:For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s

Abstract

The challenge of defining populism and judging its proclivities for good or ill has bedeviled generations of scholars. In this sweeping survey from the American Revolution to the eve of the Civil War, veteran political historian Ronald P. Formisano stakes out a middle ground. Skirting precise definition, he considers as “authentically populist” any movement that arose from the grass roots, mobilized “masses of ordinary people,” and in their name challenged the sway of “established or corrupt elites” (p. 3). Formisano aims to rescue these crusades from the condescension of history, or rather of historians. Without idealizing them, he holds that populist insurgencies have been, as a rule, neither quixotic nor destructive. Generally level-headed, and exhibiting often a mix of positive (egalitarian, feminist, leveling) and negative (intolerant, hypermasculine, xenophobic) impulses, they have on balance energized and refreshed rather than degraded American democracy. Formisano rightly observes that Americans grounded their new polity in the useful fiction of popular sovereignty, the idea that “the people” had created government and were its only true masters. This conception practically invited the discontented to challenge authority whenever it, in their judgment, contradicted the people's real will. The predictable result was chronic instability, as one populist insurgency after another chased the chimera of a regime where the people would, truly and directly, rule.