By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
The Populist Party was created in 1892. What’s particularly remarkable about them was that they were racially integrated. Black farmers in many counties in the rural South began to make common cause with white farmers.
Ignatius Donnelly on the Plight of the Farmers
The Party held its first convention in Omaha. The author of the party’s platform was Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesotan. The rhetoric of the party platform of 1892 gives you a vivid sense of how the farmers were the victims of conspiratorial forces. Here’s what it said:
We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislators, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion is silenced, business is prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized. If not met and overthrown at once, it forebodes terrible social convulsions or the establishment of an absolute despotism.
Planks of the Party
The actual platform of the Populist Party contained a number of planks.
- First, the direct election of senators. From the time of the writing of the Constitution right through into the 20th century, United States senators weren’t chosen by direct election. They were chosen instead by the state government.
- A second plank was federal control of—or the nationalization of—the railroads, telephone company, and telegraph.
- A third plank was Charles Macune’s Sub-Treasury Plan, giving farmers far more economic control over their own destiny.
- A very important plank was the free coinage of silver at a 16-to-one ratio with gold. This was another of these inflationary measures. At that time, silver could not be monetized, the currency plan was artificially constricted.
- They favored a graduated income tax, so that the nation could more accurately tax those who were best able to afford it.
- They also advocated an eight-hour working day for all industrial workers and a ban on immigrants.
Attempts at Liaising with Industrial Working Class
The last plank of their platform represented their attempt to win the allegiance of the industrial working class. They recognized that they, as a farmers’ movement, didn’t, on the face of it, have much to offer industrial workers, but they attempted to get them because they realized that only by having urban working-class voters could they become a majority party, which was their intention.
The idea of the ban on immigrants was this: Very often when a strike took place, the employer would hire recent immigrants as strike-breakers. If immigration was stopped, there would be fewer strike breakers and, in fact, fewer industrial workers altogether would be coming into the country, which would put the workers in a stronger bargaining position.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Not So Popular After All
As it gradually turned out, these attempts to win the allegiance of the industrial working class were unsuccessful and very few townsmen ever did, in fact, vote Populist.
Many of the Populists believed that a great conspiracy was strangling the nation, as Donnelly’s rhetoric made clear, that the combination of British and Yankee bankers, many of them Jewish, had deliberately created these hard conditions and worsened the farmers’ plight. They talked also in conspiratorial tones about an event called the “Crime of ’73”.
Crime of ’73
Now, the Crime of ’73 was a legislation that had been passed in 1873 after the end of the Civil War, removing silver as a circulating medium of currency. At the time, it had been unremarked upon, and had gone almost unnoticed, but now, suddenly, farmers, wishing to have an inflationary currency, looked back at 1873 and believed that it was at that moment when their economic woes were intensified.
In the Jeffersonian tradition of believing that farmers are the good people of the world, that they have all the intrinsic virtue and that by contrast, cities are sinks of vice, they were always willing to believe the worst of city dwellers. They had a broad anti-Semitic streak; they were anti-Jewish, holding a very abstract form of prejudice. They also had a generalized—but largely abstract—fear of immigrants, too.
Achievements of the Populists Party
Eventually, many of the Populists’ proposals did find their way into the law or into the Constitution, but not at the Populists’ urging. For example, federal income tax and the direct election of senators were both accomplished by Constitutional amendments, the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments of 1913. The Populists had hoped for much closer federal control of the railroads, but that goal was achieved by the passage of the Hepburn Act of 1906.
The Interstate Commerce Commission had been founded back in 1887 to regulate interstate commerce, but originally, its enforcement panels were very slight. They were dramatically escalated by passage of the Hepburn Act in 1906, as more and more people recognized that the railroads gave them an enormously powerful position, with profound effects for the whole nation’s economic life and that they should therefore be closely monitored, to prevent them from abusing their monopoly position.
Issues Persisted
Many of the issues confronting the Populist farmers continued to plague their successors. Tenancy and sharecropping became more common, and farmer ownership less so. The fact that more and more farmers were rendered bankrupt meant that if they were going to stay on the land at all, they had to stay on as tenant farmers.
American farming itself was beset by overproduction throughout most of the 20th and 21st centuries. Southern sharecropping remained very widespread right into the 1940s and 1950s when, finally, the invention of cotton harvesting machines contributed to the depopulation of the southern countryside.
Common Questions about the Planks of the Populist Party
The Populists attempted to get the industrial working class because they realized that only by having urban working-class voters could they become a majority party, which was their intention.
The Populists’ proposals found their way into the law, not at the Populists’ urging, but were both accomplished by Constitutional amendments, the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments of 1913.
The Crime of ’73 was legislation that had been passed in 1873 after the end of the Civil War, removing silver as a circulating medium of currency.
