The Populist Explosion. John B. Judis
worldview that stressed a far more limited role for government in the economy.
The role of underlying worldviews is characteristic of politics in the United States and Europe, and of all countries that are governed primarily by consent rather than by force and terror. In Great Britain, for instance, laissez-faire capitalism, associated with Adam Smith’s invisible hand, prevailed for much of the nineteenth century, but after World War II it was superseded by Keynesian economics.
American politics is structured to sustain prevailing worldviews. Its characteristics of winner takes all, first past the post, single-member districts have encouraged a two-party system. Third-party candidates are often dismissed as “spoilers.” Moreover, in deciding on whom to nominate in party primaries, voters and party bigwigs have generally taken electability into account, and in the general election, candidates have generally tried to capture the center and to stay away from being branded as an “extremist.” American political history is littered with candidates who proved too extreme for the prevailing consensus of one or the other major parties—think of Fred Harris or Jesse Jackson among Democrats and Tom Tancredo or Pat Robertson among Republicans.
As a result of this two-party tilt toward the center, sharp political differences over underlying socioeconomic issues have tended to get blunted or even ignored, particularly in presidential elections. Campaigns are often fought over fleeting social issues such as temperance or abortion or subsidiary economic issues such as the minimum wage or the deficit. But there are times, when, in the face of dramatic changes in the society and economy or in America’s place in the world, voters have suddenly become responsive to politicians or movements that raise issues that major parties have either downplayed or ignored. There are two kinds of such events.
The first are what political scientists call realigning elections. In these, a party or a presidential candidate’s challenge to the prevailing worldview causes an upheaval that reorders the existing coalitions and leads to a new majority party. Franklin Roosevelt’s campaigns in 1932 and, even more so, 1936 did this, and so did Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980. Such elections are rare. They are usually precipitated by economic depression or war, and by a succession of political outbursts that challenge, but do not replace, the prevailing worldview. In American politics, these outbursts often take the form of populist candidacies and movements.
These catalytic populists have defined politics in “us vs. them” terms—as struggles of the people against the establishment based on issues and demands that the latter had been sidestepping. The rise of the People’s Party was the first major salvo against the worldview of laissez-faire capitalism. Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth coincided with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and helped drive the Roosevelt administration to develop a new politics to sustain its majority. Together, these movements established the populist framework that Bernie Sanders, who described himself both as a democratic socialist and as a progressive, would adopt during his 2016 campaign.
As liberal critics would point out during the 1950s, the People’s Party had within it strains of anti-Semitism, racism, and nativism, particularly toward the Chinese, but these were at best secondary elements. Until the movement began to disintegrate, the original People’s Party was primarily a movement of the left. The first major instances of rightwing populism would come in the 1930s with Father Charles Coughlin, and then in the 1960s with George Wallace’s presidential campaigns. Wallace helped doom the New Deal majority and helped lay the basis for the Reagan realignment of 1980. He created a constituency and a rightwing variety of populism—what sociologist Donald Warren called “middle American radicalism”—that would migrate into the Republican Party and become the basis of Donald Trump’s challenge to Republican orthodoxy in 2016.
The People’s Party
In May 1891, the legend goes, some members of the Kansas Farmers Alliance, riding back home from a national convention in Cincinnati, came up with the term “populist” to describe the political views that they and other alliance groups in the West and South were developing. The next year, the alliance groups joined hands with the Knights of Labor to form the People’s Party that over the next two years challenged the most basic assumptions that guided Republicans and Democrats in Washington. The party would be short-lived, but its example would establish the basis for populism in the United States and Europe.
At the time the populists were meeting in Cincinnati, the leading Republicans and Democrats in the United States were reveling in the progress of American industry and finance. They believed in the self-regulating market as an instrument of prosperity and individual opportunity, and thought government’s role should be minimal. Grover Cleveland, who was president from 1884 to 1888 and from 1892 to 1896, railed against government “paternalism.” Public sector intervention, he declared in his second inaugural address, “stifles the spirit of true Americanism”; its “functions,” he stated, “do not include the support of the people.” Government’s principal role was to maintain a “sound and stable currency” through upholding the gold standard. Cleveland and his rivals quarreled over the tariff and whether the Democrats were the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” but they agreed on the fundamental relationship between government and the economy.
But during these years, farmers in the South and the Plains suffered from a sharp drop in agricultural prices. Farm prices fell two-thirds in the Midwest and South from 1870 to 1890. The Plains, which prospered in the early 1880s, were hit by a ruinous drought in the late 1880s. But unsympathetic railroads, which enjoyed monopoly status, raised the cost of transporting farm produce. Many farmers in the South and the Plains states could barely break even. The small family farm gave way to the large “bonanza” farm, often owned by companies based in the East. Salaries were threatened by low-wage immigrants from China, Japan, Portugal, and Italy. Farmers who retained their land were burdened by debt. In Kansas, 45 percent of the land had become owned by banks.
The farm revolt began in the 1870s with the Farmer Alliances in the North and South. These were originally fraternal societies, modeled on the Masons, with secret handshakes that bonded the members together. The Southern Alliance began in Texas and spread eastward over the South. In the North, it began in New York, died out, and then was revived in the 1880s in the Plains states. The alliances organized cooperatives to try to control prices, which were increasingly set in distant markets, and they began to pressure legislators to regulate railroad rates. As they became more deeply involved in politics, they began to join forces with the Knights of Labor, the workingman’s organization that had been founded in 1869 and that by the early 1880s was the main labor group in the United States. In 1885, the Texas alliance declared in a resolution that it sought a “perfect unity of action” between itself and the Knights of Labor.
While the Grange, a farm advocacy group that started just after the Civil War, foreshadowed later interest groups like the National Farmers Union, the alliances saw themselves representing the “people,” including farmers and blue-collar workers, against the “money power” or “plutocracy.” That was reflected in their early programs, which included a demand for the incorporation and recognition of labor unions alongside demands for railroad regulation, an end to land speculation, and easy money (through the replacement or supplementing of the gold standard) to ease the burden of debt that the farmers suffered from. Except for a few scattered leaders, the populists were not socialists. They wanted to reform rather than abolish capitalism, and their agent of reform was not the socialist working class, but the loosely conceived idea of “the people.” Daniel DeLeon, the head of what was then the country’s main socialist party, the Socialist Labor Party, criticized them as “bourgeois.”
Some of the alliance members backed the Greenback Party’s presidential slate in 1880 and 1884, but most sought to influence the dominant parties in their region. The Southern Alliance wanted to transform the Democratic Party, and the alliance in the Great Plains wanted to change the Republicans. In December 1889, the alliances began a series of meetings to develop a national program. Besides the demands on currency and land, the program now also included the nationalization of railroads, a graduated income tax, political reform (including the secret ballot and direct election of senators), and a “sub-treasury” plan that would allow farmers to borrow money from the federal government to store their crops until prices rose high enough for them to