The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America

This author does an excellent job of explaining the agrarian revolt which was instrumental in the rise of populism and the People's Party of the 1890's. Mr. Goodwyn details the causes of unrest for farmers in particular. The root cause was financial under the practices of the crop lien system and specie payments. He also details the factor that money played in both major parties of that era with the "gold standard" and "free silver" being advocated by an assortment of national politicians. The author also provides profiles of some of the major leaders of the populist movement- Charles Macune, William Lamb, "Stump" Ashby, S.O.Daws to name a few. I found the information on the Farmer's Alliance and the cooperatives quite interesting. These co-ops introduced wholesale and retail competition to rural areas. The idea of cooperative stores remind me of the old "Farmer's Store" that we frequented during my childhood. The various platforms of the party were detailed as well as the struggles for control of leadership and some of the less than ethical leaders that appeared during the movements short history. Mr. Goodwyn sheds a lot of critical light on fusion as the monumental, internal battle for direction in general. He makes the point that the movement opposed the banking and large business communities, and yet, some in leadership supported the vice presidential nomination of a banker! Another aspect that he examines closely is the differences in strength and specific ideology of populism that was found in individual states. The information on Mark Hanna and the McKinley campaign was timely considering how critical a factor money has become in presidential campaigns. There are historical parallels in the Republican party. There were many memorable quotes in the book, this one from page 269 summarizes the sentiments of the agrarian revolt- "In many ways, land centralization in American agriculture was a decades-long product of farm credit policies acceptable to the American banking community." For a clear explanation of American populism this is the book to read! Populism basically boils down to one Constitutional phrase-"We the people". It's politics for the people with humble roots stretching back to the farmers and rural folk of the late 1890's.

I was moved, impressed, and inspired by this book. There are a couple of other reviews that do excellent jobs of summarizing, so I will try to limit my ten pages of notes to a few highlights, and some other books that I believe can help the 3 out of 5 Americans that want "none of those now running." The Republican and Democratic parties have sold out (this is best documented in Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It) and it is time we restored the Constitution and demanded Electoral Reform to restore We the People as sovereign. Written in 1978, this book could not have come to me, and others in the transpartisan movement, at a better time. The author opens with very helpful overviews of how a mass culture, a mass indoctrination, if you will, is a much cheaper and easier way to keep the mass docile, than a forced or fascist solution. He reminds me of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. He then moves to the manner in which industrialization eroded democracy, making it a poor facade. I am reminded of Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System He then stresses how in a damaged or constrained democracy, public resignation and private escapism are the dominant features of the mass public. He then moves into an overview of the agrarian-based populist movement that was crushed by the railroads, Pinkerton's as an illegal army, and the banks, with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 being the consummation of the banking victory over the people. He notes that mass protest requires a higher order of culture, education, and achievement, especially in harmonization of disparate nodes. He identifies four steps within which the third is clearly of vital importance: 1. Autonomous institution emerges as a hub 2. Recruiting of masses takes place 3. Educating of masses takes place (40,000 "lecturers") 4. Politicization of the masses actualizes their power to good effect. The author does a superb job of stressing the importance of internal communication, and says that IF this can be achieved, THEN a new plateau of social responsibility is possible. He calls this plateau of cooperative and democratic conduct "the movement culture." The populists achieved a "sense of somebodyness." I am reminded of All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Bk Currents) as well as Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People. He examines the Civil War and concludes that it changed everything--it fragmented the nation into sectarian, religious, and racial prejudices. Latter in the book he examines the pernicious effects of white supremacy, which ultimately undid the potential collaboration among poor whites, poor blacks, and poor Catholics factory workers in the Northeast. The populists tried to break free of the railroads and banks that conspired to keep them in debt forever. Among

Most college kids in the 70's were force-fed RICHARD HOFSTADTER's book, The Age of Reform, which ridiculed populism. But having grown up the son of a immigrant farm boy and county agent, my view of the midwestern populism and farm culture was much much different. So Goodwyn's book was a welcome documentation of what I had known all along--that populism was a uniquely American movement, and the spirit of the frontier was never rugged individualism, but community. The Farmer-Laborer Alliances of the late 19th Century, and the People's Party that resulted, always referred to their reform movement as 'cooperation', and quoted Thomas Jefferson, and the founding fathers. In this context, populism was uniquely American. It was a struggle between democratic capitalism vs. speculative and monopoly capitalism. Real populism was about creating cooperative systems to consolidate farmer's economic power in competition with the railroads and the banks. It was the alternative to the disasterous crop-lien system of the rural south that turned so many of Jefferson's yoeman farmers into destitute sharecroppers, that forced them out of their homes to settle the western plains. Goodwyn's book debunks the idea the William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech was the defining highpoint of populism, when in fact it was it's destruction. Goodwyn points out that free silver was never more then a shadow movement of an immensely popular political movement. Goodwyn also debunks the later-day revisionists like Michael Kazin's book, author of The Populist Persuasion, that populism was a style of rhetoric than a coherent set of political ideas or reforms. While the People's Party was co-opted and destroyed by the Democrat Party, most of the reforms advocated by the populists came to pass in the 1930's with the agricultural reforms of the 1930's. Things like the rural electrification, the regulation of the railroads, the Farm Credit Administration, and the federal reserve all grew out the original populist ideas. Because of the populist complaints, eventually government intervention in the grain and other food commodies marketplace was recognized as the means of democraticizing and strengthing the market system, stablizing the food supply, and strengthening the market system. But most importantly, the dignity of the common man against the rich and powerful urban elite entered American political discourse. This is an important book, and a welcome understanding of perhaps the most successful movement by common folks to control their own destiny.

Seldom in our nation's history have there been widespread, grass-roots challenges to the economic and political system. According to the author, the agrarian movement of the late 1880s, otherwise known as Populism, was in fact the last such great challenge. Beyond the history of the movement, the author is much concerned with the implications for future democratic movements. The small farmers in western Texas in the 1880s recognized that the economic cards were stacked against them. The crop lien system and the "furnishing" merchant, the exorbitant prices paid for goods combined with low prices paid for cash crops, and the price gouging of railroads - all of these inspired some farmers to begin forming local alliances that would try to use cooperative methods to bypass those powerful interests that placed farmers in economic thralldom. Lecturers that spread across the South, and even westward and northward, drew upon close-knit farming community ties to eventually establish some 40,000 "sub-alliances" involving two million people, all finally part of a National Farmers Alliance. Through local trade stores, warehouses, and state exchanges, these sub-alliances attempted to buy and sell in bulk. But these efforts met with varying and limited success. Banking interests, grain elevator operators, and stockyards, among others, refused to deal with these farming groups, to accept their notes based on their cash crops and land. It is hardly surprising, given their radical critique of economic interests, that agrarian organizers would turn to political action to seek redress for farmer grievances. Yet the turn to politics was a highly complicating development for agrarian reform. The agrarian platform was highly radical for the times involving such issues as land reform, labor rights, government ownership and control of transportation and communication, and banking and currency reform with the elimination of the gold standard. But the hold of generational allegiances to the Democratic and Republican parties prevented many farmers from shifting to independent politics despite the fact that their traditional parties were resolutely opposed to many of the farmers' measures. Attempts at reform through the traditional parties were met by cooptation and demagoguery. The People's Party was formed at Omaha in July, 1892. The party's platform was the agrarian platform containing not only the National Alliance's sub-treasury plan, which was a plan for the issuance of greenbacks, but also calling for the free coinage of silver, both planks having the effect of increasing the money supply. Electoral success was limited. The Democratic Party through coopting of the silver issue and flagrant electoral fraud was able to defeat the Populists throughout the South, where they had their greatest support. In 1896 the People's Party through pre-convention intrigue actually nominated a staunch silver Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, for president, thus essentially ending the

This book is a stunning revisionist look at the received wisdom about the history of populism in the late 19th century. Rooting through old trunks in attics and forgotten county library newspaper archives, Goodwyn discovers the true radicalism of the populist movement, and why so much of what we were taught about the populists is wrong, distorted to cover up their fundamental challenge to the consolidation of industrial capitalism that was sweeping the world. A great book, a tragic story.