> The platform included opposition to immigration...
I'd suggest that a fatal conflict between farmers and workers in domestic industry was created by the Omaha platform in its primary demand: "1. We demand free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the present legal ratio of l6 to 1."
At the time the overwhelming majority of US exports were agricultural products (cotton, grains, animals and meat, tobacco, etc). For example, cotton exports alone in 1891 were about ten times in value all exports of iron and steel manufactured products or refined petroleum products (the two largest industrial export categories).
At the time (1892) the world market ratio of silver to gold was about 25 to 1. Farmers selling their products on the world market for gold pounds, francs and marks would receive, for example, per gold pound 8 (16 to 1) dollars where they had received 5 (gold) dollars.
But the farmer's expenses were overwhelmingly not imported (harvest labor, domestic manufactures of cloth or wagons or lamps), and those would no doubt inflate - but not at all at the rate of the new payoff for exports. And some particularly obnoxious expenses were fixed and would not inflate at all - mortgage payments above all.
But workers employed in domestic industry, transportation and construction would lose. Many of their expenses for food (at that time a much larger portion of the workers' budgets) were for products that were also exported (breadstuffs, meat) and whose price would inflate quickly toward world market rates. And few workers employed in domestic industry at that time owned their homes, and so most would not get the debtors benefit from inflation.
It was still then well remembered that during the great inflation of the civil war that wages in industry rose far slower than agricultural (and even most industrial) commodities; that is, that real wages fell, and fell sharply. The civil war was over only 27 years before 1892.
In the 1896 election this was a central point made against Bryan and "16 to 1" in the working class communities of the northeast, and he lost the election when he lost in those communities. One of the most circulated pamphlets of the campaign made just this argument with great force and clarity, "Wages vs. 16 to 1" by John DeWitt Warner (a NYC lawyer of vaguely progressive tendency, who at one time had been interested in Henry George...BTW, Single Taxers were very popular among industrial workers at that time & George had probably been elected mayor of New York by working class votes in 1885 until Tammany "counted him out", but the idea that the only government tax should be on the increase in the value of land was not an idea that would much appeal to farmers!)
john mage