This focus of this paper is the
importance of the 1896 U.S. presidential election, possibly the only
presidential election in American history in which a third party was
effectively able to dominate the agenda of one of the country’s ruling parties
(in this case, the Democratic party). “The year 1896, in short, saw the climax
of Populism, the time of its greatest significance in American history.” The
purpose of my paper, then, “is to show first that the Populists were not
tricked into naming Bryan
as their candidate.”[1]
While it can be argued how authentic of a representative he was, he adopted
Agrarian language and in the election of 1896 language was paramount in
determining the victor. “That McKinley and the status quo triumphed over Bryan and reform was not
because of any failure of the Populists. They, together with their political
allies for silver, concentrated their efforts in the campaign on the farmers
and industrial workers in the pivotal north central states. And there, through
circumstances largely beyond the control of the reform parties, the reformers
lost their first great bid for progressive change.”[2]
There was no way that the agrarian lecture circuit, even with Bryan at the
helm, could have fairly competed with the McKinley noise machine, otherwise
known as the national press.
Late-19th
century agrarian activism was “the flowering of the largest democratic mass
movement in American history”[3]
and necessarily incurred a tremendous backlash, which mainly played out in the
American press. In studying the language of the backlash, we gain insight not
only into the politics of the era, but a reveal of how democracy and power work
in America.
Agrarian Populism
should be understood in the context of the Civil War. Much as the Northern
press despised the “Popocrats,” it was in fact a North-centric economy that
created the agrarian foment leading up to the creation of the Populist party
that would eventually elect William Jennings Bryan as a presidential candidate.
The “first
spectacular flowering” of agrarian activist culture was born in the crucible of
the “Great Southwest Strike” of 1886, which followed on the heels of an 1885
labor victory. The Knights of Labor had forced the Missouri-Pacific railroad
line to honor a union contract for its employees. However, in 1886, Jay Gould,
the railroad’s magnate and “guiding spirit,”[4]
allowed management to fire workers for attending union meetings and the strike,
notable for is war-like violence, began:
From
beginning to end, the Great Southwest Strike was a series of minor and major
battles
between
armed strikers and armed deputies and militiamen, interspersed with commando-
like
raids on company equipment by bands of workers. Thousands were indicted,
hundreds
were
jailed, and many died. Workers “killed” railroad engines by displacing various
connections—in
the words of one indictment, “in such a manner as to unfit said engine for
use
by said company.” Major newspapers denounced the strikers, suggested that their
grievances
were imaginary, praised Hoxie’s “magnanimity,” and repeatedly predicted the
imminent
return of the men to their jobs. It was within those shifting emotional
currents
that
Alliance
radicalism emerged. [5]
The Farmers Alliance supported the
striking railroad workers and were celebrated in the pro-labor press. At the
time of the strike, most farmers were “likely to be dependent on a single rail
line and monopolistic or oligopolistic purchasers.” They had little control
over the price of their single cash crop, as prices were now set in a world
market. The periphery agrarians were charged higher interest rates than farmers
closer to the industrial core and were then “starved for credit in the long
months between planting and harvest.” The farmers on the periphery were also
more likely to be vulnerable to drought and insect damage, especially those in
the South. “These were the conditions that predisposed periphery farmers to
define their interests as antithetical to those of large industrialists,
bankers, and railroads and to look to the national state for solutions to their
difficulties. As their distress intensified in the 1880s and 1890s, they
undertook a broad evaluation of changes in the late-nineteenth-century economy
and of what those changes meant, not only for farmers but also for other
vulnerable groups. In particular, the agrarians reached out to factory, mine,
mill, and other railroad workers, who shared both their vulnerability to
concentrated economic power and their vision of a more decentralized and
egalitarian society in which the producers of the nation’s wealth would share
more fully in its bounty. In the process, they constructed the most original
and searching critique of industrial capitalism that American history has yet
experienced and a political movement that mounted the broadest challenge to the
foundations of the new economic system.”[6]
Other papers, such
as the Waco
Examiner, bemoaned the Alliance’s
arrival on the scene: “But for the aid strikers are receiving from the farmers
alliances in the state and contributions outside, the Knights would have gone
back to work long ago.”[7]
The Austin Statesman looked further
ahead and pondered future consequences: “Unless some eruption occurs between
the Knights of Labor and the Farmers Alliance, the affairs of Texas stand a
good chance of falling into the hands of those organizations at the state
elections next fall.”[8]
They were not wrong. By August of 1886 the Texas Alliance had formulated a
platform which became known as the “Cleburne Demands.” Goodwyne summarizes the
document thusly: “In short, the plank advanced the doctrines of the Greenback
Party. To address the immediate problem of a severely contracted money supply,
the committee proposed, as a consciously inflationist measure, the ‘rapid extinguishment
of the public debt through immediate unlimited coinage of gold and silver’ and
‘the tendering of same without discrimination to the public creditors of the
nation.’”[9]
The local press was quick to sound the alarm. The Galveston News
declared in no uncertain terms that the “Democratic Party is in a perilous
position.” The Dallas News further elucidated the looming threat: “[the Alliance] is dominated by the spirit of class
legislation, class aggrandizement, class exclusiveness, and class
proscription.” Furthermore, the Democrats must push back against the Alliance, because it would
be “scarcely less than treason to be indifferent to such a danger.”[10]
But language used by the Dallas News to influence readers reveals that
the Alliance
represented more than simply a political threat. The Alliance members were wrong—politically,
philosophically, and perhaps even spiritually: “The discontented classes are
told, and are only too ready for the most part to believe, that the remedy is
more class legislation, more government, more paternalism, more State
socialism. The current gospel of discontent as a rule is sordid and groveling.
Its talk is too much about regulating capitol and labor…and too little about
freeing capital and industry from all needless restraints and so promoting the
development and diffusion of a high order of hardy manhood.”[11]
The aforementioned (and quoted) newspapers represented a corporate culture
heavily influenced by a particular creed of “progress.” However, at the same
time, the Alliance
was developing its own ideology, one with a different idea of what constituted
“hardy manhood.” Goodwyn writes that the burgeoning Alliance culture was “steeped in a new language
of cooperation.”[12]
These ideas had root in an older, Jeffersonian, Le Cour idea of a “true
American.” [citation?]
In
light of the hyperbolic reaction form the press, it is worth investigating the
actual language of the Cleburne Demands for ourselves. Their basic purpose
appears to be to define farmers as a separate, American class; in a similar
situation as labor, but not the same. From the start the preamble states that
the members will be agitating the legislature “as shall secure to our people
freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are
now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations.”
The farmers are “our people” who should be linked with but are not the same as
labor. Per plank 1: “The recognition by incorporation of trade unions,
co-operative stores, and such other associations as may be organized by the
industrial classes to improve their financial condition, or to promote their
general welfare.” Rural farmers are not “the industrial classes” but they
identify with them in solidarity of class struggle.[13]
The
Cleburne Demands not only identify the rural farmers as a separate class, but
an exclusively American one. Per plank 4: “That measures be taken to prevent
aliens from acquiring title to land in the United States of America, and to
force titles already acquired by aliens to be relinquished by sale to actual
settlers and citizens of the United States.” So, while the press decried Cleburne as an attack on
American manhood, a more accurate description would be a redefinition of
American manhood, or, rather, American citizenship, or perhaps most fairly, of
farmer American citizenship. Certainly, Wall Street is not allowed membership
into the brotherhood (for example, plank 5 excoriates “the dealing in futures
on all agricultural products”). Nor are “railroads or other corporations.” Per
plank 6, it is only those [i.e. farmers] who develop land—not those who merely
own it—who can be called “actual settlers.” Plank 14 goes for the throat: “We
demand the passage of an interstate commerce law, that shall secure the same
rates of freight to all persons for the same kind of commodities, according to
distance of haul, without regard to amount of shipment; to prevent the granting
of rebates; to prevent pooling freights to shut off competition; and to secure
to the people the benefit of railroad transportation at a reasonable cost.”[14]
Surprisingly,
given how important it would become in the ensuing decades, the currency issue
does not get mentioned until plank 11: “We demand the substitution of legal
tender treasury notes for the issue of the National banks; that the Congress of
the United States regulate the amount of such issue by giving to the country a
per capital circulation [emphasis theirs] that shall increase as the population
and business interests of the country expand.” However, here we see why the
currency issue would become so important: it is key in defining farmers as a
class. Plank 12 goes on to insist on the representation of this class in
national government: “We demand the establishment of a National bureau of labor
statistics, that we may arrive at a correct knowledge of the educational,
moral, and financial condition of the laboring masses of our citizens; and
further, that the commissioner of the bureau be a cabinet officer of the United
States.” The final plank, #16, solidifies the farmer identity as a class in
opposition to big business and in solidarity with but different from industrial
labor: “We recommend a call for a National labor conference, to which all labor
organizations shall be invited to send representative men, to discuss such
measures as may be of interest to the laboring classes.”[15]
“Mostly
farmers, the Populists were not spokesmen for a static society, nor were they
opposing and fleeing from the industrial future. They sought rather to capture
federal power and use it both negatively to end economic abuses that had
flourished since the Civil War and positively to improve the lot of farmers and
industrial workers of the land. The Populists failed in 1896—but their failure
was by no means ignominious, and in one sense they triumphed at a later day
when their reforms were introduced under other auspices and the ‘Pops’ had
become but a fading memory.”[16]
There was a definite socialist influence, but the agrarians who would go on to
found the Farmers Alliance quickly distanced themselves from socialism. They
were, rather, Jeffersonian in influence.
From a
twenty-first century vantage point, it might be difficult to understand the
emotion that surrounded the discussion of currency forms in the late nineteenth
century. Here, it is worth exploring the “gold, “silver” and “greenback”
mindsets/ideologies and the major players involved. To put it another way, we
want to ask what did “silver,” for example, really mean and why was the
opposition to aggressively opposed to it? An important elucidating fact is
that, at the time, currency had both practical—indeed, life and death in the
case of the agrarians—consequences, as well as deep-seated cultural meanings.
The gold standard, the preference of the moneyed elite, signified the status
quo and the comfort that not only the elites, but many of the middle and
working class took in its apparent stability at a time of violently unstable
economic change.
When McKinley
promised “prosperity” and “a full lunch pail” he was not speaking to those of
his own class, but the workers who populated the factories of the country’s
economic northern core. McKinley’s “front-porch” campaign was low-key.
At
the 1896 Democratic National Convention, Bryan
declared, emphatically, dramatically, that the people on the periphery—workers
and agrarians alike—should not be crucified upon “a cross of gold” for the
benefit of the moneyed elite. Unlike
McKinley, Bryan
spoke in grandiose and often apocalyptic terms. Like a fire-and-brimstone
preacher, he promised deadly consequences should the country continue to
sacrifice its most vulnerable citizens for the sake of those benefitting from
the status quo (signified by his infamous “Cross of Gold” speech). He wanted to
change the course of the nation.
Bryan’s passion was
excoriated in the urban press. He was not an honorable man of God; he was crazy
and dangerous. The Farmers Alliance would prove to be the most important
organization that brought Bryan to power, though
not all in the FA were in lockstep behind Bryan.
Watson, prominently, continued to wage a vitriolic, third-party presidential
campaign of his own at the same time that Bryan
was trying to win votes across the country. To the die-hard Populists Bryan
didn’t go far enough, while the Republicans thought he went too far. In between
was a growing class of workers who didn’t understand the politics of silver,
but who very clearly heard the warnings of anarchy, poverty and punishment from
their employers and newspapers.
[1]
Durden ix
[2]
Durden x
[3]
Goodwyn vi
[4]
Goodwyn 35
[5]
Goodwyn 36
[6]
Sanders 29
[7]
Goodwyn 40-41
[8]
Goodwyn 41
[9]
Goodwyn 48-49
[10]
Goodwyn 49-50
[11]
Goodwyn 53
[12]
Goodwyn 53
[13]
“Cleburne
Demands.” American History Online. Facts
On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE52&iPin=E14309&SingleRecord=True
(accessed April 7, 2014).
[14]
“Cleburne
Demands.”
[15]
“Cleburne
Demands.”
[16]
Durden xi
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