A People's History of the United States (43 page)

There were more Alliance experiments. In the Dakotas, a great cooperative insurance plan for farmers insured them against loss of their crops. Where the big insurance companies had asked 50 cents an acre, the cooperative asked 25 cents or less. It issued thirty thousand policies, covering 2 million acres.

Macune's sub-Treasury plan depended on the government. And since it would not be taken up by the two major parties, it meant (against Macune's own beliefs) organizing a third party. The Alliances went to work. In 1890 thirty-eight Alliance people were elected to Congress. In the South, the Alliance elected governors in Georgia and Texas. It took over the Democratic party in Georgia and won three-fourths of the seats in the Georgia legislature, six of Georgia's ten congressmen.

This was, however, Goodwyn says, “an elusive revolution, because the party machinery remained in the hands of the old crowd, and the crucial chairmanships of important committees, in Congress, in the state legislatures, remained in the hands of the conservatives, and corporate power, in the states, in the nation, could use its money to still get what it wanted.”

The Alliances were not getting real power, but they were spreading new ideas and a new spirit. Now, as a political party, they became the People's party (or Populist party), and met in convention in 1890 in Topeka, Kansas. The great Populist orator from that state, Mary Ellen Lease, told an enthusiastic crowd:

At the People's party national convention in 1892 in St. Louis, a platform was drawn up. The preamble was written by, and read to the assemblage by, another of the great orators of the movement, Ignatius Donnelly:

A People's party nominating convention in Omaha in July of 1892 nominated James Weaver, an Iowa Populist and former general in the Union army, for President. The Populist movement was now tied to the voting system. Their spokesman Polk had said they could “link their hands and hearts together and march to the ballot box and take possession of the government, restore it to the principles of our fathers, and run it in the interest of the people.” Weaver got over a million votes, but lost.

A new political party had the job of uniting diverse groups—northern Republicans and southern Democrats, urban workers and country farmers, black and white. A Colored Farmers National Alliance grew in the South and had perhaps a million members, but it was organized and led by whites. There were also black organizers, but it was not easy for them to persuade black farmers that, even if economic reforms were won, blacks would have equal access to them. Blacks had tied themselves to the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and civil rights laws. The Democrats were the party of slavery and segregation. As Goodwyn puts it, “in an era of transcendent white prejudice, the curbing of ‘vicious corporate monopoly' did not carry for black farmers the ring of salvation it had for white agrarians.”

There were whites who saw the need for racial unity. One Alabama newspaper wrote:

The official newspaper of the Alabama Knights of Labor, the Alabama
Sentinel,
wrote: “The Bourbon Democracy are trying to down the Alliance with the old cry ‘nigger'. It won't work though.”

Some Alliance blacks made similar calls for unity. A leader of the Florida Colored Alliance said: “We are aware of the fact that the laboring colored man's interests and the laboring white man's interest are one and the same.”

When the Texas People's party was founded in Dallas in the summer of 1891, it was interracial, and radical. There was blunt and vigorous debate among whites and blacks. A black delegate, active in the Knights of Labor, dissatisfied with vague statements about “equality,” said:

A white leader responded by urging there be a black delegate from every district in the state. “They are in the ditch just like we are.” When someone suggested there be separate white and black Populist clubs which would “confer together,” R. M. Humphrey, the white leader of the Colored Alliance, objected: “This will not do. The colored people are part of the people and they must be recognized as such.” Two blacks were then elected to the state executive committee of the party.

Blacks and whites were in different situations. The blacks were mostly field hands, hired laborers; most white Alliance people were farm owners. When the Colored Alliance declared a strike in the cotton fields in 1891 for a dollar a day wages for cotton pickers, Leonidas Polk, head of the white Alliance, denounced it as hurting the Alliance farmer who would have to pay that wage. In Arkansas, a thirty-year-old black cotton picker named Ben Patterson led the strike, traveling from plantation to plantation to get support, his band growing, engaging in gun battles with a white posse. A plantation manager was killed, a cotton gin burned. Patterson and his band were caught, and fifteen of them were shot to death.

There was some black-white unity at the ballot box in the South—resulting in a few blacks elected in North Carolina local elections. An Alabama white farmer wrote to a newspaper in 1892: “I wish to God that Uncle Sam could put bayonets around the ballot box in the black belt on the first Monday in August so that the Negro could get a fair vote.” There were black delegates to third-party conventions in Georgia: two in 1892, twenty-four in 1894. The Arkansas People's party platform spoke for the “downtrodden, regardless of race.”

There were moments of racial unity. Lawrence Goodwyn found in east Texas an unusual coalition of black and white public officials: it had begun during Reconstruction and continued into the Populist period. The state government was in the control of white Democrats, but in Grimes County, blacks won local offices and sent legislators to the state capital. The district clerk was a black man; there were black deputy sheriffs and a black school principal. A night-riding White Man's Union used intimidation and murder to split the coalition, but Goodwyn points to “the long years of interracial cooperation in Grimes County” and wonders about missed opportunities.

Racism was strong, and the Democratic party played on this, winning many farmers from the Populist party. When white tenants, failing in the crop-lien system, were evicted from their land and replaced by blacks, race hatred intensified. Southern states were drawing up new constitutions, starting with Mississippi in 1890, to prevent blacks from voting by various devices, and to maintain ironclad segregation in every aspect of life.

The laws that took the vote away from blacks—poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications—also often ensured that poor whites would not vote. And the political leaders of the South knew this. At the constitutional convention in Alabama, one of the leaders said he wanted to take away the vote from “all those who are unfit and unqualified, and if the rule strikes a white man as well as a negro let him go.” In North Carolina, the Charlotte
Observer
saw disfranchisement as “the struggle of the white people of North Carolina to rid themselves of the dangers of the rule of negroes and the lower class of whites.”

Tom Watson, the Populist leader of Georgia, pleaded for racial unity:

According to the black scholar Robert Allen, taking a look at Populism
(Reluctant Reformers),
Watson wanted black support for a white man's party. No doubt, when Watson found this support embarrassing and no longer useful, he became as eloquent in affirming racism as he had been in opposing it.

Still, Watson must have addressed some genuine feelings in poor whites whose class oppression gave them some common interest with blacks. When H. S. Doyle, a young black preacher who supported Watson for Congress, was threatened by a lynch mob, he came to Watson for protection, and two thousand white farmers helped Doyle escape.

It was a time that illustrated the complexities of class and race conflict. Fifteen blacks were lynched during Watson's election campaign. And in Georgia after 1891 the Alliance-controlled legislature, Allen points out, “passed the largest number of anti-black bills ever enacted in a single year in Georgia history.” And yet, in 1896, the Georgia state platform of the People's party denounced lynch law and terrorism, and asked the abolition of the convict lease system.

C. Vann Woodward points to the unique quality of the Populist experience in the South: “Never before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they did during the Populist struggles.”

The Populist movement also made a remarkable attempt to create a new and independent culture for the country's farmers. The Alliance Lecture Bureau reached all over the country; it had 35,000 lecturers. The Populists poured out books and pamphlets from their printing presses. Woodward says:

The
National Economist,
a Populist magazine, had 100,000 readers. Goodwyn counts over a thousand Populist journals in the 1890s. There were newspapers like the
Comrade,
published in the cotton country of Louisiana, and the
Toiler's Friend,
in rural Georgia. Also,
Revolution
was published in Georgia. In North Carolina, the Populist printing plant was burned. In Alabama, there was the
Living Truth.
It was broken into in 1892, its type scattered, and the next year the shop was set afire, but the press survived and the editor never missed an issue.

Hundreds of poems and songs came out of the Populist movement, like “The Farmer Is the Man”:

Books written by Populist leaders, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd's
Wealth Against Commonwealth,
and William Harvey Coin's
Financial School,
were widely read. An Alabama historian of that time, William Garrott Brown, said about the Populist movement that “no other political movement—not that of 1776, nor that of 1860–1861—ever altered Southern life so profoundly.”

According to Lawrence Goodwyn, if the labor movement had been able to do in the cities what the Populists did in the rural areas, “to create among urban workers a culture of cooperation, self-respect, and economic analysis,” there might have been a great movement for change in the United States. There were only fitful, occasional connections between the farmer and labor movements. Neither spoke eloquently enough to the other's needs. And yet, there were signs of a common consciousness that might, under different circumstances, lead to a unified, ongoing movement.