“Populist” is a term so fraught with distortion and so apt to raise misleading connotations that we probably should find another word to use. It is worse in this respect than even “Whig” or “liberal.” Taken precisely, it refers to a political movement that swept some agricultural regions of the further Midwest and South in the late 19th century.

American historians have generally treated Populism in one of two ways: they have either confused it with the Progressivism that followed shortly on its heels, as a forerunner of the New Deal and modern liberalism; or, in a slightly more sophisticated and honest version, they have dismissed it as misguided rural bigotry irrelevant to the goals of enlightened urbanites.

The first interpretation is clearly wrong. It is true that there was some slight coincidence of political goals, in terms of federal legislation, arising from the Populists’ search for specific remedies. But Populists were basically rural Jeffersonians who mistrusted the remote and concentrated power of the Eastern elites who were the most obviously observable cause of their own distresses. Most of the Progressives, at least in the East, were self-consciously modern. They believed in the rule of elite urban experts (themselves) to solve all social ills by the application of science and systematization (regimentation). They were hired hands of the ruling class despised by the Populists, and still are. No Progressive that I know of was an enthusiast for free silver, and Progressives from east of the Mississippi almost all joined the homefront clamor for the War to End All Wars. Populists did not, and in fact provided the greatest core of patriotic opposition.

The first school of historians wanted to find honorary ancestors for the 20th century political movements they favored and over-emphasized the element of Populism that suggested a stronger central control of the economy. The latter school was a later generation of Ivy League liberals who wanted to distance themselves from the at-times messy and uncontrollable tendencies that were likely to develop if American yahoos from the boondocks were turned loose. Thus, they emphasized the bigoted and eccentric aspects of the Populists that were more likely to lead to Joe McCarthy than to George McGovern.

Most certainly the Populists were ethnocentric, and some of them were eccentric as well. But there is not the least evidence that the Populists were any more ethnocentric or eccentric than any other Americans of their time, including the conservatives and the Progressives. As American historians have tended over and over to do, these writers built their interpretations of our multi-various and magnificent past on small fragments of movements rather than the whole. (They have done this with the Revolution, Jacksonian democracy. Reconstruction, and much else.) That is, they always emphasize the bits of evidence that support whatever interpretation the Northeastern intelligentsia finds fashionable at any particular moment and ignore the substantial evidence that conflicts. Thus, Arthur Schlesinger uses a few Boston intellectuals to interpret Jacksonian democracy, and Populist historians have used a few crazy Kansans to characterize a much larger and different movement.

We now have for the first time a careful, accurate, full, and well-synthesized survey of Populism in the work of McMath, an economic historian. McMath understands the social and religious fabric, the mores, and the inheritance of political ideas out of which Populism arose. He understands the ecology and economy of the grain, cotton, tobacco, and mining regions where the movement flourished.

He gives a clear and succinct account of the origins of Populism, its impulses, its social fabric, its political history (nationally, regionally, and state-by-state), and its relation to other phenomena such as the cooperative, labor, and free-silver movements. More importantly, he understands the basic political inheritance, which was not socialist or Progressive but which rested on pious allegiance to Jeffersonian democracy and the defense of the liberties of the common decent people who labored in the earth and produced real goods, as opposed to the slick operators who did not delve and span but grew rich on the government. (The bank and railroad corporations that the Populists attacked were, after all, not paragons of private enterprise but rather privileged collaborators of the political elite.) The author also understands that these instincts are as much or more “conservative” than “liberal,” although he clearly prefers the latter.

No, Populists were not the kind of people who wanted to confiscate your income, unless you were particularly rich and arrogant. They were not the kind of people who would make you wear your seat belt and forbid you to light up a stogie, for your own good, or send your children across town to achieve some abstract balance of school population and the Marines halfway round the world to save democracy in some place where they don’t know democracy from cornflakes. We ought to give the glory of fathering (or rather mothering) those great accomplishments to the Progressives. A Populist, on the other hand, is someone who thinks those bast–ds in Washington have too much power. He votes for George Wallace, Ross Perot, or Pat Buchanan, not for George McGovern, George Bush, or Bill Clinton.

Ponder this wonderful reactionary and timely passage from Ignatius Donnelly’s oration at a Populist National Convention:

We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. . . . The newspapers are subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated, our homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrated in the hands of capitalists. . . 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. . . . We charge that the controlling influences dominating the old political parties have allowed the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to restrain or prevent them. They have agreed together to ignore in the coming campaign every issue. . . . In this crisis of human affairs the intelligent working people and producers of the United States have come together in the name of justice, order and society, to defend liberty, prosperity and justice.

 

[American Populism: A Social History, by Robert C. McMath, Jr. (New York: Hill and Wang) 245 pp., $19.95]