User:172/Populist movement sandbox
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Origins
The Grangers
The Alliances
The Omaha Convention
Thus in 1892 their leaders organized the Populist, or People's, Party, and the Farmers' Alliances melted away. Its first convention was in July 1892, when 1,300 excited and exultant delegates from farm, labor and reform organizations poured into Omaha, Nebraska, determined at last to make their mark on a U.S. political system they viewed as hopelessly corrupted by the moneyed interests of the industrial and commercial trusts. The delegates formally proclaimed the creation of the new party, approved a set of principles, and nominated candidates for the presidency and vice presidency. By common consent, the party already had a name, one first used by the Kansas agrarians: the People's party. The movement was more commonly referred to, however, by the Latin version of that name: Populism.
The Populist leadership and constituency
Populism was stronger in some regions than others. Its greatest influence was in an arc of states extending from the Dakotas southward through Nebraska and Kansas; in a string of Southern states stretching from Texas through northern Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, and into Georgia and the Carolinas N S ; and in the Rocky Mountain States. Ironically, it was relatively weak in areas where the Granges had been most successful, because that was where agriculture had managed to achieve its greatest security and stability.
The movement appealed to geographically isolated farmers who felt cut off from the mainstream of national life and resented their isolation. Populism gave such people an outlet for their frustrations; it also provided them with a social experience, a sense of belonging to a community, that they had previously lacked.
The core constituency of Populism consisted of imperiled, small farmers with little long-term economic security—farmers whose operations were only minimally mechanized, if at all, who relied on a single crop, and who had access only to limited and unsatisfactory mechanisms of credit.
The status of such farmers varied, of course, from region to region. In the Midwest, the Populists were usually family farmers struggling to hold onto their land (or to get it back if they had lost it). In the South, there were significant numbers of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Yet, whatever their differences, the bulk of Populists were engaged in a type of farming that was becoming less and less viable in an era of new, mechanized, diversified, and consolidated commercial agriculture.
While trying to broaden their base to include labor and other groups, the Populists constituency was also notable for the groups it failed to attract as for those it attracted. Populist spokesmen attempted to generate enthusiasm for the movement within the working class; and Populist publications spoke of the connection between marginalized farmers and the marginalized industrial working class. There were energetic and continuing efforts to include labor within the Populist coalition. Representatives of the Knights of Labor attended early organizational meetings; the new party added a labor plank to its platform—calling for shorter hours for workers and restrictions on immigration, and denouncing the use of private detectives agencies as strikebreakers in labor disputes. However, these energies bore little fruit. First, the labor organizations were too weak and disorganized themselves to be able to deliver any adequate support. Another problem was the consistent failure to forge sufficiently broad lines of communication between industrial workers and farmers to define clearly enough the common interest between the two groups. Also, almost all of the Populist leaders, like their constituents, were Protestants, while Catholics accounted for a large portion of the working class in the large urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest.
In the South, in particular, the movement also considered the desirability of attracting African Americans, whose large numbers and dire poverty potentially made them possible, valuable Populist allies. There was an important African American component to the movement—a network of "Colored Alliances" that by 1890 numbered over one and a quarter million members. Many Midwestern Alliance members supported a full merger of the Colored Alliances with the national movement. Even some white Southern leaders displayed a willingness to consider interracial cooperation. However, in the end, the influence of white racism proved too strong. Most white Populists were willing to accept the assistance of African Americans only as long as it was clear that whites would remain in control of the movement. When conservatives began to attack the Populists for undermining white supremacy in the South, most farmers refused to endanger white supremacy by voting against the Democratic Party, and the interracial character of the movement quickly faded.
The Populist ideology and program
The reform program of the Populists was spelled out in the Ocala Demands of 1890 and then, even more clearly, in the Omaha platform of 1892. Among the most prominent of the many issues included in these documents was a proposal for a system of "subtreasuries," which would replace and strengthen the cooperatives with which the Grangers and Alliances had been experimenting for years. The government would establish a network of warehouses, where farmers could deposit their crops. Using those crops as collateral, growers could then borrow money from the government at low rates of interest and wait for the price of their goods to go up before selling them.
The pragmatic portion of their platform focused on issues of land, transportation, and finance, including the unlimited coinage of silver. The Populists called for the inflation of the currency (to be achieved by the unlimited coinage of silver), a system of government-operated postal savings banks (the populists considered national banks oppressive institutions of concentrated power), a graduated income tax, government ownership of their railroads, lower tariffs, the direct election of U.S. senators (which would weaken the power of conservative state legislatures), and other measures designed to improve the ability of their constituencies to influence the political process and give farmers economic parity with business and industry.
Some of the proposals were clearly unrealistic, but they were all focused on undermining the power of banks, railroads, and monopolies, which were far from guiltless in creating problems for their agrarian constituencies. Society, they claimed, had an obligation to protect the well-being of its individual citizens. The rights of property owners were, therefore, secondary to the needs of the community. Populists did not reject private property; most were themselves landowners or aspiring landowners. They did, however, emphatically reject the laissez faire orthodoxies of their time, the idea that the rights of ownership are absolute. In short, though not a challenge to industrialization or capitalism itself, the Populists raised one of the most powerful challenges of the era to the direction in which U.S. industrial capitalism was moving and the chaotic way in which the economy was developing.
The Populists as a third party movement
The elections of 1892
The elections of 1892 dispelled whatever doubt may have remained as to the potential power of the new movement. The Populists showed impressive strength in the West and South in the 1892 elections, and their candidate for president—James B. Weaver of Iowa, a former Greenbacker who received the nomination after the sudden death of the early favorite, Leonidas Polk—polled more than 1 million votes, 8.5 percent of the total, and carried six mountain and plains states for 22 electoral votes. By fusing with the Democrats in certain states, the party elected five senators, ten members of the U.S. House of Representatives, three governors, and nearly 1,500 state legislators, nearly all in the Northwest. It could also claim the support of the numerous Republicans and Democrats in Congress who had been elected by appealing to Populist sentiment.
The Panic of 1893 and the silver question
At first, the Populists at first did not pay a great deal of attention to the silver issue. But as the party gained in strength, the money question developed an increasing importance. The Populists sought to broaden their alliances with other political groups. The "money question" seemed a way to win the support of many people not necessarily engaged in farming but nevertheless starved for currency.
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The financial Panic of 1893 heightened the tension of this debate. Bank failures abounded in the South and Midwest; unemployment soared and crop prices fell badly. The crisis, and President Grover Cleveland's inability to solve it, nearly broke the Democratic Party. Democrats who were silver supporters went over to the Populists as the presidential elections of 1896 neared.
The "fusion" with the Democrats"
The election of 1896 appeared to the Populists to provide and opportunity to expand their influence and reach for national power
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In 1896, the Populists allowed themselves to be swept into the Democratic cause by their mutual preoccupation with the Free Silver Movement.
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Southern and Western delegates came to the Democratic convention determined to seize control o the party from conservative Easterners. Eager to stem challenges from the Populists among their constituencies, the Democrats hoped to incorporate some important Populist planks—among them free silver—into the Democratic platform and nominate a pro-silver candidate for president.
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Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his spellbinding "Cross of Gold" speech favoring free silver, which would emerge as one of the most famous speeches in U.S. political history. Pleading with the convention not to "crucify mankind on a cross of gold," William Jennings Bryan, the young Nebraskan champion of silver, won the Democrats' presidential nomination.
The choice of Bryan and the nature of the Democratic platform approved by the convention that year, calling for tariff reduction, supporting the principle of the income tax, pledging stricter government regulation if railroads and monopolies, and, most importantly, supporting free silver, placed the Populists in an intractable quandary. They had expected the Democrats to adopt conservative programs and nominate conservative candidates, akin to outgoing laissez faire Democratic president Grover Cleveland, leaving the Populists to represent the growing forces of protest. But now the Democrats had co-opted much of their agenda.
The Populists faced the choice of naming their own candidate and splitting the protest vote or endorsing Bryan and losing their identity as a party. When the party assembled, the convention voted to endorse Bryan amid considerable acrimony. Many Populists argued fervently that "fusion" with the Democrats—who had endorsed free silver, but ignored other and more important Populist demands—would destroy the party. But the majority concluded that there was no viable alternative.
Some businessmen grew hysterical when considering the prospect of a Bryan presidency. Many employers threatened to fire their workers who voted for him. Bankers threatened to not renew the mortgages of farmers who voted for him.
Such threats tuned a number of potential Democratic voters away from Bryan. In addition, Bryan's own campaign style alienated potential Democratic voters. His revivalist, camp-meeting style sat well with Protestants of old native stock in the South and the West, but it did not sit well with Catholic and immigrant voters in the major urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest, who were typically core Democratic constituencies. Many Catholic voters decided to stay home on election day. In addition, Bryan attracted fewer Republican farmers than he had expected. (Shortly before the election, the price of wheat suddenly rose, and Western farm discontent suddenly fell.)
For the Populists and their allies, the election results in 1896 were a sheer disaster. The Populists had gambled everything on "fusion" with the Democrats, and they had suffered a humiliating defeat. The Populist movement stood exposed as a phenomenon too weak to influence national politics. Within months of the election, the party began to dissolve. Never again would farmers raise such a forceful, influential protest against the nature of U.S. capitalism on the national political scene.