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The People, No

Page 28

by Frank, Thomas


  14.    Blacklisting Trump officials: See the petition and the “Open Letter to America’s CEOs” circulated by the anti-Trump group Restore Public Trust (https://trumpadminseparation.restorepublictrust.org ), and Michelle Goldberg’s column approving of the operation in the New York Times for April 9, 2019, “Cancel Kirstjen Nielsen.” DCCC blacklist: See Akela Lacy, “House Democratic Leadership Warns It Will Cut Off Any Firms That Challenge Incumbents,” Intercept , March 22, 2019.

  15.    See Elizabeth Logan, “Lena Dunham Called Out American Airlines after Hearing Transphobic Talk from Two Employees,” Teen Vogue , August 3, 2017.

  16.    See the thoughtful article on a closely related subject by German Lopez, “Research Says There Are Ways to Reduce Racial Bias. Calling People Racist Isn’t One of Them,” Vox , July 30, 2018.

  17.    A 2018 study of European and American voters by political scientist David Adler showed that centrists, rather than partisans of the left or right, were “the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions and the most supportive of authoritarianism.” This fascinating challenge to the working-class authoritarianism thesis might seem counterintuitive, but it fits perfectly with what I am describing in this chapter as well as with the much-noted anti-democratic centrism of the European Union. See Adler, “Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists,” New York Times , May 23, 2018.

  18.    William Galston, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (Yale University Press, 2018), p. 22. Galston does not specifically endorse any of these “viable alternatives.”

  19.    See the literature on the “Anthropocene.”

  CONCLUSION: THE QUESTION

    1.    Martin Luther King, “Foreword” in A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans: A Summary (A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1967), n.p. One place the Freedom Budget can be found online is https://www.crmvet.org/docs/6701_freedombudget.pdf .

    2.    “Democracy of literature”: Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, The First Hundred Million (Simon & Schuster, 1928), p. 2. Statistics on H-J’s lifetime achievement are from R. Alton Lee, Publisher for the Masses: Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), p. 202.

    3.    “Same level”: Haldeman-Julius, First Hundred Million , p. 2. “The door to learning and culture”: Haldeman-Julius advertisement quoted in Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 171. I am indebted to Freedman’s book for the interpretation that follows. “They are not intended to decorate shelves”: 1922 Haldeman-Julius advertisement quoted on www.haldeman-julius.org/haldeman-julius-resources/university-in-print.html .

    4.    E. Haldeman-Julius, My First 25 Years: Instead of a Footnote: An Autobiography (Haldeman-Julius, 1949), p. 6.

    5.    KKK: The Kreed of the Klansmen: A Symposium , 1924. Marcet Haldeman-Julius, The Story of a Lynching: An Exploration of Southern Psychology (1927). The story in question was the mob murder of John Carter, a savage incident that shocked the nation in May 1927. Two years later, Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius co-wrote Violence (Simon & Schuster, 1929), a novel describing a fictionalized version of the same horrible event.

    6.    This Tyranny of Bunk was the title of a Big Blue Book from 1927. The Dumbness of the Great: A Survey of the Nonsense, Absurdities, Inconsistencies, Illogicalities, Inaccuracies, and Idiocies of the World’s Outstanding Leaders was a brutal attack on religiosity through history that was written by Joseph McCabe (one of H-J’s favorite writers) and published by Haldeman-Julius in 1948 as Big Blue Book number 700.

  The other quotations are from H-J’s The Outline of Bunk (Stratford, 1929), pp. 343, 448. Of the many secularist pamphlets published by Haldeman-Julius, probably the most famous are Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Clarence Darrow’s Why I Am an Agnostic (both 1929).

    7.    Haldeman-Julius’s greatest hero seems to have been the Populist/Socialist labor leader Eugene Debs, whom he describes in his autobiography as a kind of secular saint: “Debs was great. Debs was beautiful. Debs was noble. Debs was a son of the Socialist movement—a self-made, self-educated worker who, with the aid of his Socialist comrades, had disciplined himself as speaker, writer and leader.” (Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, My Second 25 Years: Instead of a Footnote: An Autobiography [Haldeman-Julius, 1949], p. 59.)

  The former Populist Clarence Darrow was also a hero of the Haldeman-Julius publications because of his well-known religious skepticism. Ironically, one of the hoariest set pieces of the anti-populist literature is the 1925 Scopes Trial over the teaching of evolution in the public schools, in which the by-then fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan clashed with the agnostic Darrow, thus supposedly revealing the ignorant fundamentalism of the Populist mind. But, as the historian Charles Postel points out, this cozy cliché only works when you omit the fact that Darrow had been an actual Populist leader while Bryan never stopped being a Democrat.

  As long as we’re on the subject, here is one last fun Populist detail: Mary Elizabeth Lease, the uber-Populist orator who coined the exhortation “less corn and more hell,” was also a confirmed believer in the theory of evolution. In 1931 she told the Kansas City Star that “the Bible teaches birth control. And the Bible teaches evolution. I am a believer in inspired religion and I am a believer in scientific research.” She went on to refer to Bryan as “a paid advocate of darkness” for his role in the Scopes Trial and to name her three “greatest teachers” as Moses, Jesus, and Albert Einstein, who “proved that the soul of man, co-operating with the mind of man, can understand everything.”

    8.    Gilbert Seldes, Mainland (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), p. 151.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the 1980s I was passionate about Populism but gave up on the subject a few years into graduate school: going over a forgotten third party with a microscope somehow lost its appeal for me, and I moved on to other things. But the political panic of 2017 brought me back, as did the encouragement of my publisher, Sara Bershtel.

  It’s a challenge to return to a subject after neglecting it for so long, but the changes in research technology made it easier than one might expect. So did the people who helped me with the digging on this project: Zachary Davis, Charlie Goetzman, Grace Menninger, and Amelia Sorenson. Most of all I am indebted to Steve Richmond, who sank countless hours into this project in the late stages, unearthing many of this book’s great finds, and without whom it would probably never have been completed.

  The works of Michael Kazin served as models for this study; his 1995 book The Populist Persuasion had enormous significance for me when it first appeared. Another model was Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven , a work and an author that will probably never get the serious attention they deserve.

  For this project I interviewed the Reverend William Barber, Fred Harris, and Jim Hightower, three men who were enormously helpful in explaining the reform tradition and the power of mass movements. There are moments with all of them that I will never forget, but the one I am truly sorry I could not work into the text was when Hightower showed me a framed Texas poll tax receipt from 1964, a memento of a thankfully bygone era.

  At Pittsburg State University in Kansas, a mandatory stop on the itinerary of anyone writing about the Little Blue Books, Steve Cox and Randy Roberts were especially helpful. The one who is most responsible for my fascination with this subject, however, is Bridget Cain, who picked up some Blue Books for me at a junk shop in Lawrence way back when.

  Wesley Hogan helped me find my way through the civil rights journalism of Lawrence Goodwyn. Joe Vaccaro instructed me in the history of Minnesota radicalism. Matt Stoller furnished me with one of the best anecdotes in this entire enterprise. Liz and Matt Bruenig steered me toward probably a dozen more. Barry Lynn, who is as close to a populist as Washington, D.C., will allow, encouraged me throughout.

  Thanks al
so to all the people who answered the seemingly random queries I posed: Lance Bennett, Joel Bleifuss, Taylor Branch, Fred Gardaphe, Jay Harris, Michael Honey, Michael Kazin (again), Steven Klein, Bob McChesney, Christopher Parker, Charles Postel, Gabriel Zucman, and the helpful staff at the Kansas State Historical Society.

  Jim McNeill read the manuscript, as he has read all of my manuscripts over the last twenty years. Chris Lehmann took a crack at it, too, just like in the old days. Eric Klinenberg set me straight on a few things, and Kate Zaloom made valuable suggestions on a few others. Johann Hari’s advice was consistently excellent. Rick Perlstein proved himself, once again, a man of remarkable insight both historical and contemporary.

  Old Town Editions of Alexandria, Virginia, took pictures of cartoons from my 1896 copies of Judge magazine. The Newberry Library provided me with photographs of Chicago Tribune cartoons from 1936. Meg Handler helped me secure permission to reprint all the pictures I assembled.

  Sara Bershtel and Riva Hocherman of Metropolitan Books steered this whole project brilliantly from start to finish. My agent, Joe Spieler, provided his usual shrewd counsel.

  The mistakes and the blunders and the screwups are mine. I claim them all.

  INDEX

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  ACT UP

  Adamic, Louis

  Adams, Henry

  AFL-CIO

  AFSCME Local 1733

  Against Democracy (Brennan)

  Agee, James

  Age of Reform, The (Hofstadter)

  “Agricultural Unrest” (Laughlin)

  Alabama

  All Labor Has Dignity (King)

  Altgeld, John P.

  America First

  American Bar Association

  American Enterprise Institute

  American Journalism (Mott)

  American Liberty League

  American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator

  American Prospect

  American Protective Association

  American Railway Union

  “America Was Promises” (MacLeish)

  anarchism

  Animal Farm (Orwell)

  Anti-Pluralism (Galston)

  anti-Semitism

  antitrust laws

  Appeal to Reason

  Arizona

  Arnold, Thurman

  Aspen Ideas Festival

  AT&T

  Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad

  Atlantic Monthly

  Atwater, Lee

  Australian Labour Party

  Austria

  authoritarianism

  “Ballad for Americans”

  “Ballad of Hollis Brown, The”

  Balzac, Honoré de

  banks

  Bannon, Steve

  Barber, William, II

  Bardo, Clinton

  Batman films 6

  “Battle Hymn of the Republic”

  Beck, Glenn

  Bell, Daniel

  Bell, Jeffrey

  Bellamy, Edward

  Benton, Thomas Hart

  Bentsen, Lloyd

  Bilbo, Theodore

  Birmingham, Alabama

  Black Lives Matter

  Black Populism

  blacks

  “Blacks and the Unions, The” (Rustin)

  Blair, Tony

  Blow, Charles

  Bonus Army

  Boston Globe

  Bouie, Jamelle

  Bourbon Democrats

  Bourke-White, Margaret

  Boxer Rebellion

  Brain Trust

  Brennan, Jason

  Bretton Woods Conference

  Brexit

  Brigham Young University, Team Populism

  Brinkley, Alan

  British Labour Party. See also United Kingdom

  Brookings Institution

  Brooks, David

  Bryan, William Jennings

  Buchanan, Patrick J.

  Burke, Kenneth

  Bush, George H. W.

  Bush, George W.

  Caldwell, Erskine

  California

  Calloway, Cab

  Capra, Frank

  Carmichael, Stokely

  Carrel, Alexis

  Carter, Jimmy

  Carver, Thomas Nixon

  Cavalcade of America, The (radio show)

  Center for American Progress

  Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

  “Century of Protest, A” (video)

  Chamber of Commerce

  Cherokees

  Chicago

  protests of 1968

  steel strike of 1937

  “Chicago” (Sandburg)

  Chicago Tribune

  China

  Choate, Joseph H.

  Choctaw

  Churchwell, Sarah

  Citizen Kane (film)

  Civilian Conservation Corps

  Civil Rights Act (1964)

  civil rights movement

  Civil War

  Clanton, O. Gene

  Cleveland, Grover

  Clinton, Bill

  Clinton, Hillary

  Coin’s Financial School (Harvey)

  Colby, Bainbridge

  Colored Farmers’ Alliance

  Columbia University

  Commentary

  Congressional Research Service

  Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)

  conservatism

  Cooke, Jay, IV

  Cooperative Commonwealth

  Cornell University

  corporations

  Coughlin, Charles

  counterculture

  Cowie, Jefferson

  Coxey, Jacob

  Coxey’s Army

  Creek tribe

  Crowd, The (Le Bon)

  currency reform, 128n-29n

  Daily Kos

  “Dangerous Rise of Populism, The” (Human Rights Watch)

  Darrow, Clarence

  Debs, Eugene

  Declaration of Independence

  “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic” (Sullivan)

  Democracy Scare

  Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

  Democratic Leadership Council

  Democratic National Convention

  of 1896

  of 1932

  of 1936

  of 1976

  of 2016

  Democratic Promise (Goodwyn)

  Denning, Michael

  Depression

  Diggs, Annie L.

  Dole, Bob

  Dos Passos, John

  Dow Jones Industrial Average

  DuBois, W.E.B.

  Dukakis, Michael

  Duke University

  Dumbness of the Great, The (Big Blue Book)

  Dunham, Lena

  DuPont Company

  Eastwood, Clint

  Easy Rider (film)

  Eichengreen, Barry

  Eisenhower, Dwight

  elections

  of 1892

  of 1896, 37n-38n

  of 1928

  of 1932

  of 1936

  of 1940

  of 1948

  of 1968

  of 1976

  of 1980

  of 1988

  of 1996

  of 2000

  of 2008

  of 2016

  Electoral College

  Eliot, Charles William

  Emerging Republican Majority, The (Phillips)

  End of Ideology, The (Bell)

  End Poverty in California

  Englebrecht, H. C.

  Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

  European Union

  Evans, Walker

  Farm Bureau

  farmers

  Farmers’ Allian
ce

  Farmers Holiday Association

  Farmers Union

  Farm Holiday strike

  Farm Security Administration

  Federal Communications Commission

  Federalist Society

  Ferguson, Niall

  Field, Stephen J.

  financial crisis of 2008

  First Battle, The (Bryan)

  Flint sit-down strike

  Fonda, Henry

  Fonda, Peter

  Foreign Affairs

  Foreign Policy

  Forerunners of American Fascism (Swing)

  Fox News

  France

  Revolution

  Freedom Budget

  Freedom Rides

  Friedrich Naumann Foundation

  From Many Lands (Adamic)

  Fusionists

  Galbraith, John Kenneth

  Galston, William

  Garland, Hamlin

  General Electric

  General Motors

  George, Henry

  George III, King of England

  Georgia State Bar Association

  Gerstle, Gary

  Gilder, George

  Gingrich, Newt

  Godkin, E .L.

  Goering, Hermann

  Goethe, J. W. von

  Goldman Sachs

  gold standard

  Good Neighbor League

  Goodwyn, Lawrence

  granger movement

  Grapes of Wrath, The (film)

  Great Society

  Green, Josh

  Greening of America, The

  Guardian

  Haider, Jö rg

  Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel

  Haldeman-Julius, Marcet

  Hamilton, Alexander

  Hanna, Mark

  Harrington, Michael

  Harris, Fred

  Harvard University

  Harvey, William “Coin”

  Hay, John

  Hayden, Tom

  Haymarket anarchists

  Hearst, William Randolph

  Hightower, Jim

  Hillman, Sidney

  Hitler, Adolf

  Hofstadter, Richard

  Honey, Michael

  Hoover, Herbert

  Hoover Institution

  Hour of Decision, The (Spengler)

 

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