> Populism was a dead end for Americans _even_ when it was rooted in an
> actually existing material base.
What should have farmers in the 1880s and 1890s done, voluntarily surrender their land to their creditors, get a job in a factory, and bid their petty bourgeois past a fond farewell? What extant political program offered the true solution to farmers' credit problems???
As Goodwyn's history of the 1890s agrarian revolt argues, rather than representing a "dead end" Populism did call the entire economic system into question, at least for those whose lives revolved around agricultural production, which at the time was most of the population. Read Faulkner's short story "The Furnishing Merchant (could be wrong on the title??)" to get an idea how Southern communities operated and then think about what democratic access to capital would have done to such societies. The Populists' greenback critique of capitalism represented an authentic indigenous radicalism, something those firmly entrenched within a Marxist tradition have a hard time seeing. Writing in the journal Marxist Perspectives (sorry -- I'm away from my books and don't have a proper cite) labor historian David Montgomery correctly faulted Goodwyn's history for the lack of a true class analysis and noted that Populism had little to offer industrial workers and their struggle for workers' control. (Curiously the People's Party fared well in many urban areas.) But Montgomery was too good of a historian to cavalierly dismiss Populism as petty-bourgeois reformism. Instead he saw it as an authentic struggle for workers' control of the production process in an agricultural setting.
While the jaded of might dismiss Goodwyn's interpretation of Populism as nothing more than a romantic New Left quest to find antecedents of participatory democracy, the historic impact of the Populists' failure to build a cooperative commonwealth is clear. It's no coincidence that the 1890s were the high-water mark for voter participation rates in the US. In the wake of the Populist implosion, elite "Progressives" quickly passed reforms that limited the impact "the people" could have in politics. For instance, cities across America enacted legislation that reduced the ability of working-class immigrants to express their will politically, while at the federal level "rule by experts" became the guiding principle of such legislation as the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. Back when Americans used to debate such issues as control of the money supply, people took the time to vote. Now that such issues are safely removed from the political sphere, it's no wonder so few participate in politics.
mark
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