The term is much-debated. Daniel T. Rodgers includes ‘the people’ among his ‘contested truths.’ Political definitions center on the question, ‘Who rules?’ Persons calling themselves populists insist on popular sovereignty against (in the words of one Kansas populist, “the plutocrats, the aristocrats, and all the other rats”—presumably not including the democrats (Canovan 51). Socioeconomic definitions (as offered, for example, in Hofstadter’s Age of Reform) point to the agrarian origins of pre-twentieth-century populists, the industrial-working-class origins of many twentieth-century populists. Early populists were “entrepreneurial radicals” of the post-1815 farm (see also Canovan’s formulation, “rural radicalism”). Later populists were industrial workers displaced or threatened by large-scale, shadowy economic forces. Typically, the dichotomy turned up by these definitions pits paper-pushers of various descriptions (bankers, corporation men, bureaucrats, university professors) against the worker/producers, those who (to employ nineteenth-century vocabulary) were described as horny-handed sons of toil. Ideological definitions of populism (seen also in Hofstadter) point to certain key themes in populist discourse as the telltale markers: the imagery of a golden (though not a gold-standard) age; the apocalyptic conflict of good and evil; conspiracy theories; teachings on the primacy of money in the determination of social and political as well as economic power; jingoism or, to use a less Hofstadterian term, patriotism.
These definitions all run up against the very sort of contestation out of which populism itself is born. Is Mr. X or Movement Y ‘truly’ populist? the people are sovereign, but who are the people? Who are the producers? Does Mr. X or Movement Y believe his/its own discourse? The answer will very often depend upon how the writer offering the definition defines the key terms. Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion attempts to short-circuit this dilemma by defining populism as a rhetoric, “a language”—and a “flexible” one, at that—”whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter” (1). I shall use Kazin’s definition as my starting point, working back to the social, economic, political, and ideological markers. When, where, and why have politicized American citizens appropriated the language of populism, the appeal to and for ‘the people.’
Under this definition (although Kazin doesn’t notice it), the first American populists were of course the revolutionaries who deployed the themes expounded in the Declaration of Independence: A “people” is severing the political bands connecting it to another “people”; respectful of the opinions of mankind, they declare their reasons for so doing; these include the principle that just governments are based on the consent of the governed and that when a form of government becomes destructive of certain inherent human rights, the people may alter or abolish that government and frame new governing forms. In America, the Tories had the British and mercenary armies, but the Whig elites/gentry needed soldiers who could only be drawn from the commons. Local militias were also in place, as were the local governments; in both the use of guns and the use of words, American commoners were already empowered before the Revolution began. Economically, the Americans were commercial-agrarian for the most part, and not only did not need but were impeded by the British imperial trading system. socially, Americans were overwhelmingly Protestant, sharing suspicion of ecclesiastical hierarchies. Just as important, America had no titled nobility; this made an unmixed republic possible, obviating the Aristotelian-Polybian need to balance the ‘orders.’
These conditions enabled and encouraged political elites such as the ‘Virginia dynasty’ of Jefferson, Madison, et al. to appeal to ‘the people’ against the foreign and foreign-dominated incipient ‘tyrants.’ The American Whigs borrowed their conspiracy theory, elaborated at some length in the Declaration of Independence, but also in Jeffersonian fulminations against centralized banking, from English Whig sources—particularly Cato’s Letters. Theirs is a perfect example of Richard Bensel’s distinction between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in that sense, the question of populism in America is always not only a matter of ‘when’ and ‘why’ but of ‘where.’ Once the American ‘periphery’ cut itself loose from the British imperial ‘core,’ a new ‘periphery’/’core’ dichotomy arose, between the farmers in the interior of the new country and the merchants along the coast. The battle over the 1787 Constitution, won by the merchant-coastal interests who wanted those farmers to pay their debts, moderated without by any means eliminating the populist elements of the Revolution; the Jeffersonian “Revolution of 1800” saw a return of the appeal to the people, now framed within the new constitutional structure, a return powered by the claim that Hamlton and his allies were secret monarchists bent on establishing their class via a complex and unfamiliar financial system, including that old-Whig bète noire, a national bank.
Kazin excludes the revolutionary generation from populism because it was led by gentry. This is true, but if populism is a persuasion, then it doesn’t necessarily matter who is making the appeal. At any rate, Jefferson founded the Democratic Party, which produced in the next generation no less a common-touch figure than Andrew Jackson, rich but rough-hewn, who again appealed to ‘the people’ against the bankers and their supposed English puppet-masters. In this project, Jackson could appeal not only to farmers and rugged frontiersmen (quite literally dwellers on the periphery) but to small business people, equally at the mercy of “the money power.”
Although drafted into populism by later political orators, Lincoln—first a new Whig, then a Republican—was not a populist. For Lincoln, government of, by, and for the people was a problem, not a solution. Like Publius, Lincoln worried that popular sovereignty may attack unalienable, natural rights; he would, like Publius, guard the people from their own excesses. For the next populist movement we must turn to the decades after the Civil War.
The first self-described populists reacted to the economic hard times of the 1880s and 1890s, and against the corporations, which came to prominence in the years after the war. America went back on the gold standard in 1879; the demand for gold outstripped the supply for most of the next twenty years. Economic contractions occurred in 1882-85 and again in 1891-97 (for details see Friedman and Schwartz, 106 ff.). There was no relief for the consequent deflation, as silver had been demonetized in 1873, remonetized in 1876 in insufficient quantity to inflate the currency. The populists would scarcely recommend anything along the lines of a Federal Reserve Bank, such a thing being decidedly anti-populist. Under such conditions, wherein debtors were paying back creditors in dollars worth more than they were when the dollars were borrowed, the ‘periphery’ had serious, politically exploitable grievances against the ‘core. Third-party ferment—uncontrolled by the Australian ballot system, which wasn’t instituted until the 1890s—crystallized into the formation of the People’s Party, a coalition of Western small farmers burdened by exclusionary and confiscatory monopoly practices by the railroads and Southern small farmers burdened by usurious local storekeepers under the ‘crop lien’ system.
A co-op movement in 1880s Texas got the new populism started; the co-ops were an attempt by farmers to control both buying and selling, and so to cut out the middlemen, including creditors. This venture was undercapitalized and therefore unsuccessful. Farmers turned to politics, thinking that even if they had no credit they still had votes. Silver miners in the West and other political elites could then formulate a convincingly nasty story: Demonetization was “the Crime of ’73,” perpetrated by a cabal of Jewish, English, and Anglo-American financiers who wanted to establish the gold standard so American bankers could pay off loans to other gold standard nations, Britain first and foremost. In later words of Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, “a vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents and is rapidly taking possession of the world.” By 1889, the populists reached out to the Knights of Labor, proposing a coalition of ‘producers.’ In addition, the late 19th-century populists, like the American colonists and the Americans of the Second Great Awakening, were animated by Protestant religious fervor. “Christ himself was an evicted peasant,” one of them claimed. Such language contrasted sharply with the increasingly scientistic language of the elites, who excused hardship by claiming it ensured the survival of the fittest.
The People’s Party ran into several difficulties. North/South wounds hadn’t healed; enlisting freemen in the South would have been a useful counter to the Democratic Party, but, despite some efforts in that direction (most notably in Texas), race prejudice remained too strong. In the North, populism would tend only to take votes from the Republicans, giving power not to populists but Democrats. Also, a ‘people’s party’ still needs to be a party, with organization, funding, professional politicians. ‘The people’ can’t simply take over; even the American revolutionaries needed George Washington, John Adams, Robert Morris. Finally, labor didn’t feel comfortable with the farmers. To an industrial worker in New York City, what’s wrong with low farm prices?
As a result, the People’s Party as absorbed in the West by the Democrats when the latter nominated William Jennings Bryan, and was blocked in the South by Democratic politicians who bribed, intimidated, and played on racial prejudice. On their end, the Republicans were also busy and effective, ruining the populists’ electoral chances, which depended on fusion controlled by themselves rather than co-optation controlled by the Democrats, by instituting the Australian ballot system (Argersinger 287-306), designed to enable individuals to resist ‘popular’ pressures. In the end, as Margaret Canavan writes, “Whether they like it or not, Populists were a collection of minority groups, not ‘the people’ itself” (54). This raises an important point about populist appeals, a point made by almost everyone who writes about them. In the broad, extended, diverse Madisonian republic, designed to make popular sovereignty untyrannical by registering divisions among the people, appeals to ‘the people’ will always be self-limiting. Even in colonial, pre-Madisonian America, the revolutionaries hadn’t represented much more than one-third of the population. Appeals to ‘the people’ are seldom taken up by most, let alone all, of the population. Appeals to ‘the people’ serve rather as means by which one elite can knock a hitherto more powerful rival—to be sure, sometimes benefiting many others beyond themselves. In fact, the ‘new’ elite very often will include ‘new men,’ aristoi of virtue and talent (or at least oratorical ability) who rise from subordinated social classes. This is obviously one of the main appeals of populist movements to ambitious and capable persons.
Farm prosperity from 1900 to the First World War further blunted populist fervor; by the time farmers again had cause for complaint, in the 1920s, they were insufficiently numerous plausibly to claim title to ‘the people’ as a political slogan. In the twentieth century, ‘periphery’ and ‘core’ in the United States had much less geographic salience than at any time previously. Twentieth-century populist appeals shifted for the most part to interest groups—’peripheral’ in social and political ways but not so much territorial ones—starting with the labor movement under Gompers and, as Michael Kazin rightly sees, the prohibitionist movement. The civil rights movement of the 1945-65 period, the student movement of 1962-72, the ‘Moral Majority’ and other right-of-center populist appeals of the last quarter of the century, have all pretty obviously played to groups that cannot seriously be described as ‘the people’ as a whole. What populist rhetoric does do—and here again Kazin is astute—is to give such groups a vocabulary with which to address their fellow citizens in a broad-based republic where Marxist and other class-based appeals sound more strident than they might in a more rigidly stratified society in which old, settled social orders prevailed in recent memory.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt seems to have learned from the Democrats’ co-optation of Bryan. If ever there was a circumstance that might have yielded a renewed populist movement, it was the Great Depression. All the elements were there for an agro-labor coalition: economic disaster, incompetence and corruption on Wall Street, stumbling Washington pols—in Robert H. Wiebe’s phrase, “masterless men in a structureless society” (60). A new version of Coxey’s Army erected Hooverville across the street from the White House. Yet FDR and his professionalized elite—man of them coming out of the secular wing of the Progressive movement—adeptly incorporated these elements (especially the farmers) into a bureaucratic state-building project. And note well: This could be done on the basis of the old program of the People’s Party, insofar as that party advocated increased activity and regulation by the federal government. Hofstadter observes, “Populism [of the late 19th century] was the first modern political movement in the United States to insist that the federal government had some responsibility for the common weal,” by which he means responsibility for its management (61). Once again, organization triumphed over popular energy, but this time the organization wasn’t the old-fashioned party structure, reformed into subordination by the Progressives, but a centralized, state apparatus that regulated populist passions by rechanneling them into a governmental structure (some might say ‘maze’) of institutions and regulations.
Kazin discusses the ‘shift to the Right’ in twentieth-century populist politics; he doesn’t say much about why the Right could appropriate populist rhetoric. If populist appeals set the average, hard-working, productive American against the bloated, lazy, despotic few, then the government itself, particularly when allied to corporate and other organized, professionalized interest groups, could easily stand in for the nearest contemporary equivalent of George III or the Monster Bank. Institutionalized or statist liberalism—’statist liberalism’ being something of a contradiction in terms, as Locke reminded readers of Thomas Hobbes—makes an inviting target for conservatives who subscribe not to The New Republic but the old one. Add to that a foreign threat from the Left, Communism, which is genuinely statist, and to that dark suspicions—very much in the Whiggish tradition of conspiracy-mongering—of collaboration (or at least ‘softness’) by a no-enemies-on-the-Left neoliberal state toward that foreign threat, and you have an enduring political trope of the years 1945-1990. Notice that the solution to political problems advanced by 19th-century populists—a larger national state, intervening in behalf of ‘the people’—could itself become the target of populist ire, once that state was professionalized, co-opted by elites. Notice also that a populist-talking Right, once in power, soon divides into state-tolerating ‘neo-conservatives’ and state-hating ‘libertarians,” the latter sometimes in alliance with state-hating religionists and ‘paleo-conservatives.’
Another way of stating the matter is this: If the plausibility of populist appeals depends upon some real sense of a ‘periphery’ exploited by a ‘core,’ American populism in the twentieth century was fragmented. Except for the dichotomy of ‘the people’ versus ‘the government’—rather blunted because the people elect much of the government—or ‘the people’ versus ‘the corporations’—rather blunted because the people buy products made by the corporations and often buy stock in the corporations themselves—America became the core in the modern world. Real peripheries, and therefore plausible populism, have moved offshore, into Africa, parts of Latin America and Asia. Populism, defined as appeals to the people as a whole, depends upon believable claims that some organizable group can be said to be, or at least represent, the people. Populism thus needs a relatively simple society (an agrarian one will do, very nicely) with a majority class or group of classes that can style itself the producing and moral majority. Populism also needs both an immediate grievance and a structural target—respectively, for example, a depression and a politica/economic elite—to aim at. Populism in the United States has occurred when a material cause—economic hard times, typically—meets a formal cause—a stratified political and economic structure—in the name of a final cause—a threat to the natural rights of the sovereign people, or their ‘progress.’ Add one or more efficient causes—the long train of abuses and usurpations cited in the Declaration of Independence, the Crime of ’73, the Crash of ’29—for new political elites to brandish, and you have populism. The antidote to the excesses of populism is the artfully redesigned structure of political institutions—the Constitution of 1787, the New Deal state of the 1930s.
Works Cited
Argersinger, Peter: “Fushion Politics and Anti-Fusion Laws.” American Historical Review, Spring 1980, 287-306.
Canovan, Margaret: Populism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
Friedman, Milton, and Schwartz, Anna Jacobsen: A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Hofstadter, Richard: The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.
Kazin, Michael: The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Rodgers, Daniel T.: Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Wiebe, Robert H.: Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Recent Comments