American Consequences - February 2021

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR for women’s suffrage, labor union collective bargaining rights, an eight-hour workday, a graduated income tax, direct election of U.S. Senators by voters instead of state legislators, price supports for farmers, and federal regulation of railroad monopoly shipping rates. If you’re a well-meaning liberal (and,

But the Greenback constituency was primarily rural with support from labor, especially in mining and heavy industry. So really they’d be like some kind of reactionary nut supporters of Trump Forever. The Greenback Party won control of a number of municipal governments in what would later become the Rust Belt, and it elected 20-some members of Congress. But Greenback influence faded as American economic growth recommenced after the depression of 1873 to 1877. (Could that growth have had anything to do with a sound dollar?) Shifts in economic reality often have a way of dispersing the mists of populism. Widespread flirtations with Marxism among intellectuals in the 1930s (a sort of “highbrow populism”) disappeared into the capitalist war-making machinery of the 1940s. The populist “youth culture” social upheavals of the 1960s ended in the 1970s with thousands of hippies saying, “Oh wow, man, we’re broke.” And where did the occupiers of Occupy Wall Street go? Probably to Reddit and WallStreetBets, to day trade GameStop stock. However, another financial panic in the early 1890s gave fresh impetus to Greenback-style populism. A new political party was started in 1892, officially named the People’s Party, but popularly – as it were – called the Populist Party. (According to the OED , the word “populist” seems to have been coined that year by the Columbus Dispatch to describe the party.) The Populist platform called for an inflationary monetary policy. It also called

conservative though I am, I have no objection to your being so), this all sounds so attractive, and so politically advanced – such policies being proposed more than 120 years ago! But before you get too excited about this Populist movement of yore, you should know that there was, among the Populists, an element of another kind of populism that isn’t so popular with you. Before you get too excited about this Populist movement of yore, you should know that there was, among the Populists, an element of another kind of populism that isn’t so popular with you. Wikipedia is not the most precise or accurate research tool. But the crowdsourced nature of the free online encyclopedia does give us a rough survey of “what is commonly thought and known” about a subject. The Wikipedia article “People’s Party (United States)” is, in general, favorably disposed to the Populists. But the “Women and African Americans” section of the article (to which I’ve made addenda in brackets) reports that...

American Consequences

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