Populists in Power: Public Policy and Legislative Behavior

Abstract

Populists in Power: Public Policy and Legislative Behavior The great historiographical debate over Populism, begun in the I950s, shows little sign of ending now, three decades later. For a generation historians had generally accepted the picture drawn by John D. Hicks in his classic The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis, I93 ). The Populists, Hicks maintained, had been earnest farmers responding politically to agricultural difficulties and political indifference by agitating for political and economic reforms. Then in the I95OS a number of scholars, reacting to the tensions of their own times and reflecting different interests, depicted Populists variously as reactionary, nativistic, anti-semitic, and irrational. This picture, so absurdly overdrawn and poorly substantiated, was in turn countered by a long list of studies that effectively destroyed all the claims of the revisionists. This scholarly debate, however, leaves the student of Populism little more knowledgeable about the subject than at the beginning. As Turner has observed, Reactionary Populists chased socialist Populists through the learned journals in a quarrel that generated more heat than light. 1 Two basic problems underly this impasse. The first is methodological, for too often the historian's position depends on the particular Populists studied-Tom Watson orJerry Simpson, Texans or Nebraskans-and a blindness to the necessity and the difficulty of determining whether the choice was representative. The second problem evident in Populist historiography is its data base,