It is a widely accepted view that 1896 marked the end of agrarian-led reform. With the Populist dissenters vanquished, the two major parties are said to have become sectional vehicles of elite dominance. In a tacit bargain, the plantation elite controlled the South, and the industrial and financial elite dominated the North. Competition and voter turnout declined sharply; most congressional seats became safe regional sinecures. (see footnote 1) Within the southern Populist heartland, the restoration of elite hegemony began with the passage, in state after state, of new constitutions and electoral laws that made it all but impossible for African Americans to vote. Populists generally resisted the imposition of electoral restrictions but without enough force to block them. Frustrated after their own electoral defeats at the hands of a manipulated black vote, a minority of southern Populists were beguiled by the Bourbon Democrats' argument that if only the electoral process could be "purified"--by the elimination of the black franchise--white southerners could divide among themselves without fear of corruption or loss of white social supremacy. (see footnote 2) [148]
The results of the Bourbon electoral coup are well-known. Registration requirements, poll taxes, literacy tests, and new ballot forms proved devastating to the poor-white electorate as well as the black. The new institution of the white primary, offered as a sop by the Bourbons, was not a "purified" arena in which class politics could thrive: it gave rise to a politics characterized by short-term and personalistic, rather than programmatic, factions and to a new breed of racist demagogues. (see footnote 3) In spite of these developments, the South was washed by a new reform tide in the first decade of the twentieth century, but in both South and North, reform, in the conventional telling, was now very much an urban, middle- and upper-class phenomenon. (see footnote 4) Agrarian [148] radicalism had presumably died at the polls in 1896 or been buried under a mound of suffrage restrictions. [149]
The problem with this account is that it ignores the continuity across the 1896 divide and the fact that most of the national legislative fruits of the Progressive Era had their unmistakable origins in the agrarian movements of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Given the indisputable facts of suffrage restriction and resurgent racism, how can we explain the apparent afterlife of populism? One might, of course, deny the paradox and interpret the national legislation of 1909-1917 as a conscious program of the bourgeoisie (see footnote 5), but this interpretation is difficult to sustain empirically, as evidence set out below will demonstrate. [149]
The alternative approach, followed here, distinguishes intrastate and national political processes and argues that the decline of interparty competition and voter turnout and the tragedy of racist politics within the South did not destroy the agrarian impulse in national politics. That impulse retained significant organizational and institutional support in the agrarian areas, and its rationale in the national political economy was not significantly undermined after 1896, despite the improvement in farm prices and currency volume. There were, in particular, four factors that sustained the agrarian reform program in national politics after 1896: a new wave of farmer organization; the direct primary; the national Democratic Party leadership of William Jennings Bryan; and most fundamentally, regional political economy. [149]
Bryan
The ideological and organizational leader of the transformed Democratic Party from 1897 through at least 1912 was William Jennings Bryan. Whatever Bryan was in his early political career in the 1890s--perhaps, as his critics charge, an ordinary left-of-center silver Democrat with a flair for oratory--[154] such a superficial description hardly fit him during the period from 1896 to 1915 (the year in which Bryan effectively ended his political career by resigning his cabinet seat to protest administration policies he believed would lead the country into war). [155]
At some point after receiving the nomination of the Populist and silver Democratic Parties, Bryan became, heart and soul, a populist. He was committed to the farmer-labor alliance, to a great expansion of government regulatory functions, and to the democratization of wealth and political power; he opposed militarism at home and abroad; and in all his stands, political principle was cast in the strong moral tones of nineteenth-century republicanism (see footnote 33). In his remarkable career, including three presidential races, Bryan's electoral base was periphery farmers. He himself never found a formula with which to win the labor vote of the core and diverse regions, but that was not for lack of trying. [155]
In the 1900 campaign, Bryan played down the monetary issue and stressed opposition to trusts and imperialism and support for labor. The Democratic platform that bore his imprint "condemned two practices inimical to labor's well-being, the injunction and the blacklist; pandered to its fears by opposing Asian immigration; called for a federal 'labour bureau'; and carried Bryan's own pet proposal for avoiding strikes and lockouts, a plan of voluntary arbitration" (see footnote 34). [155]
None of these propositions, however, could counter the Republicans' "full dinner pail" and Spanish American War victory. The Republican convention had proclaimed, in Chauncey Depew's words, "gold and glory--gold, the standard which...had given us the first rank among commercial nations and the glory of our arms, which has made us a world power" (see footnote 35). Northern intellectuals drawn to Bryan's anti-imperialism were offended by his economic radicalism and his collaboration with Tammany Hall (whose Irish leader, a gold Democrat in 1896, had come over to Bryan for his anticolonialism). Many western silver Republicans, on the other hand, were too nationalistic to stay with Bryan on the imperialism issue. The GOP again funded a propaganda blitz to warn workers of the dangers of a devalued dollar and cuts in the protective tariff, and the northeastern press reported business contracts contingent on McKinley's reelection and attacked Bryan for stirring up class resentments. Though Tammany's endorsement improved Bryan's vote in New York, and anti-imperialism had a similar effect in Massachusetts, McKinley still swept the core and diverse states and took from Bryan's collumn six states, all west of the Mississippi, that he had carried in 1896 (see footnote 36). [155]
Though Bryan remained the most influential national Democrat, his [155] demoralized party turned elsewhere in 1904.He had led a progressive reform party twice and lost. Shortly after the 1900 defeat, northern conservative Democrats (centered in New York) and disgruntled southern Bourbons alienated by the party's economic radicalism were emboldened to seek reinstatement. They promised success if the party returned to its pre-1896 "moderation" under their leadership. Emerging victorious out of the internecine party warfare of 1901-4, the conservative "reorganizers" succeeded in nominating the New York gold Democrat Judge Alton B. Parker. However, Bryan attended the convention as the leader of the progressive wing and obtained appointment to the platform committee. There he countered every conservative proposal with a pgrogressive plank of his own, advocating nationalization of railroads and the telegraph, a government-issued currency, an income-tax amendment to the constitution, a strong antitrust plank, anti-imperialism, electoral reform, and several labor planks. Though the convention had seemed stacked against him, Bryan rallied his troops and, by the force of his personality and his standing with the mass of Democratic voters, succeeded in foiling the reorganizers' plan to adopt a conservative platform. He took to the hustings in support of state and local progressive Democrats, attacked Roosevelt for his militarism, and propounded his own progressive program. When Parker lost overwhelmingly, "the Commoner" was ready to pick up the pieces and reconstitute the party. Abandoning its outreach to the "plutocracy," the Democratic Party, under Bryan's leadership, returned to the basics of the farmer-labor alliance and the populist creed. (see footnote 37) [156]
By 1905 progressive reform was coming into bloom in state and city politics across the West, Midwest, and South, with tentative buds in the Northeast, and even the White House colored in remarkable new hues. Bryan, like a devoted gardener, encouraged all this growth, advertising it in his paper, the Commoner, and fighting for the cause in Nebraska, on the Chautauqua circuit, and on the hustings as he campaigned for progressive state and local candidates around the country. He praised Roosevelt's efforts in peacemaking abroad, and in antitrust, railroad regulation, and meat inspection at home, but he criticized the president for not going far enough. (see footnote 38) Indeed, Roosevelt's progressive transformation may be read as a response not only to the small progressive wing of the GOP but also to the massive support for Bryan's agrarian progressivism in the interior of the country. [156]
Bryan and his hinterland constituents had few serious disagreements on policy; in the case of the southern Democrats' defense of white supremacy, the absence of conflict points to a serious contradiction in the reformer's democratic creed. Indeed, Bryan's greatest flaw as a champion of the [156] disadvantaged stemmed from his compromises with racism within the farmer-labor coalition that he hoped to lead to power. Though he courted black votes, strongly condemned lynching, and advocated equal "citizenship" rights in education and voting, Bryan did little, if anything, to put these ideals into practice and seldom challenged the prejudices of the southern Democrats. Likewise, he took the Gompers/AFL line on Chinese exclusion. (see footnote 39) On the "woman question," however, the Nebraskan's stand was far more advanced than that of most of his troops, and his public advocacy of government ownership of railroads and telephone and telegraph companies caused great distress for conservative elements in the party. (see footnote 40) [157]
As one of the many reform enterprises in which he participated, Bryan was one of the fathers of the constitution of the new state of Oklahoma in 1907, advising on its construction and strongly endorsing the resulting document. Not surprisingly for a state soon to host the nation's strongest Socialist Party, the new platform was described in the Outlook as "the most radical organic law ever adopted in the Union." It had extensive provisions for direct democracy via the initiative and referendum and contained provisions for the election of administrative and judicial officials, advanced labor and antitrust sections, and authorization for state and city governments to engage in any enterprise they might wish to undertake. (see footnote 41) When, in the following year, Bryan supervised the drafting of the Democratic Party platform, he combined elements of the Oklahoma constitution, the Nebraska state party platform, and labor planks endorsed by the AFL. (see footnote 42)
Even after his third defeat in 1908, agrarian and labor reformers rallied around the program Bryan had championed for years, and conservatives in the party were forced to endorse ideas they had long opposed. It was the pull of Bryan's leadership, his de facto control of the party's nomination, and the desire to tap into his mass following that transformed the prim, conservative governor of New Jersey (who had been a Cleveland-gold Democrat) into the candidate of progressive Democrats in 1912. Bryan played a major role in securing the nomination for Woodrow Wilson, wrote the 1912 platform that charted the path of reform for the "New Freedom" years, and coached the candidate through the campaign. And it was Bryan who inspired the congressional Democrats to push the president on antitrust, labor, banking, currency, farm credit, and Philippine independence and who encouraged them to restrain Wilson's momentum toward preparedness and war. (see footnote 43) [157]
Writing of Bryan's lifelong devotion to political reform, Claude Bowers observed in the early 1950s, "Almost everything we've got today in the way of reforms originated with Bryan." (see footnote 44) Later scholars and pundits associated [157] him more with the event that immediately preceded his death: the Scopes evolution trial. However, even that involvement, which reflected the aged reformer's commitments to evangelical Protestantism and strong local religious communities, had more to do with the political reform impulse than has been generally recognized. Bryan strongly objected to arguments that drew on the social implications of Darwinism to justify the exploitation of workers and consumers and to discourage reform movements. Against those tenets he wrote in 1921, "Pure food laws have become necessary to keep manufacturers from poisoning their customers; child-labor laws have become necessary to keep employers from dwarfing the bodies, minds and souls of children; anti-trust laws have become necessary to keep over-grown corporations from strangling smaller corporations, and we are still in a death grapple with profiteers and gamblers in farm products." (see footnote 45) The Antimonopoly-Greenback-Populist creed that Bryan embodied was naturally antithetical to Darwinism, whose founder, in The Descent of Man, had argued against reforms that checked the salutary process of weeding out the weak and less fit. In addition, Bryan abhorred Nietzsche's Darwinist defense of war as both necessary and desirable for human progress. Such ideas, he believed, were important factors in the development of German militarism leading to World War I. (see footnote 46) [158]
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