Conscious Choice: Lessons From a Century Past

November 1996 | News of the Earth

Lessons From a Century Past

by Mark Long

As I listen to the heated rhetoric of the second presidential debate and witness the acrimony and feigned differences between candidates, I think about the death of my great-grandfather exactly one hundred years ago. This legendary patriarch of my family was shot during a political argument in an Iowa bar, shortly before the 1896 election. That year, a highly politicized electorate had placed some very real alternatives on the national table.

The 1896 election was a watershed event, leading to nearly 40 years of uninterrupted Republican rule and the dissolution of the People’s Party and the Populist uprising. The early success of the populist movement had threatened, for a moment, to alter the course of this country by undermining the near-absolute power held by corporate giants of the Gilded Age. This threat to the status quo led, in the words of Walter Dean Burnham, to “the substantially complete insulation of elites from attacks by the victims of the industrializing process.”

Looking back at the election of 1896 provides an opportunity to reexamine some of the myths we hold regarding American political history. All nation-states are rooted in myths, which attempt to create a whole out of constituent parts. This is particularly true in the U.S., which has a diverse population. Like other myths that influence our behavior, however, some of our national myths are dysfunctional The radical power of history lies, in part, in its ability to subvert those dysfunctional myths.

One of the more powerful myths we repeat to ourselves, for example, is that democracy is ever-expanding. This myth plays the dual role of glossing over past embarrassments while legitimizing the present. Studying a 100-year-old election, however, helps to reveal how misleading the “expansion” has been. This is not to deny that there have been some very real and important expansions in the franchise. Yet, there has been a dramatic, overwhelming constriction in the content of our political discourse that has kept pace with the expansion of the franchise.

As with the history of all social movements the story of populism is both sketchy and contested. Yet, we know enough about what the core of the movement stood for and what it tried to accomplish to challenge the assumption that democracy and opportunity in this country are ever-expanding. Compare the issues of 1896 with those of today: the alternatives to the emerging capitalist system offered by the populist movement in the late 1800s seem light years more advanced than the bland administrative differences that underlie contemporary American politics.

The most significant challenge to the Gilded Age can be traced to a gathering of farmers at the home of John R. Allen in Lampasas, Texas in 1877. There, simple men and women gathered to discuss the economic difficulties they faced and to work out a collective response to their agricultural problems. They were plagued by unfair freight rates, resulting from government sanctioned monopolies of the railroads; mounting debt, resulting from deflationary national monetary policies (implemented through private banks) and increased competition from corporate farms; and growing tensions between rural producers and big-city merchants. The resulting mass movement was called the Farmer’s Alliance—a loose gathering of farmers and laborers, set to change their world.

The historical view from the Allen farm stretches east across all of the states of the old Confederacy and north into the Canadian plains. By the time the Farmer’s Alliance and its political wing, the People’s Party, had run its course, millions of people had joined their local sub-alliances and the cooperatively run grain elevators, furnishing stores, farm equipment production factories, etc. The power of the Populists grew from the local level outward.

Before the high tide of Populism had receded, the People’s Party could claim outright or fusion control of various state legislatures, governorships, many U.S. House seats and even a few U.S. Senate seats. In fact, not withstanding its humble origins, the People’s Party had the distinction of being the most powerful third party in the country in the post-bellum period. The Populist movement is an inspiring example of how powerful a political movement can be when grounded at local levels and animated by a compelling vision.

The founders of the Farmer’s Alliance took as an article of faith all the high-falutin’ rhetoric about the government belonging to the governed. They cared not for tracking polls and insider access but for a just world in which they could go about their daily affairs of plowing fields, tending mules, raising children, nurturing community, and watching seasons fold one into another—without fear of losing all they had in a rigged market.

The growing power and energy of their movement allowed the Alliance men and women to ask ever more challenging questions: why not nationalize railroads and communications networks, since they were the product of government largess? Why not print greenbacks so that there would be enough money to go around and farmers could pay their bills? Why not establish an old-age pension so that people didn’t have to worry about starving to death in their waning years? Why not, in fact, create a whole new economic system that takes as its basic value a livable world for the working people who actually produce our national wealth?

These farmers and railroad workers and miners had reasoned their way into proposing a non-Marxist, co-operative, socialist democracy. They believed in the power of people, in the form of government (this was before government had become the enemy), to benefit citizens, not corporations. It was a simple idea, though one hundred years later its time has still not come.

There were many shoals against which the populist ship foundered; the greatest of these was an inability of the People’s Party to escape the orbit of the Democratic Party. Democratic candidates sought at every turn to co-opt the popular power of the movement while at the same time rendering harmless its radical critique of the developing industrial/capitalist order. That strategy reached its zenith, and, the populists their nadir, during the election of 1896, at the hands of William Jennings Bryan.

Bryan had won the Democratic nomination at the Chicago convention with his famous “cross of gold” speech, in which he stated: “You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest on our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country....

“Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Unfortunately for real populists, the young Senator had simplified the whole of populism into the one issue of increasing the money supply through silver coinage. His speech persuaded many populist leaders to support his bid for the White House rather than field a candidate of their own or focus their energy on local gains. The populists lost momentum, and when Bryan lost the election, they lost even the chance to be an influence in national politics.

In as much as we are capable of learning anything from history, the fate of the populist moment offers us two lessons against which we can judge the current presidential race. Most importantly, we can recall the tendency and power of the Democratic Party to co-opt progressive, grass-roots movements to further its own electoral ends. This is a lesson that the environmental movement should take to heart.

Frankly, Clinton’s environmental record has been overwhelmingly dismal. Like Bryan, he pays lip service to the movement while refusing to embrace its basic principles. He courts individuals in positions of national leadership in order to co-opt the positive public image of the movement, but he simultaneously demoralizes and demobilizes its base. Witness the Sierra Club’s endorsement of the “Great Capitulator,” a travesty indeed.

Secondly, in examining the collapse of Populism one can not help but conclude that the Alliance movement turned its attention to the national electoral stage too soon. As a result, the people in positions of leadership lost touch with their local base; they sacrificed the basic tenets of the movement for short-term political gain. The resulting demoralization of the movement was dramatic and fatal. The sudden melting away of the Alliance provides a potent reminder that grass-roots mobilization and energy is what makes a movement a movement and, ultimately, what gives it power. Its utter collapse after the election of 1896 should serve as a beacon of warning to those who enjoy the air-conditioned offices of the major environmental groups.

Clinton’s rhetoric about building a bridge to the 21st Century suggests a ubiquitous cultural assumption of a national future that unfolds unfailingly to an ever brighter tomorrow. We might do better to build a bridge toward a better understanding of the nineteenth century. It’s not that we could, or should, turn back the hands of time. Rather, we should be ever mindful of democracy’s past promises—as a historical touchstone against which to judge its anemic performance today.

My grandfather may have died in a bar fight, in vain, but the populist movement was martyred. What I wouldn’t give for a tattered, dusty old ballot to cast a vote for a Jerry Simpson or a Eugene Debs.

Local (Northern Illinois)
• As expected, Chicago’s Blue Bag recycling program has proven to be more hype than hope for the city’s solid waste problem. According to the Chicago Recycling Coalition the percentage of recyclables recovered via the blue bags is somewhere below the three percent the city is claiming. Overall the city is reclaiming an anemic 11 percent (three percent through blue bags, five percent through sorting and three percent from evaporated water, hardly an environmental boon). The problem with relying on sorting as the principal technique for recycling is that it often yields materials of a non-marketable quality. It is time for the Daley administration to own up to the fact that Blue Bag has a limited future and to begin experimenting with recycling alternatives.

• Ralph Nader is not on the ballot in Illinois and is not a “qualified” write-in candidate, either. Meaning: if you write him in on your ballot it will simply not be counted. Can you think of a better argument for the need for ballot access reform?

National
• The Clinton administration abdicated its responsibility to care for the nation’s forests when it backed down on its demand for a repeal of the Salvage Logging Rider in negotiations with Republican house leadership over the Omnibus Appropriations bill. This is a bill which has inflicted far more damage on our public forests than was ever seen in the Bush administration and which Vice President Gore himself has admitted was the administration’s biggest environmental mistake.

• Motor Voter has been largely responsible for the largest two year increase in voter registration in the nation’s history. Over nine million new voters were registered over the past two years. The true test of the bill will be voter participation rates in the coming election.

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