What do pundits really mean when they
describe a politician’s rhetoric as “populist”? Does that candidate
recoil from the uncertainties and anxieties caused by globalization?
Stand up for the little guy against elite corporate interests? Appeal
to popular and irrational impulses and therefore pose an authoritarian
threat to democracy? Is populism progressive or conservative?
In the middle of this interminable
electoral year, this is hardly an idle or academic question.
In 2004,
former Sen. John Edwards introduced “populist” rhetoric into the
presidential campaign when he described “two separate and unequal
Americas.” In 2008, he addressed the plight of the poor so powerfully
that both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama felt obliged to
embrace his language, as well as many of his policies.
Although historian Michael Kazin
has rightly observed that both the left and right have used populist
appeals against “elites” throughout the 20th century, there was, in
fact, an actual Populist movement that took root during the infamous
“gilded age” of the 1880s and 1890s.
In his new book, The Populist Vision, Charles Postel offers an
original and riveting account of the Populist vision that jump-started
20th-century social reform movements and is still relevant to our
contemporary American society.
We can easily imagine how Populists viewed their world. Our generation
of Americans also feels disoriented by living in a shrinking world. In
the late 19th century, writes Postel, “The traumas of technological
innovation, expansion of corporate power, and commercial and cultural
globalization” left many Americans reeling from the speed of change.
“Corporations grew exponentionally amid traumatic spasms of global
capitalist development. The rich amassed great fortunes, a prosperous
section of the middle class grew more comfortable and hard times
pressed on most everyone else.”
Out of this alienating and disorienting
experience grew a Populism that previous historians have often
simplified. Some have viewed Populists as radical visionaries who
dreamed of a utopian, egalitarian American society. Still others have
characterized them as nostalgic, rural reactionaries who yearned for an
Edenic, agrarian past.
Postel, however, offers a far more nuanced interpretation. Armed with
a wide array of sources, he convincingly argues that American Populism,
for all its flaws and failures—it eventually failed to promote racial
equality—was fundamentally a modern social movement that offered a
“divergent” path to the creation of a modern capitalist society.
By excavating the ideas, lives and organizational activities of
Populist activists, Postel demonstrates that the women and men in the
Populist movement largely valued “business methods, education and
technology” and embraced the ideas of modernity and progress. He
vividly describes, for example, the rich intellectual debates that
rippled through the movement. “Few political or social movements,” he
writes, “brought so many men and women into lecture halls, classrooms,
camp meetings and seminars or produced such an array of inexpensive
literature.”
By scrutinizing their politics, Postel
also reveals that the Populists, who decried the corruption of the
traditional political parties, sought “a new type of politics that
would deliver rationalized, nonpartisan and businesslike governances.”
For the Populists, argues Postel, the Post Office represented the ideal
government agency. An elaborate bureaucracy, the Post Office simply
delivered a necessary service without favoring special interests or
interfering with the lives of its customers. This was “the Populist
vision of an alternative capitalism in which private enterprise
coalesced with both cooperative and state-based economies.” The Farmers Alliance,
for example, “pursued the dramatic expansion of government regulation
and control in the country’s economic life. This included demands for
the public ownership of railroads and the telegraph. ... At stake was
who should be included and who should wield shares of power—a conflict
that all concerned understood as vital to the future of a modern
America.”
Most historians of the Populist movement have focused largely on one
region of the country, or exclusively on farmers or miners. Postel
instead provides a far more expansive view of this national movement by
including black and white farmers, wage earners, miners, railroad
workers, rural women and bohemian urbanites. Taken together, those who
participated in such a broad-based movement not only ranted against
banks and farm policies, but also scrutinized the wages of workers,
education, women’s rights, business, religion, race, science and
technology.
It is Postel’s focus on women, however, that makes his interpretation
of Populists so convincing. For decades, historians of gender have
argued that whenever you study women as part of any social movement or
political event, your interpretation will very likely change. We now
know, for example, that middle-class women—for good or ill—have led
most of the social and reform movements in our country’s past.
By including women, Postel discovers a modern sensibility that other
historians of the Populist movement have missed. Like their male
counterparts, rural women sought a different path to progress and
capitalist development. By taking seriously the dreams and hopes of
women farmers, Postel explores the female Populists who struggled to
end the whiskey trade that threatened their earnings and families,
dreamed of leaving field labor for a modern education, fought for the
right to vote, and sought their own economic independence as
telegraphers, clerks, teachers and even professionals.
The Populist movement attracted hundreds of thousands of women. Why?
Because it was the only institution that offered women equal political
participation. In addition, it also “offered rural women hope for an
expanded social cultural environment, improved methods in the kitchen
and garden, a more just configuration of marriage and family
relationships, and increased opportunities for education, employment,
and perhaps participation in political affairs. In short,” writes
Postel, “the Alliance movement attracted large numbers of women because
it raised the prospects of a more independent and modern life.” And
this vision of female independence, he emphasizes, is incompatible with
an older historical description of “rural protest representing
tradition-bound farmers heroically defending their communities and
homes from the encroachments of modernity. ...”
Aside from demonstrating the modernity of Populism, Postel’s great
insight is that the particular way American capitalism developed was
not “predetermined.” The Populist struggle to develop a more regulated
and equitable capitalism, he argues, was not defeated because it was a
backward, traditional, agrarian movement. The Populist vision of
progress lost because its participants could not defeat the more
powerful political and economic interests they battled.
Elegantly written, meticulously researched, “The Populist Vision” is an
enthralling history of the movement that created the most pervasive
political impulse in American politics. Postel’s book has won both the Frederick Jackson Turner and Bancroft awards,
which it justly deserves. His work also helps us to understand the
actual Populist Vision that lies behind the superficial and shallow
rhetoric to which we’ve been subjected during this election year.
Ruth Rosen
teaches history at the University of California, Berkeley, is the
author of “The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement
Changed America” (Penguin, 2006) and is a frequent contributor to Dissent Magazine and Talking Points Memo.
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