CHAPTER IV

THE REVOLT OF THE WEST

That which was the body has come to be only the rich fringe of the nation's robe.-BENJAMIN HARRISON

POPULISM

Politics is the art of giving expression in legal forms to ideals of public welfare. In a democratic state, where the people are held competent to cherish their own ideals of public welfare and to choose the servants who are commissioned to carry out those ideals, politics must necessarily be popular in origin and trend. The thoughtful student realizes that it is not alone in legislative halls, courts of justice, and administrative councils that our history has been made. The activities of these institutions eventually respond and correspond to the pressure of economic and social needs, of which large sections or classes of the country have become sufficiently convinced to compel the attention of the government. Our history could be written in chapters dealing with a succession of crises originating in social needs: the need for the complete independence of a people long accustomed to self-direction, the need for the stabilization of law and credit under some adequate authority in federal system, the need for removing the embarrassing pressure of foreign nations from the borders of our young republic, the need for providing facilities for the development of our vast public domain in the West, the need for solving the momentous problem presented by two irreconcilable systems of society claiming the favor and protection of the same national government. With the settlement of this last problem through the ordeal of the Civil War and its bitter aftermath of reconstruction, another issue came into prominence; namely, the demand for a more equitable distribution of the mounting wealth of the country.

In a previous chapter (pp. 86-101) we have studied the causes of the discontent of the Western farmer and the Eastern wageearner, have noted the organization of political parties to forward their interests, and have traced the varying fortunes of those parties down to the election of 1880. The decade of the eighties, which we have just examined from the strictly political point of view of the activities (and the inactivities) of the government at Washington, was the great epoch in the development of independent parties. Under a bewildering variety of names-Farmers Alliance, Agricultural Wheel, Corn Growers Association, Anti-Monopolists, Farmers Mutual Benefit Association, Colored Alliance, United Laborites, Tax Reformers, National Farmers Alliance, and Industrial Unions-organizations of protest against the economic conditions which oppressed the farmers and the laborers sprang up, fused, split, re-formed into a hundred kaleidoscopic combinations. Their multiplying thousands of members, though not able to agree sufficiently among themselves in their demands to make a stable and unified party, were nevertheless all in agreement on the basal points of hostility to the railroads, the great industrial corporations, and the "money lords" of Wall Street.

We can distinguish three phases in the history of this movement of protest during the decade. From the union of the Greenback and Labor parties at Toledo in 1878 to the GreenbackLabor campaign of Benjamin Butler in 1884 the principle of fusion was prominent. During the middle eighties labor took the lead in the attempt to rally the discontented elements of the country. But the reaction from the desperate series of strikes which characterized the years of the "great upheaval" (18851886), the murderous Haymarket riot, the tyranny of Martin Irons at St. Louis, and the disrepute into which the Knights of Labor had fallen after the Haymarket affair (p. 194) brought a temporary halt to the labor movement, after it had put two parties into the field in the presidential election of 1888. The third phase of the movement of protest, which opened with a convention held at St. Louis in 1889, was marked by the emergence of the agrarian element as the dominating factor. The

St. Louis convention, which is generally regarded as the starting point of the Populist party, was called to effect a union between the Farmers Alliance and the Knights of Labor. The demands of the St. Louis platform, however, were all in the interests of the agrarian rather than of the industrial class,1 and the platform was signed by eighteen representatives of the Farmers Alliance and only three representatives of the Knights. "The numerical relation of these two committees," says F. E. Haynes, "roughly corresponds to the comparative strength of the two main elements composing the new radical party that was in process of formation."

The movement of protest gathered momentum rapidly in the West and the South. The year 1890, which saw Congress immersed in the debates over the tariff, silver, pensions, the trusts, and Federal elections, witnessed a different scene on the Western plains. "The country schoolhouses were packed with excited throngs. County, district, and state conventions were attended by great crowds of earnest and indignant farmers. The excitement and enthusiasm were contagious, and the Alliance men deserted their former parties by thousands." Ridicule and denunciation heaped upon them by the Republican and the Democratic press alike only intensified their zeal to "wipe the old parties off the face of the earth and establish a people's government." Without political organization or coherence as yet, the "embattled farmers" went to the polls in the autumn of 1890 pledged to support only candidates who were avowed foes of monopoly. In several of the Southern states (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida) the Alliance controlled the Democratic conventions and wrote its principles into the platforms. In South Carolina, Benjamin Tillman, the champion of the farmers and the wage-earners against the ruling aristocracy of the state, was elected governor by a majority of

1 For example, the abolition of the national banks, the free coinage of silver, the resumption by the government of the unutilized lands granted to the railroads, plentiful paper currency, government ownership of the railroads, the prohibition of "futures" in grain.

2 Frank B. Tracy, in the Forum, Vol. XVI, p. 243.

over four to one. The South sent to the Fifty-second Congress thirty representatives and one senator indorsed by the Alliance. Because the South was a solid Democratic section, the contest between radicals and conservatives there was naturally for the control of the state conventions. The bipartisan West, on the other hand, encouraged independent political action on the part of the radicals or, in the very strong Republican states, a fusion between the radicals and the Democrats. Thus, we find the farmers (generally in combination with the Knights of Labor or other industrial organizations) launching new parties in various Western states: a People's party in Kansas, a People's Independent party in Nebraska, an Independent party in South Dakota, an Industrial party in Michigan, with fusion tickets in North Dakota, Colorado, and other states. In the elections of 1890 these independent parties secured eight congressmen and two United States senators. They returned a majority of the Senate and half the members of the lower House in Nebraska, and sent large delegations to the legislatures of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado, and the Dakotas.

The remarkable showing of the agrarian malcontents in these elections made them more formidable, if not more respectable, in the eyes of the old parties. There was serious apprehension mingled with the denunciation now. Many a seasoned politician who had pursued his schemes and manipulations utterly indifferent to what he was pleased to call the "ravings" of a small group of "cranks," "calamity howlers," and "political rainmakers," found himself suddenly obliged to reckon with a new factor; for these despised people had furnished the one argument that the politician understands-votes. The partisan press began to concede, as one Democratic paper put it, that "the third-party movement might materialize into something more than talk." Another effect of the victories of the radicals in various local elections was the quickening of the movement for their fusion into a single political party to contest the presidential election of 1892.

A series of conventions, following one another in rapid suc

cession, accomplished this result. Delegates from three of the alliances met at Ocala, Florida, in December, 1890, and issued a platform of demands practically identical with the St. Louis platform of a year before. In June, 1891, a conference of five farmers' and laborers' associations met at Washington to formulate plans for a unified party on the basis of the St. Louis platform. On May 19, 1891, nearly fifteen hundred representatives of various radical agrarian and labor alliances, in convention at Cincinnati, launched a new party under the name of the People's Party of the United States of America. They invited "all progressive organizations" to meet in conference early in 1892 and, unless some other form of coalition were effected, to call "a convention of the People's party for the nomination of a president." The conference, which met at St. Louis on February 22, selected a national committee empowered to call a national convention, which assembled on July 2 at Omaha, Nebraska.

In the rapidity with which the forces of protest coalesced in a national political organization, in the fervor of the apostles of the movement, and in the hostility which it aroused among the conservatives of the country as a menace to orderly government and the security of vested interests, if not the direct incitement to spoliation, the People's party showed points of resemblance to the nascent Republican party of thirty-five years before. But there were three important points at least in which it differed from a truly popular movement destined to win a national triumph. In the first place, the appeal was to a discontented class which was so preoccupied with its complaints that it had little comprehension or concern for the effects upon the country at large of the remedies which it proposed for its own relief. Again, the inspiration of the movement, in spite of the fervor of its apostles, was not a genuine moral indignation, like the Republican rising of the middle fifties, but an economic "inferiority complex" whose victims attributed their unfortunate condition to the deliberate, malevolent persecution of the capitalists. And finally, there were discordant elements in the party itself for which there was no single principle, like the limitation