Populist Revolt Research Articles

American naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather

American Naturalism and the Jews examines the unabashed anti-Semitism of five notable American naturalist novelists otherwise known for their progressive social values. Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser all pushed for social improvements for the poor and oppressed, while Edith Wharton and Willa Cather both advanced the public status of women. But they all also expressed strong prejudices against the Jewish race and faith throughout their fiction, essays, letters, and other writings, producing a contradiction in American literary history that has stymied scholars and, until now, gone largely unexamined. In this breakthrough study, Donald Pizer confronts this disconcerting strain of anti-Semitism pervading American letters and culture, illustrating how easily prejudice can coexist with even the most progressive ideals. Pizer shows how these writers' racist impulses represented more than just personal biases, but resonated with larger social and ideological movements within American culture. Anti-Semitic sentiment motivated such various movements as the western farmers' populist revolt and the East Coast patricians' revulsion against immigration, both of which Pizer discusses here. This antagonism toward Jews and other non-Anglo-Saxon ethnicities intersected not only with these authors' social reform agendas but also with their literary method of representing the overpowering forces of heredity, social or natural environment, and savage instinct.

Social Movements and Organizational Form: Cooperative Alternatives to Corporations in the American Insurance, Dairy, and Grain Industries

How do social movements promote diversity and alternative organizational forms? We address this question by analyzing how cooperative enterprise was affected by the Grange—a leading anticorporate movement in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State-level analyses across three industries yield three findings. First, the Grange had positive effects on cooperatives and mutuals during the nineteenth-century populist struggles over corporate capitalism. Second, these effects were stronger where corporations counter-mobilized to block challengers' political efforts. Grangers pursued economic organization as an alternative to politics and in response to blocked political access. Third, the Grange continued to foster cooperatives even as populist revolts waned. It did so, however, by buffering cooperatives from problems of group heterogeneity and population change, rendering them less dependent on supportive communities and specific economic conditions. These findings advance research at the movements/organizations interface by documenting movement effects and by isolating different causal pathways through which mobilization, countermobilization, and political opportunity shape economic organization. The results also provide economic sociology with new evidence on how social structure moderates economic forces, and help revise institutional analyses of American capitalism by showing how cooperatives emerged as significant, rather than aberrant, elements of the U.S. economy.

Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (review)

460Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril account, census records, or an interview with a descendant of the community or the black survivors—to piece together a story of die expulsion ofseveral hundred blacks from their homes and communities. Jaspin is less successful in attempting to place his story in its larger historical context. His knowledge of history and his selection ofsources is flawed, and he occasionally overgeneralizes, misinterprets, or relies on dated or less than reliable secondary sources. There is also the question of die use of the term "racial cleansing." This term conjures up images of Bosnia or Darfur where hundreds of thousands were systematically resettled or slaughtered in a human tragedy of immense proportions. Jaspin's editors at the Austin American -Statesman, where he first ran his story, ultimately rejected the term, substituting instead "racial expulsion." They also eliminated references to his charges that the AtlantaJournal-Constitution was complicit in covering an episode of racial cleansing in nearby Forsyth County, Georgia. In spite ofJaspin's occasional flaws of scholarship and his digression into his personal struggles with his employer, this is a book that cannot be ignored. Whether it is racial cleansing or expulsion, the story that unfolded in scattered rural communities , North and South, in the decades that followed emancipation is important and deserves our attention.Jaspin should be commended for bringing it to us. Texas Southern UniversityGary D. Wintz Greenbackers, Knights ofLabor, and Populhts: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth -Century South. By Matthew HiId. (Athens: The University ofGeorgia Press, 2007. Pp. 344. Maps, appendices, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-82032-8973 - $42-95. cloth.) Matthew Hild's Greenbackers, Knights ofLabor, and Populists addresses the previously neglected subject of biracial farmer-labor-political collaboration across the South during die last three decades of the nineteenth century. These tumultuous decades witnessed great conflicts between labor and capital over the meaning of democracy, which in the South culminated in the Populist movement. HiId hits redefined Soudiern Populism as not a farmers' revolt but instead a farmer-labor movement with a continuity dating from die Greenback Party of the 1870s. HiId backs his assertions tiirough an analysis of the proceedings of numerous Grange, Knights of Labor (KOL), and other labor organizations, as well as newspapers of die era, and by drawing upon die previous historiography of populism and agrarian protest in the South. HiId traces the continuity offarm-labor insurgency beginning widi the Greenback -Labor Party (GLP) of the 1870s by demonstrating die commonality of the KOL's Reading platform of 1 878 along with the GLP's Toledo platform ofthe same year, the Texas Farmers' Alliance Cleburne demands of 1886, and the Populists' Omaha platform of 1 892. HiId contends that in states where farm-labor insurgency held the greatest amount ofcontinuity, for instance Texas, Arkansas, and Alabama, Populists had greater success in building a strong party backed by both farmers and laborers. While HiId acknowledges that a history of farm-labor collaboration was not necessary for a strong People's Party, Nordi Carolina and Georgia each had 2??8Book Reviews461 large parties with minimal labor support, it was necessary to attract die support of labor to populism. Previous historians have acknowledged the continuity ofagrarian protest from the GLP to the People's Party; however, Hild's analysis of the primacy of labor's involvement in this continuity differs gready from the current historiography. The stark difference comes through in Hild's interpretation of the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1 886. While historians have argued that the defeat ofrail workers at the hand ofJay Gould served as a hindrance that prevented future farmer-labor collaboration due to blows suffered by die KOL, HiId states "the strike actually served as a catalyst for farmer-labor third party insurgency" (48) . The strike, according to HiId, fostered direct political collaboration between farmers and laborers against tiieir common enemy in the railroad corporations. For HiId diis collaboration laid the groundwork for future farmer-labor insurgency through the populist revolt. Some readers may argue that the KOL's declining numbers through the 1 890s prevented any potential labor supportfor populism. HiId suggests the KOL's influence persisted despite its decline in actual members. He...

‘More mighty than the waves of the sea’: toilers, tariffs, and the income tax movement, 1880–1913

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of social progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak. Walter Lippmann In the spring of 18...

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

One of most insightful social observers* cracks the great political mystery of our time: how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank turns his eye on he calls the thirty-year backlash--the populist revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. The high point of that backlash is the Republican Party's success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers. In asking what 's the matter with Kansas?--how a place famous for its radicalism became one of the most conservative states in the union--Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests? Where's the outrage at corporate manipulators? And whatever happened to middle-American progressivism? The questions are urgent as well as provocative. Frank answers them by examining pop conservatism--the bestsellers, the radio talk shows, the vicious political combat--and showing how our long culture wars have left us with an electorate far more concerned with their leaders' values and down-home qualities than with their stands on hard questions of policy. A brilliant analysis--and funny to boot--What's the Matter with Kansas? presents a critical assessment of who we are, while telling a remarkable story of how a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs came to convince a nation that they spoke on behalf of the People. *Los Angeles Times

State banking in early America: a new economic history

Preface 1. Introduction 2. Establishment and Governance of the Antebellum Bank 3. Banking Theory and Banking Practice in Antebellum America 4. New England: Small Banks and Familial Ties 5. The Rise and Fall of the Suffok System 6. Middle Atlantic: Conservatism and Experimentation 7. New York's Safety Fund System: America's First Bank Insurance Experiment 8. Free Banking: A populist Revolt Takes Root in new York 9. Banking in the South and West: Banks and the Commonwealth 10. Property Banking, Free Banking, and Branch Banking 11. Assessing America's Early Banks Bibliography Index

Beyond Parochialism: Southern Progressivism, Prohibition, and State-Building

BEGINNING IN THE 1940s, STUDENTS OF SOUTHERN REFORM MOVEMENTS generally argued Progressivism was a regional by-product of the Populist revolt and its disruptive impact on the political system. In some of these accounts, the agrarian radicalism of the 1890s exerted a strong influence on the development of Progressivism; in others, Progressivism emerged as a mild alternative to Populism, achieving prominence after the decline of the farmers' movement. (1) In still other narratives, revisionist scholars have maintained the South's reform efforts after 1900 are best understood as an outgrowth of the region's conservative political traditions. Though varied, most of these chronicles concur with Dewey W. Grantham's assertion southern progressivism was largely an indigenous phenomenon. (2) Conversely, recent scholars often emphasize the role of the northern-based, national Progressive movement in shaping its less advanced counterpart. For example, Paul Harvey argues religious Progressives borrowed organizational models and reform ideas from the North, only to find that the tradition of localism in life presented a major obstacle to their visions. Likewise, George H. Gilliam suggests national experts from regulatory, trade, and industry associations provided invaluable assistance to the inexperienced officials of Virginia's State Corporation Commission, who needed informed analyses of detailed statistical and financial information to regulate railroad rates effectively. Meanwhile, other scholars contend the movement for the improvement of public schoolhouses grew out of northern efforts to improve public education in the South, and the region's Progressive women looked to the North for female models of progress, such as Hull House. (3) The most sweeping statement of this theme is William A. Link's The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930, which underscores the critical importance of northern-based national reformers, experts, and patrons in stimulating several reform campaigns and state-building efforts after 1900. Drawing on both his own research and of like-minded scholars, Link argues the South's crusades for the enactment and implementation of prohibition, education reform, hookworm eradication, child labor laws, and woman suffrage would not have occurred in the absence of these national influences. Hampered by a culture valued localism and community power, reform efforts promoted coercive state action after outside pressure groups had actively encouraged such interventionist policies in the region. For example, Link maintains the National Child Labor Committee propelled the South's drive for state child labor laws and factory inspections; similarly, in his view, northern philanthropists played a crucial role in orchestrating school reform and expanding the educational bureaucracy. In short, Link implies Progressivism was heavily reliant on national leaders, resources, and strategies but it contributed little to the development of reform and state-building elsewhere in the nation. (4) Through an examination of the prohibition movement, this study argues Link and other scholars have overestimated the unique character of the South while underestimating the impact of Progressivism on national reform campaigns and state-building efforts after 1900. (5) Specifically, this article will demonstrate reformers were fully capable of devising governmental solutions to perceived problems and of providing policy templates for the more enlightened regions of the country. Above all, it will suggest parochialism--far from being a deterrent to centralized policies--also served as a catalyst for these policies. Before considering national Progressivism's influence on the South and vice versa, one should consider the suitability of prohibition as an appropriate case for this exercise. …

Gendering the master narrative

KATHLEEN BROWN'S GOOD WIVES, NASTY WENCHES, AND ANXIous PATRIARCHS: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia is representative of new gender history that fundamentally challenges our definition of southern politics. Brown, like many of her generation, forces gender history into the mainstream by writing grand narrative. Responding to Joan Scott, these scholars demonstrate that gender is a useful category of historical analysis by systematically restructuring the cornerstones of southern history. This emphasis on politics is as much tactical as an analytical maneuver. Each scholar focuses her or his attention on some of the most time honored subjects of southern political history-the origins of slavery, the Nullification Crisis, the origins of the Civil War, the Populist revolt, and politics of Jim Crow. Together, they convincingly argue that gender is integral to the structure and expression of power. By redefining history's most hallowed domain, they have caught the attention of the profession and won the top prizes given out by the Organization of American Historians and American Historical Association.1 Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs serves as an example of all the promise and perils of this new direction in gender studies. Brown is not content merely to augment or to challenge the standing interpretation of her topic. Instead she rewrites the master

Executive compensation and the Modern Industrial Revolution

The controversy over executive compensation reflects a populist attack on wealth and legitimate shareholder concerns regarding ineffective pay practices. These factors both reflect rapid worldwide political, economic, and technological changes that have redistributed income (causing the populist revolt), and produced excess capacity (causing the failure of pay systems that reward size and growth rather than wealth creation). The new world economy has produced unparalleled opportunities to create wealth, even in sectors with few growth opportunities. In order to realize these opportunities, compensation committees must provide incentives to create, rather than destroy, value, and must not acquiesce to the populist attack on high pay.

Ardabil Becomes a Province: Center-Periphery Relations in Iran

Amid all the attention that Iranian politics has received since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, local politics has been almost totally neglected. This neglect vitiates our understanding of contemporary Iran, as it is at the local level that state policies are carried out, contested, reshaped, resisted, or revised. Beginning with the centralizing state-building of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1926–41), Tehran increasingly dominated Iran's politics, commercial activities, and cultural life, and most of the country's Westernized elites lived in the capital. The 1979 revolution was to some extent a populist revolt against this Westernized elite, and among the new rulers those whose social and family roots are outside Tehran abound. Among the common people, “the experience of participation in mass political activity … undermined the feeling of political abjection,” while the new rulers have attempted, not always successfully, to lessen the gap not only between rich and poor, but also between rich and poor provinces. The new prominence of provincials in national life has gone hand in hand with a greater recognition of Iran's ethnic and linguistic diversity, while at the same time the sense of common participation in the revolution and the Iran–Iraq War has knitted people of different ethnic backgrounds more closely together.

Understanding African politics

Generalisation about African politics and political systems is made difficult by the extent to which African states both differ from one another and have changed since independence. This article discusses whether it is nevertheless possible to understand African states as examples of the same political system, as some recent studies have asserted (or assumed). It argues that by comparing the historical patterns of political development in African states, one can identify a limited number of distinct historical paths, starting with the process of decolonisation (where there are two variants). Subsequently divergent paths arose from differing responses to early post‐independence political crises, producing contrasting forms of politics ‐ ‘centralised‐bureaucratic politics’ and ‘spoils politics’ ‐ and corresponding political systems. Further differentiation has arisen systematically from popular responses to the breakdown of these forms, giving rise to populist revolts, state collapse or to democratic challenges (and sometimes democratic restructuring). Each of these represents a distinct form of politics, and political systems, within Africa. A model of the process of political development in post‐war Africa is set out along these lines, and used to criticise several recent attempts at characterisation of African politics, in which either states belonging to one historical path (and thus one political system) are treated as representative of all African states, or in which states from different paths and belonging to different systems are seen as examples of the same political form and political process.

Nineteenth‐century agrarian populism and twentieth‐century communitarianism: Points of contact and contrast

(1995). Nineteenth‐century agrarian populism and twentieth‐century communitarianism: Points of contact and contrast. Peabody Journal of Education: Vol. 70, Education and the liberal‐communitarian debate, pp. 86-104.

Orval E. Faubus: Out of Socialism into Realism

ORVAL E. FAUBUS WAS REARED A LIBERAL. His father, Sam Faubus, was a Socialist who detested capitalism and bigotry with equal fervor. The son's critics, myself included, have accused him through the years of selling out the beliefs of his father on both race and economics. The story may be less straightforward than that. Orval Faubus came to power in Arkansas after World War II when two things were happening: First, the old populist revolt that had inflamed the hills for several generations was burning itself out.1 The end of Faubus's own radicalism coincided almost perfectly with the decline of radicalism among his people, not only in the Ozarks but right across the southern uplands. Prosperity, meager as it was, finally intruded into the hills and nudged out not only the Socialists like his father but also the intellectually tamer populists who had used their hill-country base to shower invective on the delta planters and their establishment cohorts in banking, business, and industry. Resentment slowly began to give way to the other side of the populist coin, hope. Hope and appetite and a vestigially populist belief still current: that our fellow hillbilly Sam Walton made it and, with a little luck, I can make it, too. Second, a national phenomenon with far-reaching consequences was coming to a head during the 1950s. The racial equilibrium of the South was being extraordinarily disturbed, not merely by local agitation but more importantly by external forces that eventually would sweep away the entire breastwork of white supremacist defenses. The liberal Faubus might have thrown in with the national mood, a growing impatience with southern heel-dragging. Realistically, however, how much can he be blamed for choosing to be seen as defender of the local faith, no matter how little he shared that faith? What would have been the fate of a governor who chose the other side? Some of my heroes have argued that he could have exerted leadership for the rights of blacks and survived. Or that, at the least, he could have died an honorable political death. Maybe so. But Orval Faubus had seen quite enough of honorable struggle for lost causes in his boyhood home. And there was something else. By the time he was grown, he had seen enough fear, loss, and death to last a lifetime. Literally from the beginning, Orval Eugene Faubus's life was threatened. He weighed two-and-one-half pounds when he was born the night of January 7, 1910, and was so frail that the midwife expected him to die before morning. One night when he was a year old, he caught the croup and stopped breathing. His father rushed him outside into the cold air and plunged a finger into his throat to save his life. The toddler was just learning to talk when he wandered from the house and fell into a deep spring of water and somehow did not drown but climbed out just as his mother got there. Danger continued to surround him as he grew and became part of the community. The year he was seven, one playmate died of diphtheria and another was crushed to death by a falling tree. During another year, flux swept the community and killed two children in a neighboring family. Life was not only perilous at Greasy Creek; it was also hard. Southern Madison County was like most of the Ozarks at that time. The residents scraped by. The towns had a small prosperity, but the countryside provided little more than subsistence. Rural people like the Faubuses raised almost all their food. Shoes and coats were practically luxuries because they had to be bought with cash, and cash was pitiably scarce. Even kerosene for the lamps was so dear that, after John D. Rockefeller cornered the market and raised the price, young Orval had to walk behind the wagon and carry the filled can the two miles from Combs to Greasy Creek, so as not to spill any-or so he recollected in 1964 when Rockefeller's grandson Winthrop tried to wrest the governorship of Arkansas from him. …

Capital Report: The FDA's New Sheriff

David Kessler is that rare creature in cynical Washington: a hero. In the few months since he rode into town to head the beleaguered Food and Drug Administration, he has, for example, terrorized the food industry into using package labels that bear some relation to the contents, cracked down on misleading claims in the drug industry, and, of course, become a media star. He is also leading a revolution in drug testing and approval. The traditional clinical trial will never be the same, and nobody is sure whether that's good news or bad. Among the reforms announced in November: * Quicker approval for new drug applications, including a for drugs for life-threatening illnesses. Accelerated approval is supposed to reduce the time it takes to get new drugs to market, from the present ten years to an average of six. Fast-track drugs will move even more swiftly because companies can submit final data after the drug has been in use for a while. Kessler says that the agency agreed to trade approval time for increased ability to get a fast-track drug off the market quickly if problems turn up. * External review of some new drug applications by outside contractors. Likely contractors include statistical research companies, universities, retired FDA and drug industry employees, and private physicians--and also new, private companies set up for this purpose. The agency is already selecting up to a dozen new drug applications for outside review. * Accepting data from foreign studies in lieu of repeating the studies here. This may take some time to implement, because it requires bilateral discussions to establish reciprocal approval arrangements, development of common standards for clinical trials and a common format for applications, and a consensus on manufacturing practices. The changes include an expanded role for institutional review boards, which are now to take sole charge of decisions to proceed with the earliest (Phase I) stage of clinical trials. Kessler also exacted a promise of more staff and money from the White House--although how that is to happen, given federal budget constraints, is not clear. A populist revolt of sorts contributed to these steps. Consumer groups, especially gay activists, forced the agency to agree to greater speed and lesser insistence on safety when the drug is intended for a life-threatening condition like AIDS. But capitalism is behind the changes too. The pharmaceutical industry is delighted at the prospect of a shorter time to market. Federal and state government pressure to lower prices, plus escalating research and development costs, have been threatening the industry's sales levels ($175 billion a year worldwide) and its apparently recession-proof growth, rate (10 percent annually). …

The FDA's New Sheriff

David Kessler is that rare creature in cynical Washington: a hero. In the few months since he rode into town to head the beleaguered Food and Drug Administration, he has, for example, terrorized the food industry into using package labels that bear some relation to the contents, cracked down on misleading claims in the drug industry, and, of course, become a media star. He is also leading a revolution in drug testing and approval. The traditional clinical trial will never be the same, and nobody is sure whether that's good news or bad. Among the reforms announced in November: * Quicker approval for new drug applications, including a for drugs for life-threatening illnesses. Accelerated approval is supposed to reduce the time it takes to get new drugs to market, from the present ten years to an average of six. Fast-track drugs will move even more swiftly because companies can submit final data after the drug has been in use for a while. Kessler says that the agency agreed to trade approval time for increased ability to get a fast-track drug off the market quickly if problems turn up. * External review of some new drug applications by outside contractors. Likely contractors include statistical research companies, universities, retired FDA and drug industry employees, and private physicians--and also new, private companies set up for this purpose. The agency is already selecting up to a dozen new drug applications for outside review. * Accepting data from foreign studies in lieu of repeating the studies here. This may take some time to implement, because it requires bilateral discussions to establish reciprocal approval arrangements, development of common standards for clinical trials and a common format for applications, and a consensus on manufacturing practices. The changes include an expanded role for institutional review boards, which are now to take sole charge of decisions to proceed with the earliest (Phase I) stage of clinical trials. Kessler also exacted a promise of more staff and money from the White House--although how that is to happen, given federal budget constraints, is not clear. A populist revolt of sorts contributed to these steps. Consumer groups, especially gay activists, forced the agency to agree to greater speed and lesser insistence on safety when the drug is intended for a life-threatening condition like AIDS. But capitalism is behind the changes too. The pharmaceutical industry is delighted at the prospect of a shorter time to market. Federal and state government pressure to lower prices, plus escalating research and development costs, have been threatening the industry's sales levels ($175 billion a year worldwide) and its apparently recession-proof growth, rate (10 percent annually). …

Anxious Odes of Tate and Lowell

for the Texas brewing interests. The end he sought ? exploiting Democratic divisions in order to increase black political leverage ? was the same in 1907 as in 1887; only the means to that end had changed.27 As for Melvin Wade, he was present when the first Texas Populist convention met in Dallas in 1891. Still a devoted Republican, he was reluctant to sever his ties with the GO.P. A year later, however, he too had joined the People's party. Throughout the Populist revolt he ranked second only to Rayner as a black leader in the third party.28 Norris Wright Cuney, as head of the GO.P. in Texas, never did join Rayner and Wade in the third party movement. But in 1896 he acquiesced in a deal between the Populists and Republicans whereby Texas Populists, disgruntled over their national party's nomination of a Democrat for the presidency, agreed to vote for Republican William McKinley. In return, Cuney and the Republicans promised not to field a state ticket and supported the Populists in their effort to oust the Democrats from the statehouse.29

The Unpredictable Past: Reflections on Recent American Historiography

THE FUTURE IS CERTAIN, a Soviet joke assures us, only the past that unpredictable.' For historians, alas, the future hardly certain, and the fact that the past unpredictable has become no laughing matter. Indeed, it has caused a good deal of concern in recent years and the growing conviction among many that the venerable craft of the historian in a state of crisis. This was not always so. The unpredictability of the past was an accepted fact to those who thought seriously about history. The dialectic between the past and the present was seen not only as inescapable but as salutary. History, Henry James observed, is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what 'happens,' but the finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it.2 This truth was built into the graduate program at Columbia University when I was a student there thirty years ago. On our comprehensive written examinations, there was one question that was repeated year after year: Discuss the changing interpretations of: . . . which was followed by a varying list of the basic events: the American Revolution, the creation of the Constitution, Jeffersonian Democracy, the causes of the Civil War, the nature of the Populist revolt, and on and on. Historians were, and I think still are, comfortable with the fact that our understanding of these standard historical occurrences inevitably varies from generation to generation because they perceive that, of necessity, we view them through the prism of a changing present. Nor have historians conceived of this prism as a prison that condemned them to a flawed vision. There was confidence that, although we might operate in cycles of historical interpretations, the general movement was upward toward an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the past. The present was not merely a hindrance; it could provide new ways of seeing things, new tools, new perceptions of human motivation or economic forces that helped us to gain a surer sense of past generations. When the French historian Marc Bloch made the familiar observation, Misunderstanding of the present the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past,

The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s

A Populist newspaper in North Carolina commented in 1890 that agrarian unrest was common just about everywhere, in “high tariff and low tariff” countries as well as in “monarchies, empires, and republics.” Historians of this discontent have neglected the international dimension of protest that was so striking at the time. The countries that produced the most vigorous agrarian movements, Germany and the United States, have been especially well protected from the scrutiny of comparison. One reason for this neglect is that scholars in both countries emphasize their nations' peculiarities and capacity to make their own histories. The most influential study of American Populism, for instance, is still John D. Hicks' The Populist Revolt (1931). Hicks ascribed the movement to the closure of the frontier, the “safety valve” once thought to be the special feature of American history. Most scholars today reject the “Turner thesis,” but continue to see populism as uniquely democratic. Just as American Populists have been celebrated as “good guys,” German agrarian leaders have been demonized. The marked anti-Semitic aspect of agrarian movements in the 1890s has led historians to link them more or less directly to national socialism, the arguably unique “outcome” of German history. Whatever the sources of this exceptionalism, the constrained view has distorted the understanding of a crucial historical conjuncture.

Populists in Power: Public Policy and Legislative Behavior

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,

Populism Redux: John D. Hicks and the Populist Revolt

Populism Redux: John D. Hicks and the Populist Revolt