[lbo-talk] Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading but Not for the Reasons the Critics Have in Mind

Seth Ackerman sethackerman1 at verizon.net
Tue Oct 10 20:33:56 PDT 2006


Doug Henwood wrote:


> This is a tremendous exaggeration. Hofstadter conceded the populists
> had reasonable complaints and many virtues. The passages on anti-
> Semitism take up just a few pages, and are not the centerpiece of his
> analysis (and, though he doesn't mention this, isn't Bryan's choice
> of imagery, "crucified on a cross of gold," rhetorically interesting,
> coming from a time when the Jews were blamed for nailing up Jesus?).
> He points out that American populism is a political ideology of petty
> producers - and rightly, I think, underscores the radical departure
> of the New Deal from the individualist roots of American radicalism
> for something much more collective. That kind of collectivism, which
> lasted into the 1970s, is exactly what the New Right has been trying
> to reverse all along, and they've accomplished a good bit of the
> task. Hof's emphasis on the individualism of American white
> protestantism is highly relevant now - it illuminates what's the
> matter with Kansas, since American white protestants love The Market
> as an instrument of reward and discipline. That love is not some
> recent confidence trick perpetrated by Karl Rove, but has deep roots.

I've been knee-deep in Populism for the last two semesters, Doug, and I can say pretty confidently that this is wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm not trying to contest your rehabilitation of Hofstadter, who I admire a lot. Besides, I haven't read enough of his Populism stuff. But this depiction of Populism - whether yours or his - as a movement that was ultimately deeply individualist because it ws made up of petty white Protestant producers is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Populism was deeply, totally, explicitly committed to collectivism. Its whole ideological essence was precisely a rejection of the individualism in the surrounding political environment. Its true, most Populists were petty producers - but almost as many were landless tenants. And there was no significant political difference between those two subgroups, either on ideology or program.

Where did their ideology come from? The key book on this subject is Steven Hahn's The Roots of Southern Populism. His argument strongly implies that Southern populism was in many ways analagous to early European working class socialism. Both were movements of people who until recently had been embedded in pre-capitalist, non-market, quasi-collectivist agricultural communities (he spends a long time demonstrating that antebellum upcountry farmers indeed lived in a non-market world with a non-market culture). Then economic dislocation forced them into the vortex of the individualistic market (enclosure/industrial revolution in Europe, Civil War/indebtedness/rise of the world cotton market in US).

Their response was key. In both cases, they could have gone either way - towards a nostalgic, reactionary, backward-looking anti-capitalism (like Luddism), or a progressive collectivist solution (like socialism). After a series of false starts, the southern farmers embraced collectivism. For god's sake, the main slogan they used to describe their vision of the good society was The Cooperative Commonwealth. That wasn't a random choice of words.

Some doctrinaire American Marxists like Daniel DeLeon - who had never seen a farm in his life - denounced them because they refused to sign on to his program of socialization of all means of production, including collective farming. At the farmer-labor congresses, the populists would try to replace "all" MoP with "socialization of the MoP where practicable." Then DeLeon would storm out. The populists were for nationalizing the railroads, banks, telegraphs, grain elevators, and all industry.

When Debs - certainly a Marxist, or at least Marxisant - overtook DeLeon as the leading socialist, he jumped at the chance to ally with the populists and agreed to their program of "socialization of the MoP where practicable." And they supported him passionately. The irony is that it was the *labor movement* - the one under Gompers, I mean - that was deeply individualistic. That's why Gompers refused to ally with the Populists and fought socialists, like Debs, who did.

Seth



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