People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [175]
One gathers from yellowed pamphlets that the agrarian ideologists undertook to re-educate their countrymen from the ground up. Dismissing “history as taught in our schools” as “practically valueless”, they undertook to write it over—formidable columns of it, from the Greek down. With no more compunction they turned all hands to the revision of economics, political theory, law, and government.
The National Economist, a Populist magazine, had 100,000 readers. Goodwyn counts over a thousand Populist journals in the 1890s. There were newspapers like the Comrade, published in the cotton country of Louisiana, and the Toiler’s Friend, in rural Georgia. Also, Revolution was published in Georgia. In North Carolina, the Populist printing plant was burned. In Alabama, there was the Living Truth. It was broken into in 1892, its type scattered, and the next year the shop was set afire, but the press survived and the editor never missed an issue.
Hundreds of poems and songs came out of the Populist movement, like “The Farmer Is the Man”:
. . . the farmer is the man
The Farmer is the man
Lives on credit till the fall
With the interest rates so high
It’s a wonder he don’t die
And the mortgage man’s the one
that gets it all.
The farmer is the man
The farmer is the man
Lives on credit till the fall
And his pants are wearing thin
His condition it’s a sin
He’s forgot that he’s the man
that feeds them all.
Books written by Populist leaders, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth, and William Harvey Coin’s Financial School, were widely read. An Alabama historian of that time, William Garrott Brown, said about the Populist movement that “no other political movement—not that of 1776, nor that of 1860–1861—ever altered Southern life so profoundly.”
According to Lawrence Goodwyn, if the labor movement had been able to do in the cities what the Populists did in the rural areas, “to create among urban workers a culture of cooperation, self-respect, and economic analysis,” there might have been a great movement for change in the United States. There were only fitful, occasional connections between the farmer and labor movements. Neither spoke eloquently enough to the other’s needs. And yet, there were signs of a common consciousness that might, under different circumstances, lead to a unified, ongoing movement.
Norman Pollack says, on the basis of a close study of midwestern Populist newspapers, that “Populism regarded itself as a class movement, reasoning that farmers and workers were assuming the same material position in society.” An editorial in the Farmers’ Alliance spoke of a man working fourteen to sixteen hours a day: “He is brutalized both morally and physically. He has no ideas, only propensities, he has no beliefs, only instincts.” Pollack sees that as a homespun version of Marx’s idea of workers’ alienation from his human self under capitalism, and finds many other parallels between Populist and Marxist ideas.
Undoubtedly, Populists, along with most white Americans, had racism and nativism in their thinking. But part of it was that they simply did not think race as important as the economic system. Thus, the Farmers’ Alliance said: “The people’s party has sprung into existence not to make the black man free, but to emancipate all men . . . to gain for all industrial freedom, without which there can be no political freedom. . . .”
More important than theoretical connections were the Populist expressions of support for workers in actual struggles. The Alliance-Independent of Nebraska, during the great strike at the Carnegie steel plant, wrote: “All who look beneath the surface will see that the bloody battle fought at Homestead was a mere incident in the great conflict between capital and labor.” Coxey’s march of the unemployed drew sympathy in the farm areas; in Osceola, Nebraska, perhaps five thousand people attended a picnic in Coxey’s honor. During the Pullman strike, a farmer wrote to the governor of Kansas: