Populist Era

Populist Era. No historical period conforms precisely to a specific span of years, and the Populist Era is no exception. The events of the 1890s—the time period known as the Populist Era—reflected social and economic pressures, and reactions to those pressures, that had been building for decades. Similarly, the Populist movement itself, a response to long‐term political, economic, and social changes, was rooted in earlier agrarian protest movements—the Farmers' Alliance movement of the 1880s, the Granger movement of the 1870s—and even in rural folkways antedating the Civil War.

Populist Politics.

The politics of the Populist Era were issue‐oriented. Following several decades of weak presidents, corrupt politicians serving corporate interests, and dominance by two parties that often seemed indistinguishable, the Populist party and Populists generally took a sharply different approach. Whereas both the Republican party and the Democratic party usually nominated candidates allied with corporate interests, Populists championed America's workers, small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers. While the dominant parties espoused Social Darwinism, laissez‐faire (at least in theory), and governmental passivity, Populists advocated active government intervention in the economy and regulation of trusts and corporations in the public interest. Whereas Presidents Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley all advocated a sound‐money policy to protect creditors, and used force to break strikes and unions, Populists favored the unlimited coinage of silver and other measures to increase the money supply and help debtors, and opposed the use of troops against striking workers.

The Economy.

The 1890s was a decade of depression, unemployment, widespread poverty, and crisis in rural America. In the period after 1870, the rapid settlement of western lands, improved agricultural technology, and the spread of railroads and steamship lines resulted in agricultural overproduction and increased competition in world markets, driving prices down and putting farmers in a harsh credit squeeze. The Panic of 1893, triggered by the failure of a London banking firm, caused many British investors to unload their American stocks, precipitating a stock market crash. The sell‐off came just as the high McKinley Tariff of 1890 depressed the agricultural export market. The resulting three‐year depression, the worst in American history up to the 1930s, saw soup kitchens, desperate strikes, farm foreclosures, and ragged armies of the unemployed.

Evidence of unrest abounded. In July 1892, strikers at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead Steel Works near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, fired on two barges loaded with Pinkerton detectives, killing seven and wounding many more. State militia broke the strike, and a steelworkers' union did not emerge until the 1930s. An 1894 strike at George Pullman's sleeping‐car works near Chicago, protesting wage cuts combined with rent increases in Pullman's company town, precipitated a confrontation between the American Railway Union and the General Managers Association, the latter representing twenty‐four railroads operating through Chicago. The Cleveland administration, securing a court injunction against the strike, sent in federal troops when escalating violence threatened delivery of the mail. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1894, “Coxey's Army,” three hundred unemployed workers led by the Ohio Populist Jacob S. Coxey (1854–1951), staged one of the earliest marches on Washington, demanding jobs and relief.

The South and the Great Plains, both Populist strongholds, suffered severe economic deprivation exacerbated by drought in the 1890s. Indeed, the rural South experienced a prolonged economic downturn that extended from the end of the Civil War through the 1930s. Along with agrarian protest, factory workers' discontent in industrialized areas of the South, such as northern Alabama, contributed to the climate of unrest.

Desperate economic conditions were widespread. Some 40 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 1900, a higher percentage than in the Great Depression of the 1930s. No organized social service network, no minimum wage laws, no unemployment insurance, and no federal welfare programs protected the poor. Poverty fell especially hard on the unemployed, marginal farmers, urban immigrants, and other particularly vulnerable groups. African Americans experienced not only high rates of poverty but the added burden of racism. Jim Crow laws spread across the South in these years, imposing a rigid system of racial segregation. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1898), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld racially segregated public facilities, from schools to transit systems. A record of 226 lynchings occurred in 1892, mostly in the South and Southwest. The total number of lynchings from 1889 to 1918 exceeded 2,500, and most victims were African American. Even in the North, de facto segregation and discrimination prevailed. Speaking in Atlanta in 1895, the era's most prominent black leader, Booker T. Washington, urged African Americans to acquire useful vocational skills and to avoid agitation for racial equality.

Society and Culture.

Battered by economic crisis and political upheaval, American society and culture also underwent major transformations. The nation's ethnic composition was changing dramatically. Nineteenth‐century immigration peaked at 790,000 in 1882, and even during the depression of the later 1890s, between 250,000 and 350,000 newcomers arrived annually. The massive immigrant influx contributed both to desperate overcrowding and appalling conditions in city slums and to a vibrant urban culture of immigrant festivals, and social organizations; churches, saloons, dance halls, and beer gardens; and music halls offering vaudeville shows featuring broad ethnic humor and the latest songs from Tin Pan Alley, such as After the Ball (1892) and Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage (1900).

The “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe unsettled many native‐born Americans of northern and western European ancestry. The increasing numbers of Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians alarmed many American Protestants and gave rise to urgent strategies to convert and assimilate the newcomers. The waves of immigrants placed tremendous pressure on local governments and city services, providing convenient scapegoats for those seeking explanations for municipal corruption, labor unrest, and political radicalism. Blacks moving to cities—although only a trickle compared to the Great Migration ahead—experienced disruption as well. Between 1880 and 1915, 25 to 30 percent of urban black households had a mother but no father present, twice the percentage for rural black families. The economic crisis affected the family life of immigrants and native‐born, white and black alike. Across America, unemployed men left home to seek jobs in other cities and even other regions, sometimes abandoning their families in the process. On foot and in freight trains, tramps scoured the country seeking employment or, if not a job, a handout.

Reform Movements.

Populism was only one manifestation of a larger reform current in the 1890s that launched the Progressive Era. Through the leadership of Jane Addams and others, settlement houses arose in the immigrant districts of most big cities. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, under its energetic president Frances Willard, pursued a broad reform agenda, while the Anti‐Saloon League, founded in 1895, launched a coordinated campaign for national prohibition. Social Gospel advocates like W.D.P. Bliss and Washington Gladden exhorted middle‐class churchgoers to apply their Christian principles to the social problems of the new industrial order. Charles M. Sheldon's best‐selling Social Gospel novel In His Steps (1896) told of an urban congregation that commits itself to reform by posing the question “What would Jesus do?” The British journalist William T. Stead made a similar plea in If Christ Came to Chicago (1893). The photojournalist Jacob Riis offered middle‐class readers a harrowing picture of slum life in How the Other Half Lives (1890), as did the novelist Stephen Crane in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). William Dean Howells addressed urban labor unrest and the economic roots of crime in such novels as A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and The Quality of Mercy (1892), while Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) portrayed the corrupting effects of city life on an ambitious young woman from the country.

The 1890s saw activist stirrings among middle‐class American women, signaling the revival of the woman‐suffrage movement and women's broad‐scale reform involvement in the Progressive Era. Kate Chopin in The Awakening (1899) portrayed the stultifying life of a vivacious young wife in the tradition‐bound and patriarchal culture of New Orleans, while Charlotte Perkins Gilman explored the effects of women's economic subordination in Women and Economics (1898). A vogue for bicycles and bicycling, a prelude to the automobile era just ahead, put many young women as well as young men on wheels in the 1890s.

America and the World.

Expansionist fever pervaded the Populist Era, fueled by missionary zeal, a quest for overseas markets, desires for an empire to match those of the European powers, and the jingoism of tabloid newspapers. In Our Country (1885), the Reverend Josiah Strong offered a potent array of nationalistic, racial, and religious arguments to awaken Americans to their global destiny. In The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), Alfred Thayer Mahan urged an expansion of U.S. naval power, including acquisition of the refueling stations that a two‐ocean navy demanded. After a series of diplomatic interventions in South America, the decade ended with a major expansion beyond the nation's continental borders: The United States annexed Hawai'i in 1898 and, in the same year, in the aftermath of the Spanish‐American War, acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain. An anti‐imperialist movement recruited such varied supporters as William Graham Sumner, William James, and Andrew Carnegie, but most Americans approved of the nation's imperial aspirations. In foreign affairs, as in the domestic arena, the last decade of the nineteenth century stands as a kind of curtain‐raiser to the twentieth.

The Culture of Populism.

The Populist movement unfolded in a rapidly changing society. Many Populists lived in a traditional world that preserved rhythms of life dating to the pre–Civil War era and earlier. In the small towns of rural America, churches and the village store nourished community life. Cooperative patterns of work, common rites and rituals such as hunting and fishing, land‐inheritance customs, and grazing on common lands in the West all encouraged premodern and anti‐commercial values and patterns of life. But this traditional life was under siege. The spread of railroads brought “drummers” (traveling salesmen), mail‐order catalogs, and national magazines whose advertisements offered an array of mass‐produced goods. And farm life itself was evolving under the economic pressures posed by expensive new equipment; rising land prices; a global market; and new systems of transporting, processing, and marketing agricultural products.

Threats to traditional folkways from industrialization, business consolidation, commercial agriculture, and the rise of urban‐immigrant America spurred the agrarian protest spirit known as Populism. Some historians have seen Populism as a reactionary phenomenon, a last stand for agrarian values before the juggernaut of modernization. Richard Hofstadter, in his influential Age of Reform (1955), viewed the Populists as deluded reactionaries who scapegoated Jewish bankers and big‐city immigrants, oversimplified complicated economic issues, and romanticized an idealized past of self‐sufficient yeomanry.

Certainly Populism had a darker side. One leader, Thomas E. Watson (1856–1922) of Georgia, soured by his foray into biracial agrarian protest, became a virulent nativist and racist. Yet recent historians generally adopt a more positive approach, viewing Populists as realistic in their analysis of their problems and the remedies they espoused, and tolerant by the standards of their time, providing a place for women in their movement—the first American political movement to do so—and even, in the South, for a time making common cause with blacks in a class‐based political campaign. The historian Lawrence Goodwyn, in The Populist Moment (1978), emphasized the creation of a “movement culture” based on a shared commitment to democratic forms and institutions. From this perspective, Populism appears at heart a cooperative movement, not only in the narrow sense of establishing purchasing‐and‐marketing cooperatives, but also in the broader sense of seeking to promote cooperation among agrarian communities with similar values, a shared culture, and a remembered past. From the perspective of a century later, Populists can be seen as precariously suspended between two worlds: one of agrarian values and cooperative, grassroots, democratic institutions and the other a modernizing, corporate, impersonal world. The Populists’ attempt to adapt to that emerging modern world while preserving as much as possible of their traditional values, folkways, and institutions gave their movement—and the decade that bears its name—its unique character as an epoch in American history.
See also Advertising; Agriculture: The “Golden Age” (1890–1920); Americanization Movement; Anti‐Semitism; Bryan, William Jennings; Depressions, Economic; Expansionism; Feminism; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Latin America; Free Silver Movement; Homestead Lockout; Labor Movements; Literature: Civil War to World War I; Missionary Movement; Popular Culture; Populist Party; Pullman Strike and Boycott; Race and Ethnicity; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Tariffs; Temperance and Prohibition.

Bibliography

John D. Hicks , The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People's Party, 1931.
Norman Pollack , The Populist Response to Industrial America, 1962.
Gilbert C. Fite , The Farmers’ Frontier, 1865–1900, 1966.
Lawrence Goodwyn , The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, 1978.
Bruce Palmer , “Man Over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism, 1980.
Steven Hahn , The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890, 1983.
Barton C. Shaw , The Wool Hat Boys: Georgia's Populist Party, 1984.
Robert C. McMath Jr. , American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898, 1993.
William F. Holmes, ed., American Populism, 1994.

Wayne Flynt