Hello and welcome to this lecture entitled Farmers, Movements, and Populist Politics 1875-1900. First, we'll cover the complaints that farmers had about the political economy during the Gilded Age about 1875-1900 or so. These included complaints about the financial system of the United States, falling prices for crops, rising prices for goods they purchased, basic economic fairness, and agriculture's changing place in American political thought and the political economy.
Next we'll cover three organizations that tried to ameliorate the economic crisis. these ills, some by channeling them into political action. The patrons of husbandry, also called the Grange, the Farmers Alliance, and the People's Party, which we call the Populist Party or the Populists.
Let's look first at some of the complaints farmers had during the Gilded Age. These are not all the complaints heard at the time, but an overview of those that led to the so-called Populist Uprising of the 1890s that had its own far-reaching consequences. Remember that the group we call farmers consisted in the south of a few planters or large landowners, a larger group of small landowners called yeoman farmers, and the majority of farmers called sharecroppers.
Remember too, that much of the activity we'll discuss is affected by the emerging Jim Crow racial caste system, by the low cash economy, and by significantly underdeveloped physical, political, and financial infrastructure. One significant grievance farmers shared regardless of their income or station was the narrowness and lack of alternatives to existing revenue streams, that is, competition to supply them with money and credit. Today, we enjoy a multiplicity of banks, credit unions, credit cards, financial institutions, deposit savings accounts, and the like. Even the government supplies us with certain kinds of credit for school, farms, and house housing. Until the Great Depression, most people did not have access to any of these things.
Even credit cards that provide personal loans to tide us over until our cash flow improves didn't exist until 1957. But earlier, credit alternatives were few and far between, which became a political issue. Across the cotton south, sharecroppers worked in the labor and financial systems of the crop lean. As we discussed earlier, the crop lien was a mechanism by which sharecroppers mortgaged next year's crop to rent land from the landlord and to get supplies and tools from the furnishing merchant. Often, crop lien contracts specified that croppers had to market their crop through either the landlord or the merchant. This system, even at its most benign, made the local merchant and local landlord the only revenue streams.
that they did not compete with each other either. The only real leverage croppers had was to change landlords annually. But once strident laws were in place, landlords and furnishing merchants could virtually insurf sharecroppers, binding them to the land through debt peonage. As industries opened and competed for labor, farmers or their families might move to work for wages, but they rarely wanted to move off. the land.
Industries closed for long periods annually and landlords and merchants use multiple means made legal to keep their supply of labor. The South had few banks or loan companies. One contemporary study found the South seriously underserved by financial institutions even in 1897. So there were few alternative revenue streams to the crop lien creditors. Besides share croppers had nothing but but their small amount of personal property to use as collateral for loans. The lack of credit and other banking services affected landowners large and small almost as badly.
Yeoman farmers with small acreage might be able to secure loans, but rarely for terms of less than five years, when what they needed was credit to tide them over between crops. Many loans on land and personal property bore interest of up to 40% per annum, which for for many was a recipe for failure and foreclosure. Losing a farm to a bank often drove yeoman families into the ranks of sharecroppers.
Planters too suffered from the South's tiny financial system, paying high interest on mortgages if they could get such credit at all. Related to the financial industry that is banking and credit being so underdeveloped that credit was difficult to obtain and expensive, was that revenue streams were very narrow for the majority of farmers. The U.S. currency was inelastic. It did not increase when more money was needed to buy and sell crops in the autumn, which drained cash from the eastern banks into the south and west and caused at least four economic recessions, which we call panics, over 30 years. The dollar also appreciated almost 300 percent from 1865. to 1895. This hurt debtors badly and, like banking, became a hot political issue in the 1890s.
All of this was because the U.S. demonetized silver in 1873, thus basing the amount of money in circulation on the amount of gold held by the government. The U.S. government had financed the Civil War in part by issuing greenbacks based on the full faith in the U.S. government. and credit of the government, but began retiring them in the 1870s and 1880s, thus shrinking the money supply further. Aggravating the long-running agricultural depression that resulted from tight money was the expansion of the industrial economy that also sucked money out of the system. Remember, every other developed nation in the world also retained this gold standard, so there was a finite amount of money in existence.
regardless of the demand for money. Even big gold strikes like that in the Klondike in 1898 barely made a blip in the supply of currency worldwide. When businesses couldn't get money, they couldn't do business. You might think that tight money would lead to high prices for crops, but that wasn't the case with cotton and other staple crops, corn, wheat, and the West.
The perversity of the crop lien system was that as price... fell on the world market because of oversupply, farmers produced more of the crop, thus glutting the markets even more. Farmers didn't see their problem as one of oversupply, and who can blame them when there were people without adequate food clothing and shelter but the economic system did not privilege distribution. Farmers instead interpreted the low crop prices they received to other things usually some kind of conspiracy. One of the problems they encountered was that most farmers had to sell their crops at the height of harvest when prices on what's called the spot market were at their lowest.
Few farmers could afford the cost paid to warehouses to hold their crops until prices rose sometime after the harvest and there were no alternatives to private owned and controlled warehouses and grain elevators. Between what farmers received for their crops and what they paid in production and transportation costs, they often had too little to settle their annual furnishing land debts and so were stuck working for the same people the following year until their debts were paid. That's what the law demanded. Farmers small holders, sharecroppers, and even planters, interpreted their troubles to be the result of bad acts by monopolies.
Big corporations were a new thing after the Civil War, and their presence and outright depredations caused most small producers to fear and loathe them. They were especially hated railroads, largely because railroads were what we call a natural monopoly, and that there's usually too little business to justify competition. along any particular line. Railroads also committed bad acts as a matter of course, some of which seem reasonable to us now, but were considered evil then.
Railroads charged small producers more than large producers, and they often either charged much more for short hauls than for long hauls, or worse, charged so-called through rates, a fare to take the goods to a hub, even if the farmer only wanted goods to go part of that way. Railroads also had a terrible reputation as an economic pirate and for good reason. The Panic of 1873 was a direct result of railroad stock manipulation and railroads both watered their stock that is a fraudulent practice of selling more stock than the company had assets to cover, and defaulting on railroad bonds provided by bribed legislatures.
Railroads were in such shambles by 1890 that financier J.P. Morgan bought most of the major eastern lines and consolidated them to prevent a complete failure of the national transportation system and to make a ton of money in the process. Among other things, Morgan created the Southern Railway Company and in 1893 that managed 7,000 miles of track absorbed from three major bankrupt lines. Farmers found it difficult to cut their expenditures given the number of merchants and transportation middlemen they had to pay for, even for basic necessities. This was aggravated by taxation policies and the tariff, both of which farmers considered to be conspiracies against them.
Land was the most common source of income for the poor. of state and local taxation. Farmers felt put upon because they paid land taxes, but private individuals and corporations did not pay taxes on anything but small amounts of real property, which was not the source of their wealth. There were no taxes on stocks, bonds, bank accounts, or personal property to speak of. No taxes on accumulated wealth either, only on land.
Farmers also suffered from federal tariff policies. Tariffs, levies on foreign-made goods that operate like sales taxes, were part of the economic system that protected manufacturing by raising foreign competitors'prices and part of the political system that sacrificed the interests of weaker interest to stronger. Farmers enjoyed very little tariff protections for the goods they produced, but paid what they thought of as overly high tariffs on manufactured goods that they were not able they bought. We're not talking here of merely consumer goods, but of goods they needed to run their farms. Farmers, particularly in the South, felt the economic deck was stacked against them.
Farmers felt a vague but persistent dread as their status in the American political economy fell with the rise of manufacturing and the financial industry during the Gilded Age. Whether they actually enjoyed the public esteem of America or not, farmers felt their occupation to have been both noble and privileged in American political theory. This was because so much of the American economy was theirs. Only in 1920 did more people live in America. in cities than on farms, and the Census Bureau defined cities as having only 2,500 people, so that's really a small town.
And in the South, farmers dominated the population well into the 1940s. One of the most important disputes in American political theory was that between the vision of Thomas Jefferson of a polity composed of yeoman farmers, many with slaves admittedly enough, and the vision of Alexander Hamilton, of a polity of manufacturers and individual workers. Until the Civil War, the Jeffersonian view was dominant, but afterwards a Hamiltonian economy arose.
With it, the interest of industries took precedent over that of farmers. At least that's what the farmers thought. Even more aggravating was the rise of the financial industry, the purveyors of stocks, bonds, and money, who made the wheels of industry. return for a cost. Speaking of the extent of this rise that included both the major financial bosses like Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie, the latter two were industrialists too, Ohio Senator John Sherman, the brother of William Tecumseh Sherman, once quipped that, quote, where we used to speak of fortunes in the thousands, we now speak of them in the millions, unquote.
We cannot discount the psychological impact. of this perceived loss of status, combined with the true generalized revulsion at the machinations of the moneylenders. Remember, many farm families were highly religious and often considered the love of money to be the root of all evil. So when the moneyed elite acted badly, farmers thought they were not merely bad actors but morally bankrupt and that their system should be overthrown to satisfy both the farmers self-interest and their morality.
Traditionally isolated and fiercely independent, farmers organized during the Gilded Age to improve their lot. Americans had long been a nation of joiners in the phrase of historian Arthur Schlesinger senior with Masonic like organizations springing up throughout the 19th century. These were often secret or an open secret, relied on more or less elaborate rituals, and existed for everything from socializing to mutual benefit to insurance to labor unions.
We'll discuss three important organizations for southern farmers, the Patrons of Husbandry, the Farmers'Alliance, and the People's Party. Patrons of husbandry, still called the Grange today, was organized in December 1867 by Minnesota farmer turned federal bureaucrat Oliver Kelly and six others. These founders envisioned a national organization composed of state chapters that were composed of county chapters. chapters.
Grange historian Dennis Norton maintains that there were two Granges, the first founded in the south and west up until 1880. The second arose in the old agricultural areas of the northeast and mid- Midwest, 1880 to 1890. We'll concern ourselves with that first Grange. Kelly wanted the Grange to be a fraternity to represent farmers like unions represented workers. The Grange was open to both men and women, though only whites, and it relied on Masonic-like rituals and its emphasis on reducing farm isolation through sociability to attract members.
The first thing local Granges did was to build chapter lodges. to give locals an excuse and a place to meet. These lodges also served as venues for neighborhood events as well as for schools, especially in the South.
Grange has also followed a calendar of meetings and celebrations that brought neighborhoods together. They had harvest festivals, Children's Day, celebration of the anniversary of the order on December 4th, regular meetings, and many other festivals. It also provided disaster relief and help.
for farm families who suffered misfortunes. Besides sociability, education was the foundation upon which the grain built its programs and activism. It pushed for curricular reform in public schools, particularly to add agricultural training to the course of study. Some southern grain went so far as to establish schools for their members'children, though that was often to provide for a white school in a heavily black area.
It led the charge to get land-grant universities to de-emphasize the older elite curriculum designed to be used by the black community. designed to produce gentlemen in favor of a curriculum that emphasized applicable skills like agriculture and mechanics. You can see this in the names adopted by many southern colleges like the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College now Auburn University, and the African American colleges that kept their A&M names like North Carolina A&M, Florida A&M, Alabama A&M.
Finally, the Grange championed adult education for literacy and skills provided by the states or by itself. In many ways, the Grange was similar to the settlement house movement that served immigrants in large cities later in the 19th century. But Kelly and other founders recognized that they could not rely solely on fellowship and education to grow the order. They had to appeal to the material interests and problems of the farmers.
to make those farmers join together. So Kelly proposed Grangers adopt the then-current idea of keeping money at home through cooperative selling and buying. At first, the Grange copied the system for selling and buying cotton that prevailed, in which local agents bundled cotton from small producers into amounts large enough to sell to manufacturers.
This was a system in competition with the emerging streams of revenue and economic activities that relied on planters and furnishing merchants, and brought charges that the Grange was communistic. Ignoring these claims, the Grange expanded the system and set up cooperative stores, some industrial cooperatives, cooperative manufacturing, and even cooperative banks and insurance agencies. None of these worked well, particularly in the face of relentless criticism and ruthless competition to undercut them.
Thank you. Ineptitude and possible chicanery hurt the cooperative arrangements of the Grange, too. Maladministration led to declining membership.
Oliver Kelly was forced out in a dispute with the board in 1878, and the cooperatives failed altogether in the aftermath of the Depression that followed the Panic of 1873. By 1880, the southern and western Grange was dead. It revived in the Midwest and Northeast. but was even more conservative. Although the Grange was not remembered for its political stances, it did begin to promote a legislative agenda that tried to promote the farmer's immediate interests without offering any kind of critique of the prevailing political economy.
It supported state and federal laws as appropriate for things from game laws, fence laws, animal protection, and consumer protection to tariff reform, direct election of senators, and support for income taxes. Eventually, the Grange advocated a fairly sophisticated agenda of federal regulatory legislation that included railroad regulation, support for the Interstate Commerce Commission, rural free delivery of the mails, and a postal savings bank, and even nationalization of the telephone and telegraph systems. One of the things that killed the Grange in the South and West was that it did not offer a robust critique of the emerging system of economics that privileged industry over agriculture, and it did not advocate serious political organizing and local resistance.
Such that... was how the Farmers'Alliance eclipsed the Grange. The Southern Farmers'Alliance and Industrial Union flourished about 1875 to 1889. It was formed in Lampasas County, Texas in 1875, along with many other organizations in other counties and other states. Texas County alliances merged and incorporated the Farmers'State Alliance in 1880. There was in fact a much more well-organized Northern Alliance in the northern Plains states.
The two groups grew separately and never merged though they had similar programs. The Southern Alliance grew beyond the borders of Texas into the cotton areas of the southeast after Charles McCune became its leader in 1886. He merged his group with the Louisiana Farmers Union and changed its name to the Southern Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union. It absorbed similar groups in other states over time, such as the North Carolina Farmers Association, and where there were no organizations, the Alliance sent lecturer organizers to build county-level sub-alliances. They were similar to Methodist church circuit-riding preachers. The Alliance also grew by subsidizing newspapers, paying editors to promote its stories, and agitating for local sub-alliances.
It was attractive because it spoke about politics, which the Grange steadfastly refused to do. In 1886, the Texas Alliance generated 17 legislative proposals that it hoped to work into state and national law, including the ability to incorporate cooperative stores, which was prohibited in Texas law, the equalization of taxation between farmers and land companies, abolition of convict leasing, powerful interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads and it supported the new National Bureau of Labor Economics. As the Alliance spread across the South, either building sub alliances or absorbing existing organizations, it included only white men in its membership but also brought poor farmers, tenants, and large landowners together.
This combination is, for us, a proving ground, if you will, for how race trumped class as the premier economic organizing principle in the South. The acceptance of white supremacy and racial segregation diverted attention from the clash of interest between the so-called mud seal members and the planters. The competing agendas between these two groups weakened the alliance's economic program and split its politics. This problem played out under the directorship of the alliance's second president. North Carolinian and former Confederate officer wounded at Gettysburg, Leonidas L. Polk.
He represented the planter wing of the Alliance and even though he was highly political, he stopped short of advancing a class-based critique of the farmers problems that would have pushed the Alliance to the left. As the Alliance grew, it was roiled by tensions among its members interests. Sharecroppers, yeomen and planters had different stakes in the system of agriculture and different agendas.
It was also roiled by growing outside of Texas and absorbing groups with their own priorities, like the 1889 merger with the Agricultural Wheel of Arkansas, a radical organization that was expressly political and represented almost no planters. As early as 1880-84, Texas Alliance men had engaged in a range war by cutting fences raised by cattle barons that cut off access to the yeoman's water and common pasturage. This became an issue in the Texas legislature demonstrating that direct action could get an issue before the lawmakers.
Alliance chapters also created cooperative buying and selling institutions like those of the Grange but on a grander scale and with a decidedly political critique of monopoly. The Alliance promoted cotton bulking through agents, then the establishment of cotton gins and cotton yards, flour mills, as well as creating credit companies. Most of these failed, but they did increase membership and gave Alliance rhetoric its militant edge. Militant members of the Alliance and their friends in the wheel before the merger thought they could strike a blow against Monopoly and save money by breaking the so-called jute trust that produced wrappings called bagging to contain cotton bales. To do this, farmers fought to substitute cotton bagging for jute with the cotton produced by Alliance and wheel cooperative mills.
This action merged with another, to push to withhold cotton from the market to sell when prices went up. Unfortunately, in most of the South, Jenner's could not find enough cotton bagging to make the strike effective, and the alliance couldn't provide enough credit to make it possible to hold cotton off the market. South Carolina and Georgia farmers, however, were able to force a reduction of jute bagging prices in the strike, and the militancy opened the way for a producerist critique of what farmers called monopoly capitalism. The Farmers'Alliance got into politics full-time at its St. Louis Convention in 1888. There, it adopted a platform to reform landholding, transportation, and finance. This St. Louis platform called for nationalization and public ownership of railroads and telegraphs, the free coinage of silver to expand the currency, and a sub-treasury.
Let me explain the sub-treasury. was the federal department of the treasury to create regional subtreasuries that would establish federally operated warehouses to store non-perishable crops so they could be sold outside of the glut at harvest time. These offices would then provide farmers who stored their crops low interest loans for 80 percent of what the feds thought the crops would bring when sold.
When the feds sold the crops or the farmer withdrew the crop to sell it, That money paid off the loan and interest, and any profit went to the individual farmer who paid off their own debts. This, then, was a federally sponsored alternative revenue stream that would effectively destroy the social and political power of local economic elites by taking farmers out from under the control of those planters and furnishing merchants. Such a scheme would put farmers on a cash, rather than a credit, footing. The Alliance had bills introduced into Congress in 1890 that got as far as hearings, but they died in committee or on the floor. And the Sub-Treasury Plan riled the planters who were still in the Alliance, though in a minority.
The Alliance met in Ocala, Florida in 1890, where it confirmed the St. Louis platform with some changes and additions. It called for direct elections of senators, regulation rather than public ownership of railroads and telegraphs. added a land loan program similar to the sub-treasury plan for crops. This politicization of the Alliance led to its eventual demise as its militants merged with the People's Party.
Before explaining the populists, let's look at the so-called colored alliance that was a parallel organization with the Farmers Alliance. Although segregation wasn't mandated by law until the 1890s, the law only codified the racial attitudes of those with power, the white community. White farmers understood that they alone could not affect the outcomes they wanted unless they could coordinate with black farmers.
But their racism didn't allow them to sit in the same meetings. Thus, a colored alliance organized separately in 1886 and 1887 and shared a similar model and trajectory. as the Farmers Alliance, though they lacked the Alliance's resources to even attempt to promote a militant agenda. The Colored Alliance was another opportunity for black men to exercise political leadership.
Remember, black men could vote into the 1890s and to create political networks. It claimed 1.2 million members in 1891. Some state leaders of the Colored Alliance were black, others white, usually depending on which leader could promote that state's most important agenda. Colored Alliance participated in alliance-formed cooperatives, but only within the limits of white supremacy.
This lack of resources led to the failure of the Cotton Strike of 1890 in the Black Belt of the Southeast. A third political party emerged because of agrarian discontent. In many places, This included factory labor allies.
The populist party's rise took place toward the end of the era of the Farmers'Alliance and performed a different function. It was a political party that sought to win office and to influence policy. Populists at the state and national levels wanted increased democracy and currency reform. They offered a political critique of the U.S. representative democracy as it was then practiced as being too narrow. They offered a critique of the U.S. economy as being too pro-corporate and behind the times.
Let's look now at the emergence of populist politics. In 1892, the People's Party, that is the Populist Party, formed. It produced at its meeting of 1892 the Omaha platform which came directly from Charles McCune's 1888 St. Louis platform of the Farmers Alliance.
This was written by Ignatius Donnelly, a colorful politician from Minnesota who had joined the Minnesota Grange in 1873 but abandoned it in 1875 after a poor showing in the 1874 elections. and when he realized he could no longer use it to promote himself. You might know him as the popularizer of the lost continent of Atlantis.
What he wanted was a democratic federal government to protect the weak, producers such as farmers and workers, from the strong, idlers who they identified as the owners of capital. The program was this, that the government would own the communications and transportation systems that there would be free coinage of silver and paper currency based up to fifty dollars per person this was just one metric to determine the amount of money in the economy gold bugs that is people on the gold standard use the metric of the amount of gold bullion held by the government silverites wanted the government to buy and mint as much silver as it could with 16 ounces of silver being worth the same as one ounce of gold. Today, we base the amount of money in our economy on the gross domestic product.
The Omaha platform called for progressive income taxes, too. It also called for the direct election of senator by the people rather than election by state legislatures. This came with the 17th Amendment in 1913. It wanted the eight-hour day for factory labor. and severely restricted immigration to prevent employers from undercutting wages by importing contract labor.
West Coast employers had imported Chinese workers who were almost slaves and the increasing arrival of eastern and southern Europeans, particularly Jews, were blamed for oversupplying cheap labor. This nativist and racist reaction among farmers and workers of older stock, many of whom had been decried only a generation earlier themselves, is a taint on their reform efforts, but part of the history of reform. The Omaha platform included the sub-treasury scheme for creating agricultural credit.
This again came directly from the Alliance's St. Louis program. Union General James Weaver ran as president and garnered one million votes in the election of 1892. Politics were not then as nationalized as they are now, so county and state politics played an important role in American life. This is to say that local issues animated local populace just as much as national issues did, and where there might have been close agreement with the national platform, there was no party discipline that prevented state populace from making alliances that would have been anathema at the national level.
As the populists worked on state elections between presidential years, they created the situations that the national party would copy. In southern states, with an active Republican party, populists often fused with them. Where the Democratic Party was dominant, as in the Deep South, populists ran as uber-Democrats.
In both cases, white populists either threatened to ally with black voters or actually did so, thus taking votes away from the black belt. planters who control their sharecroppers votes. Remember, voting one is done in public by straight ticket voted, often by placing a token into a box or a jar while election officials looked on. Even then, if election officials didn't like the outcome, they simply did away with ballots and tokens and reported incorrect numbers to achieve their desired goal. Vote stealing was so bad in the Alabama black belt that some officials asked that they might be relieved of the burden of stealing votes by disfranchisement of African Americans.
Regardless, the populist agitation was a direct threat to the dominance of the successors of the Redeemers, that is, a threat to the dominance of the Democratic Party in the South. Even though few populists won seat in legislatures or in governors'offices, the Bourbon conservatives allied with alarmed liberal Democrats to wreck future populist uprisings. One of the main weapons they used was black and poor white disfranchisement, which we'll discuss more later. After the debacle of the 1896 presidential election, some southern populists re-enlisted as the left wing of their state democratic parties, but advocated full-throated white supremacy.
One of the most important of these was Tom Watson of Georgia, who continued as a populist into the new century. As you see, he ran for the presidency as a populist in 1904, but after losing, went back to publishing his newspaper, the Jeffersonian, full-time. He oddly committed to virulent and violent white supremacy, but continued to support both populist economic nostrums and political reforms.
Let's talk now about the 1896 election at the national level. Populists were co-opted, some by the Democrats, others by Republicans. And bimetallism, that is the coining of gold and silver, became mainstream populist programs.
Politicians took over the official party rather than activists, and William Jennings Bryan made his cross of gold speech and received the Democratic nomination for president. The populists held their convention after the Republican convention and after the Democratic convention so they could decide which party to fuse with. They hoped to garner silver rights from. both parties, those who did not want to be on the gold standard.
Ultimately, the National Populist Party joined with the National Democratic Party, but the Democrats and the Populists lost the election to William McKinley. The populist reform impulse faded thereafter, but what killed it? Well, one thing was internal divisions within the Populist Party.
Another was the return of prosperity after 1896. The jingoism of the Spanish-American War of 1898 also landed a blow. And the changing class dynamics of the reform movement. All of these things led to the demise of the Populist Party. So let's summarize.
Agrarianism looked backwards to a time when yeoman farmers were the Jeffersonian ideal of Americans. Independent producers who engage very little with the market, not beholden to anyone for anything. That ideal, however, was a myth. It had never really existed except as a legend.
Even by the time of Jefferson's inauguration as president in 1803, this ideal was on its way to extinction. But agrarians were not merely critics of the emerging industrial and corporate order of the Gilded Age. They did not merely reject corporations and the government that supported business, but sought government programs and self-help projects that benefited small farmers as much as manufacturers, financiers, and agribusiness.
Agrarian activists built voluntary organizations to ameliorate problems of rural life, particularly isolation and poverty. and built pressure groups almost like labor unions to advocate for governmental policies in support of their economic and social positions. Americans usually turn this kind of advocacy into political action. Our electoral system channels such energy.
So it's not surprising that farmers formed the backbone of the People's Party, also known as the Populists. The agrarian activist political program articulated in the St. Louis platform the agricultural wheel in 1888 and the Omaha platform of the Populist Party of 1892 written by Ignatius Donnelly included the monetization of silver as only one plank. This was to inflate the currency to ease debtors and allow for more even and robust economic growth.
But by 1896 bimetallism had become a single issue in the presidential campaign. splitting the populist party that nominated the Democrat pro-silver nominee, William Jennings Bryan, as their own presidential candidate. The stinging defeat of Bryan by William McKinley, the jingoism of the Spanish-American War, and the return of prosperity after 1897 And the change in the class nature of the emerging reform movement buried populism as a distinct movement.
American farmers had been replaced as the leading edge of the economy and as the hegemon of American culture and society. This ends the lecture. And as always, thank you for your attention.