Our Divided Political Heart (30 page)

To the extent that Populism refers to something specific in our history, it is to the movement of agrarian rebellion on behalf of notions of a “
cooperative commonwealth
” that erupted in the 1880s. This uprising created a remarkably successful third-party movement that won a significant share of the popular and electoral vote in 1892 and merged with the Democrats to support the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, in 1896.

The People’s Party platform of 1892 is an impressive and radical document. “
We meet in the midst of a nation
brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.” The preamble, written by veteran reformer and celebrated Populist orator Ignatius Donnelly, has many resonances in our day’s protests against Wall Street and the financial world:

The people are demoralized
; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of
these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

“
We seek to restore the government
of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people,’ with which class it originated,” the platform promised. “We believe that the powers of government—in other words of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience should justify, to the end that oppression, injustice and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.”
The preamble, as the historian Robert Mc-Math observed
, succinctly distilled the Populists’ philosophy as it had developed over two decades in the halls of the Farmers’ Alliance and the struggles of the labor movement.

What followed were specific and far-reaching proposals that proved genuinely prophetic in describing what the Progressive and New Deal reformers would achieve in the not-too-distant future: a graduated income tax, a shorter workday, initiative and referendum, the secret ballot, and the direct election of United States senators. “
One by one
,” wrote Harold U. Faulkner in
Politics, Reform, and Expansion
, “the reforms advocated by the Populists were taken up by the very people who had denounced the Populists as socialists, anarchists and Jacobins.” It’s a familiar pattern in our history.

The platform also called for government ownership of the railroads and the telephone and telegraph systems. Responding to the interests of indebted farmers, it proposed inflationary monetary policies, including the “
free and unlimited coinage of silver
,” which became Bryan’s battle cry four years later. Prophetic in a different way was the platform’s call for restrictions on “
undesirable immigration
.” The “
present system
,” the Populists proclaimed, “opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage earners.”

For historians who focused on the actual content of the Populists’ program and the underlying demands of the organizations that built the People’s Party, the 1882 platform was a straightforward expression of what Populism was: a social reform movement rooted in agrarian and labor organizations
that sought relief in hard times and the redress of legitimate grievances. For many years, the definitive account of populism was John D. Hicks’s
The Populist Revolt
, which viewed Populism largely in these terms. Hicks saw the Populists as engaged in “
the last phase of a long and perhaps a losing struggle
—the struggle to save agricultural America from the devouring jaws of industrial America.” Published in 1931, Hicks’s view was clearly influenced by the Great Depression and the economic discontent it let loose. His account, as McMath noted, saw farmers on the Great Plains “locked into an agricultural market over which they had little control” and buffeted by “
falling commodity prices, high freight rates
, and expensive credit, compounded by capricious acts of nature.” At heart, Populism was rational, reformist, egalitarian, and democratic—if also angry and mistrustful of big-city elites and, sometimes, of immigrants.

But a funny thing happened to the Populists in the 1950s. More precisely, a funny thing happened to their image, especially among liberals. An important group of intellectuals, almost all of them urban
and
urbane liberals and anti-Communists, challenged the straightforward view that the populists were primarily about defending the economic interests of those who felt shortchanged by the wealthy and powerful. These writers mistrusted mass movements, feared populism’s allegedly anti-intellectual tendencies, and worried about political “
extremism
.” Such feelings arose from their understandable horror over Nazism and Soviet Communism, both murderous mass movements that purported to be bold responses to economic breakdown and deeply felt injustices. The liberal anti-Communists of the 1950s also confronted the rise of McCarthyism and the “pseudo-conservatism” Hofstadter and Viereck described. They borrowed the concept from the social psychologist Theodor Adorno, who defined a pseudo-conservative as someone “
who, in the name of upholding traditional American values
and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

In the introduction to
The Age of Reform
, his enormously influential critical reexamination of Populism and Progressivism, Hofstadter is candid in acknowledging that his interest “
has been drawn to that side of Populism and Progressivism
—particularly of Populism—which seems very
strongly to foreshadow some aspects of the cranky pseudo-conservatism of our time.”

Hofstadter criticized intellectuals (he was clearly talking about liberals) who “
suffer from a sense of isolation
which they usually seek to surmount by finding ways of getting into rapport with the people, and they readily succumb to a tendency to sentimentalize the folk.” As a result, “
they periodically exaggerate the measure of agreement
that exists between movements of popular reform and the considered principles of political liberalism. They remake the image of popular rebellion closer to their heart’s desire.” No sentimentalist, Hofstadter was determined to expose the less attractive sides of Populism and Progressivism. He was not, he insisted, trying to argue that these great reform movements “
were foolish and destructive but only that they had, like so many things in life
, an ambiguous character.”

Still, in light of the largely positive treatment afforded the Populists by Hicks—and Hicks, in turn, was influenced by the towering historian Charles Beard’s emphasis on the importance of economic forces—Hofstadter’s was a radical revision, hostile to the Populists in its emphasis on their proclivity for dark schemes and conspiracy theories.

“
There was something about the Populist imagination
that loved the secret plot and the conspiratorial meeting,” Hofstadter wrote. “There was in fact a widespread Populist idea that all American history since the Civil War could be understood as a sustained conspiracy of the international money power.” Hofstadter devoted several pages of his book to describing and analyzing Ignatius Donnelly’s popular 1891 political novel,
Caesar’s Column
, which sketched a dystopia (it was set in 1988) that would engulf America if reformers failed. For Hofstadter, the novel was permeated with a “
sadistic and nihilistic spirit
” and offered “a frightening glimpse into the ugly potential of frustrated popular revolt.”

Hofstadter also accused the Populists of having “
activated most of what we have of modern popular anti-Semitism
in the United States.” Hofstadter emphasized that Populist anti-Semitism was “
entirely verbal . . . a mode of expression
, a rhetorical style, not a tactic or a program. It did not lead to exclusion laws, much less to riots or pogroms.” Nonetheless, in a book published just a decade after the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi death camps, it was a loaded charge.

It was not just the Populists’ style that Hofstadter found distasteful. He also challenged their very understanding of the interests that they were organized to advance. They failed, he said, to understand that they were “
an organic part of the whole order of business enterprise and speculation that flourished in the city
.” Mistakenly, they embraced an “agrarian myth” and cast themselves as “innocent pastoral victims of a conspiracy hatched in the distance.” Populism, in Hofstadter’s telling, was explained less by economics than by status anxiety over farming’s declining “rank in society.” The farmer, Hofstadter said, “
was beginning to realize acutely not merely that the best
of the world’s goods were to be had in the cities and that the urban middle and upper classes had much more of them than he did but also that he was losing in status and respect as compared with them.” For the farmer, said Hofstadter, it was “
bewildering, and irritating too
, to think of the great contrast between the verbal deference paid him by almost everyone and the real status, the real economic position, in which he found himself.”

This brief summary does not do full justice to the richness of
The Age of Reform
. Many of its observations have withstood the test of time, and Hofstadter was both brilliant and devastating in describing how so much of the radical and reformist energy of Populism was lost when Bryan’s 1896 campaign concentrated its energy on the cause of “
free silver
.” This “was not distinctively a People’s Party idea, nor was it considered one of the more ‘radical’ planks in the People’s Party platform.” His description of the modernization of the farm lobby into a hugely powerful force in Washington is relevant to our day. And more than half a century before Barack Obama’s struggles to get his program through the United States Senate, Hofstadter wrote of the substantial imbalance of representation in Washington in favor of rural areas, and concluded: “
The Senate represents this inequity in its most extreme form
.” It still does.

Nevertheless, Hofstadter’s negative judgments on Populism—and, to only a slightly lesser degree, his critique of the Progressives—proved to be the most politically consequential feature of
The Age of Reform
. In a brilliant reconsideration of the book, Alan Brinkley noted that Hofstadter’s portrait of Populism “
was from the beginning the target of strenuous
(and often vituperative) attacks.”

It is a measure of the durability of Hofstadter’s interpretation that it
was the object of a 1996 column by the late Molly Ivins, an enthusiastic fan of populism who mourned the historian’s continuing impact:

The problem with trying to redeem populism
—the most small-d democratic movement in American history, a rich strain of native American radicalism—from the political press corps is that reporters were all forced to read Richard Hofstadter in college. And Hofstadter, an otherwise commendable historian, always mistook populism-in-decline for populism itself. In the words of
The Economist
, this led him to mistake populism for “a pathetic but also rather offensive group of economic illiterates and political nostrummongers, victims of the Agrarian Myth and propagators of xenophobia and racial prejudice.” How sad. In fact, populism spanned classes, races and sections of the nation in a way nothing else ever has. It included black sharecroppers, industrial workers and small-business men all over America at a time when both sectionalism and racism were viciously strong.

At the time of
The Age of Reform
’s publication, Hicks, whose verdicts Hofstadter in many ways overturned, offered a surprisingly gracious response, calling it “
a delightfully refreshing book
,” although he argued that Hofstadter had overemphasized Populist anti-Semitism, a critique of Hofstadter’s view other historians have supported. But as David Brown, Hofstadter’s biographer, notes, Hicks’s student George Mowry zeroed in on an important truth. “
One has the feeling
,” Mowry wrote of Hofstadter, “that the author occasionally fails to understand the agrarian mind and that he is making some of his judgments about Populism and agrarian progressivism not in terms of the conflicts of the past, but rather more fully in terms of the author’s urban present.” C. Vann Woodward—one of the greatest historians of the South, the biographer of Populist Tom Watson, and a Hofstadter friend—eventually took to the pages of the
American Scholar
to offer a balanced defense of the agrarian rebellion. His title went straight at the distance between Ivy League halls and waves of grain: “
The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual
.” While personally kind to Hofstadter and his book, Woodward insisted that the Populists were not deluded, that theirs was an
authentic struggle for power based on real economic grievances. Earlier scholars may have been too uncritical of the Populists, he wrote, but historians now faced a new problem. “
The danger
,” he wrote, “is that under the concentrated impact of the new criticism the risk is incurred not only of blurring a historical image but of swapping an old stereotype for a new one. The old one sometimes approached the formulation that Populism is the root of all good in democracy, while the new one sometimes suggests that Populism is the root of all evil.”