The Folklore of Populism
Hofstadter, Richard
For a generation after the Civil War, a time of great economic exploitation and waste, grave social corruption and ugliness, the dominant note in American political life was complacency....
...Moreover, they owed the United States a debt of gratitude: "We stand, and have stood for years, ready to extend our blood and treasure in defense of Latin America against European aggression...
...To the Populist mind there was no fundamental conflict between the farmer and the worker, between the toiling people and the small businessman...
...The brunt of the social struggle, however, is borne by the urban laborers, a polyglot, silent mass of sullen, underfed humanity...
...Once we get rid of the men who hold the country by the throat, the parasites can be easily removed...
...his Rogasner (Ernest Seyd...
...even to name them in any language that comes readily to the historian of ideas is perhaps to suggest that they had a formality and coherence that in reality they clearly lacked...
...It is not American to give up without trying...
...but, for the moment, Free Cuba had displaced Free Silver in public interest, and when reform raised its head again, it had a new face...
...Such persons have an opportunity to impose their own style of thought upon the movements they lead...
...We are nearing a serious crisis," declared Weaver...
...The farmers are "no longer the honest yeomanry who had filled, in the old time, the armies of Washington, and Jackson, and Grant, and Sherman . . . but their brutalized descendants—fierce serfs—cruel and bloodthirsty peasants...
...it would take the starved and miserable ryots and coolies of the world and by giving them management and supervision provide them with the means of life, as well as rescue them from paganism...
...the Populists in return were charged with favoring war as a cover under which they could smuggle in an inflationary policy...
...Those who owned bonds wanted to be paid not in a common currency but in gold, which was at a premium...
...Emery attributed the panic of 1873, its bankruptcies, and its train of human disasters: "Murder, insanity, suicide, divorce, drunkenness and all forms of immorality and crime have increased from that day to this in the most appalling ratio...
...indeed, it was the first such movement to attack seriously the problems created by industrialism...
...But what they chiefly objected to was institutional militarism rather than war itself, imperialism rather than jingoism...
...It was not enough to say that it stemmed from Wall Street...
...A manifesto of 1895, signed by fifteen outstanding leaders of the People's Party, declared: "As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America...
...If that vent was closed, every throne in Europe would be blown up in twenty years...
...When Caesar's Column appeared, the reform movement in America had not yet made a dent upon the torments and oppressions that were felt by a large portion of the people...
...The scum of creation has been dumped on us...
...In some men the situation fostered a feeling of desperation, and Donnelly's was a desperate work...
...And one Congressman from a strong Populist state wrote to congratulate Olney for having spiked the guns of Populism and anarchism with his vigorous diplomacy...
...The farmer lived in isolation from the great world in which his fate was actually decided...
...Mary E. Lease, that authentic voice of inland Populism who became famous for advising farmers to "raise less corn and more hell," wrote a bock in 1895 under the ingratiating title: The Problem of Civilization Solved, in which these characteristics were rather ingenu ously displayed...
...There was something about the Populist imagination that loved the secret plot and the conspiratorial meeting...
...A war with England would be the most popular ever waged on the face of the earth the most...
...It would of course be misleading to imply that the Populists stand alone in thinking of the events of their time as the results of a conspiracy...
...The age was more innocent and more fortunate than ours, and by comparison with the grimmer realities of the twentieth century many of the events of the nineties take on a comic-opera quality...
...Now that the farmers too are destroyed as a prop of the existing order, the rulers rely solely upon the bomb, the dirigible, and a mercenary army...
...We should follow the example of European nations and annex all we can and establish protectorates wherever possible in America...
...A villain was needed, marked with the unmistakable stigmata of the villains of melodrama, and the more remote he was from the familiar scene, the more plausibly his villainies could be exaggerated...
...There is no power on earth that can defeat us," said General Weaver during the optimistic days of the campaign of 1892...
...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...
...although they knew perfectly well that society was composed of a number of classes, for all practical purposes only one simple division need be considered...
...It did not lead to exclusion laws, much less to riots or pogroms...
...A west-coast newspaper spoke for many Americans when it said: "We are at the mercy of England, as far as our finances go, and (war) is our only way out...
...So the Shylocks gathered in convention and "perfected" a conspiracy to create a demand for their gold...
...If the city is miles across," he wondered, "how am I to get from the railway station to my hotel without being assaulted...
...On the other are the farmers, laborers, merchants, and all other people who produce wealth and bear the burdens of taxation...
...Mrs...
...Rapacious business methods, the bribery of voters, the exploitation of workers and farmers by the plutocracy, had gone unchecked until the end of the nineteenth century, when the proletariat had rebelled...
...Such conditions foreboded "the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism...
...but . . . until this is done there is no other reform that can be accomplished...
...But there is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy, between singling out those conspiratorial acts that do on occasion occur and weaving a vast fabric of social explanation out of nothing but skeins of evil plots...
...The Populists distinguished between wars for humanity and wars of conquest...
...Lease wrote that "we need a Napoleon in the industrial world who, by agitation and education...
...was a dark figure out of the coarsest anti-Semitic tradition...
...The traveler from Uganda learns in a conversation (documented by Donnelly with real articles from current magazines) that as early as 1889 many writers had warned against the potentialities of this state of affairs...
...The first part of the story need not detain us: it deals with the life of one Ephraim Benezet of Kansas who is given a bottle that empowers him to turn iron into gold, a windfall which not surprisingly makes it possible for him to solve his own and the country's financial problems...
...there was only one issue upon which the money power could really be beaten and this was the money issue...
...As early as 1885 the Kansas preacher Josiah Strong had published Our Country, a book widely read in the West, in which the cities were discussed as a great problem of the future, much as though they were some kind of monstrous malignant growths on the body politic...
...She proposed a vast reshuffling of peoples in which the tropics in both hemispheres be taken over by white planters with Negroes and Orientals as "tillers of the soil...
...As they had it, an agent of the Bank of England, Ernest Seyd by name, had come to the United States in 1872 with $500,000 with which he had bought enough support in Congress to secure the passage of the demonetization measure...
...The rebellion had been put down by the farmers, not yet completely expelled by mortgage foreclosures from their position as property-owners and businessmen...
...Some members of the governing class are forced to build a pyre on which they are then burned...
...The most direful part of this business between Rothschild and the United States Treasury was not the loss of money, even by hundreds of millions...
...There were two nations...
...The situation of the oppressed Cubans was one with which the Populist element in the country could readily identify themselves, and they added their voice to the general cry throughout the country for an active policy of intervention...
...The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind...
...The people themselves have become equally ruthless—"brutality above had produced brutality below...
...At the climax of the story, the secret revolutionary organization, the Brotherhood of Destruction, after buying off the "Demons," revolts and begins an incredible round of looting and massacre which may have been modeled on the French Revolutionary Terror but makes it seem pale and bloodless in comparison...
...This universal discontent must be quickly interpreted and its causes removed...
...Donnelly's hero and narrator is a stranger, a shepherd of Swiss extraction living in the state of Uganda, Africa, who visits New York and reports his adventures in a series of letters...
...The omnipresent symbol of Shylock can hardly be taken in itself as evidence of anti-Semitism, but the frequent references to the House of Rothschild make it clear that for many silverites the Jew was an organic part of the conspiracy theory of history...
...While the conditions of victory were thus made to appear simple, they did not always appear easy, and it would be misleading to imply that the tone of Populistic thinking was uniformly optimistic...
...those who lived by lending money wanted as high a premium as possible to be put on their commodity by increasing its scarcity...
...The nationalist fervor of Mrs...
...Hamlin Garland recalled that when he first visited Chicago, in the late 1880's, having never seen a town larger than Rockford, Illinois, he naturally assumed that it swarmed with thieves...
...Between these two there is no middle ground...
...It is a struggle," said Sockless Jerry Simpson, "be tween the robbers and the robbed...
...It is perhaps a childish book, but in the middle of the twentieth century it seems anything but laughable: it affords a frightening glimpse into the ugly potential of frustrated popular revolt...
...In this story the powerful English banker Baron Rothe plans to bring about the demonetization of silver in the United States, in part for his own aggrandizement but also to prevent the power of the United States from outstrip ping that of England...
...This strange convergence of unlike social elements on similar ideas has its explanation, I believe, in this: both the imperialist elite and the Populists had been bypassed and humiliated by the advance of industrialism, and both were rebelling against the domination of the country by industrial and financial capitalists...
...For Populist anti-Semitism was altogether abstract...
...As WE REVIEW these aspects of Populist emotion, an odd parallel obtrudes itself...
...Everyone remote and alien was distrusted and hated—even Americans, if they happened to be city people...
...The last of these I will touch upon in connection with the free-silver issue...
...the conspiracy theory of history...
...If it is true, let us attach England to the United States and blot her name out from among the nations of the earth...
...The complaints and demands and prophetic denunciations of the Populists stirred the latent liberalism in many Americans and startled many conservatives into a new flexibility...
...Such rhetoric, which became common currency in the movement, later passed beyond Populism into the larger stream of political protest...
...The Greenbackers had long since popularized this argument, insisting that an adequate legaltender currency would break the monopoly of the "Shylocks...
...Modern liberals, finding the Populists' grievances valid, their programs suggestive, their motives creditable, have usually spoken of the Populist episode in the spirit of Vachel Lindsay's bombastic rhetoric: Prairie avenger, mountain lion, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun, Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West There is indeed much that is good and usable in our Populist past...
...where sympathy with oppressed and revolutionary peoples had been the dominant sentiment in the past, the dominant sentiment now seemed rather to be hatred of their governments...
...The remainder of the book was a recital of a series of seven measures passed between 1862 and 1875 which were alleged to be a part of this continuing conspiracy, the total effect of which was to contract the currency of the country further and further until finally it squeezed the industry of the country like a hoop of steel...
...underneath them, bearing the city's subway system, run smokeless and noiseless electric trains to which passengers are brought by electric elevators...
...The people are demoralized...
...Some leaders of the Republican Party, which had attempted to appease the powerful silver sentiment in 1890 by passing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, made a strategic move in the troubled year of 1894 to capture Western sentiment...
...Even conservative politicians sensed that, whatever other grounds of harmony were lacking between themselves and the populace of the hinterland, grounds for unity could be found in war...
...Populism was the first modern political movement of practical importance in the United States to insist that the federal government has some responsibility for the common weal...
...we are attacking greed and avarice which know no race or religion...
...The strain of anti-Semitism, often recognizable in the physical stereotypes used in cartoons, was sounded openly in the silver campaign...
...For the wrongs and insults, for the glory of my own country, I will bury the knife deep into the heart of this nation...
...If the present strained relations between wealth owners and wealth producers continue much longer they will ripen into frightful disaster...
...One thing seems clear: "most of the leading Congressional backers of intervention in Cuba represented southern and western states where Populism and silver were strongest...
...Nativist prejudices were equally aroused by immigration, for which urban manufacturers, with their insatiable demand for labor, were blamed...
...Against the plausibly drawn background of the corruption of the Grant administration, Rogasner proceeds to buy up the American Congress and suborn American professors of economics to testify for gold...
...Lease projected her grandiose schemes of world partition and tropical colonization, men like Roosevelt, Lodge, Beveridge, and Mahan projected more realistic plans for the conquest of markets and the annexation of terri• tory...
...The rising mood of intolerant nationalism was a nationwide thing, certainly not confined to the regions of Populist strength...
...These notions which appeared with regularity in the political literature, must be examined if we are to re-create for ourselves the Populist spirit...
...Hard times, then," said one popular writer, "as well as the bankruptcies, enforced idleness, starvation, and the crime, misery, and moral degra dation growing out of conditions like the present, being unnatural, not in accordance with, or the result of any natural law, must be attributed to that kind of unwise and pernicious legislation which history proves to have produced similar results in all ages of the world...
...Often, indeed, a deep-lying vein of anxiety showed through...
...Some Federalists believed that the Jeffersonians were conspiring to subvert Christianity...
...While Populist readers were pondering over Donnelly's apocalyptic fantasies, Brooks and Henry Adams were also bemoaning the approaching end of their type of civilization, and even the characteristically optimistic T. R. could share at moments in "Brooks Adams' gloomiest anticipations of our gold-ridden, capitalist-bestridden, usurermastered future...
...In Populist demonology, anti-Semitism, Anglophobia went hand in hand...
...The United States was abundantly endowed with rich land and rich resources, and the "natural" consequence of such an endowment should be the prosperity of the people...
...Its air-conditioned hotels are capped by roof-top restaurants serving incredible luxuries, where "star-eyed maidens...
...it would either get credit for stopping the atrocities, for buying Cuba, if that was the outcome, or for "fighting a successful war, if war there be...
...The financial argument behind the conspiracy theory was simple enough...
...Coin Harvey's Baron Rothe was clearly meant to be Rothschild...
...To discuss the broad ideology of the Populists does them some injustice, for it was in their concrete programs that they added most constructively to our political life, and in their more general picture of the world that they were most credulous and vulnerable...
...Where contemporary intellectuals gave the Populists a perfunctory and disdainful hearing, later historians have freely recognized their achievements and frequently overlooked their limitations...
...but among no stratum of the population was it stronger than among the Populists...
...But anyone who enlarges our portrait of the Populist tradition is likely to bring out some unseen blemishes...
...This report may have been somewhat overdone, but the identification of the silver cause with antiSemitism did become close enough for Bryan to have to pause in the midst of his campaign to explain to the Jewish Democrats of Chicago that in denouncing the policies of the Rothschilds he and his silver friends were "not attacking a race...
...Chicago was bad...
...Can they not reciprocate by giving us the leadership on this continent...
...The Nye Committee, years ago, tried to prove that our entry into the first World War was the work of a conspiracy of bankers and munitionsmakers...
...It would be easy to misstate the character of Populist anti-Semitism or to exaggerate its intensity...
...While the Populist tradition had defects that have been too much neglected, it does not follow that the virtues claimed for it are all fictitious...
...But other assumptions in her book could be found among the Populists with great frequency—the smug assumption of Anglo-Saxon superiority and benevolence, the sense of a need for some new area of expansion, the hatred of England, the fear of Russia, the anxiety over the urban masses as a potential source of anarchy...
...Populists were opposed to large standing armies and large naval establishments...
...For the people of the Old World, having to choose between death by starvation and resistance to tyrants, would turn upon their oppressors and tear them to pieces...
...There are, moreover, certain types of popular movements of dissent that offer special opportunities to agitators with paranoid tendencies, who are able to make a vocational asset out of their psychic disturbances...
...These inventions were cynical...
...It will be an easy matter, after the greater spoilsmen have been shorn of their power, to clip the wings of the little ones...
...The convolutions of Donnelly's plot, which includes two tasteless love stories, do little more than entitle the book to be called a novel, and the work is full of a kind of suppressed lasciviousness that one finds often in popular writing of the period...
...The fall of man had dated from the war itself, when "the money kings of Wall Street" determined that they could take advantage of the wartime necessities of their fellow men by manipulating the currency...
...Canada should be annexed—so also Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Hawaii...
...Here I propose to analyze the others, and to show how they were nurtured by the traditions of the agrarian myth...
...They keep in their hire a fleet of "Demons," operators of dirigibles carrying poison-gas bombs, whose aid they are ready to use at any sign of popular opposition...
...This stewardship, far from being an imposition on the lesser breeds without the law, would be an act of mercy...
...the dualistic version of social struggles...
...On the one side," said Bryan in his famous speech against the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, "stand the corporate interests of the United States, the moneyed interests, aggregated wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless...
...The Populists wanted a restoration of agrarian profits and popular government...
...Donnelly's was different from the other utopias...
...Jefferson appears really to have believed, at one time, that the Federalists were conspiring to re-establish monarchy...
...His book, A Call to Action, published in 1892, drew up an indictment of the business corporation which reads like a Jacksonian polemic...
...But what both the Greenbackers and free-silverites held in common was the idea that the contraction of currency was a deliberate squeeze, the result of a long-range plot of the "Anglo-American Gold Trust...
...The agitation of the Populists, which brought back to American public life a capacity for effective political indignation, marks the beginning of the end of this epoch...
...Senator Lodge proposed in the Senate to blackmail Britain by passing a discriminatory tariff against her if she did not consent to a bimetallic plan, a scheme nicely calculated to hold in line some of the Western silverite jingoes and Anglophobes...
...This opens an appeal to close the gates against further wretched immigrants from Europe who will be used by American capitalists to beat down the wages of American workingmen...
...The very sharpness of the struggle, as the Populists experienced it, the alleged absence...
...The pervasiveness of this way of looking at things may be attributed to the common feeling that farmers and workers were not simply oppressed but oppressed deliberately, consciously, continuously, and with wanton malice by "the interests...
...For a generation after the Civil War, a time of great economic exploitation and waste, grave social corruption and ugliness, the dominant note in American political life was complacency...
...They looked upon the military as a threat to democracy, upon imperialist acquisitions as gains only to financiers and "monarchists," not to the people...
...London was still farther away and still worse...
...Even in those hopeful early days of the People's Party, Weaver projected no grandiose plans for the future, but lamented the course of recent history, the growth of economic oppression, and the emergence of great contrasts of wealth and poverty, and called upon his readers to do "All in [their] power to arrest the alarming tendencies of our times...
...To it Mrs...
...And it appears that one of the reasons why McKinley was advised by many influential Republicans to yield to the popular demand for war was the common fear, still meaningful in 1898, that the Democrats would go into the next presidental election with the irresistible slogan of Free Silver and Free Cuba as its battle cry...
...Mary E. Lease described Grover Cleveland as "the agent of Jewish bankers and British gold...
...Not long after Mrs...
...Mrs...
...In short run the Popu lists did not get what they wanted, but they released the flow of protest and criticism that swept through American political affairs from the 1890's to the beginning of the first World War...
...The slight current of anti-Semitism that existed in the United States before the 1890's had been associated with problems of money and credit...
...The conspiratorial theory and the associated Anglophobic and Judophobic feelings were part of a larger complex of fear and suspicion of the stranger that haunted, and still tragically haunts, the nativist American mind...
...There are but two sides in the conflict that is being waged in this country today," declared a Populist Manifesto...
...It is one thing, however, to say that this prejudice did not go beyond a certain symbolic usage, quite another to say that a people's choice of symbols is of no significance...
...It is in the Populist newspapers, the proceedings of the silver conventions, the immense pamphlet literature broadcast by the American Bimetallic League, the Congressional debates over money...
...The world of 1988 is governed by an inner council of plutocratic leaders who stop at nothing to crush potential opposition...
...Most of the specific reforms * Reprinted from The Age of Reform, with the permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., copyright 1955 by Richard Hofstadter, and published on October 17...
...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...
...The movement to annex Texas and the war with Mexico were alleged by many Northerners to be a slaveholder's conspiracy...
...Under a patina of pacifist rhetoric they were profoundly nationalistic and bellicose...
...and the man on the white horse turned out to be just a graduate of the Harvard boxing squad, equipped with an immense bag of platitudes, and quite willing to play the democratic game...
...The stranger approaches it in an airship, finds it lit so brightly that its life goes on both night and day...
...The only hope of averting this catastrophe was, as she put it, "the most stupendous migration of races the world has ever known, and thereby relieve the congested centers of the world's population of half their inhabitants and provide Free Homes for half of mankind...
...Moreover it was on jingoist issues that the Populist and Bryanite sections of the country, with the aid of the yellow press and many political leaders, achieved that rapport with the masses of the cities which they never succeeded in getting on economic issues...
...for the business of the worst men on earth will have been broken up, and the mainstay of the gamblers removed...
...You are very wise in your way," Rogasner is told at the climax of the tale, "the commercial way, inbred through generations...
...The early Republican leaders, including Lincoln, charged that there was a conspiracy on the part of Stephen A. Douglas to make slavery a nationwide institution...
...Controlling it, they could inflate or depress the business of the country at pleasure, they could send the warm life current through the channels of trade, dispensing peace, happiness, and prosperity, or they could check its flow, and completely paralyze the industries of the country...
...The countries of Europe respond by declaring war, and in the great international conflict that follows, the United States comes to Europe as an invading liberator...
...There follows an appeal to the peoples of Europe to revolt against their rulers...
...What brought these Goths and Vandals to our shores...
...Lease's book also represents one side of a curiously ambiguous aspect of Populism...
...Some of our principal cities are more foreign than American...
...For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose...
...The role of the United States in this world was to be the head of the federated American republics...
...They wanted cheap labor: and they didn't care a curse how much harm to our future might be the consequence of their heartless policy...
...With the coming of the nineties and the great revulsion against the outside world, the emphasis was somewhat changed...
...Not only were the gentlemen of this imperialist elite better read and better fed than the Populists, but they despised them...
...will lead the people to a realizing sense of their condition and the remedies," Roosevelt and Brooks Adams talked about the threat of the eight-hour movement and the danger that the country would be "enslaved" by the organizers of the trusts, and played with the idea that Roosevelt might eventually lead "some great outburst of the emotional classes which should at least temporarily crush the Economic Man...
...During the early nineteenth century popular sentiment in the United States, especially within the democratic camp, had been strong for the republican movements in Europe and Latin America...
...War would be a good thing even if we got whipped," declared the Silver Senator from Nevada, William M. Stewart, "for it would rid us of English bank rule...
...and the doctrine of the primacy of money...
...While Populist Congressmen and newspapers called for war with England or Spain, Roosevelt and Lodge did the same, and while Mrs...
...On innumerable matters they disagreed, but both were strongly nationalist, and amid the despairs and anxieties of the nineties both became ready for war if that would unseat or even embarrass the moneyed powers, or better still if it would topple the established political structure and open new opportunities for the leaders of disinherited farmers or for ambitious clubmen...
...As the silver question became more prominent and the idea of a third party faded, the need for a monolithic solution became transmuted into another form...
...Wherever one turns in the literature of the nineties one can find this conspiracy theory expressed...
...What the nativist mind most resolutely opposed was not so much war itself as co-operation with European governments for any ends at all...
...The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World have invaded us...
...If the people failed to enjoy prosperity, it must be because of a harsh and arbitrary intrusion of human greed and error...
...Certain audiences are especially susceptible to it—particularly, I believe, those who have attained only a low level of education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shut out from access to the centers of power that they feel themselves completely deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those who wield power...
...Such a change they would "hail with joy...
...such catastrophes offered opportunities to engross the wealth of others through business consolidations and foreclosures...
...It is the mission of the age to correct these errors in human legislation, to adopt and establish policies and systems, in accord with, rather than in opposition to divine law...
...At any rate, Populist thought often carries one into a world in which the simple virtues and unmitigated villainies of a rural melodrama have been projected on a national and even an international scale...
...The cause of reform was, in fact, too mercurial to be permanently crushed by a short war...
...fifteen prominent Senators, including outstanding Republicans, cabled their endorsement of international bimetallism...
...It is the city, after all, that is the home of intellectual complexity...
...As opposed to the idea that society consists of a number of different and frequently clashing interests—the social pluralism expressed, for instance, by Madison in the Federalist—the Populists adhered, less formally to be sure, but quite persistently, to a kind of social dualism...
...America is "united by a ligament to a corpse—Europe...
...She was most explicit about the so-called "crime of 1873," the demonetization of silver, giving a fairly full statement of the standard greenback-silverite myth concerning that event...
...We meet," said the Populist platform of 1892, "in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin...
...To extract them from the full context of the polemical writings in which they appeared is undoubtedly to oversimplify them...
...The Latin republics would be fertile fields for colonization by the surplus population of the United States—which no longer had a public domain to give its citizens—and the North Americans would import "vast swarms of Asiatics as laborers for the plantations...
...Where else in American thought during this period do we find this militancy and nationalism, these apocalyptic forebodings and drafts of world-political strategies, this hatred of big businessmen, bankers, and trusts, these fears of immigrants and urban workmen, even this occasional toying with anti-Semitic rhetoric...
...the concept of natural harmonies...
...There were, after all, relatively few Jews in the United States in the late 1880's and early 1890's, most of them remote from the areas of Populist strength...
...On the other side stand an unnumbered throng, those who gave to the Democratic party a name and for whom it has assumed to speak...
...It was not an inevitable development, but greed and stupidity had kept the ruling classes from heeding such prophets of disaster...
...This proposal was defeated by the Cleveland Democrats, but the Democratic Party's turn to make capital out of jingo sentiment came the next year with the excessively belligerent conduct of the Venezuela affair, one of the few really popular moves of the Cleveland administration...
...but the Populist areas stood in the vanguard, and their pressure went far to bring about a needless war...
...Anything that partakes of political strategy may need, for a time at least, an element of secrecy, and is thus vulnerable to being dubbed conspiratorial...
...If we tend to be too condescending to the Populists at this point, it may be necessary to remind ourselves that they had seen so much bribery and corruption, particularly on the part of the railroads, that they had before them a convincing model of the management of affairs through conspiratorial behavior...
...In the books that have been written about the Populist movement, only passing mention has been made of its significant provincialism...
...It was not enough to say that a conspiracy of the money power against the common people was going on...
...It had been going on ever since the Civil War...
...Coin" Harvey, the author of the most popular single document of the whole currency controversy, Coin's Financial School, also published a novel, A Tale of Two Nations, in which the conspiracy theory of history was incorporated into a melodramatic tale...
...Donnelly represented the leader of the governing Council of plutocrats in Caesar's Column, one Prince Cabano, as a powerful Jew, born Jacob Isaacs...
...Such pre-Civil War parties as the Know-Nothing and Anti-Masonic movements were based almost entirely upon conspiratorial ideology...
...Praised by leading members of the Populist movement and by persons as diverse as Cardinal Gibbons, George Cary Eggleston, Frances E. Willard, and Julian Hawthorne, Caesar's Column became one of the most widely read books of the early nineties...
...Lease's peculiar ideas of Weltpolitik, her particular solution of tropical colonization, were not common currency in Populist thinking...
...The politic, scheming, devious way, inbred through generations also...
...During the closing years of the century it grew noticeably...
...This traditional distrust grew stronger as the cities grew larger, and as they filled with immigrant aliens...
...According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age...
...Before long tie is elected President, and after foiling a plot to kill him and checking a bankers' conspiracy to start a civil war, he delivers an extraordinary inaugural message...
...In his preamble to the People's Party platform of 1892, a succinct, official expression of Populist views, Ignatius Donnelly asserted: "A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world...
...nothing has been said of its tincture of anti-Semitism...
...Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being made use of to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country...
...In Populist thought the farmer is not a speculating businessman, victimized by the risk economy of which he is a part, but rather a wounded yeoman, preyed upon by those who are alien to the life of folkish virtue...
...it is elaborated in such popular books as Mrs...
...Lease felt that the Latins, like the Asiatics, would certainly benefit from this and that they ought to like it...
...While such extreme fears could be quieted by some contact with the city, others were actually confirmed—especially when the farmers were confronted with city prices...
...It was a mode of expression, a rhetorical style, not a tactic or a program...
...just war ever waged by man...
...This kind of thinking frequently occurs when political and social antagonisms are sharp...
...Nature, as the agrarian tradition had it, was beneficent...
...After the defeat of Bryan, popular frustration in the silver areas, blocked on domestic issues, seemed to find expression in the Cuban question...
...According to Mrs...
...Lincoln's war policy of issuing greenbacks presented them with the dire threat of an adequate supply of currency...
...Its streets are covered with roofs of glass...
...In the history of American political controversy there is a tradition of conspiratorial accusations which seem to have been sincerely believed...
...What came in the end was only a small war and a quick victory...
...The idea seems to have occurred to Donnelly in a moment of great discouragement at the close of the unusually corrupt Minnesota legislative session of 1889, when he was struck with the thought of what might come to be if the worst tendencies of current society were projected a century into the future...
...Doubtless this fantasy was meant to say what would happen if the warnings of the reformers and the discontents of the people went unheard and unalleviated...
...Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench...
...when the farmers and the gentlemen finally did coalesce in politics, they produced only the genial reforms of Progressivism...
...SOMEWHAT AKIN to the notion of the beneficence of nature was the idea of a natural harmony of interests among the productive classes...
...A majority of them, after favoring war, attempted honorably to spurn the fruits of war by taking up the cause of anti-imperialism...
...The first, and for the Populists the preferred, enemy would have been England, the center of the gold power...
...one of the triumvirate who led the Brotherhood of Destruction is also an exiled Russian Jew, who flees from the apocalyptic carnage with a hundred million dollars which he intends to use to "revive the ancient splendors of the Jewish race, in the midst of the ruins of the world...
...We could, by wise laws and just conditions, lift up the toilers of our own country to the level of the middle classes, but a vast multitude of the miserable of other lands clung to their skirts and dragged them down...
...The proposal for colonization under government supervision and with governmental subsidies was supplemented by a grand plan for what Mrs...
...While there might be corrupt individuals in any group, the underlying interests of the productive majority were the same...
...Their demand for $50 of circulating medium per capita, still in the air when the People's Party arose, was rapidly replaced by the less "radical" demand for free coinage of silver...
...Far more ominous, however, than any of the vivid and hideous predictions of the book is the sadistic and nihilistic spirit in which it was written...
...When the war was over, the economic and emotional climate in which their movement had grown no longer existed, and their forces were scattered and confused...
...The city is finally burned, but a saving remnant of decent folk escapes in a dirigible to the African mountains, where under the guidance of an elite of intellectuals they form a Christian socialist state in which the Popu list program for land, transportation, and finance becomes a reality and interest is illegal...
...Lease candidly called the partitioning of the world, in which the Germanic and Latin peoples would be united into two racial confederations, and the British and Russian empires checked and neutralized by other powerful states...
...Perhaps the rural middle-class leaders of Populism (this was a movement of farmers, but it was not led by farmers) had more to do than the farmer himself with the cast of Populist thinking...
...In assuming a lush natural order whose workings were being deranged by human laws, Populist writers were again drawing on the Jacksonian tradition, whose spokesmen also had pleaded for a proper obedience to "natural" laws as a prerequisite of social justice...
...If not, we should take it...
...One of the cartoons in the effectively illustrated Coin's Financial School showed a map of the world dominated by the tentacles of an octopus at the site of the British Isles, labeled: "Rothschilds...
...That there must always be such an opposition between peoples and governments the Populist mind did not like to question, and even the most democratic governments of Europe were persistently looked upon as though they were nothing but reactionary monarchies...
...Emery's book, first published in 1887, and dedicated to "the enslaved people of a dying republic," achieved great circulation, especially among the Kansas Populists...
...It is a fight between labor and capital, and labor is in the vast majority...
...President Benezet wins, of course, and frees even the Russians simply by making them literate...
...During the late 1880's and the '90's there emerged in the Eastern United States a small imperialist elite representing, in general, the same type that had once been Mugwumps, whose spokesmen were such solid and respectable gentlemen as Henry and Brooks Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, and Albert J. Beveridge...
...When conspiracies do not exist it is necessary for those who think in this fashion to invent them...
...The people versus the interests, the public versus the plutocrats, the toiling multitude versus the money power—in various phrases this central antagonism was expressed...
...Nevertheless, when these qualifications have been taken into account, it remains true that Populist thought showed an unusually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms...
...Both sides of Donnelly's struggle, the Council of governing plutocrats and the Brotherhood of Destruction, are significantly portrayed as secret organizations—this despite the fact that the Brotherhood has millions of members...
...Emery, the United States had been an economic Garden of Eden in the period before the Civil War...
...Both elements found themselves impotent and deprived in an industrial culture and balked by a common enemy...
...and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty...
...It is not possible to go into any hotel in the city without hearing the most bitter denunciation of the Jews as a class and of the particular Jews who happen to have prospered in the world...
...New York is a center of technological marvels much like Bellamy's...
...He also falls in love with a proud American beauty, but his designs on her are foiled because she loves a handsome young silver Congressman from Nebraska who bears a striking resemblance to William Jennings Bryan...
...The story takes place in the year 1988, missing by four years the date of the more recent anti-utopia of George Orwell, with which it invites comparison, though not on literary grounds...
...Although dissenting minorities were always present, they were sub merged by the overwhelming realities of industrial growth and con tinental settlement...
...After the success of Caesar's Column, Donnelly wrote another fantasy called The Golden Bottle, in which this antagonism had a vivid expression...
...Wall Street was accused of a characteristic indifference to the interests of humanity...
...Caesar, one of the three leaders (who is himself beheaded in the end) , commands that the corpses be piled up and covered with cement to form a gigantic pyramidal column as a monument to the uprising...
...General James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for the presidency in 1892, was an old Democrat and Free-Soiler, born during the days of Jackson's battle with the United States Bank, who drifted into the Greenback movement after a short spell as a Republican, and from there to Populism...
...The panics, depressions, and bankruptcies caused by their policies only added to their wealth...
...Neither the big business and banking community nor the Cleveland and McKinley administrations had much sympathy with the crusading fever that pervaded the country at large, and there were bitter mutual recriminations between conservative and Populist papers...
...Here at least was a point at which the goldbugs could be vanquished...
...In this sense the Credit Mobilier was a conspiracy, as was the Teapot Dome affair...
...It is not too much to say that the GreenbackPopulist tradition activated most of what we have of modern popular anti-Semitism in the United States...
...With this great power for good in their hands, the Wall Street men preferred to do evil...
...Lease's book, the work of a naive but imaginative mind driven to the pitch of its powers by an extraordinary capacity for suspicion, was hardly as representative or popular as Coin's Financial School or Caesar's Column, but its author was one of the indigenous products of Populist political culture...
...The old agrarian conception of the city as the home of moral corruption reached a new pitch...
...most of them supported Bryan's resistance to acquisition of the Philippines...
...It was the resignation of the country itself INTO THE HANDS OF ENGLAND, as England had long been resigned into the hands of HER JEws...
...This feeling, though hardly confined to Populists and Bryanites, was none the less exhibited by them in a particularly virulent form...
...It should not be surprising that they inherited the traditions of Jacksonian democ 35I racy, that they revived the old Jacksonian cry: "Equal Rights for All, Special Privileges for None," or that most of the slogans of 1896 echoed the battle cries of 1836...
...This book, published under a pseudonym, was a piece of visionary writing, possibly inspired by the success a few years earlier of Bellamy's utopian romance Looking Backward, which called forth a spate of imitators during the last decade of the century...
...This sybaritic life, supported at the cost of great mass suffering, conceals a fierce social struggle...
...Emery's rhetoric left no doubt of the sustained purposefulness of this scheme—described as "villainous robbery," and as having been "secured through the most soulless strategy...
...If not met and overthrown at once it forbodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism...
...The manufacturers are mainly to blame...
...The problems that faced the Populists assumed a delusive simplicity: the victory over injustice, the solution for all social ills, was concentrated in the crusade against a single, relatively small but immensely strong, interest, the money power...
...Lease, Europe and America stood on the brink of one of two immense catastrophes—a universal reign of anarchistic terror or the establishment of a world-wide Russian despotism...
...While the jocose and rather heavy-handed anti-Semitism that can be found in Henry Adams's letters of the 1890's shows that this prejudice existed outside the Populist literature, it was chiefly Populist writers who expressed that identification of the Jew with the usurer and the "international gold ring" which was the central theme of the American anti-Semitism of the age...
...He also establishes a world government to keep the peace...
...Those who have been puzzled in our own time by the anti-European attitudes of men like Senator Taft and General MacArthur, and by their alternating espousal of dangerously aggressive and near-pacifist (or anti-militarist) policies, will find in the Populist mentality a suggestive precedent...
...It is no coincidence, then, that Populism and jingoism grew together in the United States during the 1890's...
...Mrs...
...Although in its anticlimactic conclusion it did describe a utopia in a remote spot in Africa, the main story portrayed a sadistic anti-utopia arrived at, as it were, by standing Bellamy on his head...
...In at least one important area of American life a few Populist leaders in the South attempted something profoundly radical and humane—to build a popular movement that would cut across the old barriers of race—until persistent use of the Negro bogy distracted their following...
...A representative of the New Jersey Grange, for instance, did not hesitate to warn the members of the Second National Silver Convention of 1892 to watch out for political candidates who represented "Wall Street, and the Jews of Europe...
...Through all the vicissitudes of time, the Caucasian has arisen to the moral and intellectual supremacy of the world, until now this favored race is fitted for the Stewardship of the Earth and Emancipation from Manual Labor...
...There is so much carnage that the disposal of the bodies becomes an immense sanitary problem...
...little has been said of its relations with nativism and nationalism...
...The blare of the bugle drowned the voice of the reformer...
...To be sure that the work is successful, he also sends to the United States a relative and ally, one Rogasner, who stalks through the story like the villains in the plays of Dion Boucicault, muttering to himself such remarks as "I am here to destroy the United States—Cornwallis could not have done more...
...But if there seems to be in this situation any suggestion of a forerunner or analogue of modern authoritarian movements, led by restless politicians and followed by a discontented but essentially conservative agrarian populace, it should by no means be exaggerated...
...Corruption itself has the character of conspiracy...
...From this simple social classification it seemed to follow that once the techniques of misleading the people were exposed, victory over the money power ought to be easily accomplished, for in sheer numbers the people were overwhelming...
...With the destruction of the money power," said Senator Peffer, "the death knell of gambling in grain and other commodities will be sounded...
...We find them, curiously enough, most conspicuous among a group of men who are in all obvious respects the antithesis of the Populists...
...The first of these were, of course, legitimate, but the power of the Populists to discriminate between the two was not strong, and they were quite ready to be ballyhooed into a righteous war, as the Cuban situation was to show...
...Coin's Financial School closed with a bitter philippic against England: "If it is claimed we must adopt for our money the metal England selects, and can have no independent choice in the matter, let us make the test and find out if it is true...
...It would of course be misleading to imply that there are no such things as conspiracies in history...
...But since it is less feasible to have no labels than to have somewhat too facile ones, we may enumerate the dominant themes in Populist ideology as these: the idea of a golden age...
...A full history of modern anti-Semitism in the United States would reveal, I believe, its substantial Populist lineage, but it may be sufficient to point out here that neither the informal connection between Bryan and the Klan in the twenties nor Thomas E. Watson's conduct in the Leo Frank case were altogether fortuitous...
...Populist anti-Semitism does have its importance—chiefly as a symptom of a certain ominous credulity in the Populist mind...
...Since the old political parties were the primary means by which the people were kept wandering in the wilderness, the People's Party advocates insisted, only a new and independent political party could do this essential job...
...We have become the world's melting pot," wrote Thomas E. Watson...
...He was accused of being unusually suspicious, and certainly his situation, trying as it was, made thinking in impersonal terms difficult...
...This measure was supposed greatly to have increased the value of American four per cent bonds held by British capitalists by making it necessary to pay them in gold only...
...While the silverites were raging openly and earnestly against the bankers and the Jews, Brooks and Henry Adams were expressing in their sardonic and morosely cynical private correspondence the same feelings, and acknowledging with bemused irony their kinship at this point with the mob...
...From Thaddeus Stevens and Coin Harvey to Father Coughlin, and from Brooks and Henry Adams to Ezra Pound, there has been a curiously persistent linkage between antiSemitism and money and credit obsessions...
...Indeed, what makes conspiracy theories so widely acceptable is that they usually contain a germ of truth...
...Our country was the safety-valve which permitted the discontent of the Old World to escape...
...It came at a moment when the threat of a social apocalypse seemed to many people not at all remote, and it remains even now a nettlesome if distinctly minor prophetic book...
...According to Mrs...
...When we have restored the money of the Constitution," said Bryan in his Cross of Gold speech, "all other necessary reforms will be possible...
...It was international: it stemmed from Lombard Street...
...To speak of anti-Semitism in the postHitler world is to raise the specter of the Nazis and the final horror of the gas chambers, which is a far cry from the anti-Semitism of the Populists...
...The one thing that prevents the American people, he tells them, from rising "to still higher levels of greatness and happiness" is the Old World...
...Anglo-Saxons, whether Populist or patrician, found it difficult to accept other peoples on terms of equality or trust...
...The Populists looked backward with longing to the lost agrarian Eden, to the republican America of the early years of the nineteenth century in which there were few millionaires and, as they saw it, no beggars, when the laborer had excellent prospects and the farmer had abundance, when statesmen still responded to the mood of the people and there was no such thing as the money power...
...The common fear of an impending apocalypse had its most striking articulation in Ignatius Donnelly's fantastic novel Caesar's Column...
...The Populist impulse expressed itself in a body of notions that represent what I have called the "soft" side of agrarianism...
...What they meant— though they did not express themselves in such terms—was that they would like to restore the conditions prevailing before the development of industrialism and the commercialization of agriculture...
...Jingoism was confined to no class, section, or party...
...Hence the interests relished and encouraged hard times...
...One of the more elaborate documents of the conspiracy school traced the power of the Rothschilds over America to a transaction between Hugh McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln and Johnson, and Baron James Rothschild...
...in the Populist program proved in later years to be either harmless or useful...
...Moreover, any account of the fallibility of Populist thinking that does not acknowledge the stress and suffering out of which that thinking emerged will be seriously remiss...
...Mrs...
...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 the capitalists...
...And Henry Ford's notorious anti-Semitism of the 1920's, along with his hatred of "Wall Street," were the foibles of a Michigan farm boy who had been liberally exposed to Populist notions...
...New York, which housed the Wall Street bankers, was farther away and worse...
...On May 2 there opened in London an unofficial bimetallic conference in which American bimetallists were represented by Brooks Adams and Senator Wolcott of Colorado...
...ONE FEATURE OF THE POPULIST CONSPIRACY theory generally overlooked is its frequent link with a kind of rhetorical antiSemitism...
...Louis "the extraordinary hatred of the Jewish race...
...Extensive footnotes which are part of the chapter as it appears in the book have been omitted...
...In the latter case, the enthusiasm, the applications for service, the employment of many of the unemployed, might do much towards directing the minds of the people from imaginary ills, the relief of which is erroneously supposed to be reached by 'Free Silver.' " When the Venezuela matter was settled, the attention of jingoes turned toward Cuba...
...By the time the campaign of 1896 arrived, an Associated Press reporter noticed as "one of the striking things" about the Populist convention at St...
...They were objects to be manipulated—benevolently, it was often said, but none the less firmly...
...On the surface there was a strong note of anti-militarism and anti-imperialism in the Populist movement and Bryan democracy...
...Among the most celebrated instances in modern history are the forging of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the grandiose fabrication under Stalin's regime of the TrotzkyiteBukharinite-Zinovievite center...
...He persuades an American Senator (probably John Sherman, the bete noire of the silverites) to co-operate in using British gold in a campaign against silver...
...The gentlemen wanted the power and status they felt due them, which had been taken away from their class and type by the arriviste manufacturers and railroaders and the all-toopotent banking houses...
...predatory behavior existed only because it was initiated and underwritten by a small parasitic minority in the highest places of power...
...E. E. V. Emery's Seven Financial Conspiracies which have Enslaved the American People or Gordon Clark's Shylock: as Banker, Bondholder, Corruptionist, Conspirator...
...And now not only our entry into the second World War, but the entire history of the past twenty years or so is being given the color of conspiracy by the cranks and political fakirs of our own age...
...THE UTOPIA OF THE POPULISTS was in the past, not the future...
...wander half seen amid the foliage, like the houris in the Mohammedan's heaven...
...An overwhelming sense of grievance does not find satisfactory expression in impersonal explanations except among those with a well-developed tradition of intellectualism...
...Olney was similarly urged by the American consul in Havana to identify the administration and the sound-money Democrats with a strong policy of mediation or intervention in the war in Cuba...
...On the one side are the allied hosts of monopolies, the money power, great trusts and railroad corporations, who seek the enactment of laws to benefit them and impoverish the people...
...The vice and crime which they have planted in our midst are sickening and terrifying...
...of compromise solutions and of intermediate groups in the body politic, the brutality and desperation that was imputed to the plutocracy—all these suggested that failure of the people to win the final contest peacefully could result only in a total victory for the plutocrats and total extinction of democratic institutions, possibly after a period of bloodshed and anarchy...
...Thomas E. Watson, one of the few Populists who had consistently opposed the war, later insisted that "The Spanish War finished us...
Vol. 2 • September 1955 • No. 4
