Much of MBS's objections in his latest post revolve around the class question. He writes: "In fact explicit alliances with labor at the time were a constant feature of populist politics." But this is a serious exaggeration. True, populists were forever looking for allies and their betwixt-and-between status as small proprietors meant that they would often look for them in the working class. But the two sides' class interests were not identifical, as both labor and populists were aware. The 1892 Populist platform contained much that was progressive (e.g. a call for a graduated income tax, nationalization of the RR's, a shorter workweek for urban workers, etc.) but also included a plank calling for restrictions on immigration. This alone was enough to make them anathema from the point of view of the urban proletariat, dominated as it was by immigrants and their immediate offspring. When workers went on strike against the railroads, Populists often cheered them on. But when workers went on strike against farmers, it was a different story. As Goodwyn himself relates, the Populist leader LL Polk condemned a strike by black cotton pickers in the 1890s, a strike that in Arkansas ended with the massacre of some 15 workers in what one historian described as "mass lynchings."
MBS is also mistaken in asserting that "Urban jewish populations did not
swell with poor jews until after 1900." Not so; the urban Jewish population began to swell after 1880. By 1890, Jews were a major presence in New York and in many other cities as well. Ultimately, though, anti-semitism was not just a response to local conditions in the late 19th century, but an international phenomen. Antisemites were as up in arms over Jews in London and Paris as they were over Jews in New York.
Finally, Populist rhetoric was saturated with reactionary Jeffersonian- Jacksonian rhetoric. Consider this statement by LL Polk in 1892: "The time has arrived for the great West, the great South, and the great Northwest to link their hands and hearts together and march to the ballot box and take possession of the government [and] restore it to the principles of our founders" -- the alliance of the West, South, and Northwest, of course, being the great geo-political goal of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonians prior to the Civil War.
Of consider this 1890 statement by Kansas Populist leader Mary Lease: The West and South are bound prostrate before the manufacturing East" -- another evocation of the Jeff/Jack political strategy that was lso unlikely to play very well with urban workers.
Finally, Warren Weaver, the 1892 Populist presidential candidate, referred to Jefferson and Jackson in the following manner: "The rugged utterances of these statesmen ring out today like a startling impeachment of our time. ... There is enough in them to completely transform and re-invigorate our present suppliant and helpless state of public opinion. Those declarations were uttered in the purer days of teh republic and before the various departments of government had seriously felt the balefult and seductive influences of corporate wealth and power." This, to my mind, is classically backward- looking, tory-radical analysis of capitalism, one that excoriates "corporate wealth and power" while at the same time seeking a solution in a return to some long-lost heroic period when men were men and women were pure.
Jefferson hated banks, cities, markets, and manufacturing. His moral ideal was the self-sufficient Southern plantation and the Western subsistence farmer, both safely removed from the corruptions of commerce. This is precisely why the Populists looked to him fro inspiration.
Dan Lazare