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Lawrence Goodwyn argued, in Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in
America (1976), that the preliminary success of the agrarian populists in
forming coalitions with black sharecroppers in the 1890s was a major reason
for the passage of Jim Crow laws. The Populist coalition threatened to
usurp the power of the Bourbon Democratic establishment, which reacted
violently at the polls to maintain power and engineered the segregation
laws to make sure that blacks and whites never would get together again. In
the North, Goodwyn wrote, it was just about as difficult for the farmers to
get together with the immigrants in the cities as it was to get them
together with the blacks in the South.
>> Goodwyn's book is a very simplistic take on a rather complicated subject.
Southern populists were far from anti-racist. Tom Nugent, twice Populist candidate for Texas guv, once declared: "My idea is that segregation as far as possible is best for the negro." Cyclone Davis, another leading Texas Pop., once said: "The worst sight of social equality to be seen in this land is the sight of a sweet white girl hoeing cotton in one row and a big burley [sic] negro in teh next row." The official state organ of the Louisiana Populist Party was called the "Weekly Caucasion." In 1894, George Populist Tom Watson attacked a political opponent for "promising to put negroes in the jury box," supported segregation in other ways as well, and even took an ambivalent stance vis-a-vis lynching. When Grover Cleveland invited Frederick Douglas, his white wife, and his black daughter from a previous marriage to the White House on no less than four separate occasion, Populists also protested quite vehemently.
This is all from a quite excellent book, "Blacks and the Populist Revolt" by Gerald Gaither (Univ. of Alabama Press, 1977). Clearly, Bourbon Democrats were competing with the Populists for the allegiance of white farmers, and both sides were not at shy about playing the race card. As for the question of the Populists and northern immigrants, the latter were quite justified in seeing the Populists as xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and more than a bit anti- semitic, a tendency that grew increasingly pronounced after the 1896 electoral debacle.ly