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 sought help and found none: "Faced with the hostility or unresponsiveness of the nation's dominant institutions [i.e., government, churches, townsmen], farmers banded together to seek redress" (49).
In Chapter 2, "Cultures of Protest, 1867-86," we read that the Populist movement did not emerge from a group of farmers who had been defeated by powerful institutions and who had no sense of history. To the contrary, the movement of Populism came out of a tra...