The Populist Persuasion

An American History

Michael Kazin

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501714511
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In The Populist Persuasion, the distinguished historian Michael Kazin guides readers through the expressions of conflict between powerful elites and "the people" that have run through our civic life, filling it with discord and meaning from the birth of the United States until the present day.

Kazin argues persuasively that the power of populism lies in its adaptable nature. Across the political spectrum, commentators paste the label on forces and individuals who really have just one big thing in common: they are effective at blasting "elites" or "the establishment" for harming the interests and betraying the ideals of "the people" in nations that are committed, at least officially, to democratic principles. Kazin's classic book has influenced debates over populism since its publication. The new preface to this edition brings the story up to date by charting the present resurgence of populist discourse, which was front and center in the 2016 elections and in the Brexit debate.

Chapter 1

Inheritance

Experience proves, that the very men whom you entrust with the support and defense of your most sacred liberties, are frequently corrupt, not only in England but also in the colonies…. If ever therefore your rights are preserved, it must be through the virtue and integrity of the middling sort, as farmers, tradesmen, & c. who despise venality, and best know the sweets of liberty.

—“Publius,” spokesman for Philadelphia artisans, 1772

The sickly, weakly, timid man, fears the people, and is a Tory by nature. The healthy, strong and bold, cherishes them, is formed a Whig by nature.

—Thomas Jefferson, letter to Lafayette, 1823

I hold that if the Almighty had ever made a set of men that should do all the eating and none of the work, He would have made them with mouths only and no hands; and if He had ever made another class that He intended should do all the work and no eating, He would have made them with hands only and no mouths.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1859

RHETORIC FOR AMERICANS

IN 1892, Georgia Populist leader Tom Watson wrote a brief synopsis of American history intended for use in that fall’s election campaign. Like any good patriot, he began with the Revolution: “Those who wished to revolt against the unjust Laws of the Mother Country were called Whigs.” Then Watson detailed how long and tragic the struggle between the people and their enemies had been. He praised the framers of the Constitution as “brave men,” while acknowledging they had superseded the instructions of the state legislators who sent them to Philadelphia in 1787. “Naturally, furious divisions arose” between Federalists and anti-Federalists. But the Constitution, implied Watson, was sensible and just, and it soon became “the Supreme Law under which we now live.”

Only then was the battle joined. Alexander Hamilton and his followers stood up for “a strong centralized Govt.” as the instrument of “a moneyed aristocracy supported by special privilege,” which Watson also called “the System.” According to Watson, Jefferson and his disciples (Andrew Jackson most prominent, and heroic, among them) successfully opposed this order in the name of both “individual enterprise” and “the will of the people.” For a few years, the new Republican Party, at the behest of principled abolitionists, also represented “a great popular impulse.” But, by the end of the Civil War, corrupt men, wielding great amounts of ill-gotten wealth, had taken control of both major parties. This “modern system of piracy” was, jeered Watson, an “improvement” over “the crude methods” of highway robbers. Now, the thieves were so dominant that “the booty is great and the risk is nought.”

A former (and future) Democrat, Watson predictably scorned the Republican Party’s obeisance to “Boodlers, Monopolists, Gamblers, Gigantic Corporations, Bondholders, Bankers.” What, he implied, could one expect of an organization that openly admitted its support of Hamiltonian principles? But the Georgian reserved his sharpest barbs for those who were perverting the Democratic Party, created to ensure that the people would always rule. “Did [Jefferson] dream that in 100 years or less his party would be prostituted to the vilest purposes of monopoly; that red-eyed Jewish millionaires would be chiefs of that Party, and that the liberty and prosperity of the country would be…constantly and corruptly sacrificed to Plutocratic greed in the name of Jeffersonian Democracy?”¹

Watson’s vigorous polemic is cast in a familiar style of American rhetoric. Only the taint of anti-Semitism (which did not become central to his worldview until after the demise of the People’s Party) distinguishes his tale from the appeals of political actors before and since who claimed to be defending the virtuous majority against its greedy, elitist foes.

But attention should be paid to familiarity. Beneath the stark dualism of Watson’s history lesson ran a powerful and persistent tradition in the public language of discontented citizens. That tradition began to emerge in the Revolutionary era and became ubiquitous during the 1830s and 1840s, the Age of the Common Man—at least in popular idiom. For Watson and his comrades in the People’s Party, this was a political and social Golden Age to which, in spirit, they wished to return. To understand the nature and persistence of populist language, one must return to its sources—the inheritance of most Americans who tried to speak for the people in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The èmbryonic populist rhetoric of antebellum America incorporated two different but not exclusive strains of vision and protest. First, there was the pietistic impulse issuing from the Protestant Reformation and continually revived by “great awakenings” that featured vivid emotional oratory, camp meetings, and the creation of new churches—all fueled by the belief in a personal God unmediated through spiritual authority. If “ALL if they choose, May enjoy the GOOD NEWS,” as one evangelical writer put it in 1809, then it was every Christian’s duty to attack sinful behavior, especially when it received encouragement and sanction from the rich and haughty.²

The second source was the secular faith of the Enlightenment, the belief that ordinary people could think and act rationally, more rationally, in fact, than their ancestral overlords. In the hands of a Thomas Jefferson or a Tom Paine, this belief was revolutionary. “Truths” about the “absolute Despotism” of King George III were “self-evident,” claimed the Declaration of Independence; freed from the shackles of “ancient prejudices” and “superstition,” Americans, wrote Paine that same year, saw clearly that the Crown, like all monarchies, was but an elaborate figleaf for arbitrary, self-aggrandizing rule. Paine, an erstwhile artisan, conveyed the devastating limpidity of his arguments by entitling his pamphlet Common Sense.³

Through the nineteenth century, the pietist and the rationalist coexisted in rhetoric, party politics, and coalitions of the discontented. Protestant Christianity, as a belief system, was common to both groups, although the forms of worship differed widely. Plebeian preachers and secular propagandists agreed, as one historian puts it, “that people should shake off all servile prejudice and learn to prove things for themselves.”⁴

From the turn of the century to the 1830s, the democratic wave crested for both groups simultaneously. Caucasian men won universal suffrage, and working people of both sexes organized the first trade unions at the same time that evangelicals of different classes were filling thousands of new churches (Methodist, Baptist, Mormon) whose numbers dwarfed those of the older, more hierarchical denominations. The sensationalistic “penny press,” read widely by plebeian audiences, mushroomed alongside Christian associations dedicated to charity, temperance, abolishing slavery, and spreading the Gospel. Charles Grandison Finney, the foremost “great awakener” in the industrializing North, was fond of comparing the conversion experience to voting for the Lord and against the Devil.⁵

Religious fervor, as Tocqueville recognized, was “perpetually warmed in the United States by the fires of patriotism.” Circuit-riding preachers and union-organizing artisans (even the Painite freethinkers among them) agreed that high-handed rule by the wealthy was both sinful and unrepublican. All believed in the nation’s millennial promise, its role as a beacon of liberty in a benighted world. “Vox populi, vox dei” worked in either direction.⁶

Moreover, evangelical and rationalist democrats drew from a common storehouse of imperishable linguistic goods. In parallel ways, they articulated four clusters of beliefs: about Americanism, the people, elites, and the need for mass movements. These constituted the primal grammar on which the People’s Party and all subsequent American populisms would depend. Both groups constructed this grammar through what the historian Kenneth Cmiel calls “the middling rhetoric”—a marriage of bombast with informality, the bluntness of a Tom Paine with the sentimentality of a Harriet Beecher Stowe.⁷

There were differences of emphasis and meaning, of course. The pietists insisted that the Christian identity of the republic must be preserved, while for the rationalists, words like Judas, sin, and redemption were metaphors to bolster the emotional weight of their argument. Yet, the very intertwining of religious and democratic referents in antebellum America kept the two faces of populism from going separate ways. As the historian Gordon Wood writes: “By the early nineteenth century, America had already emerged as the most egalitarian, most materialistic, most individualistic—and most evangelical Christian—society in Western history.”⁸

The first element in the shared language of politics was Americanism itself. This was the creed for which independence had been won and that all genuine patriots would fight to preserve. It was breathtakingly idealistic: in this unique nation, all men were created equal, deserved the same chance to improve their lot, and were citizens of a self-governing republic that enshrined the liberty of the individual. It was also proudly defensive: America was an isolated land of virtue whose people were on constant guard against the depredations of aristocrats, empire builders, and self-aggrandizing officeholders both within and outside its borders.

In recent years, scholars have disagreed about whether the Americanist creed, in the decades from the Revolution to the Civil War, can best be understood as “liberal” or “republican.” Was its main ingredient free expression and the unencumbered pursuit of self-interest (liberal), or the call for a public-spirited, moral commonwealth (republican)? Like many historical dichotomies, this one is misconceived; most American patriots clearly cherished their right to speak freely and to seek prosperity (but not opulence) in the marketplace and still longed for a society bonded by classical and Christian notions of virtue and disinterest. Antebellum officeholders and reform activists spoke to both desires—for liberation and for community—without fear of contradicting themselves.⁹

In terms of the genesis of a populist discourse, the overriding point is that Americanism meant understanding and obeying the will of the people. Whether asserting the claims of a putatively egalitarian community or the rights of individuals against the state, it was the majority with its love of liberty that must decide. To mock the opinions and/or oppose the interests of the majority was more than foolish politics; it was un-American.

Thus, early in the history of the United States, speakers and writers transformed the country from a mere place on the map into an ideology. Ever since, dissenters from the established order have wrestled with the legacy of that achievement. On the one hand, they have not needed to offer an alternative conception of the political good; they have simply accused powerful opponents of betraying the consensual creed and marshaled the details to prove it. However, the boon is also a fetter. Because the American Revolution has already occurred, advocating a new type of polity and a new constitution seems unnecessary, dangerous, close to treason. Radical transformations undertaken in other societies under such banners as socialism, fascism, and anticolonialism are thus impossible in the United States—at once the most idealistic and the most conservative nation on earth.

Populist critics must always pinpoint which individuals and which elites have defamed the national spirit; they cannot question the terms of the civic religion itself. Richard Hofstadter elegantly described the ambivalent bargain: “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”¹⁰

But who were the people America was intended to empower? The founders of the republic seldom thought to define the term. For Washington, Adams, Madison, Jefferson, and Hancock, “we the people” was more incantation than description; like speaking of the Almighty Himself, it indicated who the ultimate sovereign was but did not specify who was actually to rule the nation. The latter should be men like themselves, planters and merchants with enough independent wealth to govern impartially for the good of the citizenry, most of whom would always be laboring for others and be immersed in petty contentions. Thus, “the people” was the homogeneous bedrock of America, the foundation upon which “a natural aristocracy” of the talented and virtuous, guided by a Constitution designed to limit democratic participation, would erect a great and just nation.¹¹

Yet, soon after the Revolution, a quite different meaning of “the people” could be heard. In 1786–87, Massachusetts farmers, scissored by high taxes and low prices for their wheat and cattle, defied court attempts to seize their property for unpaid debts. One smallholder vowed, “I design to pay no more, and I know we have the biggest party, let them say what they will.” In the 1790s, Jeffersonian pamphleteers praised those who toiled “with hammer and hand” as “the industrious part of the community.” The New England farmer William Manning divided the population “between those that Labour for a Living and those that git a Living without Bodily Labour,” making clear that the former easily outnumbered the latter.¹²

These were nascent versions of a producer ethic, the central element in populist conceptions of “the people” well into the twentieth century. By the 1830s, it had already become gospel for political candidates and mass orators. Producerism was indeed an ethic, a moral conviction: it held that only those who created wealth in tangible, material ways (on and under the land, in workshops, on the sea) could be trusted to guard the nation’s piety and liberties. The Lord had told Adam, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” and the oft-quoted line buttressed the sentiment that manual labor was the only honest, authentic, and natural kind. It required a certain toughness then perceived as male and a practical knowledge that idle, speculative minds wholly lacked. It signified a historic shift from the old idea that hard work was necessary but dishonorable to a new belief in the superiority of those whose daily lives required exertion and strain. This was why, in 1834, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a Jacksonian stalwart, hailed “the productive and burden-bearing classes” as one entity. Having an occupation, doing the necessary work of society, was what entitled “the people” to have power.¹³

The producer ethic was decidedly not an Americanized version of the class consciousness Marx and other European thinkers saw as the inevitable result of the Industrial Revolution. While many advocates of producerism arose from the growing ranks of wage earners, they cast a moral net over society instead of dissecting it with an analytical scalpel in the Marxist fashion. Besides the urban proletariat, the ranks of “producers” typically included craftsmen (some of whom owned their own shops), small merchants and manufacturers, and farmers of all regions and incomes. Until the sectional crisis took center stage in the mid-1840s, even slaveholding planters who planned and supervised the raising of crops embraced the title. To qualify as a producer, one had to be willing to rise or fall primarily on one’s own efforts; intentions mattered more than results.

This blurring of c...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PREFACE TO THE 2017 PRINTING: WHO SPEAKS FOR THE PEOPLE NOW?
• NOTES TO THE PREFACE
• Introduction: Speaking for the People
• 1. Inheritance
• 2. The Righteous Commonwealth of the Late Nineteenth Century
• 3. Workers as Citizens: Labor and the Left in the Gompers Era
• 4. Onward, Christian Mothers and Soldiers: The Prohibitionist Crusade
• 5. Social Justice and Social Paranoia: The Catholic Populism of Father Coughlin
• 6. The Many and the Few: The CIO and the Embrace of Liberalism
• 7. A Free People Fight Back: The Rise and Fall of the Cold War Right
• 8. Power to Which People? The Tragedy of the White New Left
• 9. Stand Up for the Working Man: George Wallace and the Making of a New Right
• 10. The Conservative Capture: From Nixon to Reagan
• 11. Spinning the People
• Conclusion: A Language We Need?
• A NOTE ON METHOD
• NOTES
• GOOD READING
• INDEX