When the American national state began, in the late nineteenth century, to acquire the legal authority and the administrative capability to regulate a mature industrial economy and to protect its citizens from the acknowledged pathologies of large-scale capitalism, it did so in response to the demands of politically mobilized farmers. [1]
The alliance between farmers and the workers who staffed the nation's industries, mines, and railroads was a difficult one to effect and maintain, and it existed more in the farmers' perception than in the workers'. Nevertheless, its legislative fruits were more abundant than is commonly realized, and the vision of this alliance of "producers against plutocrats" was central to the Populist and Progressive Eras and to subsequent reform efforts as well. [1]
~Sanders has the opposite contention of Magliocca~
It is the contention of this book that agrarian movements constituted the most important political force driving the development of the American national state in the half century before World War I. And by shaping the form of early regulatory legislation and establishing the centrality of the farmer-labor alliance to progressive reform and the Democratic Party, the agrarian influence was felt for years thereafter. Indeed, its characteristic ideological conceptions and language are with us still. [1]
...the failure of the dynamic nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century agrarian and labor movements to restructure economic relationships and erect a positive populist or social democratic state. What this rich literature has not provided is an account of the political interaction of these two sectors and the extent to which Progressive Era national state expansion embodied and the demands of farmers and workers. [2] ~nexus of the thesis
Two scholarly tendencies may account for the divided attention given to farmers and workers and the failure to credit their public-policy achievements. One is the strong urban labor bias of the first wave of the new social history. [see footnote 3, p. 421: Rural life has indeed seen revived attention, as in James Green, Grass Roots Socialism and Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism, for example. But the balance still strongly favored labor in the 1990s.] The other is the revived interest in state theory in the 1980s. In its Marxist-derived variant, state theory treats all state expansion as a response to the expressed needs of individual capitalists, a hegemonic capitalist class, or the structural requirements of the capitalist system. [see footnote 4, p. 421: Examples of such interpretations include, preeminently, Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism, and advocates of the "corporate liberalism" perspective, for example: James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State; Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Restruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916; and R. Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920.] "State managers" are viewed almost exclusively as executive branch officials, and the industrial working class is perceived as the only significant constituency--apart from capitalists--for those state actors. [see footnote 5, p. 421: For example, see Fred Block, Revising State Theory.] In work stressing state autonomy from capitalist class interests, there has also been a common focus on the executive branch a small proto-public service intelligentsia. [see footnote 6, p. 421: See, for example, Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State, and Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal.] Both schools devote little attention to broad-based farmer or labor movements, and both slight the national legislature in which social forces and "state managers" meet to bargain, demand, threaten, and win or lose heated battles over public law. [2] ~source material for primary sources
With agrarian populism relegated to the dustbin of failed crusades, it has been assumed that labor had no political allies with which to fight state and corporate repression and that the policy choices of the Progressive Era public were limited to the varieties of "corporate liberalism" embodied in the three major presidential candidates of 1912. [see footnote 7, p. 421: Such is the argument of Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism.] The most frequently cited explanation of early-twentieth century state development remains the instrumentalist account of Gabriel Kolko, despite the volumes of prior and subsequent work disputing his argument that Progressive Era state expansion reflected almost exclusively the interests of large capitalists. [2]
This book represents an attempt to set the record straight by examining in close detail the agendas of farmer and worker movements and the legislative histories and support patterns of the major late-nineteenth-century and Progressive Era statutes that forged the design, purposes, and method of the modern American state. Moving beyond the realm of executive and elite politics and working with a database very different from the private correspondence and association archives typically relied on by the "capitalist-dominance" school, this analysis reveals--in a far less selective and ambiguous way--the public positions taken by the political representatives of capital, labor, and farmers on the actual legal formulations of contemporary issues. These patterns of support and opposition present a very different picture of the origins of the twentieth-century state from those offered both by business-dominance accounts and by many writings of intellectual historians. Among the abundant records left behind by capitalists and intellectuals, some evidence of support for--even creative fostering of--programs expanding national state capacities can always be found. But to generalize from such instances to assertions of class responsibility for actual legislation is a great mistake. Business opinion favored a new national bank in the early 1900s but not the one produced in 1913. (Business opposition sparked the strong resistance of industrial-area Republicans to the Federal Reserve Act.) Certain northeastern, urban-based intellectuals--a Louis Brandeis or a George Rublee, for example--generated ideas about antitrust policy; but to credit that intelligentsia with the Clayton Antitrust Act is to say that it was the sword that won Jerusalem and not Saladin's Muslim army. The point is that in the Proposals that might have been generated elsewhere were seized upon by regional politicians. In the case of antitrust policy, ideas that were blunted by capitalist resistance in the core industrial cities became the weapons of agrarian forces who championed new laws in 1914. [2-3]
My argument is that the dynamic stimulus for Populist and Progressive Era state expansion was the periphery agrarians' drive to establish public control over a rampaging capitalism. The periphery generated the bulk of the reform agenda and furnished the foot soldiers that saw reform through the legislature. It did so because the political economy of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century periphery was innately antagonistic to the designs of core industrial and financial capitalism and had no effective means with which to fight it other than the capture and expansion of state power. [see footnote 9, p. 421: This argument confirms Michael Rogin's suggestion, made three decades ago, that rural insurgency in the United States replaced working-class radicalism as the central dynamic of anticapitalist contention. The Intellectuals and McCarthy, 187.] [3-4] ~Bryan perhaps not a tragic figure?
The ends, if not the means, were distinctly Jeffersonian and republican. [4] ~Perhaps Bryan in a nutshell?
The force of capitalist resistance was all the more powerful because of the failure of the labor movement in the industrial North to meaningfully challenge corporate political hegemony in its local bastions. [4]
In my view, labor's tentative and ineffective political mobilization must also be viewed in juxtaposition to the greater programmatic cohesion and institutional strength of agrarian interests. The existing two-party system, not rigidly bound by partisan discipline or centralized around a unitary government, was flexible enough to accommodate rising political demands from new quarters. But the Democratic Party of the post-1896 period was an overwhelmingly agrarian vehicle that carried the legacy of populism. The periphery farmers' enthusiasm for politics and the territorial nature of their political demands interacted with the structure of Congress and the electoral system to give them a driving force and an institutional strength that workers could not match. [see footnote 10, p. 422: In the terminology of social-movement theory, the institutional constellation produced a more empowering political opportunity structure for farmer than for labor organizations.] [4] ~contradicts most arguments I've read
Thus labor was offered a subordinate role in a party coalition, the content of whose program, because of its strong agrarian bias, could be labeled by its opponents as a threat to the health of the northern industrial economy. The pull of region diminished the counterpull of class in the industrial cities. In the early twentieth century the alliance with the cotton South in the Democratic Party was a problematic one for northern labor, not because (as some scholars have argued) the party served the interests of a Bourbon elite antagonistic to labor by virtue of its class position but because the party embodied the political demands of export-oriented agricultural producers whose position in the national economy different fundamentally from that of northern industrial workers. [5] ~key difference between Sanders's argument and other books on the subject
As a result of labor's ambivalence, the threat that might have been posed to northern capital by the coalescence of its two great antagonists was muted. [5]
That these things did not happen cannot be attributed entirely to political (electoral) weakness, because elements of constitutional structure (particularly federalism and the roles of the courts in determining legal meaning) formed powerful barriers to a victory of the "producer" classes. But it is also clear that the political weakness of the farmer-worker coalition often made it impossible to over-ride the Supreme Court's constricted view of national legislative powers. [5] ~see Magliocca's argument about the conservatism of the Supreme Court
...this book will describe the sources of a majority anomaly in American political development: social forces profoundly hostile to bureaucracy nevertheless instigated the creation of a bureaucratic state. [6]
While regional economic specialization made it possible for southern agrarians--even the plantation elite--to back the national political program of northern labor, it also rendered the formation of a national working-class movement extremely problematic. [6]
