Unit 2.

2: The Populist Challenge: Agrarian Crisis and Discontent

Hicks, J.D. The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the Peoples Party. Connecticut: Greenwood
Press, 1981.
Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Movement: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolts in America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978.

1. Introduction
a. Consequences of the Civil War
b. The agrarian revolt first stirred on the Southern frontier, then swept eastward across Texas and the
other states of the Old Confederacy and thence to the Western Plains. It took almost thirty years
to spread all parts of the country.
c. J. D. Hicks argues that the various agrarian movements, particularly the Alliance and the Populist
revolts, were but the inevitable attempts of a bewildered people to find relief from a state of
economic distress made certain by the unprecedented size and suddenness of their assault upon
the West and by the finality with which they had conquered it.
2. Background of the Populist Revolt
a. Southern Economy after the Civil War
i. Crop Lien System
ii. Conditions of Farmers: Case Study
a. S.R. Simonton from South Carolina
b. Matt Brown, Negro farmer from Mississippi
iii. Great Migration
a. Going West or Gone to Texas
b. The Grievances
i. For this condition of affairs, the farmer did not blame himself. The farmer never doubted
that his lack of prosperity was directly traceable to
the low prices he received for the commodities he
had to sell.
ii. Not politicians only but many others who studied
the question held that overproduction was the root
of the evil. It is argued that peasants are distressed
due to the rapid expansion of the agricultural
frontier in the United States and the world.
iii. However, the farmers and their dependents refused to place much stock in the
overproduction theory.
iv. Railroads were blamed for this condition also. Southern railroads, like the western
railroads, were accused of levying ‘freight and fares at their pleasure to the oppression of
the citizens and of making their rates according to the principle, take as much out of the
pockets of the farmers as we can without actually taking at all.’
v. The absence of a free market was the chief reason assigned by many farmers for the low
prices they were paid for their grain. Undoubtedly, there was great irregularity and
unfairness in the grading of grains.
c. The Farmers’ Alliances
i. In September 1877 a group of farmers gathered at the Lampasas County farm of J. R. Allen
and banded together as the “Knights of Reliance.” In his view, the farmers needed to
organize a new institution for America, a “grand social and political palace where liberty
may dwell and justice be safely domiciled.” How to achieve such a useful “palace” was,
of course, the problem.
ii. The new organization soon changed its name to “The Farmers Alliance,” borrowed freely
from the rituals of older farm organizations, and spread to surrounding counties. In the
summer of 1878, a “Grand State Farmers Alliance” was formed.

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3. Course of the Populist Revolt
a. The Activities of Farmers’ Alliances
i. S. O. Daws, a thirty-six-year-old Mississippian, was the first populist leader. Daws had
developed an interesting kind of personal political self-respect. Raised in the humiliating
school of the crop lien system, he did not believe the inherited economic folkways were
fair, and he thought he had the right to say so. Late in 1883 the Alliance named Daws to a
newly created position, that of “Traveling Lecturer,” and endowed the new chief organizer
with broad executive powers to appoint sub-organizers and sub-lecturers for every county
in the state of Texas.
a. A “trade store” system was agreed upon wherein Alliance members would contract
to trade exclusively with one merchant.
b. Daws’s efforts had been so impressive that his office and his appointment powers
were confirmed by the convention. The spring of 1884 saw a rebirth of the Alliance.
Daws travelled far and wide, denouncing credit merchants, railroads, trusts, money
power, and capitalists.
c. Did buyers underweight the cotton, or overcharge for sampling, inspecting,
classifying, and handling?
ii. Another leader was William Lamb who also gave his full efforts in the organisation. He
was made “state lecturer” while Daws continued in the role of travelling lecturer.
a. William Lamb emerged in 1884-85 as a man of enormous energy and tenacity. As
president of the Montague County Alliance, he had organized over 100 sub-
alliances by October 1885, a record that eclipsed even Daws’s performance in his
own county.
iii. The first spectacular flowering of this culture came in 1886 against the backdrop of a bitter
labour controversy that has come down in history as the “Great Southwest Strike.” For
decades as the nation industrialized following the Civil War, American industrial workers,
in ways not dissimilar from those of farmers, had groped for ways to defend themselves
against the forms of exploitation associated with the new corporate system.
a. The most numerically significant of these efforts developed through an institution
known as the Knights of Labour. They had forced Jay Gould, railroad magnate
and guiding spirit 1 of the Missouri-Pacific lines, to honour a union contract.
b. The cry “we made Jay Gould recognize us” was compelling, and in 1885-86 the
Knights used it to multiply their national membership from 100,000 to 700,000.
But in the spring of 1886, Jay Gould, through his general manager, H. M. Hoxie,
moved to crush the union by precipitating a conflict.
c. The struggle began when Hoxie fired a union spokesman in Texas for missing work
while attending a union meeting after the railroad had given him permission to do
so.
iv. From beginning to end, the Great Southwest Strike was a series of minor and major battles
between armed strikers and armed deputies and militiamen, interspersed with commando-
like raids on company equipment by bands of workers.
b. The Populists into Action
i. The movement became increasingly popular throughout Texas in the mid-1880s, and
membership in the organization grew from 10,000 in 1884 to 50,000 at the end of 1885.
At the same time, the Farmer’s Alliance became increasingly politicized, with members
attacking the “money trust” as the source and beneficiary of both the crop lien system and
deflation. In the hopes of cementing an alliance with labour groups, the Farmer’s Alliance
supported the Knights of Labour in the Great Southwest railroad strike of 1886. That same
year, a Farmer’s Alliance convention issued the Cleburne Demands, a series of
resolutions that called for, among other things, collective bargaining, federal regulation
of railroad rates, an expansionary monetary policy, and a national banking system
administered by the federal government.
ii. President Grover Cleveland’s veto of a Texas seed bill in early 1887 outraged many
farmers, encouraging the growth of a Northern Farmer’s Alliance in states like Kansas
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 and Nebraska. That same year, a prolonged drought began in the West, contributing to the
bankruptcy of many farmers. In 1887, the Farmer’s Alliance merged with the Louisiana
Farmers Union and expanded into the South and the Great Plains. In 1889, Charles
Macune launched the National Economist, which became the national paper of the
Farmer’s Alliance.
iii. Macune and other Farmer’s Alliance leaders helped organize a December 1889
convention in St. Louis; the convention was met with the goal of forming a confederation
of the major farm and labour organizations. Though a full merger was not achieved, the
Farmer’s Alliance and the Knights of Labour jointly endorsed the St. Louis Platform,
which included many of the long-standing demands of the Farmer’s Alliance. The Platform
added a call for Macune’s “Sub-Treasury Plan,” under which the federal government
would establish warehouses in agricultural counties; farmers would be allowed to store
their crops in these warehouses and borrow up to 80 per cent of the value of their
crops. The movement began to expand into the Northeast and the Great Lakes region,
while Macune led the establishment of the National Reform Press Association, a network
of newspapers sympathetic to the Farmer’s Alliance.
c. The Elections & the Populist Party
i. By the time of the election year of 1890, both the Southern and the Northern Alliances
were earnestly at work sharing political lines.
a. Both drew much inspiration from activities, already described from the national
conventions held at St. Louis during December 1889.
b. They wanted to nominate the independent state tickets in the election. They also
try to unite various forces of discontent into a national party. Apart from National
Farmers’ Alliance, there was Union Labour Party.
c. Alliance presidents even resolved that there will not be any division on party lines
and they will cast their votes for candidates of the people, by the people and for
the people.
ii. The success of Farmers’ Alliance candidates in the 1890 elections, along with the
conservatism of both major parties, encouraged Farmers’ Alliance leaders to establish a
full-fledged third party before the 1892 elections.
a. The Ocala Demands laid out the Populist platform: collective bargaining, federal
regulation of railroad rates, an expansionary monetary policy, and a Sub-
Treasury Plan that required the establishment of federally controlled warehouses
to aid farmers.
b. Other Populist-endorsed measures included bimetallism, a graduated income
tax, direct election of Senators, a shorter workweek, and the establishment of
a postal savings system. These measures were collectively designed to curb the
influence of monopolistic corporate and financial interests and empower small
businesses, farmers and labourers.
iii. In the 1892 presidential election, the Populist ticket of James B. Weaver and James G.
Field won 8.5% of the popular vote and carried four Western states, becoming the first
third party since the end of the American Civil War to win electoral votes.
a. Despite the support of labour organizers like Eugene V. Debs and Terence V.
Powderly, the party largely failed to win the vote of urban labourers in
the Midwest and the Northeast.
b. Over the next four years, the party continued to run state and federal candidates,
building up powerful organizations in several Southern and Western states. Before
the 1896 presidential election, the Populists became increasingly polarized
between “fusionists”, who wanted to nominate a joint presidential ticket with the
Democratic Party, and “mid-roaders”, like Mary Elizabeth Lease, who favoured
the continuation of the Populists as an independent third party.
c. After the 1896 Democratic National Convention nominated William Jennings
Bryan, a prominent bimetallist, the Populists also nominated Bryan but rejected the
Democratic vice-presidential nominee in favour of party leader Thomas E. Watson.
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 d. In the 1896 election, Bryan swept the South and West but lost to
Republican William McKinley by a decisive margin.
iv. After the 1896 presidential election, the Populist Party suffered a nationwide collapse.
The party nominated presidential candidates in the three presidential elections after 1896,
but none came close to matching Weaver’s performance in 1892.
a. Former Populists became inactive or joined other parties. Other than Debs and
Bryan, few politicians associated with the Populists retained national prominence.
v. Historians see the Populists as a reaction to the power of corporate interests in
the Gilded Age, but they debate the degree to which the Populists were anti-modern
and nativist.
a. Scholars also continue to debate the magnitude of influence the Populists exerted
on later organizations and movements, such as the progressives of the early 20th
century.
b. Most of the Progressives, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, and
Woodrow Wilson, were bitter enemies of the Populists.
c. In American political rhetoric, “populist” was originally associated with the
Populist Party and related to left-wing movements, but beginning in the 1950s it
began to take on a more generic meaning, describing any anti-
establishment movement regardless of its position on the left–right political
spectrum.
4. Decline of the Populist Movements
a. The Populist movement never recovered from the failure of 1896, and national fusion with the
Democrats proved disastrous to the party.
i. In the Midwest, the Populist Party essentially merged into the Democratic Party before the
end of the 1890s. In the South, the National alliance with the Democrats sapped the
Populists’ ability to remain independent.
ii. Tennessee’s Populist Party was demoralized by a diminishing membership, and puzzled
and split by the dilemma of whether to fight the state-level enemy (the Democrats) or the
national foe (the Republicans and Wall Street).
b. The gravity of the crisis was underscored by a major race riot in Wilmington in 1898, two days
after the election. Knowing they had just retaken control of the state legislature, the Democrats
were confident they could not be overcome.
i. They attacked and overcame the Fusionists; mobs roamed the black neighbourhoods,
shooting, killing, burning buildings, and making a special target of the black newspaper.
c. In 1900, many Populist voters supported Bryan again but the weakened party nominated a separate
ticket of Wharton Barker and Ignatius L. Donnelly, and disbanded afterward.
i. Populist activists retired from politics, joined a major party, or followed Debs into
the Socialist Party.
ii. In 1904, the party was reorganized, and Watson was its nominee for president
in 1904 and 1908, after which the party disbanded again.
d. In A Preface to Politics, published in 1913, Walter Lippmann wrote, “As I write, a convention
of the Populist Party has just taken place. Eight delegates attended the meeting, which was held in
a parlour.” This may record the last gasp of the party organization.
5. Historical Interpretations of the Populist Movement
a. Since the 1890s historians have vigorously debated the nature of Populism. Some historians see
the populists as forward-looking liberal reformers, others as reactionaries trying to recapture
an idyllic and utopian past. For some they were radicals out to restructure American life, and for
others they were economically hard-pressed agrarians seeking government relief.
b. O. Clanton (1991) stresses that Populism was “the last significant expression of an old radical
tradition that derived from Enlightenment sources that had been filtered through a political
tradition that bore the distinct imprint of Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Lincolnian democracy.”
c. Frederick Jackson Turner depicted the Populists as responding to the closure of the frontier. He
wrote that “the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist demand for government ownership of the
railroad is a phase of the same effort of the pioneer farmer, on his latest frontier.
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 i. The proposals have taken increasing proportions in each region of Western Advance.
ii. Taken as a whole, Populism is a manifestation of the old pioneer ideals of the native
American, with the added element of increasing readiness to utilize the national
government to effect its ends”.
d. The most influential Turner student of Populism was John D. Hicks, who emphasized economic
pragmatism over ideals, presenting Populism as interest group politics, with have-nots
demanding their fair share of America’s wealth which was being leeched off by non-productive
speculators.
i. Hicks emphasized the drought that ruined so many Kansas farmers, but also pointed to
financial manipulations, deflation in prices caused by the gold standard, high interest rates,
mortgage foreclosures, and high railroad rates.
ii. Corruption accounted for such outrages and Populists presented popular control of
government as the solution, a point that later students of republicanism emphasized.
e. In the 1930s, C. Vann Woodward stressed the southern base, seeing the possibility of a black-
and-white coalition of poor against the overbearing rich.
f. In the 1950s, scholars such as Richard Hofstadter portrayed the Populist movement as an
irrational response of backward-looking farmers to the challenges of modernity.
i. Though Hofstadter wrote that the Populists were the “first modern political movement
of practical importance in the United States to insist that the federal government had
some responsibility for the common weal”, he criticized the movement as anti-Semitic,
conspiracy-minded, nativist, and grievance-based.
ii. According to Hofstadter, the antithesis of anti-modern Populism was the modernizing
nature of Progressivism. Hofstadter noted that leading progressives like Theodore
Roosevelt, Robert La Follette Sr., George Norris and Woodrow Wilson were vehement
enemies of Populism, though Bryan cooperated with them and accepted the Populist
nomination in 1896.
g. James Reichley (1992) sees the Populist Party primarily as a reaction to the decline of the
political hegemony of white Protestant farmers; the share of farmers in the workforce had fallen
from about 70% in the early 1830s to about 33% in the 1890s.
i. Reichley argues that, while the Populist Party was founded in reaction to economic
hardship, by the mid-1890s it was “reacting not simply against the money power but
against the whole world of cities and alien customs and loose living they felt was
challenging the agrarian way of life.”
h. Lawrance Goodwyn (1976) and Charles Postel (2007) reject the notion that the Populists were
traditionalistic and anti-modern. Rather, they argue, the Populists aggressively sought self-
consciously progressive goals.
i. Goodwyn criticizes Hofstadter’s reliance on secondary sources to characterize the
Populists, working instead with material generated by the Populists themselves.
ii. Goodwyn determines that the farmers’ cooperatives gave rise to a Populist culture, and
their efforts to free farmers from lien merchants revealed to them the political structure of
the economy, which propelled them into politics.
iii. Hundreds of thousands of women committed to Populism, seeking a more modern life,
education, and employment in schools and offices.
iv. A large section of the labour movement looked to Populism for answers, forging a political
coalition with farmers that gave impetus to the regulatory state.
v. Progress, however, was also menacing and inhumane, Postel notes. White Populists
embraced social-Darwinist notions of racial improvement, Chinese exclusion and separate-
but-equal.
6. Conclusion
a. Populist Contributions
b. Success or Failure?

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