American Experiment (185 page)

The ever-resourceful Charles Macune now presented his subtreasury plan, providing treasury notes to farmers, as a means of financing cooperatives with public rather than private credit and thus enlisting the government in the struggle to raise agricultural prices. The indefatigable William Lamb fashioned this economic reform into a weapon of political revolt as he launched a full-scale lecturing campaign in each congressional district. The Texas Alliance won a stunning victory through the Democratic party in 1890, electing a governor and a legislature committed to most Alliance demands, but a host of Democratic “loyalists” opposed the subtreasury and bolted from the Alliance. Spurred by Lamb and other leaders, Alliance members decided to create the People’s Party of Texas. At the founding convention in August 1891 white and black delegates forged a remarkable coalition, with a commitment to political and economic equality for blacks.

As the presidential election year of 1892 approached, Alliance leaders were concluding that a
national
People’s Party was needed to consolidate the grand coalition of farmers and workers, strengthen the state parties, and seize control of the federal government. Plans were carefully laid. The Alliance organized a massive lecturing campaign, distributed vast quantities of books and pamphlets, including Bellamy’s
Looking Backward,
and formed a National Reform Press Association to coordinate the propaganda efforts of the one-hundred-strong Populist newspapers. A St. Louis conference of farm, labor, and women delegates drew up a platform and heard the Minnesota Populist orator and novelist Ignatius Donnelly give an unforgettable speech in which he charged: “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.… The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two great classes—paupers and millionaires.”

Then came the national founding convention of the People’s Party, Omaha, July 4, 1892. The delegates adopted a platform that harked back
to the “Cleburne demands” six years earlier and indeed to decades of labor, farm, and socialist manifestos: a flexible “national currency” to be distributed by means of the subtreasury plan; free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold; a graduated income tax; government ownership and operation of the railroads, telegraph, and telephone; barring of alien land ownership and return of land held by railroads and other corporations “in excess of their actual needs”; political reforms such as the direct election of United States senators. But the platform ignored labor’s most urgent needs and omitted mention of woman’s suffrage. The convention also took a moderate course in nominating for president James B. Weaver of Iowa, the reform editor and ex-Union general who had led the Greenbackers in 1880, balancing him with an ex-Confederate general as his running mate.

Plunging into the election campaign, the Populists unsheathed their thousands of lecturers, their orators such as Lease and Donnelly, their tactics in some states of opportunistic coalition-building with Republicans in the South and especially with Democrats in the West. Weaver and his wife were rotten-egged in the South—Mrs. Weaver to the point that, according to Lease, she “was made a regular walking omelet by the southern chivalry of Georgia.” The results were promising for a fledgling third party: Weaver polled over one million votes, actually carrying Kansas and four western states with twenty-two electoral votes. Populist governors were elected in Kansas, Colorado, and North Dakota. But in the Northeast, parts of the Midwest, and the South the party fared poorly. In Texas the Populists lost badly to the Democrats. It was with mingled hopes and an exhilarating sense of momentum that the Populists turned to the economic and political struggles ahead.

The idea of liberty had been the animating impulse behind the Alliance. But during the century soon to come to an end that idea had also guided organized capital and labor. Each group of course meant something different by “liberty”—businessmen meant freedom from interference with property, labor meant freedom from boss control of its working life, farmers meant freedom from furnishing merchants, banks, railroads, trusts. More than the other groups, however, the Alliance had made liberty into a positive idea—realizing and fulfilling oneself by gaining broader control of one’s working environment through participation in Alliance cooperatives. Along with industrial workers, Populist farmers had also preached the idea of equality—a real equality of opportunity. But the cooperators, with their denunciations of “selfish individualism,” had moved even more than labor toward the third great concept in the Enlightenment trinity—
fraternity,
or
comradeship.
The idea of cooperation had grown out of, and had sustained, the practices of sisterhood and brotherhood.

And if the Populists had realized all three values to a greater extent than any other large group, it was mainly because of a conscious effort toward the intensive use of massive numbers of second-cadre activists—35,000 or more “lecturers”—in rousing farmers to political self-consciousness. As in all deeply felt democratic movements, the great leaders were educators, and the great teachers were leaders.

D
EMOCRACY, RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD, IS
“government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators,” scoffed Henry Adams. He reflected a cynicism with American politics and government that was pervasive by the 1880s. The wretched poverty in city and country, the widening gap between rich and poor, the growth of an elaborate class system and an almost fixed array of castes, the suppression of blacks, women, Indians, and others, the violations of people’s liberties and rights, the intensifying boom-and-bust, all seemed to blight the hopes and dreams of clement Americans. A democratic government, reflecting the needs—and the votes—of the great mass of citizens, was supposed to avert or alleviate such evils. But the situation seemed to be worsening, the cynicism deepening.

No one had embodied the aspirations of American democracy more exuberantly than a large, dreamy, sensuous, rustic-looking editor and writer in Brooklyn named Walt Whitman, who in 1855 had published at his own expense a volume of poetry that was tall and thin and a commercial failure. It was called
Leaves of Grass.
Looking at the world through his heavy-lidded eyes—eyes that Emerson had called “terrible” and John Burroughs “dumb, yearning, relentless”—Whitman seemed to miss nothing in the multihued world around him, or in his variegated, androgynous self. He wrote of ships, gardens, far-off places, children, trees, the Brooklyn ferry, nearby cities, stallions, women, beaches—everything and anything— and later of war and wounds and death.

He wrote of democracy. The very embodiment of the Enlightenment—“the poet and prophet of a democracy that the America of the Gilded Age was daily betraying,” Vernon Parrington said of him—he evoked glowingly the revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, fraternity. Whitman was familiar with Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
and its emphasis on freedom, and he had read John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty.
“There must be,” the poet said, “continual additions to our great experiment of how much liberty society will bear.” He preached liberty from external restraints, especially from government, and he practiced it to the point of license.

Even more, he embraced equality, even the kind of “leveling” equality that conservatives derided. “I chant,” he wrote, “the common bulk, the
general average horde.” He spoke of the “divine average.” For him, according to Roger Asselineau, the mere fact of living conferred a divine character upon even the most despicable person. He would not look down on anyone:

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

No more modest than immodest….

Whoever degrades another degrades me,

And whatever is done or said returns at last to me….

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy….

Again and again in the pages of the Brooklyn
Eagle
he protested the plight of poverty-stricken women in the garment industry, of young clerks having to work sixteen hours a day.

“Great is Liberty! great is equality!” the poet exclaimed, but perhaps most of all he personified the idea of fraternity. He rarely used that term, or “brotherhood,” preferring to call people—especially working people—“comrade.” An ardent reader of George Sand and Frances Wright, he also preached feminism, proclaiming in
Leaves of Grass
“the perfect equality of the female with the male.” Not that he idealized the virtues of men and women: he recognized that his “comrades” were mixtures of good and evil. But if the democratic promise was realized, the good in people would become dominant.

Perhaps it was inevitable that such exaggerated hopes would be dashed in the wake of the Civil War. Even Whitman rapidly succumbed to the postwar disillusionment. “Pride, competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond example, brood already upon us,” he wrote in
Democratic Vistas.
Quoting Lincoln on “government by the people,” he exclaimed, “The People! ... Taste, intelligence, and culture, (so-called,),” he said, “have been against the masses, and remain so.” He railed against “pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity … everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed,” etc. He still had a basic faith in the people, but now he saw the need for the natural leaders of the race to teach and uplift the people, in contrast to his earlier criticism of Carlyle for scorning the average man and glorifying heroes.

Whitman’s ultimate hopes for American democracy lay in the future. Americans were perfectible; only materialism and repression had
corrupted them. In London, Karl Marx had harbored the same expectation, though he had little regard for the American form of bourgeois republic. Classes in the United States had “not yet become fixed,” he wrote in the early 1850s, “but continually change and interchange their elements in a constant state of flux, where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather supply the relative deficiency of heads and hands,” and where the “feverishly youthful movement of material production” had a “new world to make its own.” But later, with the rise of monopolistic capitalism, much would depend on the militant organization of the working class.

Even crusty Henry Adams confessed a hope for the future. After sardonic old Baron Jacobi in
Democracy
called the United States the most corrupt society he had known, one Nathan Gore, Massachusetts historian, burst out:

“I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it.” Democracy, he went on, “asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to higher intelligence than formerly.” He granted it was an experiment, but “it was the only direction that society can take that is worth taking.”

“And supposing your experiment fails,” said Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, “suppose society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and communism.”

“I have faith,” Gore exclaimed, “not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest.…”

Crosby’s Opera House, Chicago, May 21, 1868.

The President: “Is the convention ready? I await your pleasure.”

A hush falls over the hall. The Republicans have gathered to choose Andrew Johnson’s successor.

Mr. Logan of Illinois: “Is it the decision of the Chair that nominations are now in order?”

The President: “They are.”

Mr. Logan: “Then, sir, in the name of the loyal citizens, soldiers and sailors of this great Republic of the United States of America; in the name of loyalty, of liberty, of humanity, of justice; in the name of the National Union Republican party; I nominate, as candidate for the Chief Magistracy of this nation, Ulysses S. Grant.”

The hall erupts in a roar of cheers, shouts, whistles. Delegates flutter
handkerchiefs and wave standards; some weep as the band plays “Hail to the Chief.”

The Secretary: “Alabama!”

The chairman of the Alabama delegation: “Mr. President, Alabama, through the chairman of her delegation, casts eighteen votes for U.S. Grant.”

The Secretary: “The State of Connecticut!”

“Mr. President, Connecticut unconditionally surrenders her twelve votes for Ulysses S. Grant….”

The Secretary: “The State of Ohio!”

“Mr. President, Ohio has the honor of being the mother of our great Captain. Ohio is in line, and on that line Ohio proposes following this great Captain, that never knew defeat; to fight it out through the summer, and in the autumn, at the end of the great contest, and to be first in storming the entrenchments, until victory shall be secured, and all the stars that glitter in the firmament of our glorious constellation shall again be restored to their proper order, and all the sons of freedom throughout the whole earth shall shout for joy. Ohio gives forty-two votes for U.S. Grant.”

Amid the red, white, and blue bunting, the perfervid oratory, the heat and sweat of the Chicago convention hall, the Republicans nominated for President the “fittest” man of the time, their Civil War hero, Ulysses S. Grant. Five more times in the next three decades a stentorian orator would successfully offer an Ohioan for “the next President of the United States”; Grant again in 1872, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, James A. Garfield in 1880, William McKinley in 1896 and again in 1900. Ohio would supply two more Presidents in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and during the whole period several Chief Justices and a host of second-cadre leaders—cabinet members, congressional leaders, military and civilian officers.