The Tolerant Populists, Second Edition

Kansas Populism and Nativism

Walter Nugent

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226054087
• eBook ISBN: 9780226054117
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A political movement rallies against underregulated banks, widening gaps in wealth, and gridlocked governments. Sound familiar? More than a century before Occupy Wall Street, the People's Party of the 1890s was organizing for change. They were the original source of the term "populism," and a catalyst for the later Progressive Era and New Deal.

Historians wrote approvingly of the Populists up into the 1950s. But with time and new voices, led by historian Richard Hofstadter, the Populists were denigrated, depicted as demagogic, conspiratorial, and even anti-Semitic.

In a landmark study, Walter Nugent set out to uncover the truth of populism, focusing on the most prominent Populist state, Kansas. He focused on primary sources, looking at the small towns and farmers that were the foundation of the movement. The result, The Tolerant Populists, was the first book-length, source-based analysis of the Populists. Nugent's work sparked a movement to undo the historical revisionism and ultimately found itself at the center of a controversy that has been called "one of the bloodiest episodes in American historiography."

This timely re-release of The Tolerant Populists comes as the term finds new currency—and new scorn—in modern politics. A definitive work on populism, it serves as a vivid example of the potential that political movements and popular opinion can have to change history and affect our future.

PART I

Populism Bastinadoed and Some Caveats

OSWALD: What dost thou know me for?

KENT: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

—King Lear, Act II, scene 2

CHAPTER ONE

The Populist As Monster

In the National Gallery of Art in Washington hangs Raphael’s famous painting of “St. George and the Dragon.” One of its happiest qualities is its utter lack of ambiguity: good and evil are unmistakable; moral judgment is simple. For almost half a century, the Populist was one of the St. Georges of American historical writing. Yet suddenly in the 1950s it appeared that he was not that at all but in fact a dragon and a fierce one. The awful truth emerged that in fixing good and evil upon their canvases, historians had got the combatants reversed. The erstwhile hero stood stripped of his shining armor in the harsh glare of behavioral science and “realism.” But better to have the truth, however belated, it was said, if truth it was.

The reasons for Populism’s long-time favor were several. It was a colorful episode with more than its share of picturesque characters and quotable quotes, such as Mrs. Mary E. Lease’s undocumentable but “typical” advice to farmers to raise less corn and more hell. Historians whose outlook had been shaped by liberal reformism in the twenties and thirties regarded it benignly as a vigorous, friendly ancestor. Furthermore, in the days when Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” was riding high as an interpretive device for all American history, Populism seemed felicitously to bear it out.

In the 1950s, however, some historians and other writers concerned with the threats to American traditions they saw posed by the Cold War and by McCarthyism took another look at Populism. To them it appeared to be a late nineteenth-century eruption of the same pathological condition that produced the Wisconsin Senator and his growling cohorts. It had been thoroughly egalitarian and had despised aristocratic views and elitism, which some of these writers believed the United States needed more of, not less. A virulent strain of anti-intellectualism seemed to impregnate it. It had been notably unsubdued, unreconstructed, and unorthodox, and thus it was rudely disturbing and ultimately dangerous to any reading of American history that stressed tranquillity and harmonious order as opposed to bumptious reform and raucous protest. Treatments of Populism by earlier writers had been innocent, moreover, of the behavioral science approaches then beginning to become fashionable among historians. It was a richly endowed whipping boy indeed.

“Populism” simply identifies a movement of political and economic protest that rose out of the Farmers’ Alliances in about 1890, made its vehicle the Populist, or People’s, party in several southern and western states in the nineties, reached a high point nationally in the Bryan-McKinley campaign of 1896, and then went rapidly downhill. The interpretation of Populism that scholars as well as college students have come to accept over the past thirty years is nearly as unadorned as that. Until about 1960, standard college texts followed John D. Hicks’s study, The Populist Revolt (1931), which was cited widely in American history bibliographies as the most comprehensive book on the subject.¹ It presented Populism as a frontier phenomenon, a political answer to agrarian economic difficulties in a newly settled area. In his widely used text on post-Civil War American history, The American Nation, Hicks again viewed Populism as a political revolt against hard times, a program of positive action that tried to relieve specific economic distresses. Much the same presentation appeared in H. U. Faulkner’s extremely popular textbook for survey courses, American Economic History, with an added emphasis on class tensions in that Populism was seen as an attempt to tie farmer and labor interests together under a radical program. A slightly more elegant but basically similar view was taken by Morison and Commager in The Growth of the American Republic, wherein Populism was described as having been rooted in, and in fact created by, a government and society increasingly hostile to agrarian interests, insufficiently democratic, and unresponsive to a very severe agrarian economic distress. As for Kansas Populism specifically, the most thorough study of it, by Raymond Miller, also interpreted it as a political outgrowth of economic trouble in a frontier situation and “the simple demand of an independent and aggressive people, demanding that the government perform its legitimate functions.”²

It must have been with some dismay that a student in the 1950s who had been nurtured on this view of the Populists as an injured, honest, alert citizenry striving only for economic fair play and democratic treatment arrived in graduate school only to find that such an approach had suddenly become hopelessly out of date. As irresponsible disturbers of the peace, the Populists were in disgrace. The employment of certain behavioral science concepts was revealing that they had been neurotic, anxious, ethnocentric, anti-Semitic, and fear-ridden and that their kind of democracy was noxious since it later produced McCarthy. They had not been torchbearers of democracy but incipient fascists.

Some adjustments were in order, too, if the well-read graduate student approached the problem from the opposite side, from the place of Populism among the roots of American nativism and anti-Semitism, especially in the late nineteenth century. Up until 1950 or so, nativism and anti-Semitism were not often written about—certainly far less than Populism—but a few books discussed these attitudes, which were, moreover, embedded in some of the classic works of American historiography. Yet the student might recall that Rabbi Lee J. Levinger placed none of the onus for anti-Semitism on the Populists in his book of 1925; he might also remember that Carey McWilliams in 1947 saw anti-Semitism not as a farmer-labor fantasy but as a device employed by late nineteenth-century tycoons to gull a free and democratic-minded public into swallowing the subjugation of industrialism; and he might search in vain through Humphrey Desmond’s book on the American Protective Association for a mention of the Populists as supporters of the most widespread nativist movement of the time. Furthermore, if he had read his Henry Adams, Parkman, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, his Schouler, von Holst, Rhodes, McMaster, and Oberholtzer, he would have found that these very un-Populistic historians shared in greater or lesser degree a distaste for immigrants and Jews. And if he had studied the writings of some of the outstanding reformers, academicians, and educators of the turn-of-the-century years, he might have gained the impression that anti-Semitism and nativism in that period were chiefly well-bred eastern affairs and, therefore, probably appeared less strongly if at all among the unlettered Populists of the western prairie.³

Somewhere between college and graduate school, the vexed student of the fifties discovered that the Populist had been changed in his role. New casting directors had switched him from the sympathetic hero to the villain of a melodrama, howling calamity through a spade beard. The student was to replace a good stereotype with an unfavorable one—one less pleasant to behold but certainly, it seemed, one more in accord with social science concepts, one more profound, less idealistic, and therefore more truly historical.

In this case the re-writers of history were a disparate group. By no means all of them were professional historians or even amateurs. Many of them used the word “Populist” to refer only very tenuously to the specific party and movement that historians have called by that name and much more directly to a state of mind whose roots they were seeking. Very often the Populism of history was left unanalyzed, undescribed, and unresearched while its name became a handy catch-all word of reprobation. The depth and vigor of the criticism varied greatly, with the historians tending as a rule to be much more discreet than the others, but a general impression was left, a “climate of opinion” created, in which Populism became the bearer of many of the more shameful trends in American cultural history. The process of changing the Populist stereotype from glamor to repulsiveness was in no instance supported by direct, thorough investigations in the form of scholarly monographs, as had been the views of Hicks and several others who had dealt with Populism in several of the states in the twenties and thirties. The new view was arrived at, even in its most creditable presentations, by studies dealing mainly with other, broader subjects and actually only impressionistically and obliquely with Populism itself.

Perhaps the most concentratedly venomous of the new views was the one that appeared as something of an obiter dictum in an article concerned mainly with the place of Ezra Pound, the poet, in the mainstream of “American fascism.” The author was Victor Ferkiss, a political scientist and at one time a psychological warfare officer for the United States Army. His indictment of Populism, given unfortunately without any proof, was succinct as well as acrid:

American fascism had its roots in American populism; it pursued the same ends and even used many of the same slogans. Both despaired of achieving a just society under the joined banners of liberalism and capitalism. The attacks on finance capitalism, the hatred of social democracy and socialism, the belief that representative democracy is a mask for rule by a predatory economic plutocracy, and that a strong executive is essential for the creation and preservation of a middle-class society composed of small independent landowners, suspicion of freedom of the press and civil liberties generally as the shields and instrumentalities of the plutocracy, ultra-nationalism, anti-Semitism (both latent and active), and, finally, a peculiar interpretation of history which sees in events a working-out of a dialectic which opposes the financier and the producer—these populist beliefs and attitudes form the core of Pound’s philosophy, just as they provide the basis of American fascism generally.⁴

Another critic of the Populists who went at his task with no less verve, but with more pungency and ingenuity than Ferkiss (and certainly at greater length) was the well-known poet, pundit, social critic, and sometime historian, Peter Viereck. In 1955 Viereck contributed an essay to a book that attempted to explain the roots of the McCarthy phenomenon, and in 1956 he brought out a book of his own that was meant to be an apologia for limited democracy, representative government, and a conservative tradition based on ideas of John Adams, Burke, Calhoun, Disraeli, and others. In both works Populism was a source of the bad and an obstacle to the good. In neither was there any analysis of the economic conditions that triggered the Populism of the nineties, no history of the party, no comparison of the Populists with other Americans of that time. Instead, Populism was the possessor of several horrid traits and was chiefly important for that reason. In the first place, it was irrational, the product of “lower-class resentment” against upper-class status and privilege, the vehicle of an “emotional desire . . . concealed beneath the top-of-the-brain economic slogans of ‘free silver’ . . . to smash the egalitarian west down upon old New England and Wall Street.”⁵

Second, Populism was important not as an historical product of a specific time, place, and set of circumstances but as a manifestation of a trend or tradition that has inhered in American culture long before and long after the specific outburst of the nineties. It is as though historical events sprang to life only when the inherent idea or culture-factor breathed its spirit into them rather than that the idea was a function of the events. As in other cases of putting the cart before the horse, this approach to history gives the illusion of speed, freshness, and originality in covering historical ground. Said Viereck: a “Populist tradition” spoke through Paine, Jefferson, and Jackson, through Weaver, Bryan, and La Follette, and on through Father Charles Coughlin in the thirties to McCarthy in the fifties. Father Coughlin, the anti-Roosevelt, anti-banker, isolationist, anti-Semitic, hyperdemocratic “radio priest” of the New Deal years, hated many of the same enemies that the Populists hated, and so did McCarthy. It is true that the first two flourished during depressions, and McCarthy during prosperity, but they all used a “radical-seeming scapegoat.” Not only were the Populists of the nineties irrationally possessed in many forms, not only did they render a disservice by “habituating the midwest” to these irrationalities, but they were lineal forebears of Coughlin, pre–World War II American fascism, and McCarthy.⁶ “Populism” in Viereck’s lexicon lost its quality as a proper noun and became a blanket term for a bundle of irrationalities, and wherever these seemed to have appeared they were “Populist” ex hypothesi.

Third, the Populists and their scabrous successors were extreme nationalists, as their isolationism and a somewhat selective nativism showed. This conclusion follows easily once it has been established that Populism, Coughlinism, American fascism, and McCarthyism were only different excrescences of the same thing, because the anti-English sentiment of the Populists on financial matters can be read forward into the isolationism of the Coughlinites and the McCarthyites, and the pro-German or -Irish nationalist stands of the later groups can be read backward into Populism. Populism, therefore, although not strictly speaking nativistic, since it had some support from Scandinavian, Irish, and German farmers for reasons of group nationalism, was extremely Anglophobic, chauvinist, and isolationist.⁷

Fourth, since all these groups were Anglophobic, conscious of Jewish finance capitalism, pro-German, and protofascist, they were characterized also by anti-Semitism. “Beneath the sane economic demands of the Populists of 1880–1900 [sic] seethed a mania of xenophobic, Jew-baiting, intellectual-baiting, and thought-controlling lynch-spirit.”⁸ And, moreover, “. . . Coughlin’s right-wing fascist anti-Semitism sounds word for word the same as the vile tirades against ‘Jewish international bankers’ by the leftwing egalitarian Populist, Ignatius Donnelly.”⁹ The same chauvinism that made Anglophobia a Populist trait made anti-Semitism another.

Fifth, on this basis the “Populists” of the 1950s continued the fascistic trend of their predecessors; they led an anti-Communist crusade because it was a device for concealing their anticapitalistic spirit; their next step would have been, while they kept up their lip-service to democracy, “to set up an undemocratic terrorist dictatorship in order to purge these ‘unnatural’ aristocrats or plutocrats.” Overtly democratic, these people were actually thorough-going authoritarians.¹⁰

Sixth, in order to convince themselves and their potential supporters of the rightness and the feasibility of their cause, these groups insisted that bands of international bankers, Wall Streeters, Jewish capitalists, Eastern intellectuals—“some small aristocratic or plutocratic ‘conspiracy’”—continued to defraud the people of their rights.¹¹

Finally, for all these reasons, the Populists (old and new) preached an unalloyed egalitarianism and a demand for direct democracy. They were anti-intellectual and had no respect for elites, for, it was assumed, fancy ideas and fancy people—who were usually English, Jewish, Eastern, and conspiratorial—cheat the people of what is rightfully and naturally theirs. This was a ruse, however—“The spread of democratic equal rights facilitates, as Nietzsche prophesied, the equal violation of rights”—and instead of the conspirators, it was the egalitarians who were the great danger:

The new would-be rulers include unmellowed plebeian western wealth (Chicago, Texas, much of Detroit) and their enormous, gullible massbase: the nationalist alliance between the sticks and the slums, between the hick-Protestant mentalities in the west (Populist-Progressive on the Left, Know-Nothing on the Right) and the South Boston mentalities in the East.¹²

In rare instances, the “humane reform” of the “often noble, idealistic Populist-Progressives” got a compliment from Viereck, but he made it clear that his “legitimate target” was “Populist proto-fascism and proto-McCarthyism,” and the net impression of his writings was to caricature the Populist as a bigoted, vicious, authoritarian, xenophobic anarchist. It is regrettable that Viereck’s intriguing, if choleric, view was documented scantily, inappropriately, or not at all.

A third tradition-seeker who found in Populism (or rather, populism) a whipping boy for America’s cultural l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• Part One: Populism Bastinadoed, and Some Caveats
• Part Two: The Salad Days
• Part Three: The Political Years
• Notes
• Bibliographical Note and Acknowledgments
• Index