And... [Charles] Postel [history professor at San Francisco State University and author of The Populist Vision , where, overall, he views the Populists in a positive light] notes... White Populists embraced social- Darwinist notions of racial improvement, Chinese exclusion and separate-but-equal. And...
... racism did not evade the People’s Party. Prominent Populist Party leaders... at least partially demonstrated a dedication to the cause of white supremacy, and there appears to have been some support for this viewpoint in the party’s rank-and-file membership. After 1900 [Thomas E.] Watson [the Populist presidential candidate in 1904] himself became an outspoken white supremacist. From what I can learn about Watson, this is true. A Georgia politician and rabble- rousing publisher, Watson started out urging poor whites and poor blacks to unite against “elites.” But as time went by, he changed his mind about which rabble he was rousing. He first embraced racial bigotry and by the time he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1920, he had added nativism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism to his gross prejudices. In his Senate career, he distinguished himself by dying after 16 months in office. Further material from the Wikipedia article... Historian Hasia Diner [professor of American Jewish History at New York University] says: Some Populists believed that Jews made up a class of international financiers whose policies had ruined small
[Political scientist, former aide to President Gerald Ford, and Senior
Fellow at the (liberal leaning) Brookings Institute, A. James] Reichley (1992) sees the Populist Party primarily as a reaction to the decline of the political hegemony of white Protestant farmers... Reichley argues that, while the Populist Party was founded in reaction to economic hardship, by the mid-1890s it was “reacting not simply against the money power but against the whole world of cities and alien customs and loose living they felt was challenging the agrarian way of life.” (And, P.S., consulting other historical sources, it’s also clear that the Populists often worked in tandem with the Prohibition Party.) As someone who’s fond of loose living, charmed by alien customs, and having grandparents who, with alacrity, moved from the farm to the big city to escape the toilsome dullness of the agrarian way of life, I feel no affinity for the roots of populism or for any of the Donald Bernie Trump Sanders underbrush that has sprouted from its 19th century stump. Populism is a muddle – a political, economic, and moral dog’s breakfast.
family farms... owned the banks and promoted the gold standard, the chief sources of their impoverishment.
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February 2021
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