The Populist Vision

Charles Postel. The Populist Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

This is the story of Americans who found themselves "on the short end" (vii) of drastic economic, technological, and organizational changes in the conditions of life in the final few decades of the nineteenth century. The Populist movement organized rural Americans in an effort to deal with the rise of industrial capitalism and nationalized institutions such as the railroad. Many historians and scholars have portrayed them as anti-modern agrarian idealists, perhaps noble or perhaps deluded, who reacted to inevitable changes in the social order and the economy which they did not fully understood but certainly feared. Postel sets out to correct that narrative. The Populists, he argues, were as thoroughly modern as the forces of capital and corporate power they faced off against. They were not fighting to undo the modern world, but to claim a level of control over their place within it.

Divided into two parts, "Farmers" and "Populists", the book begins with the rise of Farmer's Alliances in the South and the Midwest. These organizations sought to aggregate the economic import of thousands of independent farmers in order to create an organized counterweight to the clout that railroads and northeastern capitalist wielded in the 1870's and 1880's. The Alliances--and other related organizations--also sought to create independent civic, educational, and cultural organizations in their quest to improve rural life and empower rural people.

Ultimately, many rural activists would embrace political action as another tool for gaining economic leverage, and the creation of a third party--the People's Party--was the result. The party was short-lived; the fusion with the candidacy of Democrat William Jennings Bryan led to fracture over compromise, and opened the door for the two major parties (particularly the Democrats) to co-opt much of the Populist agenda; albeit in ways which mitigated against the more strongly democratic elements of that agenda.

Postel does not ignore the racial component of this story--there were African-American Populists, and there were occasions in which whites and blacks collaborated; but white Populism tended towards racism as often as not, and in the end racial solidarity trumped class and agrarian solidarity.

Postel also examines the more esoteric and unconventional nonconformist wing of the Populist movement--the idealists and iconoclasts who challenged conventional moral and intellectual orthodoxies. Once again, he reminds the reader that Populists were modernists, just in a different sense than the forces of urban "reform" and capital which ultimately triumphed.