Roots of reform: farmers, workers, and the American state, 1877-1917

Abstract

Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and American State, 1877-1917. By Elizabeth Sanders. American Politics and Political Economy. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, c. 1999. Pp. x, 532. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 0-226-73477-3; cloth, $48.00, JSBN 0-226-73476-5.) This book should have a powerful impact on content delivered by textbooks and lecturers in survey courses, injecting far more continuity between Populist and Progressive periods than historians have allowed. The conventional narrative recognizes some linkage between People's Party's Omaha platform of 1892 and post-1900 reform, but that convention stresses that social bases and leadership of reform shifted from farms and rural America and third party activists to cities and urban middle classes and Progressive presidents. Elizabeth Sanders powerfully revises this narrative, arguing that the dynamic stimulus for Populist and Progressive Era state expansion was periphery agrarians' drive to establish public control over a rampaging capitalism. The periphery generated bulk of reform agenda and furnished foot soldiers that saw reform through legislature (pp. 3-4). The first 147 pages of this book cover period up to 1896 and offer nothing new in a general way, but this reader's impatience with that situation was allayed by Sanders's bold arguments on many particulars. Regarding Populists' inability to appeal to Sanders dismisses notion that Populists bore full responsibility for that failure. Rather, from Greenbackers on, Sanders asserts, agrarian reformers, including Bryan in particular, issued strong and consistent appeals to labor and workers, but latter simply did not respond. Although book's first section is necessary, it is not an easy read. It is rewarding but might have been briefer given book's density. Sanders rejects capitalist-dominance thesis that views Progressive Era reform as managed by business and political elites. The capitalist response to new regulation was rather reactive and largely negative (p. 4), expressing itself mainly through executive and Supreme Court. Whereas earlier interpretations also have centered on presidential leadership, intellectuals, or new professionals, Sanders sharply shifts focus to regional political economies of South and West and, especially, to congressional representatives of these regions. She also argues that post-1896 Democratic Party constituted major vehicle responsible for federal government's regulatory response to imbalances of new industrial-financial economy. William Jennings Bryan emerges in this story as a failing presidential candidate--in 1896, 1900, and 1908--but one who exerted great influence over Democratic platforms, congressional agenda, and Wilson's New Freedom. Building on agrarian protests from 1870s on, and stimulated by renewed rural organization after 1900, Sanders argues that periphery agrarians brought significant government action to the redefinition of trade policy; creation of an income tax; a new, publicly controlled banking and currency system; antitrust policy; regulation of agricultural marketing networks; a nationally financed road system; federal control of railroads, ocean shipping, and early telecommunications; and agricultural and vocational education (pp. 7-8). The evidential heart of this book is analysis of roll-call voting in Congress from Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through Taft and Wilson administrations. Dividing country into economic regions and subregions, Sanders establishes her argument via three categories of Congressional districts, based primarily on per capita value added in manufacturing: core, diverse, and periphery. Time and again, legislators' votes tended to be polarized between manufacturing-business core and peripheral agrarian districts, with legislators from diverse areas divided or siding with agrarians. …