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A short guide to American populist movements
WASHINGTON, D.C. - This week’s podcast was about populism in America, including its history and appearances in today’s politics. An earlier post looked that the words themselves – “populist” and “populism.” This post gives a quick tour of some American populisms.
Before populism was ever really an “ism,” it was simply a nickname for members of the People’s Party of the 1890s. In an email interview, the historian Charles Postel said:
The Populist Party was a farmer-labor party, whose policies laid much of the foundation for the Progressive Era reforms of the early twentieth century. The progressive income tax, the direct election of senators, flexible monetary policy, and the regulation of commerce, were among the numerous reforms that the Populist Party first succeeded in pushing into the center of American political debate. The common denominator of these reforms was to use the power of government, and especially the federal government, as a counterweight to the unprecedented power of railroad, banking, and other corporations, and to use the power of government to address the unprecedented crisis of inequality that, as the Populists put it, was making the United States into a country of tramps and millionaires.
In the early part of the 1900s, when people talked about populism, they were probably talking about the People’s Party and its progressive legacy. “Until the 1940s,” according to Michael Kazin in “The Populist Persuasion,” “conservative populism was an oxymoron.”
There were ugly political movements in the early part of the century that did use the style and rhetoric we now associate with populism. But they weren’t conservative in any meaningful sense.
“Sensational foes of modernist culture such as the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Father Coughlin in the late 1930s did attempt to stir up the pious masses against an elite they accused of having un-Christian designs on the nation,” Kazin wrote. “But neither sought to preserve the economic status quo.” These were hardly reformers either. Lunatic fringe is perhaps a better description.
More at http://www.caller.com/decodedc/a-short-guide-to-american-populist-movements .
Cross-posted in General Discussion.
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