The Road to Rebellion: Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1865-1900

by Scott G. McNall

In the late 1800s an unprecedented coalition of American farmers rose to challenge the course of national politics. Aspiring to a society in which justice and equality were the norm, the farmers galvanized thousands of voters, causing two dominant political parties to reshape their agendas. Yet by 1900, the movement was virtually dead. Scott G. McNall analyzes why America's largest mass-democratic movement failed. He focuses his inquiry on Kansas, the center of the agrarian rebellion that led to the creation of the Farmer's Alliance and, later, to the founding of the People's party. Integrating new historical accounts with original analyses of census data, Alliance membership records, and speech transcripts, McNall restores these Kansas voices, revealing their struggle against an entrenched class system, indifferent political parties, and economic hardship.

McNall rejects the traditional view that blames the failure of the Alliance on a turn to mass-based electoral politics, but rather sees the move into national politics by the Farmer's Alliance as part of a rational strategy to better wage their fight for economic justice. The Kansas populists failed, he argues, because of their inability to embrace a broad, working-class base, to provide an effective alternative vision, and ultimately to create a distinct class organization. Debates about how classes come into being, or how democracy is to be realized, cannot be settled in the abstract. McNall's recreation of this heroic struggle is a model in the analysis of class formation. At the same time, The Road to Rebellion is dynamic social history, which holds vital lessons for structuring and realizing alternative political agendas today.

372 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 1988

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent for the semi-Marxian class-based analysis that is sorely missing from other historiography of Populism, but gets bogged down in analysis of voting patterns rather than ideological investigation. The notion of class is semi-Thompsonian, improving upon it by noting the influence of structure but still flawed in capitulation to humanist domination of a dubious "consciousness." There is also, to an extent, a conflating of the Alliance and the Populist Party that does not hold water for the rest of the national versions of those organizations, another flaw with Populist historiography obsession with regional histories based on state boundaries.