by Jill Lepore
For all its passionate embrace of political equality and human rights and its energetic championing of suffrage, the People’s Party rested on a deep and abiding commitment to exclude from full citizenship anyone from or descended from anyone from Africa or Asia. (Emery’s anti-Semitism pervaded the movement as well, but it did not attach itself to arguments about citizenship.) Populism’s racism and nativism rank among its longest-lasting legacies. Lease, in a wildly incoherent white supremacist screed called The Problem of Civilization Solved, wove together the population theories of Thomas Malthus and Thomas Jefferson with the colonization schemes endorsed by James Madison and the outright racism of the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer to propose that all manual labor be done by Africans and Asians. “Through all the vicissitudes of time, the Caucasian has arisen to the moral and intellectual supremacy of the world,” she wrote, and the time had come for white people to realize their “destiny to become the guardians of the inferior races.”78
Many of the reforms proposed by populists had the effect of diminishing the political power of blacks and immigrants. Chief among them was the Australian ballot, more usually known as the secret ballot, which, by serving as a de facto literacy test, disenfranchised both black men in the rural South and new immigrants in northern cities. In 1888, the Kentucky state legislature became the first in the nation to attempt the reform, in the city of Louisville. “The election last Tuesday was the first municipal election I have ever known which was not bought outright,” one observer wrote to the Nation after Election Day.79 Massachusetts passed a secret ballot law later that year. The measure seemed likely to suppress the Democratic vote, since literacy was lowest among the newest immigrants to northern cities, who tended to vote Democratic. In New York, the Democratic governor, David Hill, vetoed a secret ballot bill three times.80 Hill’s veto was only broken in 1890, after fourteen men carried a petition weighing half a ton to the floor of the New York legislature.81
Massachusetts and New York proved the only states to deliberate at length over the secret ballot. Quickest to adopt the reform were the states of the former Confederacy, where the reform appealed to legislatures eager to find legal ways to keep black men from voting. In 1890, Mississippi held a constitutional convention and adopted a new state constitution that included an “Understanding Clause”: voters were required to pass oral examination on the Constitution, on the grounds that “very few Negroes understood the clauses of the Constitution.” (Nor, of course, did most whites, though white men were not tested.) In the South, the secret ballot was adopted in this same spirit. Both by law and by brute force, southern legislators, state by state, and poll workers, precinct by precinct, denied black men the right to vote. In Louisiana, black voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 5,300 in 1908, and to 730 in 1910. In 1893, Arkansas Democrats celebrated their electoral advantage by singing,
The Australian ballot works like a charm
It makes them think and scratch
And when a Negro gets a ballot
He has certainly met his match.82
Populists’ other signal reform was the graduated income tax, a measure they believed essential to the survival of a democracy undermined by economic inequality. After the Civil War, a wartime federal income tax had been allowed to expire, over the protests of John Sherman, a Republican from Ohio who would go on to author the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and who, countering Jefferson, pointed out that tariffs unfairly burdened the poor. “We tax the tea, the coffee, the sugar, the spices the poor man uses,” Sherman said. “Everything that he consumes we call a luxury and tax it; yet we are afraid to touch the income of Mr. Astor. Is there any justice in that? Is there any propriety in it? Why, sir, the income tax is the only one that tends to equalize these burdens between rich and poor.”83
But the man who drove this point home was the inimitable William Jennings Bryan. Tall, broad-shouldered, and sturdy in a string tie and cowhide boots, Bryan carried populism from the Plains to the Potomac and turned the Democratic Party into the people’s party. Born in Illinois in 1860, he’d snuck into the Democratic National Convention in St. Louis in 1876 when an obliging policeman had helped him in through a window. He’d gone to Illinois College and then to Union College of Law in Chicago. He made a particular study of oratory, at which he trained for years. Still, when he asked his mother’s opinion of his first political speech in 1880, she said, “Well, there were a few good places in it—where you might have stopped!” Moving to Nebraska, he’d settled in Lincoln, a prairie town, in the Union’s fastest-growing state. He was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1890, when he was thirty. “Boy Bryan,” he was called. He began his first run for the presidency when he was two months shy of the required age. He would live his life on the political stage and die, far diminished, in the glow cast by the footlights.84
Nearly everyone who ever heard Boy Bryan said he was the best speaker they’d ever known. In an age before amplification, Bryan may have been the only speaker most people had ever really heard: he could project his voice for three blocks, and at events where speaker after speaker took to the stage, very often only Bryan’s rose above the distant mumble of lesser men. He was also mesmerizing. The first presidential candidate to campaign on behalf of the poor, Bryan delivered the leveling promise of the Second Great Awakening to American party politics and, in the end, to the Democratic Party. One Republican said, “I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth,” even though in every case, when he read a transcript of the speech in the newspaper the next day, he “disagreed with almost all of it.”85
Lease didn’t trust Bryan, mainly because she didn’t trust anyone willing to join the Democratic Party but also she feared his lack of support for female suffrage. With Sarah Emery, Lease in 1891 signed the founding charter of the National Woman’s Alliance, dedicated to uniting the causes of suffrage and populism; its Declaration of Purposes called for “full political equality of the sexes.”86 As the People’s Party grew, and began winning municipal and state elections, Lease and Emery—and female suffrage—remained at its center. Emery became editor of the party’s magazine, New Forum.87 At the People’s Party convention in Omaha in 1892, Lease seconded the nomination of the party’s presidential candidate, James Weaver. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Evelyn Louise Lease, took the stage to call for a suffrage plank. “The motto of the Alliance is: ‘Equal right to all and special privileges to none,’” little Evelyn said, “but you are not true to that motto if you do not give woman her rights.”88 But the People’s Party betrayed Lease. The final platform, adopted on the Fourth of July, included a preamble written by a Minnesota farmer named Ignatius Donnelly. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin,” Donnelly began. “Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.”89 The platform called for the secret ballot, public ownership of the railroads, a graduated income tax, an eight-hour workday, and the direct election of U.S. senators (who were still being elected by state legislatures). Female suffrage was not among the party’s demands. “We seek to restore the Government of the Republic to the hands of the ‘plain people’ with whom it originated,” Donnelly said.90 The plain people, the party’s new leadership had determined, did not include women.
Advocates argued that the party’s best chances of success lay in fusing with the Democratic Party. Lease, opposed to fusion because she hated Democrats, grew disillusioned with the populist revolt after the Kansas People’s Party merged into the Democratic Party in 1892. The next year, she was urged to run for the U.S. Senate: “No one can come between me and the people of Kansas,” she said, “and if I want to be United States senator they will give me the office.” She also considered running for Congress in Kansas’s Seventh District. But both times she decided against running, citing her worsening health.91
Calls for fusion only grew louder after 1893,
when the nation fell once again into an economic depression, triggered by the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia & Reading Rail Road. Within months more than 8,000 businesses, 156 railroads, and 400 banks had collapsed. One in five Americans lost their jobs. “I take my Pen In hand to let you know that we are Starving to death,” a young farm woman from Kansas wrote to her governor.92 But the hard times also narrowed the agenda of the People’s Party, which focused on the fight for “Free Silver”: expanding the money supply by making silver, along with gold, the basis of currency. By now Lease was leaning toward socialism: “Nationalize the railroads, telegraph and all labor-saving machinery,” she said in 1893, to “end the cause of industrial strikes and business disquietude.”93
The suffering that followed the Panic of 1893 strengthened the income tax argument in Congress, where Bryan became its fiercest supporter. The time for an income tax seemed ripe. In the decades after the Civil War, the same labor-saving machinery that both created American prosperity and left many Americans behind in the new economy also advanced political debate about the distribution of wealth. The speed of transportation across the continent by railroad, and across the oceans by steam, meant that the United States was fully emerged in a global traffic of goods and labor, while new technologies of communication, especially the telephone and the transatlantic telegraph, raised new challenges to longstanding convictions about tariffs and taxes. By now, income taxes had become commonplace in Europe. Responding to the suggestion that if Congress passed an income tax, rich Americans would flee to Europe, Bryan wondered where they would possibly go. “In London, they will find a tax of more than 2 per cent assessed upon incomes,” he said. “If they look for a place of refuge in Prussia, they will find an income tax of 4 per cent.”94
In 1894, Bryan tacked an income tax amendment to a tariff bill, which managed to pass. But the populist victory—a 2 percent federal income tax that applied only to Americans who earned more than $4,000—didn’t last long. The next year, in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the tax was a direct tax, and therefore unconstitutional, one justice calling the tax the first campaign in “a war of the poor against the rich.”95
POPULISM ENTERED AMERICAN politics at the end of the nineteenth century, and it never left. It pitted “the people,” meaning everyone but the rich, against corporations, which fought back in the courts by defining themselves as “persons”; and it pitted “the people,” meaning white people, against nonwhite people who were fighting for citizenship and whose ability to fight back in the courts was far more limited, since those fights require well-paid lawyers.
Populism also pitted the people against the state. During populism’s first rise, the state as a political entity became an object of formal academic study through political science, one of a new breed of academic fields known as the social sciences. Before the Civil War, most American colleges were evangelical; college presidents were ministers, and every branch of scholarship was guided by religion. After 1859, and the Origin of Species, the rise of Darwinism contributed to the secularization of the university, as did the influence of the German educational model, in which universities were divided into disciplines and departments, each with a claim to secular, and especially scientific, expertise. These social sciences—political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology—used the methods of science, and especially of quantification, to study history, government, the economy, society, and culture.96
Columbia University opened a School of Political Science in 1880, the University of Michigan in 1881, Johns Hopkins in 1882. Woodrow Wilson completed a PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins in 1886. He planned to write a “history of government in all the civilized States in the world,” to be called The Philosophy of Politics. In 1889, he published a preliminary study called, simply, The State.97
For Wilson’s generation of political scientists, the study of the state replaced the study of the people. The erection of the state became, in their view, the greatest achievement of civilization. The state also provided a bulwark against populism. In the first decades of the twentieth century, populism would yield to progressivism as urban reformers applied the new social sciences to the study of political problems, to be remedied by the intervention of the state.
The rise of populism and the social sciences reshaped the press, too. In the 1790s, the weekly partisan newspaper produced the two-party system. The penny press of the 1830s produced the popular politics of Jacksonian democracy. And in the 1880s and 1890s the spirit of populism and the empiricism of the social sciences drove American newspapers to a newfound obsession with facts.
The “journalist,” like the political scientist, was an invention of the 1880s. The Journalist, a trade publication that identified journalism as a new profession that shared with the social scientist a devotion to facts, began appearing in 1883, the year Joseph Pulitzer took over the New York World.98 Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant who hadn’t known a word of English when he arrived in the United States, had served in an all-German regiment in the Civil War; after the war, he studied law in St. Louis and began working for a German-language newspaper. He made the World into one of the nation’s most influential papers. “A newspaper relates the events of the day,” Pulitzer said. “It does not manufacture its record of corruptions and crimes, but tells of them as they occur. If it failed to do so it would be an unfaithful chronicler.”99
William Randolph Hearst began publishing the New York Journal in 1895. Hearst, born to great wealth in 1863 (his father had struck gold in California), had taken over his father’s paper, the San Francisco Examiner, in 1887, after dropping out of college. In 1896, Adolph Ochs, the son of a Bavarian immigrant and lay rabbi, took over the New York Times. Ochs, raised in Tennessee, had started his career in newspapers by delivering the Knoxville Chronicle at the age of eleven; he left school three years later. He was thirty-eight when he bought the Times and pledged his intention to publish “without fear or favor.”100
The newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s were full of stunts and scandals and crusades, even as they defended their accuracy. “Facts, facts piled up to the point of dry certitude was what the American people really wanted,” wrote the reporter Ray Stannard Baker. Julius Chambers said that writing for the New York Herald involved “Facts; facts; nothing but facts. So many peas at so much a peck; so much molasses at so much a quart.” A sign at the Chicago Tribune in the 1890s read: “WHO OR WHAT? HOW? WHEN? WHERE?” The walls at the New York World were covered with printed cards: “Accuracy, Accuracy, Accuracy! Who? What? Where? When? How? The Facts—The Color—The Facts!”101
In 1895, Pulitzer’s New York World endorsed Mary Lease as candidate for mayor of Wichita. After she lost and her home in Wichita was foreclosed, she moved to New York and decided it was “the heart of America.” She campaigned for Henry George, who was running for mayor. It looked as though he had a chance, but he died in his bed of a stroke five days before the election. His body lay in state at Grand Central Station. More than a hundred thousand mourners came to pay their respects. Lease delivered a eulogy. The New York Times reported, “Not even Lincoln had a more glorious death.”102
In the summer of 1896, William Jennings Bryan, a man Ochs’s New York Times called an “irresponsible, unregulated, ignorant, prejudiced, pathetically honest and enthusiastic crank,” chugged across the plains in a custom railroad coach called the Great Nebraska Silver Train, which was decorated with giant signs that read “Keep Your Eye on Nebraska.” He was heading for Illinois, to the Democratic National Convention at the Chicago Coliseum, a three-story building that took up an entire city block, where he would deliver one of the most effective and memorable speeches in American oratorical history.
Boy Bryan, in his baggy pants and black alpaca suit, had come to Chicago to fuse the People’s Party into the Democratic Party, to turn the party of white southerners into the party, as well, of western farmers and northern factory workers, leaving the Republican Par
ty to be the party of businessmen. The wind was at his back. The Democratic Party had for the first time endorsed an income tax, “so that the burdens of taxations may be equally and impartially laid, to the end that wealth may bear its due proportion of the expenses of the Government.”103 But naming Bryan as its presidential candidate would be a far greater step for the Democratic Party than adding a plank to its platform.
Bryan leapt to the stage. “I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty,” he said, “the cause of humanity.” The struggle between business and labor had been misunderstood, and rested on too narrow a definition of business. The people are “a broader class of businessmen”: “The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer,” Bryan said. “The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all days . . . and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain.” Opposing the gold standard, the Republican Party’s central economic policy, Bryan brought together his Jeffersonianism with his revivalist Christianity. “There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”