> Allow me to clarify my view on populism and, by extension, Lawrence goodwyn's
> book, "Democratic Promise." Two things are worth bearing in mind about the
> Populists. The first is that they were overwhelmingly a petty proprietors'
> movement. This is not simply Marxist dogma speaking, but rather the only way
> to understand them in all their complexity. As small proprietors, the
> Populists at the best contained much that was positive -- their hatred of big
> capital, for example, their outrage of political corruption, their call for
> nationalization of the railroads, and so on. But there was much that was
> reactionary --their belief in the virtues of small business, anti-urbanism,
It's not obvious they celebrated small business as a virtue. As businessmenof course they aspired to progress from small to large. They certainly developed self-respect, but that's not quite what you were referring to. There may be a little more to the anti-urban theme but it's important to distinguish between populism in its heyday and the patterns in its dissolution.
> etc. As small proprietors, their outlook was small as well. They were unable
> to comprehend capitalism as it was actually taking shape in the 1890s and
Populist scholarship was pretty sophisticated. For their time, thepopulists had a reasonably good understanding of capitalism.
> could only "understand" it as some sort great Jeffersonian drama in which "the
> miners and sappers" were once more trying to topple the old republican moral
> order in which they, "the cultivatrs of the earth," occuppied the highest
> rung. It was a case of evil versus good -- evil monopolists on Wall Street,
> evil international bankers with names like Rothschild in London, evil Shylocks
The structure of oppression went from the banks right down through local characters of all sorts--suppliers, landlords, local pols. It wasn't a jewish thing.
> everywhere. Hostility to big banks, railroads, etc. led inevitably to
> hostility to industry, cities, and, esp. after the debacle f 1896, to people
In fact explicit alliances with labor at the time were a constant featureof populist politics. After all, workers of the time were of the same class as the agrarians. There weren't as many of them.
The anti-urban feeling is played out more in the prohibitionist movement, which allied with the populists for a time, and linked the liquor industry to anti-social market forces and the urban, especially Irish proletariat. Here the protestant/catholic split had some play and provided an avenue for the expression of anti-catholic bigotry. At the same time, the populists wanted to unite with urban labor. The urban theme had more to do with catholics than jews. Urban jewish populations did not swell with poor jews until after 1900. You're looking at the 1880-1900 period through a post1930, Father Coughlinite lens. (Actually Coughlin started off pretty well too.)
> who lived in those cities, particularly the Jews. Amid all the discussions of
> race recently, it is interesting to note that Northern populists were not
> especially hostile to blacks during this period. Memories of the Civil War
> were too fresh, and besides, blacks were a Southern "problem," as far as
> Northern farmers were concerned, out of sight and hence out of mind. For
> Soutehrn populists, it was a different story. Although there are a lot of
> stories of black-white cooperation among Southern agrarian elements, the white
> Populist record on race was patchy at best and outrightly hostile at worst.
> Bear in mind that Southern Populists saw themselves as oppressed by Northern
> capital, which they identified with the GOP. This was the same party that had
> rampaged through Georgia during the Civil War and which was now pressing them
> economically to the wall. Since the Republicans were perceived in the South
> as the friend of the blacks -- and indeed most blacks who still voted did so
> for the GOP -- hard-pressed white farmers gravitated to an anti-black, anti-
> Republican position.
This last is decisively refuted by the simple fact that all the ills noted above already had a savior--the Democratic Party. If these were the only problems perceived by Southern agrarians, there would have been no reason to have populist organizations and eventually a populist party.
> The second thing worth bearing in mind about the Populists is that their cause
> was hopeless. Esp. on the Plains and in the South, the movement's stronghold,
> farmers were under-capitalized and over their heads in debt. Global markets
This has nothing to do with the saliency of their critique or the positives in their movement. You could say the same thing about most any workers' struggle pre-1920.
> were groaning under the weight of a mounting grain surplus. The agricultural
> sector, particularly that oriented to export, was bound to shrink rel. to the
> larger economy as it shifted more and more into heavy industry. A socialist
> government could have done much to ameliorate the farmers' situation, which
> was indeed cruel, but it could do nothing to restore the Jeffersonian moral
> order.
Jefferson was a rallying cry for the populists, but this was mostly opportunistic use of a symbol. Their economics cannot be found in Jefferson, nor their support for an expanded public sector.
> Goodwyn's book is, of course, an enormous, 700+ page corrective to Eisenhower-
> era liberals like Hofstadter for whom any type of political extremism is a
> sympton neurotic maladjustment. But Goodwyn's work is equally tendentious in
> an opposite way. He goes to heroic lengths to paint the Populists in a
> positive way while glossing over all contributed to the movement's growing
> instability.
Much of your post could be applied to workers and their organizations,as well as farmers. Like workers, farmers used economic weapons at their disposal, which included not only labor, but also a bit of capital. When workers took over cities and ran them briefly in general strikes, we would find this very advanced political behavior. The farmers sought to establish arrangements which enable them to function routinely, not only in crisis periods.
A key idea that comes out of this, from my standpoint, is that cooperative enterprise is not some specimen under glass, but an instrument of struggle, a weapon in a dynamic process which is deployed, runs up against barriers, and is reconfigured for another try. Not unlike the struggle of a person to succeed in business, but conducted on a collective rather than individual basis.
MBS