been reached.” New York Evening Post , July 11, 1896.
18. Bryan as leader of a pirate gang: Life , July 30, 1896, p. 79. (The captured Democratic ship is flying a skull-and-crossbones flag marked “Anarchy” and “Repudiation.”) As Mephistopheles: October 1, 1896, p. 247. As simpleton: October 29, 1896, p. 327. As stage performer: ibid., p. 325.
19. New York Sun , October 1, 1896.
20. Choate later served as McKinley’s ambassador to Great Britain. He is quoted in Charles Beard, The Supreme Court and the Constitution (Macmillan, 1912), p. 112.
21. Hay had written a bitterly anti-union novel in the 1880s in which he made these points. To quote Vernon Parrington’s summary: “The proletariat is groping blindly for leadership; it is stirring uneasily; if the educated classes do not offer an enlightened leadership, the laborer will follow low cunning to immoral ends and blind leaders of the blind will bring irretrievable disaster upon civilization. Selfish appeal will kindle envy and hate; the rich and prosperous will go down before brute force; the rights of property will be destroyed; law, order, and obedience will give place to anarchy.” The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America: 1860–1920 (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930), p. 174.
22. The paper then observed that, “just as during the French Revolution one demagogue swiftly supplanted another in the affections of the mob and for a time held the supreme place of power, so the revolutionists and repudiators of the Chicago Assembly or Convention have with bewildering rapidity transferred their allegiance through a succession of Populist favorites.” “It Is Bryan of Nebraska,” New York Sun , July 11, p. 6.
23. Godkin: Nation , July 23, 1896, p. 60. “ ‘Blowing’ Himself Around the Country” was the centerfold in Puck for September 16, 1896. It can be viewed on the Library of Congress website at https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.28841/ .
24. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918), p. 344.
25. Hay, The Platform of Anarchy , p. 10.
26. On the day after the Democrats had adopted what the New York Evening Post called “the Populistic, anarchistic Chicago platform,” the paper informed its readers that the disease was everywhere:
In almost every community now there is a small band of thinkers who go about muttering to themselves, haranguing their acquaintances, and occasionally publishing an article or making a speech in which they call the attention of the public to appalling facts and events which no one else perceives or has any knowledge of (New York Evening Post , July 10, 1896).
Similarly, the noted gold bug Louis Ehrich suggested that what ailed the Populists and their allies was “intellectual astigmatism, a condition of the mind which renders it impossible for the individual to see certain lines of thought and fact in their true relation.” Louis R. Ehrich, “The Poison in Our Circulation,” Sound Currency , September 1, 1896, p. 11. Ehrich’s article seems to have originated as a speech delivered to the convention of a breakaway gold faction of the Democratic Party, which met in Indianapolis that month.
27. The “alienist’s” letter ran in the New York Times for September 27, 1896. That same day, the Times ran an editorial titled “Is Bryan Crazy?” The controversy continued for at least a week. The original story is reprinted at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5353/ . Other installments in the series can be read on the website of the New York Times : “Is Mr. Bryan a Mattoid,” September 29, 1896; “Bryan Under Criticism,” October 2, 1896.
28. J. Laurence Laughlin, “Causes of Agricultural Unrest,” Atlantic Monthly , November 1896, p. 577.
29. Ibid., pp. 584, 585.
30. “A Most Lamentable Comedy” was published in installments in the Saturday Evening Post in 1901. White collected it that same year in Stratagems and Spoils: Stories of Love and Politics (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), which is the version I am quoting from here. White mentions Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for Stratagems and Spoils in his Autobiography (Macmillan, 1946), p. 320.
31. See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Ernest Benn Limited, 1952 [1896]). White acknowledges reading it in his Autobiography , p. 271.
So what happens in White’s story of the Populist revolt? Well, the orator Dan Gregg is elected governor, whereupon he reveals himself to be utterly incompetent and makes a complete wreck of things, plus gets involved in an affair with a wealthy woman. The mind-clouding folly of Populism eventually receding, Gregg is defeated in his bid for reelection and returns to tragic, solitary crank-dom on his remote farm.
32. Peffer’s scrapbooks, available on the website of the Kansas State Historical Society, contain two examples of such imagery, both from Judge magazine, one of them undated, the other dated July 20, 1895. Leslie’s Weekly , September 3, 1896.
33. The Italian stereotype cartoon was the centerfold in Judge for August 15, 1896. “The American ‘Boxer’ ” was the cover cartoon for Judge on June 30, 1900. These two plus the Bryan/Satan cartoon were all drawn by Grant Hamilton, one of the best-known cartoonists of the era.
34. Absorbing great drafts of the white-supremacy propaganda, “the Populist white man who had valued his farm above his race,” as the historian Glenda Gilmore puts it, learned that by voting for the third party, “he had opened the gates of hell for some distant white woman.” Gilmore, cited in Michael Honey, “Class, Race and Power in the New South,” in Timothy Tyson and David S. Cecelski, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 172. On the local business class and the racist cartoons, see James M. Beeby, Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), chapter 8.
35. I am quoting from “ ‘Those Who Own the Property Should Rule,’ ” the closing editorial from the People’s Paper of Charlotte, North Carolina (November 4, 1898), as reproduced on the helpful University of North Carolina website “The 1898 Election in North Carolina,” https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/1898/hi
story .
36. Honey, “Class, Race and Power in the New South,” p. 170. See also the final report of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, dated May 31, 2006 and published by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.
37. Michael Perman, in Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South 1888–1908 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), argues that suppressing Populism was not the rationale for disfranchisement in every single southern state; in many of them it happened after Populism had already died out. However, in every case it was intended to prevent another challenge to Democratic one-party rule. On the North Carolina case, see Beeby, Revolt of the Tar Heels , chapter 9.
38. Anonymous letter to William McKinley dated November 13, 1898, and cited in Glenda E. Gilmore, “Murder, Memory, and the Flight of the Incubus,” in Tyson and Cecelski, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy , p. 88.
3. PEAK POPULISM IN THE PROLETARIAN DECADE
1. Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1940 (Haymarket Books, 2010), p. 15.
2. Floyd Olson, “My Political Creed: Why a New Party Must Challenge Capitalism,” Common Sense , April 1935, p. 7.