American Populism

Robert C. McMath, Jr., in American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898, argues that the political movement known as Populism, in the last two decades of the 19th century, was full of shortcomings, but nevertheless advanced an important program which is just as important today. McMath concludes that the Populists were middle-of-the-road reformers who suffered from the biases of their era:

Neither proto-fascists not proto-New Dealers, the Populists fashioned a popular movement out of the cultures of nineteenth-century reform [but] they failed to bend the forces of technology and capitalism toward humane ends, and many of them shared with other Americans of their time a myopic view of equal rights, one still distorted by racism and sexism (210-211).

Despite such biases, the Populists brought to the table a consideration of equal rights which has at least stayed on the table to this day, despite the fact that such rights have hardly been fully realized.

McMath writes in Chapter 1, "Populist Country Before Populism," that the roots of the movement are found in the world of agriculture in the New West and the New South. Farmers in those areas were beset by problems associated with irrigation, the expansion of railroads, and the land boom. The increasingly complex capitalistic conditions ruling agriculture in this period led to the threat of failure for many farmers in these areas. They felt they had been encouraged to farm, and then when difficult conditions occurred, they

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same problems of other new parties: "The white-hot emotions of a protest movement would begin to give way to the calculations of one more political party" (179). The final chapter covers the "Crisis of Populism," and it repeats the author's conclusion that the Populist movement was doomed when it aligned itself with a political party, although it had to do so in order to accomplish its goals. Populism was sucked into politics, lost its passion, and became simply a part of "one more political party." The legacy of Populism, however, can still be seen, says McMath, as "a vision of democratic capitalism that did not, in the end, fit well with the political and bureaucratic structures that accompanied industrial capitalism" (210). Certainly the rise of industrialization and the power it bestowed on big corporations spelled an end to populism because of populism's dependence on the labor unions which were also weakened by industrialization. Bibliography McMath, Robert C., Jr. American Populism. New York: Hill & Wang, 1993. Stephen Steinberg, in The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America, argues primarily that class divisions and economic differences are far more important than race or ethnicity in shaping the

Category: History - A