Morally, yes. Politically, not necessarily.
Sounding and feeling like Looie, I have to say it's more complicated. The Force Bill was part of sectional warfare, aimed at the Southern Democratic/Bourbon machines. To support that bill was, I imagine, to announce one's betrayal of section. By contrast, focusing on a positive program of betterment for farmers was arguably a more tenable approach. I don't say it was the most moral approach. From this distance it is easy to gloss over how difficult it is to be a hero.
At this point the Peoples Party was rife with fusionists and assorted opportunists. In the South, fusion meant compromises of one sort or another with Democrats. It was from the Democratic party that the Peoples Party sought to recruit to its farmer base, and it was for the Democratic party that many of the PP rank-and-file had ambiguous feelings. Goodwyn seems to argue that the failure to establish a clean break with the Dems, not only in the South, was their ultimate undoing.
Here's a snippet from Goodwyn about the 1892 campaign in Georgia, led by Tom Watson, then running for Congress:
Watson's Democratic opponent, Major James Black, invoked the familiar appeals of Southern sectionalism, stressing his own Civil War service and the need for white Southerners to stay with the old party to avoid the possibility of Negro 'domination.' The Democratic press, solidly behind him, raised the specter of Reconstruction and 'the revival of bayonet rule.' . . . Businessmen in Augusta made special appeals to their financial connections in New York City on the grounds that Watson was "a sworn enemy of capital, and that his defeat was a matter of importance to every investor in the country." . . . The Atlanta Constitution felt that the defeat of "anarchy and communism" extended to the entire South because of "the direful teachings of Thomas E. Watson." At one point Watson's supporters rode all night to rally to a black populist who had been threatened with lynching. . . . the Augusta Chronicle was too outraged to feel the need for a bill of particulars. "Watson has gone mad," the paper decided. . . . Whether the white vote was counted fairly or not, it was clear to all that blacks now held the balance of power in Georgia. A number of murders occurred--no one knows how many. At Dalton, a Negro man who had spoken for Populism was killed in his home, and a black minister who repeatedly spoke for Watson was fired upon at a rally, the errant bullet striking a near-by white man and killing him. Election day murders took place elsewhere, particularly in Watson's tenth district. Only in such ways did the Democratic Party hold its lines intact in Georgia in 1892.
* * *
So we might compare the feasibility of the Peoples Party coming out in favor of the Force Bill to the reaction of, say, the parties of the Second International to WWI. An historic failure, to be sure. But we would not infer something fundamentally rotten in socialism on that account.
The spirit of the people is one thing, the extent to which their ideas develop another, and the evolution of political strategy and tactics, replete with misjudgement, blunder, cowardice, opportunism, and betrayal is another still.
It would be a little unfair to lump the Pops together with their vicious, unrestrained, armed oppressors.
mbs