In Our Time - The American Populists

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what, in C19th America's Gilded Age, was one of the most significant protest movements since the Civil War with repercussions well into C20th. Farmers in the South and Midwest felt ignored by the urban and industrial elites who were thriving as the farmers suffered droughts and low prices. The farmers were politically and physically isolated. As one man wrote on his abandoned farm, 'two hundred and fifty miles to the nearest post office, one hundred miles to wood, twenty miles to water, six inches to Hell'. They formed the Populist or People's Party to fight their cause, put up candidates for President, won several states and influenced policies. In the South, though, their appeal to black farmers stimulated their political rivals to suppress the black vote for decades and set black and poor white farmers against each other, tightening segregation. Aspects of the Populists ideas re-emerged effectively in Roosevelt's New Deal, even if they are mainly remembered now, if at all, thanks to allegorical references in The Wizard of Oz.The caricature above is of William Jennings Bryan, Populist-backed Presidential candidate.With Lawrence Goldman Professor of History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of LondonMara Keire Lecturer in US History at the University of OxfordAndChristopher Phelps Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of NottinghamProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, in the late 19th century, in late 19th century America, farmers in the South and Midwest suffered with droughts and low prices, while the new urban and industrial centres were thriving.

The farmers were isolated, politically and physically. One described his farm as two 450 miles to the nearest post office, 100 miles to wood, 20 miles to water, 6 inches to hell. They formed a populist or People's Party in the 1880s to fight their cause, put up candidates for president, won several states and influenced policies for some time. In the south, though, their political rivals were so worried by their appeal to black farmers that they rushed to suppress the black boat and set black and white and poor white farmers against each other, reinforcing segregation.

With me to discuss the American populists are. Lawrence Goldman, Professor of History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Mara Keir, lecturer in US history at the University of Oxford, and Christopher Phelps, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Lawrence Goldman, how had the civil war, 1861 to 1865, affected the American farmers? Well, that war was fought largely by farm boys on both sides, both the north and the south, put into the field armies made up of farm boys from farms and small settlements.

But the war itself changed America. It began, or at least it stimulated, a process of industrialisation and urbanisation, which largely affected the north, with great cities, offering, as it happens, opportunities to American farmers in the north, close to those cities. But in the south, the effects of the war were rather different.

The great plantations were broken up, Slavery, of course, was ended. Slaves were emancipated. And the southern agricultural structure changed and not necessarily for the better. What emerged out of the Civil War in the South for farmers were systems known as sharecropping, which involved both the freed people, blacks who'd been emancipated, and also many poor white farmers as well. The plantations were divided into small lots, 40 acres. Black and white families worked these lots,

and at the end of the season, the crop was shared when it was sold, often 70 to the family, 30 to the landholder. This was not a very progressive form of land tenure. It didn't enrich anyone. There were lots of poor farmers in the south from the 1870s on the, who found themselves struggling.

There were many other conditions that were against them, but this was a period when, particularly in the South, conditions were tough. And energy in all sense of the word was sucked into the North as the Industrial Revolution really took up and hit in America. And very soon, America was going to become the leading industrial nation, nearly the industrial nation in the world, where in the South and the West, the farms, you say, broken up in isolation, as was mentioned in the introduction of an extreme kind.

It was also known as the Gilded Age. Why was that? Well, actually, the term comes from a novel, an 1873 novel that Mark Twain wrote with a co-author, Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age, a story of today. And it's really a satire on the change that has hit America. If in the 1850s and the 1860s, America was really considering the great moral question of slavery and the great issues of national identity,

are we to be a free nation or a slave nation? When the war was over, quite rapidly the focus changed to enrichment, to industrialisation, urbanisation, and getting rich quick. And Twain satirised this in this novel, The Gilded Age. It's partly set in Tennessee where... What did he mean by Gilded? Well, when you gilded a piece of metal, you put a very superficial veneer, if you like, of gold,

over base metal. And what was the superfitting? What was the base metal? The base metal is what America really is. When you strip away the gold, when you strip away the gilding, what you've got is corruption, which the novel is all about, you've got inequality, you've got poverty,

you've got unfairness, and you've got prejudice of many types as well. And what Twain is doing is trying to get at, if you like, the base metal underneath what's at least on the surface, is glittering.

Was there a consensus of recognition for this book? Yes, quite rapidly. Although it's not one of Twain's finest pieces, quite rapidly it was seen for what it was. A story of today, it was seen really as a piece of art getting to the heart of the way America was going at that time. Thank you very much.

Mara Kea, what was life like for farmers in the Midwest and the South? So they were very isolated. They were the people who voted populist, as opposed to the people who were voting Democrat or Republican, were the most isolated of farmers. They were not necessarily poorer than other farmers closer into town, but they were the furthest away. As the quote you started with, really demonstrates. I'm talking about geography. But that also had an impact culturally as well. So it meant that they lived in the least diverse communities.

They lived in communities with the few individuals. denominations. So they had a lot of churches, but they didn't have the whole sort of range from liturgical to evangelical and pietistic. They mostly had what we might call sort of shouting religions. And they were the farthest from train stations, from county seats. Works been done that the counties, a populace had about 50% less population than the counties with Democrats. And so they needed sociability and they were not really part of the intellectual

mainstream and so this was both a strength and a weakness. They were lonely and isolated but on the other hand they didn't imbibe as regularly in the propaganda or the beliefs about how things should be. And in one way they were living a great dream of America set out by Thomas Jefferson that this should be an agrarian society where you grew your own food, you live

your own life, you were the yeoman farmer. Woodsworth mentioned that too. And that was an ideal, they were proud, they were the real Americans. Yes, and indeed, you know, that's one of the things that Brian's, William Jennings Brian said in his famous Cross of Gold speech was that if you burned all the cities but kept the farms alive, the cities would spring up again overnight. But if you burned all the farms, tumbleweed would go through the streets of the cities. Let's get back to the condition of the farmers.

They're isolated, some mightness. The nearer a big city you are, the less likely you are to be poor, but they were bypassed, they were poor, and in that sense they're poor of influence. And big business was against them in all sorts of ways. But let's go back to something you said about religion. What impacted their religious life have on their beliefs? So one of the things is that they were classic Protestant soul of script,

They believed in the inerrancy of the Bible, that the Bible was correct, and that, you know, as believing Christians, they could read the Bible and that they could interpret it on their own. They did not need the mediation of an expert to explain what was happening in the Bible. This is a Presbyterian shrine of Protestantism, isn't it? Absolutely. Everybody's equal in front of the Bible. Absolutely. And this carries over into the belief of being able to look at the world around them. and the conditions around them, and to be able to interpret it themselves. It gave them self-confidence to be able to come up with their own platform. And so they're there, they're in the communities. And we're talking about, at this stage, we're talking about all white farmers, aren't we?

No, because the black farmers are also from a similar pietistic culture. And so you have similar beliefs, similar set beliefs. You're talking about great similarities? I mean, there's some discussion about how, it was and whether the camp meetings of black farmers would be more effervescent, one might say. But there are a great deal of similarities in terms of that enthusiasm. Sorry, I interrupted you. I didn't mean to. And let's take a proportion.

We're mainly talking about white farmers at the beginning, and then there are black farmers because of the end of slavery and the distribution of Blan or so on, but they're not in a majority in this movement. No, the black farmers were never in a majority in the movement. Are they anywhere near a majority? No, but it really depends on a county-by-county basis what kind of alliances were made, how strong the Republican Party was in some of these counties.

Thank you. Christopher Phelps, we've got this new parties springing up. It goes through various names and ends up being called the populists. What were the priorities of the main parties, the Republicans, Democrats, and Democrats at this point, What was his new party up against? So the party system that had evolved since the Civil War in the United States was very much, even though three or four decades on, shaped by the memory of the Civil War.

And party loyalties were sectional. So in the north, the Republican Party was hegemonic or dominant. And in the South, the Democratic Party. And politicians of both parties in both regions would waive. the bloody shirt. They would, you know, a Democrat running in a tight race in the South would tar their Republican opponent with the memory of the Civil War of the Boys of the Gray who had given their lives and of the danger of a return to Republican rule and what it had meant for crushing the South and likewise in the North. The two parties were also shaped by distinct ethno-religious

loyalties. In the South, the Democratic Party was very much a white man's party and announced itself as such. In the north, there was a bit of a division between the urban centers, especially New York, where Democrats did have viability electorally. And they played to immigrant populations, especially Catholics, but also German Lutherans and so forth. whereas the Republicans tended to play to the more evangelical Protestant denominations. And the big difference there, the reason that played out politically and meant something, was the issue of alcohol. And the evangelicals tended to be prohibitionists, and that was coming on the horizon.

It would happen in the 20s. And the people who voted Democratic like to have their stein of beer with their sausage. Are we talking about two entrenched parties here? Was it ever likely that the third party could get going? Well, there was an opening because both parties weren't paying attention to the desperation that many agrarian people were feeling. So how did this third party, which in one way did remarkably well, especially in the middle, how did it get organized? So the first thing that happened with the farmer's movement, was that, and we've had people around the table speaking very eloquently to their isolation.

And what was remarkable in the 1880s is that farmers surmounted that isolation by coming together in community. And they first did so through the farmers' alliances. The alliances were, in some ways, very much in the old American tradition because initially they attempted self-help. They tried to solve their conditions by their own activity, pooling their resources in cooperative stores, in cooperative exchanges, so that, for instance, cotton farmers bringing their cotton to market, if they sold together might be able to get cheaper freight rates

and might be able to get better prices in the market. And same with buying guano from South America. They knew by then that fertilizing your land could help. And so they were trying to pool resources. But because they're poor dirt farmers, these efforts were very undercapitalized, these farmer cooperatives. And the alliances started to realize that there's going to have to be social and political reform.

forms. How did they move to the political? That's it. They move to the political because they realize they must have measures that are going to enable them to get access to credit. So getting possessions of power? Yes. Set up a party where people could vote for them.

Well, first they lobbied the main parties because obviously they were still loyal Democrats and loyal Republicans and they tried to get their own elected officials to adopt measures that will help them, including the sub-treasurer plan, which was a very big plank and nationalization, the railways and so forth. getting nowhere with the major parties.

And in getting nowhere, they decided to launch a People's Party of their own. And they had quite a bit of success to get going. They got, can you tell us? The People's Party, which has a sort of first run in Kansas in 1890 and then gets going nationally, 1892, had an extraordinary success for an independent third party in American politics. For example, in the 1892 election in Kansas, they took all five house seats, five of the seven house seats, pardon me.

They took the Senate, they took the governorship, and they nearly controlled the lower house of the legislature. And in numerous other places, Georgia, Texas, where the populists were strong, they sent people to Congress. There was a senator from North Carolina who was a populist, and they gained in the 1892 election 22 electoral votes, which is highly unusual that third party will take enough states to get electoral votes in the electoral college. Thank you very much. We'll just take a side-sep for a moment and come back to their progress. But Lawrence Goldman, they're part of the world and the world is changing and is particularly changing in the production of commodities.

Could you briskly tell us where we fit in with that? Yes. Where the American promise fits in with that? I mean, this is really, you might say, a first era of globalization. And what's happening is that across the world, markets for raw materials and food and commodities are glutted, and they're glutted because all over the world in the later 19th century, new land is coming into production,

not only in the prairies of North America, but the grasslands of South America, South African, Velt, Australasia, Siberia. And there is an enormous excess, surplus of grain and food materials and raw materials and commodities generally. And inevitably, the price falls. And at the same time, acceleration of the ease of global communication. Precisely. I mean, you now have the age of steam.

You have steamships and railways, and it's possible to move perishable goods much more rapidly around the globe. You can bring grain through the Great Lakes system, down through the Erie Canal, across in steamships to Europe very rapidly. And all of this changes the dynamic. You're no longer, as it were, in a world of small markets. You're in a global market. anyone connected with the land. It's not just small dirt farmers in the south or the west. Anyone connected with the land is having trouble in the late 19th century. One of the reasons people are moving across from Europe.

Precisely. It's because, so we've got that. We've also got a drought. Yes. And we've also got this business of the farmers, the isolated farmers, not being able to get reasonable rates for the transport of the land. I think one of you says it was cheap.

take stuff from Chicago to Liverpool than across two states in the United States. Can you just quickly tell us why that is? It's simply that one of the great concerns they have is monopolistic power. It's a general problem in the Gilded Age but it's a specific problem for

farmers. They depend if they're going to get their food and materials to market they depend on railroad companies and the railroad companies have them by the throat and can charge what they like. Just as they complain about banks. They need credit. If you're a farmer, you always need credit. You always have to

have things advanced and interest rates are high. It's difficult to get credit. Money is expensive as it were in the late 19th century. Precisely. I mean... And the farmers want silver to come into the team to play because that would give them more ease. After the civil... The civil war is fought with the dollar off the gold standard. Dollars are printed. After the war is over, America goes back on the gold standard. And that contrasts... the money supply, and that is deflationary. That makes credit expensive, but it also reduces prices and makes life for farmers very difficult. What they want is an expansion of the money supply, and they say, if we back the dollar by silver,

and there's lots of silver in Colorado and the Midwest, then we can expand the money supply. That will be inflationary. We'll get more money. So their troubles come in battalions. Mara, what were the main political goals? Back to what Christopher was talking. They get going, let's say. say. But then what are their main goals? Well, for one... They get going there, but as it was pointed out there,

if senators or this, that and the other, what are their main goals? Well, for one, they want to increase the availability of money. And so they want to go to a bi-metallic standard where species is both silver and gold, and paper money is backed by both so that it will bring about the inflation. But they also want things like fairness in transportation, so that they also want things like fairness in transportation, so they want to nationalize the railroads, and they want to nationalize the telephones and telegraphs, so that the big lines, instead of getting rebates for the big shippers like Standard Oil,

will in fact subsidize the small spur lines, which are not quite as traveled on as much, but the farmers require to get their crops to town. They also want other things. They want their banks and their money in the banks to be safe. So they're constantly concerned about runs on banks and the closures on banks. So they want to nationalize the banking system or somehow be able to bank through the post office so that that will hold its money. Or they also want something called the sub-treasuries. system, which is they put their grain into government silos, have it evaluated, and then they're issued certificates at 80% the rate, and then they can trade those certificates like dollars, and then be able to sell it at any moment. And so they're trying to get some sort of economic security that is loosened up, that is loosening up the availability of money and their access to money.

A lot of those ideas must have seen radical and revolutionary at the time. They're quite commonplace today, aren't they? And they're quite good ideas. But at that time, they were rigidly opposed and fearsomely opposed by the southern white lease. So can you tell us about that, Christopher? Yes. Well, the idea of going off the gold standard was to both the Orthodox economists of the day and to the wealthy, the great fortunes of the Gilded Age, Anathema,

Because, of course, if you're a farmer, you want the dollar to be able to purchase more so that people in the cities who are buying can buy more cloth and more food, and therefore you are able to sell more of your produce. But that means basically that the fortunes of the rich would be reduced in value. So there was a belief that sound money. required it to be rooted in metal, especially gold. So the Democrats who control, let's just for the sake of ease here, speed really, controlled the South, largely controlled the South, saw this coming.

And at one stage it was 9% of the boat. What did they do to kill it, which is what they set out to do? Yeah, the Democrats were terrified of the emergence of populism because populism essentially was taking poor, white, and siphoning them out of voting for the Democratic Party, which they'd been able to convince them to do because of the legacy of the Civil War, and into an alliance in many cases with poor black farmers. And that idea of an interracial alliance of working people and poor people and farmers against the southern elite, the bourbon elite, as they were called, of the New South was frightening. So they essentially pulled every trick in the book. They ballot stuffed.

They brought in voters who had been dead for 12 years and were still on the rolls somehow because obviously the registrar was a Democrat. They brought in black, desperately poor, illiterate farmhands from the large plantations, applied them with whiskey, paid them a dollar each, and counted their votes. There were all sorts of machinations. There was violence, outright violence in many cases against populist organizers. So a number of elections were stolen outright from the populists. And then eventually the white Southern elite,

who might be skipping ahead of the story here, but they meet the populist threat by the consolidation of segregation of segregation. racial segregation, what we associate with the American South. Yeah, I'll come down in a moment because it's fascinating. But at this stage, is there a chance that the populist movement is going to embrace black farmers, poor black farmers, as well as poor white farmers? Right. These were poor white southern folk who had been schooled in white supremacy. It was uneven and it was imperfect, but it was extraordinary given that how much interracial solidarity was

forged. For example, I'll give you an example in 1892 in the election for a seat in the House of Representatives in a district in Georgia. Thomas E. Watson, Tom Watson was the fiery populist candidate, and he was immensely popular, and he'd actually been elected congressman on a Democratic ticket before, so he was a viable People's Party candidate, and the Democrats pulled out all stops against him. But in one case, there was a black Methodist preacher, and bear in mind the AME church is very big in the black community and was one of the ways the black populist organized was through their churches because you could meet in the church at night and nobody would know your meeting. And a black Methodist preacher who had given more than 60 speeches on behalf of Tom Watson was threatened with lynching. And Tom Watson called in 2,000 armed white populists to defend him from being lynched. and that was an immense show of solidarity.

Watson, by the way, told white farmers, you are kept apart separately, that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. In other words, this racist talk is not really about white solidarity. It's about making you the dupe so that you stay poor. Lawrence, nice go to go. But it's just worth adding what happens in the rest of Tom Watson's career because it is very, very instructive.

He is indeed when he emerges as probably the leading populist advocate in the early 1890s, an advocate of an interracial coalition of poor whites and poor blacks. But there's a problem with that, which is many whites won't cross the colour line. Many potential supporters of populism see that coalition as threatening to their status, and they won't join with blacks in that situation. And Watson moves on, therefore, and in the later stages of his career, when he's still a leading populist and indeed a presidential candidate, he's notable for his racism.

He turns against the idea of an alliance with blacks because he knows that if you link with the black voter, although by then there are very few black voters, you will lose many white voters as well. Mara wants to get in Mara. Yeah, but it is not just the whites who were not reaching across the color line. Blacks also feared reaching across the color line. They didn't want to lose what little power they had with the Republican Party.

and a lot of them also saw the populace were landholders, and they saw them as exploitative as, you know, any white landholder. So there was hesitancy on both sides, and there had to be sort of a building of trust. Just one addition here, though, which is agreed with all of that, but I would like to add in a bit about the black populace so that they're not missing from the story, which is that there was a mass movement of black populist.

Nobody knows how many. The organizer claimed a million members. That was probably wildly inflated, something like 250,000 of them or something. But this was really a civil rights movement of Ant La Letra, and a kind of post-Reconstruction black freedom movement among the black populists in which they were asking for federal enforcement of civil rights in voting rights. They were asking for an end to the convict lease system,

which is where prison. prisoners in jails and prisons were leased out to farms at discount rates and it was a way of making black labor worthless. And all sorts of measures that white populist wasn't necessarily on the white populist radar, but the colored farmers alliance, which is a parallel to the farmers alliance, was raising these sorts of black freedom demands. Now, can you tell us briskly, Lawrence, about a figure called William Jennings, Brian, who was figured very largely for a long time. Yes, Brian is probably the most important American statesman

that I suppose no one knows anything about and has never heard of. But he was three times the Democratic presidential candidate in 1896, 1900 and also 1908. He emerges as a young man in 1896 at the Democratic Party Convention in that year. Mara has already referred to the speech he gives, the cross of gold speech, which may well be the most famous and influential speech ever given in American political history. This young man, this boy orator, as they called him, speaks before the Democrats.

He speaks about the gold standard and the way it destroys opportunity for America's farmers. He ends, you know, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. that invocation of Christian rhetoric with secular concerns is very potent. He gets the nomination. And he's really the spokesperson for the Democratic Party for a generation. And he's known as the great commoner because he reaches out to the common people of America or tries to across all these different social and economic divides we're talking about and seeks, as it were, for their support.

he's eventually Secretary of State he never becomes President and only for a short time and indeed at the very end of his life he's famous because of a trial that takes place in Tennessee concerning evolution in 1925 at the end of his life he prosecutes a young man who teaches the theory of evolution he's a strong Presbyterian but if we go back to 1896

what's very interesting if we're talking about how the Democrats deal with the populists is that having nominated Brian, he becomes, as it were, a vehicle for pulling populists away from the People's Party because he speaks the language, the language of silver and the language of hope for them, and that destroys populism. Mara, what signs were there of racism in this party, in the Populist Party? We've skirted around it. Can you just briefly take us to the heart of it?

Well, basically it's a question. of white supremacy. And one of the, race, of course, in the United States is very complex. And one of the things is, if you're poor, are you going to seek alliance with other people who are poor despite their race? Or are you going to sort of gain stature in your own eyes by thinking, well, at least I'm white? So the racism is there. And, and And there are a number of cases where people cross the color line and get over their racism. And in part, it may have to do with the familiarity that living in an isolated community may mean that you know everybody in the community. So they are no longer representing, people are no longer representing a race, either white or black, but rather are representing, you know, Jim and Bob.

But there's another aspect of racism with the populism that they're quite known with, which is their anti-Semitism. They were quite anti-Semitic in their cartoons and their concerns about conspiracy. And, of course, their distrust and dislike of bankers takes the form of the Jewish banker. And they had good reason to actually be afraid of bankers because one of the things that happened, they hated Cleveland, who was president at the time. And in 1893, there was a huge crash. It was as bad as, you know, there had been one in 1880s. 1830, which was as bad, and then it was the 1893 one, and then there was the 1929 crash.

But the 1893 crash, to help get out of it without bringing in silver, was that Cleveland brokered a deal with J.P. Morgan and with the Rothschilds to borrow $65 million worth of gold. And so the populist looked at that and said, here we have a homegrown solution to bring in silver, but in fact, the power elites are making these deals with these bankers, many of whom are Jews, and indebting our country to these foreign powers. Christopher, can they be thought of as progressive in any way, the populists? Oh, I think they were very progressive. of the Mara's point is shared by a number of historians, including Richard Hofstead,

are a famous American historian, but there are others who have contested this, and I'm more on the side of those who have contested it and see the populaceous, it's very tolerant, actually, and the anti-Semitism is being marginal to their movement. So I'll just lay that on the table. But as far as them being progressive, they were extremely progressive. They are, because they're trying to challenge the political system, And because in order to get their demands made, they have to make inroads into the political system. They were very much for a kind of clean government.

They advocated direct election of U.S. senators, which at the time were usually picked by state legislatures who were subject to corruption. They wanted direct election of the president. It might interest your readers to know that had the populace. Listeners. Sorry, listeners. Never mind. They can do both multitasking. Had the populist triumphed, George W. Bush and Donald Trump wouldn't have been president of the United States because the Omaha platform of 1892 on which the People's Party was launched, called for an end to the electoral college and for the direct election of presidents.

In some ways, they're more progressive even than our current system in terms of their democratic demands. They wanted a political system, a political democracy and an economic democracy. Do you want to pick that out? Well, yes, I mean, I would agree. But I think the debate between whether there are, if you like, hostile nativist racist versus whether they're progressives is maybe slightly beside the point in a way, because they're always both. They favour state regulation and indeed state control. They want to nationalise the railroads. They want to nationalise the banks.

And you can understand that. and we might think of that as a kind of left-wing policy. On the other hand, they speak these languages, they hate immigrants, they're suspicious of blacks, they discuss anti-Semitism and so forth, and that might seem right-wing. But I think part of the problem here is that we need to understand 19th century America

is not quite mapping onto the way we think about left and right. Because actually at this time, in the late 19th century, it's the Republican Party, the party of gold, the party of the bank, and of the industrialists, but has traditionally always favoured the greater level of government intervention. Republicans believe in a government

that lays down an infrastructure for economic growth, for example. Christopher. Yes. I don't think I can lay to rest, but I want to sort of lodge a principled objection to the idea that the populace were always racist, bigots, and so forth. Let's look at North Carolina. In North Carolina,

there's an alliance between the populace and the Republicans that lasts a bit longer than most. to the peak of the People's Party. And it lasts so long that in 1898, the Democrats had to arrange a coup in Wilmington against the populist Republican Alliance, which was very much an interracial alliance, and black Republicans were on board for it. And there are countless examples of that where the racism is what's coming down on the People's Party from the Democratic Party.

The white supremacy is used to disenfranchise black voters, institute segregation, that whole system that we know from Martin Luther King fighting against it 50, 60 years later, is crystallized at the turn of the century precisely to defeat the people's party, to strip the black voter of the ability to unite with the white voter. And they were tolerant. By the way, they weren't anti-immigrant either. There was a study of farmers in South Dakota, and the immigrant farmers, who were mostly Scandinavian, you know, Swedes and Norwegians and so forth, were much more likely to be People's Party members than Republicans. And so many of them were immigrants.

Can I just post this over to you, Mara, because what seems to me from what the reading I've done for this is that the racism is not, there'll be a bit of racism ever, but he's not coming out of the white part. It's being imposed by the Democrats, by preventing the black people from voting, by saying you can only vote if your grandfather,

voted knowing damn fine that the grandfather was a slave and couldn't vote and so and so forth. This was imposed. It was driven in. And it was that which started the segregation, which worked against the principles that had come out of the civil war. It is not the fault of the white, poor white farmers. What do you think? Absolutely. I mean, I think the democratic elite was very worried. And they started creating white men's citizens unions that were, that were engaged both in controlling the nomination for the Democratic Party, but also they were involved in what's known as night riding, which was to actually go out and physically intimidate both the populace black and white through the destruction of property and through physical threat.

On the other hand, I would also say that while we're talking about all the political advances of the populace, we should also talk about some of their cultural conservatism, that they are willing to reach across the color line and they are tolerant of people that they know and are like them, but they're deeply suspicious of the city and they're deeply suspicious in the culture of the city. Can we briskly like another side step and talk about the Wizard of Oz? Who wants to wonderfully elliptically sum that up and make it relevant? Let me, Mara.

And then I'll supplement if you miss it. anything. Where you go, Marie. You've gone to about 25 seconds. Okay. The Wizard of Oz is a populist allegory. And Dorothy represents America. The scarecrow represents the farmer, the tin man,

represents the dispossessed workers. And the cowardly lion is William Jennings Bryan, who is the great orator with a tremendous roar but when push comes to shove, you know, actually steps away from his principles and gets suckered into the Democratic Party. And meanwhile, Oz, which stands for ounce and the gold ounce, is controlled by the Emerald City by a humbug. The wizard is a humbug. He is a fake. The man behind the curtain is just a political fixer who's trying to promise everything. to the people who vote for him. That was very good, but you forgot to mention Dorothy's silver shoes.

Yes, and the yellow brick road. One thing at a time, the silver shoes. Yes, actually, the ruby slippers are just because they worked better in technicolor. That, in fact, they were initially silver shoes and that she was able to get where she needed to go with the silver shoes on the yellow brick road. You've got to go, the decline, can we be brisk now? we've got not enough time left to discuss this properly, but why did it decline and why did it almost disappear

from American history books for a while? It declined, I think, because it can't make the necessary alliances. We've talked about the problem of building a coalition across racial divides in the South. It can't even make links these poor farmers in the South and the West with other farmers in the North because their economic conditions are better and there isn't a kind of national farmers' party.

nor can they make alliances with urban workers because urban workers don't want higher food prices, they want lower food prices. Urban workers don't want free trade, which is what these farmers want. They want protective tariffs to keep manufactured goods from Europe out of the American market.

They also face the classic dilemma of the third party in 1896, which is that one of their demands, free coinage of silver, which was a subordinate demand in the core popular, imagination. I mean, they're much more interested in nationalization of the railroads and in the sub-treasury plan that Mara talked about and so forth. But the free coinage of silver is adopted

by William Jennings, Brian, who was never a People's Party person. He's a silver Democrat. And they face a choice. Do we take one plank, which sort of interests us, but is not really where the action is for most of us. But it's about as good as we're going to get from a national party at this point. And it's a surprise because bear in mind, Brian winning the Democratic non-nation at that point would have been like Bernie Sanders winning last year. And they decide to go in with the Democrats. And then he nonetheless loses to William McKinley, a Republican gold standard industrialist-backed guardian of the status quo. So they come out with nothing. And their party is forever kind of on the margins after that and never really viable.

Very brief. I'm afraid, Mara. Quite frankly, the economics improve. The dysplationary spiral stops. There are a couple bad harvests in Europe so that the demand for American wheat and cotton goes up. And there's the Yukon gold rush. So suddenly there is more species. So in general, the economy improves, improves,

and therefore the populists feel better. Well, thank you all very much. We'll have to come back to the other bit of the other time. Thank you, Mark here, Christopher Phelps and Lawrence Goldman. Next week we'll be discussing Alexander Pushkin's masterpiece, Eugene O'Niegen. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. And I usually start by saying, what did we miss out, what we should have had in. It was good, though, because it was multi-perspectivo,

and actually I think that reflects the field. The field differs over how tolerant they were, to what extent they were racist as opposed to their opponents, all that we got on the table, and we shouldn't have had one point of view about it, actually. It was good that we had different points of view because historians aren't of one mind about it. One thing we missed, actually, were women,

that the populace were really open to women. Yes, and part of this had to do with... Yeah, Mary-Lise is awesome. Hold on, it's getting worse. I mean, even though this is a big... control it. You've said something important than these two chapses are up with you. Okay. Can you please start again?

So one of the things we did not include were women that the populace were very women were very involved in the populist party. Indeed, the Omaha platform that we heard so much about that convention was chaired by Francis Woolard

who was the president of the women's Christian Temperance Union. But there were also other really important women who campaigned for the populace, including Mary Lease, who is known for saying, you should raise less corn and more hell. That's actually apocryphal, but when asked about it, she said, I think it's a damn good sentiment. And she was for suffrage and the Kansas populace for suffrage.

Bear in mind that this was 20 years before Kansas adopted suffrage and more than 20 years before the U.S. adopted suffrage, they were standing for it. Yeah, absolutely. And the states which were going for suffrage and were enacting suffrage were often populist strongholds. Yeah. It's not for me to guide you here.

If you're going to say nothing, there's one question I'd really like to ask. And this thing that was mentioned that the segregation was imposed from above and violently imposed from above, and that began trouble that was not resolved until the 1960s.

Is there quite a bit in that or how much is... I mean, you know, you're faced with an insurgency to the Democratic Party control of the whole South which emerges after the Civil War in Reconstruction. A democratic elite has taken control of more or less all the southern states. And there's this threat that comes from poor people. It doesn't matter what color they are, they might vote you out. So what do you do?

one of the things you do is take up an idea which is talked about in the South from the 1870s, which is disenfranchising the blacks. After the Civil War, blacks can actually vote. They are given the legal right to vote by the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment, but violence and as Christopher has said, all sorts of other corruptions

make it very difficult for them to vote. Why don't you, if you're faced with this problem, actually now formalise disenfranchisement. And in 1890, the first state does that, Mississippi, and then state after state, from 1890 to 1908, when Georgia does it, remove the right in various ways of blacks to vote. They can't actually say blacks don't vote, but they can't vote. Like what did your grandfather vote?

That's right. Literacy tests, poll taxes. Can you read the sheet of paper quickly if you don't vote? And there are all sorts of ways. And so you pass these laws to get round the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which are designed to try to ensure black suffrage. And blacks then can't vote until the 1960s. But Jim Crow goes even further, and that's Jim Crow is the name of the system of segregation that the Southerners are putting in in the 1890s and early 1900.

It's actually to try and completely separate poor whites and blacks. So street cars being separated. railroads being separated, saloons being separated, so that you cannot, that people will not have a chance to get together to talk and to see their commonalities. So it is both about voting, but it's also about sociability to prevent any kind of alliances and fellow feeling. Exactly. If you stigmatize African Americans and make them subhuman, in fact, menacing and dangerous. white womanhood's virtue is threatened by them and so forth, then to associate with them in common cause is to not just be in rebellion against the elites

to actually violate good sense and custom. Throughout southern history, race is used to trump class, and this is another famous example, where you emphasize racial divisions in order to prevent people with a common unity, a common set of interest coming together on class lines. And unfortunately, it works.

It nearly doesn't. And that's why the populists are so interesting and exciting. But it does, in the end, undermine them. Why did it disappear so much? I had to rush that at the end. But it was written about very little, and it's taught in not taught at universities. Well, yeah, people give a lecture.

I used to give the lecture on it. I suppose you can only sustain this kind of ad hoc coalition with all the problems that it faces for a short period of time and all those issues that Mara drew to our attention at the end undermine it. It even starts to rain in the West and the drought ends and so farmers get better harvest and they forget about it. I think the important point to draw out is these problems don't go away.

Rural America continues to be in great poverty all the way through to the 1930s. when it once more becomes a huge national and international. We have grapes of wrath. We should have got to rather than Wizard of Moss, in my opinion, but I was overruled. Yes. I mentioned that one, but I think that, you know, and in the 19th, there's hundreds of thousands of rural families have to leave the land.

So this is a continuing problem, and it's not as if, you know, in some ways it goes away. I think also even though as an independent party they disappear, and even though farmers' movements never are as coherent as they were in the 1890s, you do see a legacy of the People's Party in various reforms that were enacted over the next 50, 60 years, including, well, direct election of senators happened. The Federal Reserve System in 1913 could be seen as essentially the system adopting a formerly radical idea, which is that you should have a flexible, adjustable currency that's geared to the needs of the whole economy

that's not just fixed automatically by the supply of a metal. And railroads are also regulated as well, at the end of the First World War. So, you know, in a sense, the populist program passes on to succeeding movements of reform, notably what's known as the progressives and progressivism, who are based in the cities, but who take many of these ideas and run with them to regulate the economy better in the interests of the people. I think we are about to be interrupted. There's an offer we can't refuse. And the offer is tea or coffee.

Tea would be sweet. There are many more history and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk.