POPULISM

As a term of political description, populism is one of the most frequently misused words in the English language. It signals a politics of resentment—mean-spirited and incipiently violent. As commonly employed, populism appears as a term of condescension, vague and formless but no less evocative in the disdain it projects.

In recent years, this characterization has undergone full-scale revaluation in the wake of a broad array of new evidence as to who the original populists were, what they believed, and how they acted. In the process, our sense of the intricacies involved in popular politics has been deepened in ways that enrich the modern understanding of politics itself.

In strictly historical terms, Populism refers to a third-party movement that materialized in America in the 1890s, generating a spirited energy that also caused a certain alarm near the seats of the mighty. The Populists engaged in a social analysis of contemporary American society that yielded a range of proposed economic reforms. Foremost among them was the Subtreasury Land and Loan System, which reconceptualized American banking and proposed a restructured monetary system that would fundamentally alter the power relationships between bankers and everyone else. The Populist concern about "concentrated capital" extended beyond banks to include large-scale business organizations generally. Populist reformers felt that business domination of the political process—through massive campaign contributions to friendly officeholders and persistently effective lobbying in the national Congress and the state legislatures—had proceeded to the point that the practice had begun to undermine the democratic idea itself.

In an effort to restructure American politics, Populists formed the People's party, which was free of corporate influence. The new party polled over a million votes in its initial campaign in 1892, made sizable gains in 1894, and then joined with the free-silver wing of the Democratic party to support William Jennings Bryan's unsuccessful presidential candidacy in 1896. Having lost much of its distinctive identity in the course of its "fusion" with the Democrats, the third party suffered an abrupt decline thereafter.

For many years, the scholarly verdict on populism was fairly patronizing, for it was considered an "alarmist" response to the growth of industrial America. The remedies suggested by the reformers, though doubtless well-meaning, were taken to be "excessive." Beyond this, scholars, digesting the mountain of social and economic analysis generated by the Populists, focused on certain colorful characters, such as Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas and Thomas Watson of Georgia, and quoted selected purple passages to emphasize the "primitive" or "demagogic" elements that seemed to animate the movement. The final blow to the Populists' reputation came in the form of suggestions that some were racists, nativists, anti-Semites, anti-Catholics, or a combination thereof. The movement, therefore, could be understood as a behavioral manifestation of deep-seated prejudices and "status anxieties," not a sensible product aimed at correcting unbalanced or generally exploitative economic practices pervading American society.

Over the past generation, social historians have sharpened their penetration into voluntary social formations such as the one the Populists constructed and, in so doing, have unearthed evidence of democratic advocacy that has fundamentally altered the understanding of the relevance of the nineteenth-century movement. The parent institution of populism, the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, set up an elaborate lecturing system that turned some forty thousand "suballiances" into a veritable schoolroom of economic and political inquiry. The Populist reforms were not only broadly egalitarian and democratic but workable as well. Instead of appearing as mindless provincials, the reformers were regarded as humanistic advocates who numbered within their ranks prominent reform editors and organizers—Catholic, Jewish, and African-American as well as white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Historian Walter T. K. Nugent summarized matters in the title of his book: The Tolerant Populists.

Beyond the issue of historical accuracy, the restructured view of the Populists is of increasing interest to political scientists for the light the research casts upon categories of analysis that have long been used by theorists to interpret and project social possibility. The Populist experience shows how easily election campaigns and the legislative process are made vulnerable to powerful economic influences and how these malpractices can be brought into public view through critical appraisals generated by self-organized popular constituencies. There is a third, rather unwanted, discovery—the multiple hazards to popular democracy that persist in highly stratified and socially isolated modern populations. As the Populist experience clarifies the interrelationship of these dynamics, a series of long-standing assumptions about political conduct in the modern state have come under sustained revaluation.

For generations, many scholars took the sudden appearance of citizen politics in any society as some sort of "spontaneous" happening through which the routine "apathy" of "ordinary people" was somehow temporarily overcome. As the enormous practical difficulties involved in creating organized citizen advocacy have become better understood, it is increasingly apparent that serious political movements are laboriously constructed by human hands and are in no sense "spontaneous." Indeed, the term is used by scholars to describe moments of political organization they have not otherwise researched. As such, the word spontaneous routinely conceals the social relations it purports to describe.

Moreover, given the powerful economic and cultural authority invested in prevailing forms of elite governance, the hesitancy of average citizens to expose themselves to retribution and ridicule by opposing sanctioned authority clearly involves an intelligent (if cautious) response that cannot accurately be described as "apathetic." The process through which social fear is, on occasion, overcome stands as an important and neglected question that bears directly on the long-term durability of democratic substance in any society.

In the aggregate, what a clear reading of populism and other large-scale popular movements reveals is that, as a category of political science, democratic movement building has been centrally overlooked. Abstract description has substituted for sustained research. What scholars mean to imply when they use the term political consciousness is similarly ephemeral and thus stands in need of detailed elaboration and redefinition. In the contemporary period when the savings and loan crisis and attendant structural problems in the banking system itself have once again forced the populist concern for the "financial question" upon the stage of national politics, the paucity of systematic analysis of the nation's banking system has brought all these matters of social and political interpretation to the surface with transparent power. As scholars seek more precise categories of analysis with which to interpret "reform politics," new questions arise as to the way "mainstream politics" is understood as well. The dynamics that underlay the appearance of nineteenth-century populism thus turn out to be quite "modern."

Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (1976); Walter T. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populists and Nativism (1963).

Lawrence Goodwyn

See also Elections: 1892, 1896; People's Party; Subtreasury Land and Loan System.