Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Came the Revolutions Every so often, say at the end of a Bicentennial year or the beginning of a Presidential term, Americans remind themselves of their revolutionary...
...It was not easy to demonstrate that the needs of farmers were compatible with those of workingmen, and political machines had a powerful grip on the immigrant workers of the big cities...
...Much as the Founders might inveigh against the established church, they abhorred atheism even more, and while they were bent on upending authority, the notion of anarchy terrified them...
...The farmer is the man The farmer is the man Lives on credit till the fall With the interest rates so high It's a wonder he don't die And the mortgage man's the one that gets it all...
...Who doubts that there continues to be a place for the radical spirit in America...
...Most of the violence Populists got involved in was instigated by their enemies and directed against them...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Came the Revolutions Every so often, say at the end of a Bicentennial year or the beginning of a Presidential term, Americans remind themselves of their revolutionary heritage and then, likely as not, take themselves to task for betraying the American dream...
...identification with the downtrodden has been transformed into a sometimes coldhearted competition as the great body of workers has entered the middle class...
...In any case, the Knights of Labor and its successor, the American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers, were by and large too conservative for the Pops...
...Among the unions...
...The more far-sighted of the Populist leaders saw the importance of creating an alliance with workers in the growing cities...
...Tom Paine was always in a minority...
...Today, the miners' wives do up their hair in a manner that coffee-house radicals may mock, but they can still man the picket lines...
...their vision extended beyond the sectionalism of the post-Civil War era...
...The Farmers The Founding Fathers, successful revolutionaries of the 18th century, would not have felt at home with those failed revolutionaries of the 19th century, the Populists, whose movement sprang not from the commercial and professional classes but from the wretchedly poor of a depression-stricken land...
...They were decidedly deficient in bloody-mindedness...
...Given how little they had of their own, it is a wonder they did not do a lot more damage to the property of others...
...They were in many ways well satisfied with their condition, seeking simply more scope for their prospects...
...But even if imported ideologies had showed themselves to be more merciful than they are in practice, they would still have little to do with the realities of this fortunate land...
...the notion of propertyless immigrant masses crowding into cities would have seemed terribly threatening to his visions of a new republic...
...My own thoughts have lately been turned to our revolutionary heritage by two provocative histories—The Enlightenment in America by Henry F. May and Democratic Promise—The Populist Movement in America by Lawrence Goodwin—and by a good film documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A., made by Barbara Kopple...
...they promoted the radical idea of economic cooperation to free the farmer from his reliance on middlemen and railroad magnates, and fought the hard-money policies that handed their destinies over to Eastern bankers...
...Perhaps it is not even desirable...
...They are, in fact, about three different indigenous revolutions, which succeeded and failed in ways that the respective revolutionists could not possibly have foreseen...
...The well-to-do ski while the poor shiver...
...Democracy in practice, from Jefferson's Presidency on, has not been much like the dreams of any of the 18th-century thinkers...
...The Knights of Labor reached its modest peak of success in the 1880s, as Populist doctrines were only beginning to circulate through the farm counties...
...Though insurrections have flared, however, they have quickly sputtered out...
...These opponents of one monarchy found in France's feckless Louis XVI, soon to be done in by revolutionists of quite a different temper, an ally against George III...
...Had he been able to foresee the nation's drive toward industrialization, Tom Jefferson would have despaired...
...The makers of the first American revolution were not terribly revolutionary by this century's standards, nor even by the standards of their own time...
...They were men of property, fighting for what was theirs...
...As Professor May observes: "It comes as a shock to Americans, who tend vaguely to identify Enlightenment with democracy, to find that almost none of the 18th-century philosophers had a program with a real place in it for most people...
...The farmer is the man The farmer is the man Lives on credit till the fall And his pants are wearing thin His condition it's a sin He's forgot that he's the man that feeds them all...
...And finally, the "people's party" itself was finished off by its putative allies, the silver interests...
...We are constantly in danger of living out our lives in a slough of complacency...
...The Workers In Barbara Koppel's flawed yet revealing film, Harlan County, U.S.A., we get close to the Kentucky coal miners who are still fighting a battle that has been carried on over generations against the powerful, remote corporations who own the mines, and against weak, inept and crooked functionaries who have run their unions...
...She sings it in a still strong voice to a meeting of strikers in the 1970s...
...It was not until after Populism had been dissipated as a movement that the young industrial unions showed the kind of militant spirit and political audacity that had characterized Populism in its brief but eventful career...
...But the time was not ripe...
...On the farms now only migrant workers, remaining innocent of prosperity, speak in terras that evoke memories of Populism...
...Their ranks were stained by racism and demogoguery and self-serving leaders, but there was great nobility among them as well...
...One of their songs, "The Farmer is The Man," conveys their spirit: When the farmer comes to town With his wagon broken down, The Farmer is the man that feeds them all If you'll only look and see I think you will agree That the farmer is the man that feeds them all...
...They are much better off than they were when she first sang her song 40 years ago, yet the fight for safety, better treatment, more control over their lives goes on...
...the ma-jor parties, thoroughly corrupt, found it more to their interests to refight the Civil War than to attend to the more pressing needs of the nation's down-and-outers...
...Although Populism won some surprising victories, in its incarnation as a national party it never had a chance...
...Desperate, beleaguered, splendidly courageous in the face of heavy odds, drawing strength from solidarity, holding out through sheer grit, the miners' story was a major one in the building of the great union movement of the 1930s...
...These products of the Enlightenment sometimes spoke in behalf of the People, but never had in mind all the people, and made sure to put constraints upon the populace when writing their Constitution...
...At their best, the Populists created an alliance of the poor that took in blacks along with whites at a time when the wounds of Civil War were still fresh...
...The men of the Enlightenment, our American revolutionaries, would not have been comfortable with the notion of a militant workingmen's movement...
...The itinerant lecturers, that indefatigable band which carried the Populist message to thousands of families who had been denied other schooling but could recognize and appreciate an effort to help when it arrived, were beaten, ridden out of town, shot at...
...The progression from high ideals, visions of the earth's wretched uniting against the forces of greed, to the prevailing acceptance of the status quo, contentment with incremental gains and a narrow identification with one's particular group is not the stuff of folk songs...
...The injustices they felt tended to be political or economic, not personal...
...It is as if Romeo and Juliet, instead of being carried off in the flush of passion, were to have lived on into plump middle age, worrying about which college their offspring could get into...
...As the film brings us close to the miners and their wives, we can glimpse the combination of toughness and innocence that has sustained them for so long...
...The country's success has subdued both labor and farmer insurgency...
...No, not inspiring—yet considering the record of other revolutions, we might have done worse...
...Though numbers of loyalists to the Mother Country were treated roughly, and invective against King George and his ministers was popular, even scatological, there was surprisingly little inclination to demolish existing institutions...
...The style of the French revolutionaries in their guillotine phase appalled many of the Americans, who had never suffered at the hands of the Crown what the French had suffered at the hands of their masters...
...Populist candidates were crudely robbed of election victories...
...Their anger was directed at specific and distant targets...
...It is understandable that native radicals, from 1917 to our own time, have looked outward for inspiration—to the Soviet experiment, to the Chinese experiment, to Gandhi, to all manner of Eastern mysticism and Western terrorism...
...Yet if there is such a course, the map for it is more likely to be found not in alien societies, but in the depressing and heartening experiences of America's own revolutionaries...
...It takes a cold winter like this one to remind us that every national crisis is mainly a crisis for the poor...
...They knew their enemies...
...It is damnably difficult in a country so resistant to radical movements to find a course that holds out promise of fundamental change...
...One affecting scene focuses on a woman who announces that she wrote the rousing rallying song of the labor movement, "Which Side Are You On...
...it was not free-flowing and did not always flow at boiling temperature...
...these have afforded greater romanticism than our rather boring and imperfect record of change...
...These men who banded together in the name of freedom could not give up slavery...
...One can discern here the spirit that moved the farmers...
...Its supporters were the poorest of the poor, fighting the plutocracy of our Gilded Age, the robber barons and their hirelings at all levels of government...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 4
