American Populism: A Social History 1877-1898The grass-roots Populist movement that swept rural America a century ago drew millions of farm men and women and clusters of non-farmers into a powerful crusade to reshape the nation's political economy. Populists sought to usher in a "cooperative commonwealth" to reverse the growth of America's monopoly capitalism and harness the engine of private ownership for the common good. Thus, Populism became a bridge between the nineteenth-century traditions of republicanism and producerism and the regulatory state of this century. McMath crisply interprets the development of the Populist crusade from its early beginnings in the turbulent 1870s to the emergence of the Farmers' Alliances a decade later. He deals with the founding of the People's (Populist) Party in 1892, and its ultimate demise. He describes Populism's important regional components, and he places the crusade in a larger context as he compares it to parallel movements in the Great Plains and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. American Populism is an impressive book about a major social, cultural, and political movement. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Rural Life | 19 |
Cultures of Protest 186786 | 50 |
The Farmers Alliance in Search of the Coop | 83 |
Interest | 108 |
The Peoples | 143 |
The Crisis of Populism 189398 | 180 |
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Common terms and phrases
agrarian agricultural Alliance leaders Alliance members Alliance yardstick Alliance's Alliancemen American antimonopoly Association Bryan campaign candidate capital Chicago Cleburne Cleveland coalition convention cotton County crop Cross Timbers culture Dakota Dakota Territory delegates demands Democratic Party economic Edward Bellamy elected established farm farmer-labor farmers and laborers federal free silver frontier fusion George Georgia Goodwyn Grange Greenback History Illinois industrial insurgency Iowa issue join Kansas Knights of Labor Lampasas Leonidas Polk Louis Macune major parties meeting membership ment merchants Midwest mobilization Nebraska neighbors NFA&IU North Carolina Ocala Ocala demands Omaha platform organizations Peffer People's Party Plains planters political Populism President producerism producers protest radical railroads reform region Republican Senate settlers sharecropping social South and West southern farmers suballiances subtreasury Texas third-party Tom Watson tradition Union veteran vote Watson Weaver western wheat William William Jennings Bryan Wise County women workers York