Gee, Doug, sorry for "characterizing" and asking questions! I was not slandering Hofstadter I was checking with you. I never doubted that racism was deep in the roots of the Populist movement or of many (most) popular movements in the U.S. Also a certain amount of anti-intellectualism.
And I don't doubt that the anit-Semitism rap is unfair, not because I believe that Hofstadter didn't spend much page matter on it (five pages is plenty) but rather because I have read enough about some in the Populist movement to know that they identified the big city bankers with foreigners, Jews, etc. In short there was plenty in the Populist movement that was nativist, derived from Know Nothingism, etc.
But I have also read, more recently, about pockets of the Populist movement that tried to make interracial alliances, tried to extend their politics to urban areas, thought that racism was divisive. As you say Hofstadter acknowledged that an anti-populist such as Henry Adams was an anti-Semite. As far as I can tell the Populist movement was no more anti-Semitic than the Democratic or Republican party and probably a bit less racist than the Democratic party at the time.
It is not to romanticize Populism to think that Hofstadter's story of Populism might be Whiggish. (But let me say to a certain extent this is necessarily true of all of us. No matter how hard we try a big of Whiggishness comes in.)
Populism can be either "right wing" or "left wing." Local justice can mean the lynch mob or truly representative juries. The lynch mob can look like the sans culottes or the KKK. Who is romanticizing? One only has to look at the virulently racist career of someone such as Tom Watson to realize that the story is simply not simple. The populists and Watson supported the nationalization of railroads, utilities and telephones and telegraphs. This may be petty bourgeois but it is not anti-collectivist. Many populists and Tom Watson at the beginning fought against the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. When Tom Watson negotiated to join the Democrats the economic populism dropped from his rhetoric and he became more and more a supporter of white-supremacist populism. And yet, feeling betrayed by the Populist Party merger with the Democrats, a lot of the supporters of the Populists joined the Debsian socialism party -- even some of the racists, ended up in the Socialist Party.
You have read Hofstadter recently. I read him thirty years ago. Tell me then, does Hofstadter deal with this aspect of the Populist movement in a proportional way with its virulent racism?
Now remember I am only asking. Because I don't remember him doing so.
Jerry
>
>
> The anti-Semitism rap is really unfair. There are about 5 pages in
> The Age of Reform about the anti-Semitic currents in populism. Though
> he doesn't say this, his analysis is perfectly consonant with the
> anti-Semitism that floats through a lot of populist politics that is
> anti-finance and anti-urban but not really anti-capitalist. The Jew
> becomes the symbolic repository of the cosmopolitanizing (?) trends
> of capitalism - that one's a hardy perennial. Hofstadter emphasizes
> that "it would be easy to exaggerate the intensity" of populist anti-
> Semitism - it wasn't a program of persecution, but more a rhetorical
> style, "a certain symbolic usage." He acknowledged that Henry Adams
> was a bigtime anti-Semite, too.
>
> A lot of American leftists, historians and otherwise, want to
> romanticize the populists - and somehow seem surprised that a lot of
> populism today is pretty right-wing. So Hofstadter becomes the
> whipping boy for saying that there were right-wing tendencies in
> classic American populism. The same leftists want to believe in some
> deep radicalism in the American tradition, too, and are annoyed by
> his emphasis on the conservatism that runs through our history.
> Sorry, folks, it's there, and anyone alive today can see it. So why
> should it surprise us that today's paranoid, anti-intellectual, right-
> wing populism has a pedigree?
>
> Doug
>