The late Richard Hofstadter stirred up a hornets' nest of controversy among and intellectual historians roughly 30 years ago when he published a volume entitled The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955). At issue was whether or not the Populist, third party rebellion of farmers in the 1890's represented a rational and suitable response to pitiless exploitation by the industrial lords of the late nineteenth century. In his book Hofstadter launched a direct attack on the prevailing orthodoxy, that railroaders, bankers, middlemen and manufacturers, by the devices of freight rate discrimination, high interest charges, money contraction and corrupt manipulation of govern ment, had provoked a sensible reaction. Hofstadter identified five dominant themes of farmer ideology as either patently wrong or misguided: their belief in a past golden age of agriculture, in the concept of natural harmonies among productive classes, in the dualistic version of social struggles (the robbers and the robbed), in the conspiracy theory of history and in the primacy of money (free silver).1 The strongest objection to the Hofstadter thesis came in an anguished cry from the American academic left, who correctly inter preted The Age of Reform as a bulwark to support Hofstadter's well-know consensus the ory of American history: that consensus (not conflict) upon capitalistic values characterizes the basic pattern of American development. Hofstadter's most persistent and durable critic, Norman Pollack, had it right when he wrote: Yet Hofstadter does offer a way to treat movements which fall outside the consen sus framework; he denies that they are outside. Since the very existence of protest movements creates a suspicion that the consensus thesis is invalid, it is not really sufficient to dismiss these movements as irrational; rather, it is necessary to assert that, while irrational, they actually reflect deep-down the basic consensus. At a later point it will be seen that Hofstadter does precisely this. He considers the Populists to be irrational, while at the same time he regards them as oriented to capitalism.2 Whatever the merits (or demerits) of consen sus theory, or of Hofstadter's five dominant themes of Populist ideology, the book is not yet closed on the controversy. This paper proposes, by example, to examine one small but signifi cant link in Hofstadter's chain of argument, that American farmers have always been economic men, oriented to capitalism, especially in the immediate period after 1900. The dual charac ter of the American farmer, according to Hofstadter, included a and a side. The soft side of the typical agrarian radical, said Hofstadter, was characterized by sloganeering and bathos, by his tendency to withdraw into the role of injured little yeoman. The hard side was the commercial side, employing the usual strategies of the business world: combination, cooperation, pres sure politics, lobbying, piecemeal activity di rected toward specific goals. Hofstadter declined to research the history of agriculture after 1900, but he did suggest that the improved position of the commercial farmer after the turn of the century led to a fundamental change in how he determined to advance his interests.3