THE POPULIST CHALLENGE ★^653At great gatherings on the western plains, similar in some ways to religious
revival meetings, and in small- town southern country stores, one observer
wrote, “people commenced to think who had never thought before, and people
talked who had seldom spoken.... Little by little they commenced to theorize
upon their condition.”
Here was the last great political expression of the nineteenth- century vision
of America as a commonwealth of small producers whose freedom rested on
the ownership of productive property and respect for the dignity of labor.
“Day by day,” declared the People’s Party Paper of Georgia in 1893, “the power of
the individual sinks. Day by day the power of the classes, or the corporations,
rises.... In all essential respects, the republic of our fathers is dead.”
But although the Populists used the familiar language of nineteenth-
century radicalism, they were hardly a backward- looking movement. They
embraced the modern technologies that made large- scale cooperative enter-
prise possible— the railroad, the telegraph, and the national market— while
looking to the federal government to regulate them in the public interest. They
promoted agricultural education and believed farmers should adopt modern
scientific methods of cultivation. They believed the federal government could
move beyond partisan conflict to operate in a businesslike manner to promote
the public good— a vision soon to be associated with the Progressive move-
ment and, many years later, politicians like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
The Populist Platform
The Populist platform of 1892, adopted at the party’s Omaha convention,
remains a classic document of American reform (see the Appendix for the full
text). Written by Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota editor and former Radical
Republican congressman during Reconstruction, it spoke of a nation “brought
to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin” by political corruption and
economic inequality. “The fruits of the toil of millions,” the platform declared,
“are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes... while their possessors
despise the republic and endanger liberty.” The platform put forth a long list
of proposals to restore democracy and economic opportunity, many of which
would be adopted during the next half- century: the direct election of U.S. sen-
ators, government control of the currency, a graduated income tax, a system
of low- cost public financing to enable farmers to market their crops, and rec-
ognition of the right of workers to form labor unions. In addition, Populists
called for public ownership of the railroads to guarantee farmers inexpensive
access to markets for their crops. A generation would pass before a major party
offered so sweeping a plan for political action to create the social conditions of
freedom.
What were the origins and the significance of Populism?