The Populist Moment

We trace what populism looks like in the 1890s and why it’s less a single doctrine than a coalition of anger, hope, and economic suspicion. We follow the money fight over gold and silver into the Panic of 1893, Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, and the constitutional conflicts that shaped labor and taxation battles. 
• populism as a shifting set of perspectives rather than a fixed creed 
• farmers as the backbone of the 1890s populist movement 
• deep skepticism of banks and financial institutions as “unproductive” power 
• antitrust and railroad power as recurring targets 
• the gold versus silver currency debate as a fight over inflation and deflation 
• the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the run on gold claims after 1893 
• William Jennings Bryan’s rise and the 1896 election turning on monetary policy 
• John Peter Altgeld, the Pullman Strike, and limits on federal troops for enforcement 
• the “Cross of Gold” speech as economic fairness and national sovereignty rhetoric 
• the early income tax, Pollock (1895), and the long road to the 16th Amendment 
• why the Populist Party fades and gets absorbed into the Democratic coalition

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Transcript

Welcome And The Word Populism

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Welcome back to Civics in a year. Today we're talking about a term that you might have heard, populism. But populism is not a new term. Professor Bienberg is back with us. Professor Bienberg, populism, like I said, not a new term. What is it and where did it originate?

The 1890s Movement And Its Moods

Silver Money Inflation Deflation Explained

Panic Of 1893 And The 1896 Election

SPEAKER_01 1:07

I'm not going to say what it is in the abstract, because like many times it changes meanings. But what I want to talk about is the sort of populist movement in the 1890s. And it's worth emphasizing, like the progressive movement that succeeds it. There is not one single like creed that you sign up and you say this is what a populist believes. There are some populists who are basically conservative free market types that just want to have anti-monopoly kind of stuff and not in slightly more inflationary currency. There are other populists that are indeed sort of proto-socialists. So there are some populists that really want a stronger national government. There are other populists that basically say, nope, the federal government has power to coin gold and silver. We want more silver and we want antitrust against railroads. But otherwise, like leave it alone and keep the feds away from me. So there's a it's it's sort of a set of moods or perspectives. But broadly speaking, what unifies populists of this era is a sense that something has gone amiss in the American economy and that it no longer works for sort of working people. Now, whether again, whether right or wrong about the economics of this or whether they're you know, this is a sort of separate question, but it's a it's a belief that a lot of folks have, particularly rural folks. Farmers are the core, sort of the backbone of these populist movements. And they're not necessarily aligned with urban workers, right? So sometimes their interests are actually quite intentional. So it's not even a sort of you know haves versus have-nots, even as the populists try to make it as that. There's often a deep skepticism of financial institutions attached to this, that basically they're not productive parts of the economy, andor they sort of gain wealth by kind of manipulating stuff that normal people can't figure out. So, and then the populists also are both a formal political party and a sort of movement that has parts of both of the other two parties. It will eventually sort of merge into the Democratic Party. Probably the main issue, other than sort of antitrust that we we were talking about in an earlier session, probably the other main issue that sort of unifies most populists is the issue of currency, which is really boring and tedious, important, but the short version is the US government, the US Constitution authorizes the federal government to make coins of gold and silver, right? And basically, depending on the ratio that of gold and silver that's being minted and coined, and because you can convert your money back into this, like you can take a note and convert it back into currency. Depending on what the ratio is, the economy is going to tilt either inflationary or deflationary. Farmers, uh inflation meaning your money is worth less. So this is bad, this is beneficial if you've borrowed money. Deflationary, uh, it's bad if you have loaned money or are a retiree. Deflation, conversely, is bad if you have if you have um borrowed money, that the money that you are paying back is now worth more than what it was before. And so we alluded a little bit when we talked about the lodge bill, if you remember. Like I said, there's that weirda side of those senators that basically got bought off by silver to turn against the civil rights uh bill. And so part of the payoff for that is in 1890, our friend John Sherman, again, we talked about with antitrust, pushes through the Silver Purchase Act, basically increasing the amount of silver that the Fed's federal government is buying, which because they can convert it from banknotes, is basically designed to be sort of moderately anti-deflationary, I guess. Cleveland, nonetheless, but then you get a panic of 1893, and there's a run on gold as a result of this, possibly, depending on who you're asking, a run on gold, federal gold reserves as a result of this Sherman Silver Purchase Act. And so this is particularly hostile to harmful to farmers. Uh, so they basically want, so Cleveland has them repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. The farmers basically want it more or less restored and enhanced. So they want basically more silver and more higher percentage of the currency being minted being made out of silver, which they think will be useful to farmers. And this, and you see, yeah, there's an economic panic in 1893, arguably the worst before the depression. And this sort of sets off all sorts of negative economic consequences, job losses, you know. So people are then trying to figure out what do we do about this. And part of the end of doing debating is this currency question. And this ends up launching the political career of uh William Jennings Bryan, who's not a nobody. There's an account that like he's just this random backbencher, like, oh wow, this guy's a genius. Like, no, he was pretty well known as being a good orator before. But he realizes that there is a he thinks there's a political market to bring together basically working people across the country on behalf of silver. And so hadn't really been planned, but the 1896 presidential election ends up being largely about metal. They wanted to be about tariffs originally. McKinley is in fact, he's the author of a major tariff about a few years before. McKinley had been actually moderately kind of pro-silver earlier, and so it's a little odd for him to end up as like the hardcore gold guy, which is partly why his campaign people, instead of going after Brian so much, they do go after Brian. They go after this guy named John Peter Alfgeld. Have you ever heard of this guy, John Peter? I've never heard of this person. Never. Most people have not. I insisted we put one of his little speeches in the our introduction to American government reader. But Alfgeld is the governor of Illinois. Uh he's very, very politically powerful and is a leader of the populist movement. He can't run for president himself because he's German-born. But he kind of rises to political prominence during the Pullman strikes, the railroad strikes. So there's a railroad, there are prominent railroad strikes in the 1890s during this depression. Grover Cleveland has the military put the strikes down on grounds that it's interfering with the mail. He says I'm obligated to enforce federal law. The mail isn't getting delivered because the railroads are all on state. Altgeld goes after him on the grounds that, and this one is contemporary. He says the federal government cannot deploy the military for law enforcement unless requested by, basically unless requested by the state under Article 4, right? Just for violence. He says, look, the mail is still getting delivered in other ways. They're letting the mail trucks go through and mail trains go through. So you don't have the enforcing the law argument here. And so then it's just basically domestic violence in the constitutional sense. And he says, you have to have the state's permission. We didn't ask for it. And so he goes after the pro-state's rights. Cleveland guy is a sellout on this. And but Altgeld is an easy target because he's he's basically they they get there, he's very pro-labor in ways that uh Theodore Roosevelt started starts to get his political career going, basically going on tour saying if you back Brian, you're going to actually get Althgeld, who's this foreign-born communist that will ruin America. And so they they all make Althgeld out to be Brian's puppet master, even though Brian and Alfgeld don't really like each other, it's my understanding, and Althgeld actually preferred somebody else. But yeah, Brian, very famously in 1896, basically gets the Democratic Party nomination by giving a speech saying that you're going to crucify the famous line is you're going to crucify basically working people on a cross of gold if you make the currency just about gold. The interesting thing though is if you read the speech, as much of the speech is actually protesting, because officially the Republican plank doesn't say we're going to do gold. They say we'll do gold unless we can talk the other countries into doing unless the other countries like we make an agreement to do silver. So a big chunk of the speech is actually like a national sovereignty piece saying McKinley can't even say gold is good. He wants to sell out our economic policy to basically British bankers and foreigners. And so there's this weird kind of proto like America first kind of language. And then it's back into the and you're screwing over, you're screwing over workers. It also complains a lot about the income tax had just been struck down, which had been something else that populists had wanted to see, that the tax bur base basis uh shifted, particularly. Almost everybody who pays the income tax originally is like in New York and Connecticut, because it's a very high, very, very high income threshold. It gets struck down in the Pollock case in 1895, basically on grounds that the Constitution has protocols for apportioning taxes, and the majority says he didn't follow the protocols. So that's basically what populism is pushing for in the 1890s. Bryan absorbs them into the Democratic Party. Most of their platform doesn't really get through. The feds adopt the gold standard, which they definitely did not want, or they sort of re-adopt the gold standard. They don't get railroads nationalized, which some of the populists wanted. The populist party wanted it, but they get a lot better regulated. So it's like with the progressives. They get some of their pieces through a little later. But yeah, Brian, Brian sort of moves toward his other major focus, which is prohibition, which we'll talk about in another podcast. Brian keeps running forever and ever and ever, but he doesn't obviously ever get to be, get to be president. He gets to be secretary of state at one point, but that's about as high as he goes. But the populist movement sort of tapers off, the economic conditions change. And as I said before, they had a lot of different interests and perspectives. And so they just sort of fragment, fragment out again. And as a political movement, they basically just get sort of co-opted within the Democratic Party. Democrats lose. So Republicans don't feel that they need to be particularly responsive to their views.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

So talking about the Cross of Gold speech, what does that tell us about the state of American politics at that time? So this was written in 1896. What like how does the speech give us a kind of window to the state of American politics?

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Well, considering most of us don't spend much, I mean, I guess people kind of complain about the Federal Reserve from time to time, but most of us don't really get that into monetary policy. And yet, basically, and if you look at the 1896 Democratic Party platform, which is sort of built in tandem with the cross of gold speech, it's all about that. Like 80% of the length of it is basically about metal policy and how that you know inflation deflates. I mean, people get mad about inflation still. So that still matters. Like that's still a live issue, but sort of in the context, it's it's a less, so in some sense, it's a language, and like this sort of anticipates you always ask the why does this matter today? But I'll just sort of merge the two of them here. It shows that inflation is a big deal. Uh inflation deflation policies are a big deal. Stable currency is something people care about. But it's not, you know, I think most people sort of want a stable currency and not one that they feel is rigged against them one way or the other, right? The farmers are convinced that it's, you know, they're not saying like we took out loans, we shouldn't have to pay them back. They're arguing we took out loans, we shouldn't have to pay them back at a different rate, right? And conversely, people say I earned money, I shouldn't therefore have it devalued because the government's inflated, right? So there's this sort of intuitive sense of what I worked for or loaned or lend out or borrowed, like that should be sort of stable. But the fact that they're not talking about I don't know, what do we think they're not even really talking about tax rates so much? I mean, the income tax, they're you know grumbling about that a little bit. But it really is just about inflation and it's inflation and the wake of you know a depression. So those issues still matter, and they just show you how important that is to in that one particular era. In one perspective, another perspective, McKinley wins, right? It turns out Brian does not have an angry mass of all of the farmers of the United States. They're gonna rise up and join all the urban workers and throw McKinley out. McKinley wins pretty handily, and in fact, the Republicans continue to dominate politics for quite a while, other than effectively when they internally slaughter each other after 1912. So it tells us that there is a large alienated constituency of rural Americans in the 1890s who have a champion that they like, and Brian is a good speaker. So the the underlying issues still actually matter, even if the sort of gold versus silver framing feels very alien to us today.

Cross Of Gold Then Income Tax Fallout

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Well, and it's interesting talking about inflation and deflation. I mean, you talked about the panic of 1893. You know, we have the Great Depression, we have recessions, so we can talk about how like boring monetary policy is, but it definitely affects our day-to-day lives even today. So it's it's an interesting conversation. And the cross of gold speech, I have read it in the past, and it this is why I like primary sources too, because it gives us a window into that time. And you had talked about like the term populism doesn't just mean one thing because it depends when we are talking about populism, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:15

There are different populisms over time, and there are different populisms even at the same time. I mean, they're like it's a Venn diagram of most of the populist-ish folks are interested in that, you know, Alf Geld's not they're not all even into the silver necessarily. Like they have different emphasis, you know, some of them want the income tax, some of them want aggressive antitrust. So some of them want nationalization. So, you know, this is this is me as this is the the time that I sound like a historian and not a political scientist, but like even within the times, the the stuff's more complicated than just like you're not signing up to the code of populism in a way that you know, like a Christians reciting the Apostles' Creed or something like that, right? There's no sort of populist equivalent. So there are populists that aren't that keen on Brian.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

So yeah, so it's when we're talking about income tax too. The 16th Amendment has not been passed yet, correct? Correct.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

So this the this so a brief Civil War income tax gets passed during the Civil War, basically as a wartime measure, and the constitutionality of it is questionable at the time, but they sort of just phase it out and make it go away. So there's no income tax after, I want to say like 1871, 1870, somewhere in there. And they they put us they put one in in 1894 when they're they basically reduced some tariffs and then they slap an income tax to sort of make up that that revenue. And it gets struck down the year afterward. And could they have retailored that tax to try to clear the constitution? Maybe. I'm not the sort of economic historian in in that sense. Uh but obviously you know, uh about a decade and a half afterward, there'll be a sort of renewed movement for an income tax, a constitutional amendment to sort of solve that problem.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Okay. Well, Dr. Beyenberg, as always, thank you so much.