Populism and Imperialism

Politics, Culture, and Foreign Policy in the American West, 1890-1900

Nathan Jessen

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700624645, 9780700624645
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624652
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the final years of the nineteenth century, as a large-scale movement of farmers and laborers swept much the country, the United States engaged in an ostensibly anti-colonial war against Spain and a colonial war of its own in the Philippines. How one related to the other—the nature of the activists’ involvement in foreign policy debates and the influence of these wars upon the prospects for domestic reform—is what Nathan Jessen explores in Populism and Imperialism.

American reformers at the turn of the twentieth century have long been misrepresented as accomplices of empire. Rather, as Populism and Imperialism makes clear, they were imperialism’s chief opponents—and that opposition contributed to their ultimate defeat. Correcting the record, Jessen charts the fortunes of the Populists through the nineteenth century’s last decade. He shows that, contrary to the standard narrative, Populists remained powerful in West after the election of 1896; they only suffered their final political reverses in 1900 after being branded as unpatriotic traitors by their opponents. In fact, the Populists and Democrats in the West favored war with Spain for humanitarian reasons; some among them led the opposition to Hawaiian annexation and—as leaders of the anti-imperialists in Congress from 1899 on—the occupation of the Philippines.

Jessen also addresses the little-studied “money power” conspiracy theory that explains a key element of the Populist worldview. This theory, linking European imperialism and the growing economic and political power of financiers, stirred Populist opposition to American imperialism as well.

Populism and Imperialism revises a critical chapter in US history and offers lessons for the present as well as insights into the nation’s past.

1. WESTERN POPULIST IDEOLOGY AND WORLDVIEW

Amidst the turmoil of the 1890s, increasing numbers of Americans demonstrated frustration with the growing economic inequality and sought new alternatives to the system of unrestrained accumulation that they perceived as a threat to their rights and their well-being. Calls for change took many incarnations over the course of the decade, but in the West, the movement for reform was best embodied by the People’s (or Populist) Party. It would be impossible to comprehend the politics of the region during this period without an understanding of the core philosophies of the party, but historians have long struggled to make sense of the ideas that drove the movement.

In the last eighty years, the Populists have been identified as proto-progressives, backward-looking conservatives, quasi-Marxists, and radical republicans. The source of all this confusion is the Populists themselves, who frequently disagreed on policy specifics even as they concurred in their broader social analyses. A brief contrast will suffice to demonstrate the extent of their individual distinctiveness.

In April 1894, when confronted with the problem of high unemployment despite the great wealth of the few, one anonymous writer for the Populist Advocate of Topeka, Kansas, declared, “It is cruel, it is inhuman, to attribute these conditions to laziness, drunkenness, and incompetency. They are the natural product of a false and vicious system by which the few grow rich beyond all need, and the many are doomed to eternal poverty and want.” The writer went on to propose that those who were willing should have a right to work and be justly compensated.¹

John Rankin Rogers, onetime editor of the Union Labor Party’s Kansas Commoner and a future governor of Washington State, disagreed entirely. An active writer throughout his career, he also maintained a correspondence with reformers nationally, even while in office. In a response to one such activist, he explained his views of the struggling urban laborers. “The destitute poor of the cities can only be helped by what is ordinarily termed ‘charity.’ They are for the most part incapable of helping themselves. As a matter of fact I do not believe that very much can be done for them. If they were transported to a good farming region and each given a farm it is probable that they would fail as farmers.” American laborers’ greatest opportunities had been in the era when land was cheap and readily available, he said. Only land reform and a return of workers to the countryside would improve the situation for those “who lacked the ability to take the initiative.” He also called for structural changes in the American economic order, but he embraced Spencerian ideas regarding “survival of the fittest” and in most cases considered the urban poor to be the dregs and castoffs of American society.²

These two perspectives could not be more different. One identified urban laborers as producers who held the right to a vocation, while the other came close to blaming the poor for their own failures. Despite the obvious differences, Rogers was every bit the Populist that the writer in the Advocate was. Western Populists were necessarily a diverse bunch. Many had sided with the Union during the Civil War, a few others had supported the Confederacy, and at least as many had been either too young to participate or not yet residents of the United States. Longtime third-party organizers were often important in the development of the first state parties, but Republicans constituted the largest share of these parties’ initial supporters; over the course of the 1890s, ex-Democrats would make up an increasing percentage of their voters and leaders. As a result, party members were ideologically diverse. Although few of their views were necessarily incompatible, the result was a constant struggle within many state parties over the limits and meaning of reform.³

Before advancing to a study of Populist foreign policy, it is important to understand the foundations of Populist thought. Rather than focusing on their programmatic demands, this chapter discusses the broadest elements of the worldview shared by Populists (and many of their contemporaries). Three primary arguments at the center of this chapter help explain both the uniqueness of the movement and the later expansion of the Populist ideology to include complex analyses of foreign affairs. First, the Populist conception of political and economic citizenship must be understood as rooted in both the liberal individualist and radical republican traditions. The strength of the latter in their critiques of capitalist power suggests that the Populist program could have been extended beyond the limited goals of later state and national reform advocates. Second, the Populists’ views of politics were shaped by their perception of global finance. Ultimately, these views would contribute to their resistance of the foreign policy initiatives of the McKinley administration. Third, this chapter discusses Populist conceptions of proper patriotic manhood. By invoking traditional understandings of masculinity and employing civic-nationalist reform rhetoric, Populists attempted to funnel mainstream elements of postbellum identity into a movement for change.

POPULISM, LIBERALISM, AND REPUBLICANISM

The historians’ debate over Populist ideology reaches back roughly sixty years. From the time of Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform in the mid-1950s to Lawrence Goodwyn’s contribution in the 1970s, the conflict was between those who considered the Populists to be “left of center” and those who viewed them as backward-looking conservatives.⁴ That debate subsided when studies of high politics fell from their place of dominance in American history. A new debate is now taking place, although its origins are rooted in the remnants of the previous one. Scholarly disagreements are now between those who contend that the Populists were radical republicans and those who claim that they represented a form of “modern” individualist liberalism.⁵ Though not as contentious as the earlier fight, each side has largely made the two bases of thought appear mutually exclusive.

The truth does not always lie in the middle, but in this case, it is difficult to believe one side to the exclusion of the other. Those who describe the Populists as “modern” have rightly pointed out that they accepted a great deal about the new world created by industrialization and global market connections.⁶ The Populists were certainly not deluded followers of an agrarian myth; they largely believed in capitalism, industrialization, and individualism. However, these adherents of Populist modernism have not discredited the material presented by other historians. The republican thesis has not been disproved; instead, its detractors describe a viewpoint that seems out of place for old-fashioned radicals.

In fact, there is no reason to consider the two strains of thought to be diametrically opposed. Historians of early America in particular have demonstrated that liberalism and republicanism shared much in common and that most of the seminal liberal thinkers accepted much of the republican tradition.⁷ James Kloppenberg has explained that the two concepts should not be seen as mutually exclusive, and he suggests that they continued to commingle well into the late nineteenth century and beyond. According to Kloppenberg, the two streams of thought invoked different values, so if the Populists employed both, they must have felt a need to argue for something that could not easily fit into a single ideological framework.⁸

A brief examination of Populist texts provides certain insights into the complex bases of their thought. Among those examined were William Peffer’s The Farmer’s Side (1891), James B. Weaver’s A Call to Action (1892), and John Rankin Rogers’s Politics (1894), supplemented with articles from selected Populist newspapers such as the Farmers’ Alliance of Nebraska and Davis Waite’s Aspen (Colorado) Union Era. Obviously, such an investigation cannot come close to covering the breadth of western Populist thought. Still, it makes two fundamental points clear: First, Populists did readily employ both liberal and republican arguments. Second, Populists were universally opposed to the “centralization” of power, whether in private hands or in the government. Both traditions would be deployed to justify the restoration of democratic control over the market.

Perhaps the strongest point that united all western Populists was their “antimonopoly” position. Large capital enterprises held tremendous power in the relatively new western states, and incumbent Republicans encouraged the expansion of that power by taking an unabashedly pro-growth stance.⁹ To an extent, they believed that the great concentrations of wealth were a product of laws that created special privilege. In early 1890 a future Populist congressman from Nebraska, William McKeighan, wrote to the Farmers’ Alliance stating his frustration with the rise of wealth inequality in the country. The cause could be “found in the special legislation of the country, extending aid and protection to capital.”¹⁰ Waite’s newspaper likewise informed readers that in order to save freedom and attain a just distribution of wealth, “monopoly and special privilege, which are created by law, must be destroyed by the repeal of such laws.”¹¹ The partnership of government and big business had to be stopped.

The Populist attack on corporate favoritism demonstrates their disdain for the emerging “class state.”¹² Like many of the classical liberal critics of the day, Populists wanted to put an end to preferential laws that seemed to benefit only the few. For westerners, the most obvious beneficiary of friendly government policies was the railroad industry. Weaver pointed to one of the most obvious gifts given to the railroads—the enormous land grants in the western states. “In Dakota,” he wrote, “the Northern Pacific gets as much land as there is in the two States of New Jersey and Connecticut,” while in “Washington Territory its grant equals in extent the size of the three states of New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.” Weaver declared these subsidies to be unnecessary because almost “none of the aided roads . . . were built until a profit in construction could be seen without the aid of land grants.”¹³ These grants were not designed to promote progress; they were favors bestowed by friends in high places. A writer for the Aspen Union Era came to an even more serious conclusion: the huge gifts given to the railroads in 1862 and 1864 hinted at bribery on an even greater scale than that exposed in the Credit Mobilier scandal. For proof, the writer pointed to the congressional votes in 1864, in which nearly half the senators and almost the same proportion of congressmen had refused to vote at all. It was impossible to say “that a large part of the absent, or not voting senators and representatives were not bribe-takers.” Whether it was favoritism or outright corruption mattered little in the final analysis.¹⁴

Another of the more obvious targets for critics was the system of protective tariffs implemented by Republicans in Congress for the support of “infant industries.”¹⁵ Populists declared that these business combinations were infants no longer. The Aspen Union Era stated that organizations such as the steel trust were able to become monopolies “by the assistance of the protective duty on steel rails,” and they now “control the markets and fix the prices at which its products are to be sold.”¹⁶ Peffer, too, wrote that “there is a very strong disposition in certain quarters to pervert our tariff legislation from its original design into one for the benefit of a particular class of people, and that class represented by a very small number of persons.”¹⁷ Although the national Populist Party did not consider the tariff itself to be a major concern, its members were sure that protection was yet another example of congressional favoritism for those who needed little help.

Populists believed that legislative favoritism had spurred the growth of monopolies, but they were most upset that the great corporations now controlled state and federal governments. Weaver was making no great revelation when he informed readers that “monstrous combinations” controlled “the business of every city” and “thrust their paid lobbyists within the corridors and onto the floor of every legislative assembly.” The national government was no better in his eyes. Even elitists like Alexander Hamilton had not contemplated that the Senate “should become the stronghold of monopoly.”¹⁸ In addition to their control of Congress, giant corporations had taken over the courts. Weaver was furious that courts had granted constitutional rights to “corporate persons,” and he claimed that judges with ties to the business world had so perverted the Constitution that they had remade it into a tool of corporate power. Peffer claimed that there were “probably not less than one thousand lawyers” in the employ of the major rail lines, and anyone foolish enough to bring suit against them would find that “all important avenues to the courts are brought under control of the interested corporation.”¹⁹

As the giant corporations held the government under their thumb, there was no entity to prevent them from cornering their respective markets. “Once they secure control of a given line of business,” wrote Weaver, “they are masters of the situation and can dictate to the two great classes with which they deal—the producer of the raw material and the consumer of the finished product.”²⁰ Weaver explained the abstract potential of monopolies, but much of western Populist literature focused on more tangible examples that were familiar to the people of the region. Peffer pointed to a combination by meat packers that reportedly controlled the sale prices of all livestock. “When cattle from the West reached Chicago there was no competition among buyers. The stock business there was controlled by commission merchants, railroad companies, and packing houses, who divided the profits among th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Western Populist Ideology and Worldview
• 2. The Local Context: Nebraska, Colorado, and Washington, 1890–1897
• 3. The Money Power and the War of 1898
• 4. Hawaiian Annexation and the Beginning of the Debate over Empire
• 5. Patriotism and the Elections of 1898
• 6. Imperialism Comes to the Forefront
• 7. Setting the Stage for the Campaign
• 8. The Contest of 1900 and the Defeat of Reform
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover