American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Led by such women and men champions, propelled by acute needs and high hopes, the Kansas Populists roared to a sensational victory in 1890. They carried 96 of the 125 seats in the state’s lower house and swept five out of seven congressional districts, sending Sockless Jerry along with the four others to Washington.

  “THE PEOPLE ON TOP!” headlined the Nonconformist. But were they? The Populists elected only one statewide official, their candidate for attorney general. The Republicans still controlled the state administration, the holdover Senate, and the judiciary. The House passed a woman’s suffrage bill but the Senate axed it. The Populists’ one victory was to oust a conservative United States senator and send Populist editor William Peffer to Washington in his place. And now they had a crucial issue—Republican subversion of the will of the people. The Kansas Populists conducted a repeat crusade in 1892 with massive parades and encampments. This time they elected the entire state ticket and most of their congressional candidates again, including Simpson, and gained control of the Senate—but lost their majority in the House, amid accusations of wholesale Republican fraud.

  The “first People’s party government on earth” was inaugurated in Topeka at the start of 1893. After a spectacular parade through downtown Topeka the new governor, Lorenzo Lewelling, gave a stirring address—his “incendiary Haymarket inaugural,” a GOP editor called it—followed by Lease and Simpson. But the gala was shortlived. When the new legislature convened, the Populists organized the state Senate, but they and the Republicans each claimed a majority in the House. There followed a tug-of-war that would have been comic opera if the stakes had not been so high: each “majority” organized its own “House” with speaker and officers; neither side would vacate the hall, so they stayed put all night, with the two speakers sleeping, gavels in hand, facing each other behind the podium; finally Lewelling called up the militia—including a Gatling gun minus its firing pin—while the Republicans mobilized an army of deputy sheriffs, college students, and railroad workers. The GOP legislators smashed their way into the hall with a sledgehammer; and the militia commander, a loyal Republican like most of his troops, refused the governor’s order to expel the invaders.

  Bloodshed was narrowly averted when the Populists agreed to let the Republican-dominated Kansas Supreme Court rule on the issue, and predictably the court ruled against them. The Populists then paid the price. Their legislators fared worse than in 1891, passing two election reform measures and putting suffrage on the ballot, but not accomplishing much else. Their chief priority, railroad regulation with teeth, was a direct casualty of the conflict. Clearly, under the American and Kansan systems of checks and balances, a movement could win elections but still not win power.

  Alliance cooperation and Populist politics spread through other Northern states, moving west into the mountain states toward the Pacific, north into Minnesota and the Dakotas, east into the big corn spreads. Everywhere the new movement mobilized people and encountered Republican party power and entrenched elites. Thus “in sundry ways, at different speeds, at varied levels of intensity, and at diverse stages of political consciousness, the farmers brought the People’s Party of the United States into being,” in Goodwyn’s summarization. “In so doing, they placed on the nation’s political stage the first multi-sectional democratic mass movement since the American Revolution.”

  It was in the South, however, that the Alliance continued to expand most dramatically and yet to encounter the biggest obstacles. The first of these obstacles was the Southern Democracy, which continued to live off its role as defender of the Lost Cause. The second, closely connected, was race— not simply race, as C. Vann Woodward has explained, but “the complexities of the class economy growing out of race, the heritage of manumitted slave psychology, and the demagogic uses to which the politician was able to put race prejudice.” Southern Populists reluctantly concluded that they could not achieve the subtreasury plan for credit and currency and other reforms unless they forged a biracial coalition of small landowners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. This meant war with the Southern Democracy and potential division within Populism.

  Georgia was an even more tumultuous battleground than Kansas. There one man, backed by the mass of poor farmers, personified the entire movement: Tom Watson. Descended from prosperous slaveholders, he had seen his father lose his forty-five slaves and 1,400 acres after Appomattox and end up as a tavern owner in Augusta. Young Watson managed to spend two years at Mercer University before running out of money. After years of poverty he turned to law, prospered, and won election to the Georgia lower house at twenty-six, but quit before his term ended.

  “I did not lead the Alliance,” Watson recalled. “I followed the Alliance, and I am proud that I did.” After taking leadership in the “jute fight,” he decided to run for Congress as a Democrat with Alliance backing. The white Georgia Alliance sought to field its own candidates within the Democratic party and back non-Alliance candidates only if they endorsed the Alliance program—the “Alliance yardstick,” they called it. Alliance leaders took over the Democratic party state convention, wrote the party platform, won control of both houses of the “farmers’ legislature,” elected the governor and six of ten members of Congress. Watson trounced his Republican opponent almost ten to one in a fight as “hot as Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.”

  Coalitions embody conflicts. The lines were now drawn between Alliance members who were mainly Democrats and Democrats who were mainly Alliancers. The national Alliance had urged that its members of Congress not join any party caucus that did not endorse the Alliance platform. The whole Southern delegation but one stayed with the majority Democratic caucus and elected a Georgian, Charles Crisp, to the speakership. The exception was Watson. He and Sockless Jerry Simpson introduced the Alliance platform into Congress, fighting especially hard for the subtreasury proposal. Virtually none of the platform was even reported out of committee except the subtreasury item, which finally came to the floor after Watson used every maneuver to pry it out of committee; by then it was too late for action.

  Beaten in Washington, Watson flourished politically at home. This was a time when many black tenants and sharecroppers were becoming alienated from the GOP and were turning to the new party. Watson called on blacks as well as whites to overthrow the plutocracy that had used race hatred to bolster its rule. “You are kept apart,” he told black and white Georgians, “that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.” Campaigning for reelection in 1892, now as leader of the Georgia People’s Party, Watson championed political equality for blacks, economic equality to a lesser extent—and social equality or “mixing” not at all. But despite both white and black Populist support, Watson was beaten for reelection in a campaign marked by massive election fraud and the killing of a score of Populists, most of them black.

  Texas was having its own problems with the entrenched white Democracy and entrenched capital. The Texas Alliance Exchange, the linchpin of cooperative efforts, had gotten off to a flying start by selling vast amounts of cotton to eastern mills and abroad and buying supplies and equipment. Still, it could not break the enslavement of tenants and sharecroppers to the crop lien system, and increasingly it suffered from lack of capital. Banks in Dallas and elsewhere turned a cold face to requests for loans. Desperately the leadership turned to the suballiances themselves for money. In a remarkable popular mobilization, thousands of farmers marched to county courthouses to pledge help. It was not enough; a year later the Texas Exchange closed its doors for good.

  The ever-resourceful Charles Macune now presented his subtreasury plan, providing treasury notes to farmers, as a means of financing cooperatives with public rather than private credit and thus enlisting the government in the struggle to raise agricultural prices. The indefatigable William Lamb fashioned this economic reform into a weapon of political revolt as he launched a full-scale lecturing campaign in each congressional district. The Texas Alliance won a stunning victory through the Democratic part
y in 1890, electing a governor and a legislature committed to most Alliance demands, but a host of Democratic “loyalists” opposed the subtreasury and bolted from the Alliance. Spurred by Lamb and other leaders, Alliance members decided to create the People’s Party of Texas. At the founding convention in August 1891 white and black delegates forged a remarkable coalition, with a commitment to political and economic equality for blacks.

  As the presidential election year of 1892 approached, Alliance leaders were concluding that a national People’s Party was needed to consolidate the grand coalition of farmers and workers, strengthen the state parties, and seize control of the federal government. Plans were carefully laid. The Alliance organized a massive lecturing campaign, distributed vast quantities of books and pamphlets, including Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and formed a National Reform Press Association to coordinate the propaganda efforts of the one-hundred-strong Populist newspapers. A St. Louis conference of farm, labor, and women delegates drew up a platform and heard the Minnesota Populist orator and novelist Ignatius Donnelly give an unforgettable speech in which he charged: “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.… The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two great classes—paupers and millionaires.”

  Then came the national founding convention of the People’s Party, Omaha, July 4, 1892. The delegates adopted a platform that harked back to the “Cleburne demands” six years earlier and indeed to decades of labor, farm, and socialist manifestos: a flexible “national currency” to be distributed by means of the subtreasury plan; free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold; a graduated income tax; government ownership and operation of the railroads, telegraph, and telephone; barring of alien land ownership and return of land held by railroads and other corporations “in excess of their actual needs”; political reforms such as the direct election of United States senators. But the platform ignored labor’s most urgent needs and omitted mention of woman’s suffrage. The convention also took a moderate course in nominating for president James B. Weaver of Iowa, the reform editor and ex-Union general who had led the Greenbackers in 1880, balancing him with an ex-Confederate general as his running mate.

  Plunging into the election campaign, the Populists unsheathed their thousands of lecturers, their orators such as Lease and Donnelly, their tactics in some states of opportunistic coalition-building with Republicans in the South and especially with Democrats in the West. Weaver and his wife were rotten-egged in the South—Mrs. Weaver to the point that, according to Lease, she “was made a regular walking omelet by the southern chivalry of Georgia.” The results were promising for a fledgling third party: Weaver polled over one million votes, actually carrying Kansas and four western states with twenty-two electoral votes. Populist governors were elected in Kansas, Colorado, and North Dakota. But in the Northeast, parts of the Midwest, and the South the party fared poorly. In Texas the Populists lost badly to the Democrats. It was with mingled hopes and an exhilarating sense of momentum that the Populists turned to the economic and political struggles ahead.

  The idea of liberty had been the animating impulse behind the Alliance. But during the century soon to come to an end that idea had also guided organized capital and labor. Each group of course meant something different by “liberty”—businessmen meant freedom from interference with property, labor meant freedom from boss control of its working life, farmers meant freedom from furnishing merchants, banks, railroads, trusts. More than the other groups, however, the Alliance had made liberty into a positive idea—realizing and fulfilling oneself by gaining broader control of one’s working environment through participation in Alliance cooperatives. Along with industrial workers, Populist farmers had also preached the idea of equality—a real equality of opportunity. But the cooperators, with their denunciations of “selfish individualism,” had moved even more than labor toward the third great concept in the Enlightenment trinity— fraternity, or comradeship. The idea of cooperation had grown out of, and had sustained, the practices of sisterhood and brotherhood.

  And if the Populists had realized all three values to a greater extent than any other large group, it was mainly because of a conscious effort toward the intensive use of massive numbers of second-cadre activists—35,000 or more “lecturers”—in rousing farmers to political self-consciousness. As in all deeply felt democratic movements, the great leaders were educators, and the great teachers were leaders.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Brokers of Politics

  DEMOCRACY, RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD, IS “government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators,” scoffed Henry Adams. He reflected a cynicism with American politics and government that was pervasive by the 1880s. The wretched poverty in city and country, the widening gap between rich and poor, the growth of an elaborate class system and an almost fixed array of castes, the suppression of blacks, women, Indians, and others, the violations of people’s liberties and rights, the intensifying boom-and-bust, all seemed to blight the hopes and dreams of clement Americans. A democratic government, reflecting the needs—and the votes—of the great mass of citizens, was supposed to avert or alleviate such evils. But the situation seemed to be worsening, the cynicism deepening.

  No one had embodied the aspirations of American democracy more exuberantly than a large, dreamy, sensuous, rustic-looking editor and writer in Brooklyn named Walt Whitman, who in 1855 had published at his own expense a volume of poetry that was tall and thin and a commercial failure. It was called Leaves of Grass. Looking at the world through his heavy-lidded eyes—eyes that Emerson had called “terrible” and John Burroughs “dumb, yearning, relentless”—Whitman seemed to miss nothing in the multihued world around him, or in his variegated, androgynous self. He wrote of ships, gardens, far-off places, children, trees, the Brooklyn ferry, nearby cities, stallions, women, beaches—everything and anything— and later of war and wounds and death.

  He wrote of democracy. The very embodiment of the Enlightenment—“the poet and prophet of a democracy that the America of the Gilded Age was daily betraying,” Vernon Parrington said of him—he evoked glowingly the revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, fraternity. Whitman was familiar with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and its emphasis on freedom, and he had read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. “There must be,” the poet said, “continual additions to our great experiment of how much liberty society will bear.” He preached liberty from external restraints, especially from government, and he practiced it to the point of license.

  Even more, he embraced equality, even the kind of “leveling” equality that conservatives derided. “I chant,” he wrote, “the common bulk, the general average horde.” He spoke of the “divine average.” For him, according to Roger Asselineau, the mere fact of living conferred a divine character upon even the most despicable person. He would not look down on anyone:

  Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,

  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

  No more modest than immodest….

  Whoever degrades another degrades me,

  And whatever is done or said returns at last to me….

  I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy….

  Again and again in the pages of the Brooklyn Eagle he protested the plight of poverty-stricken women in the garment industry, of young clerks having to work sixteen hours a day.

  “Great is Liberty! great is equality!” the poet exclaimed, but perhaps most of all he personified the idea of fraternity. He rarely used that term, or “brotherhood,” preferring to call people—especially working people—“comrade.” An ardent reader of George Sand and Frances Wright, he also
preached feminism, proclaiming in Leaves of Grass “the perfect equality of the female with the male.” Not that he idealized the virtues of men and women: he recognized that his “comrades” were mixtures of good and evil. But if the democratic promise was realized, the good in people would become dominant.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that such exaggerated hopes would be dashed in the wake of the Civil War. Even Whitman rapidly succumbed to the postwar disillusionment. “Pride, competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond example, brood already upon us,” he wrote in Democratic Vistas. Quoting Lincoln on “government by the people,” he exclaimed, “The People! ... Taste, intelligence, and culture, (so-called,),” he said, “have been against the masses, and remain so.” He railed against “pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity … everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed,” etc. He still had a basic faith in the people, but now he saw the need for the natural leaders of the race to teach and uplift the people, in contrast to his earlier criticism of Carlyle for scorning the average man and glorifying heroes.

  Whitman’s ultimate hopes for American democracy lay in the future. Americans were perfectible; only materialism and repression had corrupted them. In London, Karl Marx had harbored the same expectation, though he had little regard for the American form of bourgeois republic. Classes in the United States had “not yet become fixed,” he wrote in the early 1850s, “but continually change and interchange their elements in a constant state of flux, where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather supply the relative deficiency of heads and hands,” and where the “feverishly youthful movement of material production” had a “new world to make its own.” But later, with the rise of monopolistic capitalism, much would depend on the militant organization of the working class.