The Populist Vision

by Charles Postel

In the late nineteenth century, monumental technological innovations like the telegraph and steam power made America and the world a much smaller place. New technologies also made possible large-scale organization and centralization. Corporations grew exponentially and the rich amassed great fortunes. Those on the short end of these wrenching changes responded in the Populist revolt, one of the most effective challenges to corporate power in American history.

But what did Populism represent? Half a century ago, scholars such as Richard Hofstadter portrayed the Populist movement as an irrational response of backward-looking farmers to the challenges of modernity. Since then, the romantic notion of Populism as the resistance movement of tradition-based and pre-modern communities to a modern and commercial society has prevailed. In a broad, innovative reassessment, based on a deep reading of archival sources, The Populist Vision argues that the Populists understood themselves as--and were in fact--modern people, who pursued an alternate vision for modern America.

Taking into account both the leaders and the led, The Populist Vision uses a wide lens, focusing on the farmers, both black and white, men and women, while also looking at wager workers and bohemian urbanites. From Texas to the Dakotas, from Georgia to California, farmer Populists strove to use the new innovations for their own ends. They sought scientific and technical knowledge, formed highly centralized organizations, launched large-scale cooperative businesses, and pressed for reforms on the model of the nation's most elaborate bureaucracy - the Postal Service. Hundreds of thousands of Populist farm women sought education, employment in schools and offices, and a more modern life. Miners, railroad workers, and other labor Populists joined with farmers to give impetus to the regulatory state. Activists from Chicago, San Francisco, and other new cities provided Populism with a dynamic urban dimension

This major reassessment of the Populist experience is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics, society, and culture of modern America.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Politics, Grad School, Class, 20th Century

397 pages, Hardcover

First published April 18, 2007

Reviews

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 2 out of 5]

The rise of populist movements across much of the globe prompted me to read Charles Postel's "The Populist Vision;" I wanted to understand the populist forebears of Trumpism and Brexit and I knew the William Jennings Bryan was one of the most famous populist politicians during the turn of the century. However, this book does not offer much to comment on present-day populism but it is a well-researched exploration of American populism during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Postel examines how populists viewed economics, labour, race relations, religion, and scientific progress. The 2/5 reflects my personal rating, whereas I think a more "objective" rating would be 3.5-4/5.

[Aaron Gibbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gave this one the ol' strategic skim treatment, and it was a pretty interesting read. I'm particularly thankful that all of Postel's main claims are clearly outlined in the introduction and conclusion.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and very readable for non-historians. Postel weaves together a series of characters and stories that touch many aspects of populism: the women leaders, the atheists and utopians, the white supremacists, the black leaders, and the railroad workers, farmers, politicians, and lecturers.

[Casey Wellock · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh, so the Populists are modern now? I was losing sleep, until I encountered this mystic truth.

[David Damiano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision challenges the opinion first articulated by Richard Hofstadter in his 1955 classic The Age of Reform that the Populist movement represented an impulse by disgruntled farmers and rural ignoramuses to restore a mythical agrarian ideal upon which the United States was allegedly founded. Hofstadter’s argument, presented in this way by Postel, certainly seems simplistic and dismissive, but within the context of his perspective, reacting to liberal historians who viewed the Populists with rose-tinted glasses and claimed the rural reformers as historical antecedents of the Progressive movement, I think Hofstadter’s thesis still has merit. In either case, this review is about Postel and not Hofstadter.

The premise of Postel’s argument is that the Populists were modern people with modern, progressive aspirations. They were not Luddites, raging against technology and innovation, but rather embraced it fully, believing that science – whether it be new agricultural methods or more dubious concepts of “scientific” government and racial theory – would usher in a new era of prosperity for the farmer and for all those who were being squeezed by the burgeoning capitalist order. The Farmer’s Alliance sought collaborative solutions, mirroring the corporate trusts, in order to regulate the market and control prices. Rural reformers in this respect were hardly the social revolutionists which contemporary urbanites conceived them to be. The Farmer’s Alliance distanced itself from radical groups such as the Knights of Labor and attempted to clarify that their organization was nonpartisan and business-oriented.

In this aspect, Postel is convincing. That said, the sources from which he cites are by and large the leadership of the Farmer’s Alliance and of the People’s Party – Charles Macune, Leonidas Polk, Mary Elizabeth Lease, etc. What of the rank and file? Naturally, it is invariably more difficult for a historian to probe the opinions of this nebulous demographic. Postel perhaps obliquely acknowledges the issue by emphasizing the centralized and antidemocratic nature of the Populist leadership. The point being, Farmers Alliance leaders may have emphasized their alliance with the businessmen and their full-hearted embrace of the market economy, but the very fact that they felt obliged to present themselves in this light suggests that a significant component of the Populist movement was not dedicated to these pursuits.

My interest in the Populist movement is its role as a predecessor to the American socialist movement which in some respects picked up where the Populists left off at the turn of the 20th century. Eugene Debs, for instance identified with the Populists in the aftermath of the Pullman Strike, and the Socialist Party’s ability to establish roots in rural areas, notably Oklahoma, is derived from the Populist legacy. While Potsel does examine labor Populism, and the efforts of the Farmers Alliance and People’s Party to establish ties with the labor movement, he leaves the question of poorer farmers who were subordinate to the more affluent leadership mostly untouched (although he does explore land and resource-poor Southern black farmers and the tribulations of the Colored Alliance).

All things considered, this is an excellent book about Populism. Often forgotten or dismissed as a unsuccessful predecessor to the Progressive Movement, we would be remiss to cast aside both the conservative and radical elements of the Populists and appreciate the role that they played in stimulating an energetic age of reform, shaking the country out of the torpor of the Gilded Age.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postel provides the quintessential modern history of the Populist movement: building upon the works of John Hicks and Peter Arsinger, with their positive appraisals of the Populist movement, rejecting the elitist critiques of Richard Hofstadter whilst integrating the valid critiques of the Populists as a white, male-centered enterprise, the proper picture of the Populist movement and People's Party as a deeply flawed yet progressive coalition of petty-bourgeois farmers and labor comes into view.

Postel surveys the long list of Populist historians and comes to a relatively unique conclusion: rather than a typical backward-facing agrarian movement, the Populists were distinctively "modern" in their understanding of the world. While they opposed the direction capitalism was taking, they proposed an alternative vision of capitalism complete with large-scale cooperative enterprise, "benevolent" monopolies, and national reform.

Postel pays particular attention to the initial economic efforts of the precursor to the People's Party, the Farmers' Alliance. Rather than seeking immediate political solution, the Populists first attempted to "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" by pushing forward rural economic development and cooperation, integrating modern education, technology, and farming techniques in a way usually inaccessible to the rural farming family. Postel discusses the unique role of women in being harbingers of the Populist movement and the roles they played in the Farmers' Alliance, as well as the academic and intellectual nature of the Populist movement at large through popular science, academic debate, and the Populist press.

Moving into the formation of the People's Party, Postel examines their "business politics," challenging corporations within the framework of capitalism and the bourgeois political system, the hopelessly contradictory understanding of race and white supremacy among white Populists as well as the way black Populists attempted to subvert this and turn these contradictions to their own advantage, the various other reform movements involved with the Populists (labor, Bellamy's Nationalist clubs, Georgist Single-Taxers, utopian socialists, etc.), the wide range of religious attitudes and lack thereof within the Populist movement, and finally the fall and defeat of the Populist movement itself.

Postel's work is the best modern history written on the Populist movement, and surpasses his predecessors by far. I only wish he had pointed more to why the business efforts of the Populists failed aside from the lack of cooperation within the movement itself—I think the failure of the Populists' cooperativist efforts have important implications for modern progressives like those of Richard Wolff who advocate cooperatives as immediate solutions to the problems of capitalism. I wish he had also drawn attention to other aspects of white supremacy, such as the nature of settler-colonialism itself giving advantage to whites, rather than the simple social structure and expectations of the Redemption/Jim Crow South.

[Jim Gulley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Populists’ vision was to harness the forces of modernity: scientific discovery, corporatism, education reform, and the expansion of the federal government to create a better life for rural and working Americans. Postel challenged prior historical arguments that the Populist movement was striving to return to an “old” America; instead, he argued that the Populists were thoroughly modern and that many of their platforms served as forerunners of the Progressive Era and the New Deal.

Postel organized the book around two broad themes: farmers and politics. The two sections are divided into topical chapters, each supporting his argument effectively. Populism was short-lived in American history, arising in Texas in the mid-1880s and ending abruptly with the defeat of William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election. Postel asserts that the demise of the party was rooted in its “schizophrenia.” It espoused egalitarian ideals, yet segregation and white supremacy were core values. It decried corporatism and monopoly but adopted those practices to suit its purposes. It claimed a Jeffersonian heritage of agrarian independence but promoted an expansion of the federal government. It claimed to represent the middle class while opposing small businesses and middlemen.

[William Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was recommended this book by my supervisor as a follow-up to Goodwyn’s work. I was somewhat disappointed, as I felt there was very little new material beyond the wisdom that comes from being written 40 years after Goodwyn’s book.

It was however a very well researched and presented book, and its chapters were well signposted. It didn’t make the Hofstaderian mistake of using fancy prose and making big, unbacked claims.

A slight personal critique I would have, is that I wasn’t a fan of the national scope he used to cover the movement.
I understand why he did this, but it made it a little difficult to follow his train of thought sometimes. He would be discussing Peffer in Kansas and then jump to Cannon in California in part of the same argument. Personally I just found this weakened his arguments slightly. I prefer each region to be dealt with individually, as one of the key features of Populism was its regional disparity. All the jumping back and forth made it tricky to follow the various characters and overstated the level of cohesion in the movement.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the most boring book I've ever read

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the best analysis of the 19th century Populist movement.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very insightful and original interpretation of the Populist movement. From Hofstader to Goodwyn to Lasch and onwards, the Populists have been viewed as atavistic backwoodsmen who opposed modern urban and capitalist life, but Postel convincingly shows the more typical Populist to be a rebellious "rural businessmen." Populists viewed themselves as profoundly "modern" and "scientific," words they used with reckless abandon in almost all of their numerous reform newspapers, and they cared deeply about the organization of farmers mainly because it would improve their bottom line. It is a strange reform movement indeed whose major paper was titled the "National Economist" (at least when the Populists were still the "Farmers Alliance.")

In fact, Postel gets much of his impression of the movement from the early Farmers Alliance, which emerged in Texas in 1886 and over the next five years took over numerous other state alliances until in encompassed over 1 million members. It established several (unsuccessful) cooperative ventures to market grain and cotton and consumer goods, and worked to establish a national farmer's "trust" to meet the railroad and other "trusts." When the movement turned to politics, the sentiment was similar. As William Peffer, one of the Populists few U.S. Senators said, "Let us organize for business, and let that business be one of intense political power." It was a movement for self-interested profit, but on the part of those who viewed themselves as part of the oppressed.

The fact that much of the action and the anecdotes here takes place before the real emergence of the "People's Party" in 1892 in Omaha makes Postel's argument at least somewhat suspect, but those dealing with the rise of Populism will now have to confront Postel's description of its vigorous business-reformist roots.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postel’s populists are “anti-modernists” in the same way that Henry Adams et. al were, they were not opposed to modernity, rather they were opposed to the particular path that modernity was taking and wanted an alternate path to modernity that included the values they believed important, values that were associated with a more innocent past (real or imagined) but they did not want to go back to that past

[Lorraine Herbon · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this work, Dr. Charles Postel, of my beloved alma mater Sacramento State, challenges the work of prior historians of the Populist movement, especially Richard Hofstadter. Rather than tradition-bound whiners wishing to hang on to a simpler past, Postel shows that Populists were actually forward-looking and modern. It's fun to watch him take the interpretations of those earlier historians and knock them down one by one.

[Alessandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outstanding re-interpretation of the Populist movement. They were not ignorant, irrational traditionalists, but modernists in their own right, seeking to stamp the U.S. with their own capitalist vision. Only pitfall is his discussion of race in the movement-needs further development and to re-iterate the serious idiocy surrounding much of Populist thought on segregation and "racial uplift."

[Lonni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would only appeal to a history geek!