The party held its convention in February in St. Louis, where Minnesota populist Ignatius Donnelly penned a preamble to the platform that won widespread acclaim and became the group’s manifesto—what the populists called the nation’s “second Declaration of Independence.” Donnelly was a former Republican congressman and railroad lobbyist who in the mid-1870s had begun moving leftward and had won acclaim as an author and an orator. In the preamble, Donnelly charged that “the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up the colossal fortunes of a few.” Government and the major parties were complicit in this theft. “We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them,” Donnelly wrote.
Donnelly’s preamble echoed the themes of Jacksonian democracy. “We seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people,’ with whose class it originated,” he wrote. But while the Jackson Democrats wanted to restore popular democracy by eliminating the role of government in the economy, Donnelly and the populists—in a challenge to the prevailing laissez-faire worldview—wanted government to actively combat economic injustice. “We believe that the powers of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded . . . as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.”
At the St. Louis convention, Donnelly’s platform was enthusiastically endorsed by Georgia’s Tom Watson, who had been elected to Congress in 1890 as a Democrat backing the alliance platform. “Never before in the history of the world was there arrayed at the ballot box the contending forces of Democracy and Plutocracy,” Watson declared. “Will you stand with the people . . . by the side of the other wealth producers of the nation . . . or will you stand facing them, and from the plutocratic ranks fire a ballot in support of the old parties and their policies of disorganization, despotism, and death?”
There was always a more conservative strain within the populist movement. In the South, some alliance members cooperated with the parallel Colored Farmers’ Alliance, but others did not, and racial issues often divided populists from the Plains and the South. Populists also favored the expulsion of Chinese immigrants, whom businesses had imported to provide cheap labor on western farms and railroads. That was understandable, but their support for exclusion was often colored by racist rhetoric. Kansas populist leader Mary E. Lease warned of a “tide of Mongols.” And Watson’s People’s Party Paper denounced the Chinese as “moral and social lepers.” But in the 1880s and early 1890s, populist politics was primarily directed upward at the plutocrats. As historian Robert McMath recounts, they were repeatedly accused of being “Molly Maguires, Anarchists, and Communists.”
In the 1892 election, the People’s Party did remarkably well. Their woefully underfunded presidential candidate received 8 percent of the vote and carried five states. Then in 1893, as Cleveland was taking office, an economic depression took hold, leaving a quarter of Americans unemployed and thousands of farmers bankrupt. Cleveland reaffirmed the gold standard, and to pleas for government aid from farmers, Cleveland’s Secretary of Agriculture, Julius Sterling Morton, responded, “The intelligent, practical, and successful farmer needs no aid from the government. The ignorant, impractical, and indolent farmer deserves none.”
In the 1894 election, the People’s Party’s candidates for the House of Representatives won 10 percent of the vote. The party elected 4 congressmen, 4 senators, 21 state executives, and 465 state legislators. With their base in the South and the West, and with Cleveland wildly unpopular, they looked to be on their way to challenging the Democrats as the second party, but the election of 1894 turned out to be the party’s swan song.
The populists were done in by the dynamics of the two-party system. In the Plains states, anger against Cleveland turned voters back to the more electable Republicans. In the South, Democrats subdued the People’s Party by a combination of cooptation and, in response to the willingness of some populists to court the negro vote, vicious race-baiting. Watson said of the opposition to the People’s Party, “The argument against the independent political movement in the South may be boiled down into one word—nigger.”
In the wake of 1894, Southern Democrats like South Carolina Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman commonly combined a patina of populist economics and political reform with white supremacy. (Tillman’s nickname came from his promise in 1984 that if he were elected, he would go to Washington and “stick a pitchfork in Grover Cleveland’s old fat ribs.”) Watson himself and Texas’s James “Cyclone” Davis, while continuing to support populist economics, became allies of the Ku Klux Klan.
But the biggest damage occurred on the national stage. In 1896, the Democrats nominated Nebraskan William Jennings Bryan and adopted key planks of the populist platform, including monetization of silver (“free silver”!), the regulation of the railroads and other corporations, and a restriction on “foreign pauper labor.” At its convention, the People’s Party chose to endorse Bryan rather than to run a candidate of its own. In the 1896 election, the populist vote migrated to the major parties. To make matters worse, the populists also lost their blue-collar ally when the Knights of Labor fell apart and was replaced by the interest-group oriented American Federation of Labor. The People’s Party limped along and finally collapsed after the 1908 election when Watson, running as its presidential candidate, received 0.19 percent of the vote.
But during their heyday from 1885 to 1894, the populists of the alliances and the People’s Party had a profound effect on American and, as it turned out, Latin American and European politics. They developed the logic of populism—the concept of a “people” arrayed against an elite that refused to grant necessary reforms. In American politics, they were an early sign of the inadequacy of the two parties’ view of government and the economy.
The populists were the first to call for government to regulate and even nationalize industries that were integral to the economy, like the railroads; they wanted government to reduce the economic inequality that capitalism, when left to its own devices, was creating; and they wanted to reduce the power of business in determining the outcome of elections. Populism had an immediate impact on the politics of some progressive Democrats like Bryan, and even on Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette. Eventually, much of the populists’ agenda—from the graduated income tax to a version of the sub-treasury plan—was incorporated into the New Deal and into the outlook of New Deal liberalism.
Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth
In the 1920s, while much of Europe suffered from economic and political instability, partly as a result of post-World War I reparations and gold-based finance, the American economy enjoyed a boom. Republican business boosterism and rugged individualism dominated politics. But the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed shattered the public’s confidence in the free market, as well as in Republican rule, and helped to bring about a new Democratic majority.
Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats won a landslide victory in 1932, but not by repudiating the Republicans’ overall outlook on government and the economy. In the campaign, Roosevelt criticized Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover for overspending and promised to cut the government bureaucracy by 25 percent and balance the budget. Once in office, Roosevelt actually tried to make good on this promise through the Government Economy Act, which cut more than $500