Hogg and the Alliance leadership fell out. Then, the national Democratic Party chose Grover Cleveland, a sound-money conservative, for its Presidential candidate in 1892. The Farmers' Alliance felt betrayed. In the emotional backwash, Hogg snubbed the Alliance men, and the chairman of the state Democratic committee read them out of the party. They followed the course of the truly alienated in American life: they joined a hitherto unheard-of group, the People's Party of Texas, newly formed among the hardscrabble, limestone hills of Lampasas. Here, on the exact edge of the old farmline frontier, third-party Populism was born. Quickly, the People's Party exploded, via the already formed Alliance, from Texas to Nebraska, from Arkansas to Virginia.
The crushing depression of these years fed its growth. But Populism was to be relatively unimportant in the West and upper South, despite the adoption of some of its planks by the national Democrats and William Jennings Bryan. Third-party Populism, the only real Populism, sprouted fully only in the far South. It was to be a bitter and debased continuance of the Civil War, dividing not only North and South, but this time Southerner and Southerner. In Texas, in 1894 and 1896, the People's Party did not fuse with the Democrats. Instead, it developed its own leaders and own platforms, and fought a bitter, hardly understood internal political war.
The basically amiable faction politics, without ideological divisions, disappeared in a welter of bitterness and turmoil not seen since Reconstruction days. Interest politics arose, dividing farmer and businessman, owner and tenant, debtor and creditor, with intolerance on both sides. The Populists mounted their attack on the "system" with evangelistic fury, flaying now the national scene of uncontrolled capitalistic orgy, now the "middlemen" who were the system's local lackeys. They had, certainly, sufficient to be bitter about. Their reaction, and actions, were logical in their time. They also were rather frightening, as all such American movements are from time to time.
The Populists proclaimed the old doctrine of Jeffersonian equality, shouted that the common people were the salt of the earth, that labor was holy, and the tree of American liberty withered in too-dry soil. The attack caught fire. Seventy-five Texas papers supported the third party; one, the Southern Mercury at Dallas, was influential. The Populists evolved their own pantheon of stump men: Tom Nugent, Jerome Kearby, Cyclone Davis, and T. P. Gore, who later had some success in Oklahoma.
A high number of Populist leaders were fundamentalist preachers from the frontier. Populist meetings took on a camp meeting, revivalist style. Hymns were sung; sermons preached; this was not a campaign but to some men, a holy crusade. The new evangelists found much inspiration in the Bible, against money-changers and self-proclaimed scribes and Pharisees. Caught up and bewildered by eroding economic change, over which they had no control, the farming people listened and agreed to high-sounding, if ridiculous, financial panaceas, and roaringly agreed that their manhood must not be sacrificed up on a cross of gold.
Rhetorical hatred was directed toward the East, the source of all evil, the place from which Yankee money flowed. Wall Street, whose workings not one farmer in a million understood, became an enduring, odious symbol. The shadowy figure of the "Jewish banker" became involved; although not one Texan in a thousand had ever even seen a Jew. Shylock had been a respectable, despicable English-speaking symbol for three hundred years—something later, and Jewish, observers forgot. Shylock the banker was an allusion every farmer immediately understood, and every farmer had figuratively, with great anguish, been relieved of his pound of flesh.
Someone, inevitably, had to serve as scapegoats for this long pain. The rancor against the Shylocks was to remain rhetorical, because the Jews remained out of reach. But also inevitably, scapegoats nearer to home were found, despite the earnest, and apparently honest, efforts of the Populist leaders.
Easterners made a number of errors about this lot. They did identify Populism with the fundamentalist Bible Belt, and considered it anti-Eastern, anti-intellectual, anticapitalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-aristocratic. They reacted rather violently. Major magazines, such as the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Weekly, were as hysterical in denunciation as the preachers on the stump. Theodore Roosevelt accused Populists of plotting social revolution and subversion of the Republic, and actually proposed shooting twelve of their leaders dead by firing squad. Joseph H. Choate argued before the Supreme Court that the demands for an income tax were "beginnings of socialism and communism." The members of the Union League Club apparently were so frightened that the estimable Mark Hanna, the coolest if not the most lovable head around, rebuked them for acting like scared chickens.
Somehow, Wall Street had its own myth: that the People's Party were anarchists, frothing to burn the nation out.
All this requires some inspection. Actually, Populism was neither the beast the corporate capitalists thought it, nor anything like the true reform movement later Eastern anticapitalist intellectuals lovingly longed for.
Populist thinking was provincial and Southern, because its supporters were provincial and generally uneducated. It was also imperfect, overemphasizing the importance of ready money, and believing a few dollars could offset a long-term trend. It was also simplistic, trying to separate mankind into producers and drones, farmers and workers, and "greedy interests living off them." This was then and later emotionally satisfying, if socially insane. An industrial society had to be complex, and in no tightly organized society would human psychology afford much honor or reward to manual labor. Populism also succumbed to the American agrarian myth, but far better educated Americans succumbed to it, also. The People's Party invented its conspiracies and its inevitable Golden Age. It was composed mostly of ignorant people, and heir to all the superstition, folklore, and prejudice of inner America, which was considerable. However, few of these foibles were in any way worse than the biases and hypocrisies of other American regions. The industrial upper classes in the East were more than rhetorically anti-Semitic, although they were too genteel to shout about it from the pulpit. The insistence upon rampant capitalism and gold, as sort of religions, bears no more inspection than the farmer's naïve trust in government credit and free silver.
For better or for worse, most of the Populist programs came to pass in later, neo-Populist times. The Populist charge that private banking was stacked against the farmer was true, as was his belief that only the general government could provide adequate credit on the farms. Given his mistaken assumption that there was a place for the family farm, much Populist thinking was eminently logical.
American intellectuals could view the historic passage of the dinosaur, or the collapse of the European feudality under economic factors, with greater assurance than they could view the demoralization of the farmer. The American ethic did not have an agrarian origin, but Americans had spent too many generations on the farm. Populism, and its myths, were to infect the coming years with deep nostalgia.
The Populists in Texas were theoretically and rhetorically opposed to the monied East. But distant capitalism was out of reach; they waged their bitterest battle against what they considered the agents of capitalism and industrialism at home. The farmers rebelled against the pretensions to breeding and social superiority of the new-rich, post-1860 mercantile and business classes, but not against private property or the concept of wealth itself.
Many outsiders confused this attack as an attack on aristocracy, but then they confused the new industrial upper class in the United States with aristocracy, too. In parts of Texas—and much more strikingly in Virginia, where there was more available gentry—some of the most honored names supported the Populist cause. The landowning, or former landowning, groups shared many of the beliefs and hurts of the small farmer.
The Populist assault on the state government was not intelligent but emotional. They turned a political struggle into a crusade and made it "them" or "us." They were too simplistic, forgetting the essential of American political success, the pragmatic alliance between disparate groups. They tried
to form a great alliance composed only of the poor. There were more poor than rich or well-off in America, but in America, with its cause-and-effect ethic, any such alliance was doomed. Locally, they drove the Democratic Party with all its historic strengths and associations in the Southern mind entirely into the business-conservative camp. Instead of creating a new North–South battleground, Populism scarred new battlefields in the South itself, on which some poisonous mushrooms were allowed to grow.
The farmers hoped to enlist the Northern proletariat, to create another New York–Western axis as in the Jacksonian age. They had no real routes of communication, nor any ideology or leadership palatable to the North. Mark Hanna, master craftsman that he was, was certain that silver could not be sold to Indiana farmers, and he was right. The whole tier of states that went for Lincoln in 1860 went for McKinley in 1896. The Northern farmer remained unconvinced, and the McKinley people, with enormous success, convinced the Eastern workers that Southern agrarianism threatened their whole house of cards. It was still a near-thing; the Republicans won because they yet retained the initiative in American life. The Populist-Democrats, on the national level, were a reactionary wail of protest for a passing way of life.
The second great alliance sought by the Populists was with the impoverished and quiescent Negro mass. The Populist leaders knew they could not offset the Democrats in Texas without black allies. Negroes still voted in Texas in the 1890s; there were no legal restrictions in their way, though they faced intimidation in many counties. After Reconstruction, the Negroes, always outside the money economy, drifted outside the political scene. Populist evangels determined to bring them back in.
There was no real difference between the lot of the black tenant and the white. Both faced and suffered from the same conditions. But here the Populist leadership stepped on dangerous ground. Blinded by their own logic, they failed to remember the illogical ways men think and act. They made their second great mistake. First, they had turned "interest" politics into class politics in Texas; now, they infused status politics with disastrous results.
Black and white workers were sent among the Negroes. These were paid workers, generally called "'fluence men." They distributed bribes and favors, and their mission was to influence votes. They enjoyed considerable success, because the Negro vote was ripe. The Democrats, for twenty years, had left it strictly alone.
With its melange of factions, traditions, and expertise, the Democrat Party fought back. Hogg and Culberson built tight south-Texas machines, dragooning the Mexican vote; at this time the Mexican vote in Texas was brought almost entirely into the conservative camp, not by ideology but through the use of local Anglo leaders and superb machine politics. The Democrats had the scared support of most businessmen and virtually every corporation or interest within the state. They also had control of the apparatus of government, and they used it well.
The Populists had aroused class and caste hatreds. Now, they met with practices not seen since Reconstruction: the stuffed ballot box, packed courts, hostile election boards. They also found economic boycotts, social ostracism, and severe retaliation. Preachers who favored Populists were turned out; both white and black Populist workers were evicted from their tenant farms.
The black alliance made the People's Party terribly vulnerable to the South's most sensitive charge: race treason. The Populists were branded with the accusation that they were disloyal to both Texas and the white race, and this was one they simply could not throw off. The Civil War was still a burning event. All voters either remembered the conflict, or had been born during Reconstruction.
The Republican patronage party in Texas made things worse, by publicly supporting Populism. Hoping only for a McKinley victory in the North, local Republicans plotted further wreckage among the Democrats. They did more damage to the Populists.
The Democrats survived. Culberson, Hogg's successor, beat Tom Nugent in 1894 for governor. In 1896, the year the national Democrats undercut Populism by adopting its planks, Culberson beat Jerome Kearby by only 58,000 votes out of more than half a million. The election was resplendent with counting-out and other forms of fraud.
The People's Party did elect a bloc of state representatives and many local officials, but not enough to win influence; 1896 was their high-water mark. By now, the national Democrat Party had destroyed third party Populism by incorporating it, and in Texas the stubborn third party, by battling the Democrats, had strangled themselves.
Populism aroused an enormously hostile reaction both in the North and South. Much of its approach was irrational, but its method scared more men than its madness. Pragmatism, not evangelism, was the root of American politics. There was still a shuddery sensitive spot left on the American soul by the irrationalism of the Civil War.
More remarkable than the People's Party's rise was its quick demise. By 1898 it was fading fast, and by 1900 it had disappeared. There were a number of reasons. The most important was that Populism had never had a genuine ideological base. It was interest politics, waged by men who wanted dollars more than social reform. As historians noted, silver dollars were the real goal, not the theory of free coinage of silver. Populists rose because they were hard-working men and women who were pushed to the wall by changing systems; when they could make it again under the American system, all their protest would dissipate. Populists in Texas had very little, if anything, in common with the Progressivism of the high Midwest, with which they were often confused. They were not liberals, but reactionaries—looking not forward but backward, to the mythical agrarian democracy over which Tom Jefferson was supposed to have presided. Their cause was lost forty years before.
Few Texas farmers in their smelly overalls had deserted the American ethic, or the folk-conservatism deeply implanted in the American Protestant mind. The great wail of political protest heralded no change of outlook or ethic, or any European infusion of notions of political theorism or class. The Texas farmer revolted, within the strict limits of political action, because his middle-class attitudes and status were eroded by economic forces beyond his control, but the erosion did not continue long enough to have a permanent effect. He did remain essentially anticapitalist, but this was nothing new. The Southern farmer had always been basically anticapitalist.
By 1900, the economic outlook for farmers brightened immeasurably. Cycle followed cycle; due to increased urbanization in the North and improved European markets, all farm prices rose. The desperation of the 1890s was followed by ten fat years. The farmer had dollars to jingle, and his protests subsided, if they did not entirely go away. The Democrats learned something from Populism. They incorporated much of it, in Texas and nationally. If the adoption of the silver plank was political idiocy, there were other aspects of Populism that had more lasting appeal.
Although much genuine myth, and much later political practice, lived on after the great crusade, one part of it turned sour. The People's Party germinated the racism that was simply waiting for irrigation in the South.
An understandable reaction of the dominant Democratic local parties was to demand that the large, unlettered, and alien Negro vote be placed without the pale. The attempt to fuse blacks with poor whites scared every business and property interest in Texas. It also, in a humanly understandable if not entirely palatable reaction, turned many Populists' stomachs. A phenomenon of the collapse of third-party Populism was its retreat into virulent racism, perhaps brought on by Democratic charges, perhaps a result of failure and frustration. The attempted political alliance between white and black sharecroppers did psychological damage to the status-minded white. The black man performed one definite service in Texas besides labor; he provided an unmistakable social floor. Few white men could equate their lot with the Negro and maintain an American self-esteem. No men willingly accept a loss of caste.
The Democrats, first by de facto practices, then by written law, denied the Negro the privilege of voting in the Democrat primary. In one-party states, this disenfranchised the race. The
former Populists approved this fully, as if frightened by the brink they had almost passed. The former Populists, even more strongly, demanded that the blacks be defined and be legally separated socially at law. The polls were closed; the signs went up. Here the restoration was finally consolidated in caste, and both interests and "the people" rid themselves of a bad scare.
These years again showed that relations between white and black depended upon the Negro not impinging upon the white. The white's tolerance was geometrically proportional to his distance, real or imagined, from the black. This of course was a common human reaction, by no means confined to Texas or the American South.
Cotton-kingdom Texas's mood was to ensure continued subordination of the race. The new western counties tended to be more liberal; the cattle kingdom's dominant feeling was to keep the Negro out. One incident in Lubbock County in 1900 was significant, and told much of American race relations beyond the limits of the South. Farming was at this time coming experimentally to the High Plains and along the lower Rio Grande, based on new ways of irrigation and new crops. One immigrant seeded cotton in the far northwest. A horde of cowhands, when they learned the nature of the crop, roped the farmer, and at gunpoint made him plow it up. "Cotton brings niggers, and this is white man's country," they said.
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