populism grange

8/17

modern = progressive? the squad?

see pseudo-pop // authoritarian, ~ inequality (recall occupy and TP opposite reaction to same crisis/ inequality

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several endorse mta

Sebastopol Grange

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mta 10 25 ymail

Cultural Change for the We the People Amendment

tenth in the series

The Populist movement of the late 19th century was the largest democratic mass movement in U.S. history. The movement included several parallel but independent organizations of farmers in the South, Midwest and High Plains. The movement later included urban working people across the country

Among the social movements covered in this series, the Populist movement is the least recognized (dare I say “popular”) and understood. Few can name any of its organizers, strategists or speakers (William Jennings Bryan doesn’t count, as explained below). There are no Populist movement holidays, postage stamps, detailed descriptions of its activities in high school history books, or even legitimate recognition of its lessons (positive or negative) incorporated in democratic activist organizations.

The movement’s relative invisibility can be explained by several factors. First, it was largely a rural movement that was the most active in a part of the country (i.e. the Midwest and South) not associated with the mass social movements. Second, it occurred during a period of U.S. history that was dominated by the rapid rise of industrialization and urbanization. And maybe, most significantly, its goals of creating an authentic bottom up democracy and bringing the corporate state under popular control through democratic politics, a democratic society grounded in mass dignity, was not going to see the light of day in our dominant corporate culture, which includes reformist non-profit democracy organizations.

Farmers were experiencing extremely hard times in the 1870’s. This was the age of growing economic and political power of corporations (railroads and banks in particular), trusts and capitalist Robber Barons. The ownership of both industrial and agricultural land was being increasingly centralized.

The dominant American cultural narrative of perpetual progress wasn’t being felt by millions of farmers, especially in the South, who were either in severe debt or foreclosed on their mortgages and became tenant farmers due to the furnishing merchants of the crop-lien system. When the “money power” (i.e. banks) successfully removed federal Greenbacks from federal circulation, deflation resulted in falling agricultural prices. Extreme drought and the poor quality of land for farming were additional factors.

The cultural message conveyed by the power elite to Farmers was that they were “lazy,” inherently inferior,” or in other ways at fault for their conditions. Ingraining indignity and inferiority was the deliberate aim to ensure passivity, resignation, deference, and social control; to erode any aspirations for significant democratic change; and to preserve the growing corporate culture that was projected as “democratic.”

Some farmers who had personally experienced or witnessed economic hard times and wanted to be politically active began to educate themselves and come together. A group gathered in 1877 in Texas and formed an organization that would a year later become the Grand State Farmer’s Alliance. Its county and state structure was to be a rural organization of self-help.

S.O. Daws, considered the “First Populist,” had developed a high degree of political self-respect. He believed the crop-lien system was oppressive and that those who experienced it had a right to speak out and seek change.

To attain a mass democratic “insurgent movement,” Daws, William Lamb and other leaders in what became the national Southern Farmer’s Alliance felt an “insurgent culture” must be created. To combat the demoralization of the hard times, individuals needed to acquire a new way of looking at themselves -- a personal self-respect and collective confidence and hope that fundamental chance was achievable. Cultural change was just as important as economic and political change.

Populist strategy and work attempted to proceed sequentially – that is, stages that occur in an order that maximized the chances of creating a powerful democratic mass movement.

The four stages for any democratic mass movement to be successful, as Lawrence Goodwyn in The Populist Moment describes, are:

“(1) the creation of an autonomous institution where new interpretations can materialize that run counter to those of prevailing authority -- a development which, for the sake of simplicity, we may describe as ‘the movement forming’; (2) the creation of a tactical means to attract masses of people -- ‘the movement recruiting’; (3) the achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis -- ‘the movement educating’; and (4) the creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas, shared now by the rank and file of the mass movement, can be expressed in an autonomous political way -- ‘the movement politicized.’”

The degree of success of each stage is directly tied to the success of the previous ones. The growth of the movement is severely limited if any single stage is not fully developed. Each of these stages create formal structures, programs and strategies seeking structural democratic change. For the Populists, each stage also provided the opportunity to create or affirm “insurgent culture.”

Here are examples of the accomplishments of each stage in the Populist’s effort to build a democratic mass movement, including how each contributed to an “insurgent culture.”

Movement formation - The initial Texas (Grand State) Farmers Alliance was the first of several southern and a few western state Alliances that made up the National Farmers Alliance and Cooperative Union (also known as the Southern Farmer’s Alliance) of white farmers. An equivalent Northern Alliance of white and black farmers existed in the upper Midwest and High Plains states. There was also a separate Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union, consisting of black farmers of the South. National alliances, especially the Southern Alliance, organized state alliances, which organized town or county-based suballiances. These numbered in the thousands. The Movement involved 2.5 million people. The Alliances created separate organizations to address the economic needs, such as National Farmer’s Alliance Exchange Organization.

These organizations offered members who had always been told they were inferior and powerless the democratic infrastructure to talk, learn, plan, decide and build relationships, as well as to work in solidarity for democratic change. They provided the insulation from the dominant hierarchical culture to overcome deference and gain self-respect. They were acting individually, but collectively with others.

Movement recruitment - A mass movement needs masses of people. Sloganeering or pointing out problems is insufficient compared to meeting people’s immediate needs. The Populists produced programs and several radical plans to attract members.The Alliance created the world’s first large scale worker’s cooperatives, organizations to collectively buy supplies and market their crops. Cooperatives included retail stores, mills, and storehouses, which lowered costs and increased profits to members by cutting out middlemen. This attracted farmers by the millions who had previously had to negotiate on their own with bankers and companies they bought from and sold to.

Cooperatives were a way for farmers to gain more economic and political power through collective action. They believed they could become free individually by working together. Cooperatives allowed farmers to experience an autonomous democratic culture in their daily lives through their own direct involvement, in opposition to the dominant hierarchical structure of society. It also demonstrated who their enemies were when they negotiated with bankers and merchants.

The Alliances also supported the Greenback movement in calling for democratic money creation that would, if implemented, reduce their own debt, as well as the power of banking corporations. They also developed their own financial alternative, the Subtreasury Plan, which called for the federal government to build warehouses where farmers could store crops and receive low-interest loans against them. The goal was to help farmers hold onto their crops when prices were low after harvest, allowing them to wait for better market conditions and receive cash immediately to pay debts. The Plan was proposed by Charles Macune, a brilliant Southern Alliance leader. Subtreasury was an empowering idea that gave farmers a cultural sense that their movement was more capable of addressing poverty, indebtedness and the financial power of the financial system. It increased their confidence and self-identity.

Movement education – Establishing organizations from the national to local levels and using those structures to recruit people by addressing their immediate economic needs are important sequential steps, but by themselves do not dismantle economic and political structures of society that remain oppressing and undemocratic. The next step for the Populists, interconnected to some extent with recruitment, was internal economic and political education that went beyond the learnings of farmers within their cooperative about the corporate system of economic power and privilege.

This was achieved through traveling lecturers – individuals who either came into the movement with a high degree of self-respect and awareness/personal experience of the dominant economic and political system, or who were recruited from existing Alliance members and trained. Lecturers would speak on the backs of wagons or halls as they traveled from town to town. They large numbers of people who were inspired and gained confidence and a collective desire to seek political change not only from what they heard, but from being in the presence, often, of thousands of others who attended. There were 40,000 lecturers in the Alliance lecturing system.

Newspapers were published in all the branches of the Alliance – especially in the Northern Alliance. Examples included the American Nonconformist (Iowa) Kansas Farmer, Western Rural and Family Farm Paper (Chicago), Progressive Farmer (N. Carolina), and Alliance Vindicator (Texas). In addition, there was the National Economist, Washington, D.C. The National Reform Press Association united 1000 populist newspapers across the nation.

Traveling lecturers and newspapers served as critical internal communication methods for the movement to insulate and defend itself from the external propaganda of the corporate culture about what was possible and who was worthy to participate. This resulted in enhanced individual self-respect, collective self-confidence and a dramatic increase in political awareness, which helped crystallize the necessity to become directly involved in electoral politics. This included reaching out and forming alliances with working people and national labor organizations.

Movement politicized – The cooperative movement of the Alliance branches were aggressively opposed by corporations. Bankers, commodities brokers, and railroads retaliated by boycotting the Alliance. This eventually undermined the cooperatives' effectiveness. Farmers realized the current corporate-dominated economic system made their efforts impossible. It pushed farmers to form the People’s Party to pursue political solutions to their economic problems. They also developed political demands and statements.The most notable were the Ocala Platform and Omaha Platform. The latter, adopted by the People’s Party at their 1892 convention, called for a graduated income tax; the Subtreasury Plan; the direct election of senators, government ownership of railroads, telegraph lines and other key industries; the eight hour workday; postal savings banks; and the secret ballot.

Populists ran candidates at all levels of government, electing two U.S. Senators, 45 U.S. Representatives and numerous governors. However, following the defeat of their Presidential candidate, James Weaver, in 1892, they decided to “fuse” with the Democratic Party and support William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 Presidential election. This split the movement, since Bryan did not support many of the items of the Omaha Platform. The party and movement never recovered.

Some of its individual proposals were adopted by the new “Progressive” movement of the early 20th century and passed into law, including the graduated income tax, postal savings banks, and eventually the eight hour workday. The direct election of U.S. Senators became the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Populist Party served as a critical cultural “bridge” for farmers who had previously been loyal (yet ignored) by one or the other of the major parties: poor white farmers by Democrats and by poor black farmers by Republicans. It was an important awakening. They saw politics as a cultural struggle to create humane ways to relate to one another, to be ideologically free from the defined limitations of possibilities, and to aspire for a new democratic culture and democratic institutions.

Cultural Lessons for Move to Amend

1. Every movement covered in this series has spotlighted the importance of individual self-respect, self-confidence and self-worth as a social psychological precondition for individual and collective action. In the case of the Populist movement, it was the poor rural farmers of the Midwest and South, white and black, who strived to affirm their own dignity and confidence. They believed in their right and power to define their own existence in the face of the growing industrial might of corporations, financial power of bankers, agricultural control by commodity brokers, propaganda of the dominant mainstream media; and political power of the two-party political duopoly.

Move to Amend supporters face many of the same forces today, but are more powerful, polished, well funded, and culturally ingrained. MTA leadership continuously reinforces the messages that citizens and residents have the right and duty to amend the U.S. Constitution given its serious flaws and that the elements to be abolished in the We the People Amendment – “a corporation is a person” and “money equals speech” – are illogical and absurd. We emphasize that individuals who support us in any way – educating, advocating, organizing or contributing – are leaders who, when grounded in the knowledge of the history of corporate constitutional rights and money as speech, often know more on the subjects than the public officials, political aides, journalists and educators who they encounter. This helps build self-confidence and respect, as well as the commitment to educate and organize others.

2. Move to Amend must face the reality that it’s nowhere near being a powerful democratic mass movement as outlined by the sequential four stages as defined by Goodwyn. In the end, the Populists weren’t successful either, although they understood the necessity of organizing internally sequentially. A mass exodus of members followed the decline of the Farmers cooperatives. This dramatically weakened their breadth and depth of their base of educated, empowered and committed individuals to work for political change and the People’s Party.

We’ve worked in our own way to build an “insurgent culture” of probably several thousand self-respecting and confident supporters over our history through our national, affiliate, and partner networks. We’ve produced an impressive array of educational materials on corporate constitutional rights, the We the People Amendment and social change in general – including our Movement Education Program, videos, on-line presentations, and printed material. We’re active on social media and even organized for many years our populist-branded “Barnstorm” speaking tours in cities and towns in almost every state. But it's not been sequential and its effectiveness has been limited by the incomplete efforts of building and maintaining local, state and regional organizations; as well as the inability to recruit masses of people by programmatically addressing their immediate felt needs. And of course, we don’t have a political party to independently drive our democratic goals through the electoral area.

A mass democratic movement is needed. It will have to be larger than any single organization – more like a coalition. Move to Amend and the We the People Amendment must be included. The coalition will need to include all four sequential stages. It will have to break free from the current dominant narrative that we live in an authentic democratic republic, which we’ve never had. It will need to be psychologically committed to fundamental change – legislative, but also constitutional. It will need to include a recruitment component – something that can help people who are increasingly hurting due to the growing economic crisis.

Times have changed. We need to change with them. This very well may need to include a new grassroots, democratically based political party that hasn’t been captured by billionaires and corporate entities or defers to the leadership of any single political candidate. It’s a big agenda, but like the Populists, there must be a new way to look at ourselves and a new way to envision the future.

3. Move to Amend must continue to centralize anti-racism and gender justice because we believe that anti-oppression is key to building a democracy movement. Entrenched racism in the Southern Alliance severely weakened the movement, although there were sincere efforts made to form an interracial alliance. Nevertheless, black farmers were excluded from membership, a reflection of the white supremacy that existed in the post-Reconstruction period and the reality that some Populist farmers had been slaveowners. Black farmers organized their own independent group in response to their exclusion.

Racism was used by white Southern Democrats party officials to divide lower-class white farmers from black farmers to undermine the movement. Democrats in some cases divided farmers by supporting some Populist proposals while at the same time supporting plans to disenfranchise Blacks.

Move to Amend leaders need to continue to consciously and persistently declare and demonstrate through our actions that the attainment of an equitable democracy is unattainable if the power elite can effectively play the “race card.” Race and gender justice are not “side issues” or unrelated to the issues of corporate rule and the corruption of big money in political elections. We are currently witnessing the continued effectiveness of how race and nationality around immigration are being used to divide people from seeing their common interests to fundamentally challenge growing authoritarianism. We need to publicly condemn and oppose ongoing oppression of people of color and all those who are currently being exploited to justify authoritarian measures.

4. Move to Amend must be vigilant to resist cooptation of its principles. Advocates inside the Populist Party who supported “fusing” with the Democratic Party in the 1896 Presidential election outnumbered those who advocated for maintaining its independence. The end of the Populist movement was the result. Its goal of creating an authentic bottom up democracy and bringing the corporate state under popular control through democratic politics was replaced by the Progressive movement, which accepted the reality of a corporate state and simply sought greater reforms to reduce corporate harms. Gone was the vision and commitment of structural transformation.

The same urge exists among many working on democracy issues currently to simply (1) elect more Democrats, (2) pass better democratic laws, and/or, if at all focused on constitutional change, to (3) simply overturn the Citizens United decision. Call it a brand new, same old story. Let corporate constitutional rights for the most part remain. Don’t touch the constitutional decision that equates money as free speech. Support an alternative loophole-laced amendment that isn’t as comprehensive as the We the People Amendment.

Nothing could be further from what’s needed. In reality, given the flagrant broken political system we’re facing in which the Trump Regime is exploiting, undermining or simply ignoring the Constitution, it’s clear that fundamental constitutional renewal is urgent. It requires more than what democratic improvements can be achieved through any single amendment. There must be an entire package. The We the People Amendment must be included.

The most important take-a-way of the 19th century Populist Movement is the realization that the only means to create a genuinely equitable democracy society is to create a genuinely equitable democracy mass movement. Participants of that movement must not only support candidates and platforms calling for democratic change, but must actively and consistently be meaningfully engaged in the structures, plans and programs of that movement that provides direct assistance to those in need and works for fundamental structural political and economic change. This is how a democratic “insurgent culture” will be created and sustained.

In solidarity

Greg Coleridge

National Co-Director

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an 11 24

The results of last week's U.S. elections were cataclysmic for the Democratic Party, which lost control of the White House and Senate as the Republicans gained a trifecta, but economic justice advocates on Wednesday said that for many working people, the fight for a better standard of living and a political system that places people over Wall Street profits remains the same.

United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain acknowledged in aletter to membersthat while the election outcome was not one that "our union advocated for, and it's not the outcome a majority of our members voted for, our mission remains the same."

"We must raise the standard of living for our members and the entire working class through unity, solidarity, and working-class power," said Fain. "No matter who is in the White House."

Noting that "in a democracy, the four most important words are: The People Have Spoken," Fain suggested that the Democratic Party did not convince a key constituency—working people, including an estimated78% of Americans who live paycheck-to-paycheck—that it represents their interests, and as a result handed the presidential victory to President-elect Donald Trump.

While the UAW endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris and Fain campaigned with her, he said, "for us, this was never about party or personality. As we have said consistently, both parties share blame for the one-sided class war that corporate America has waged on our union, and on working-class Americans for decades."

Trump ran an openly xenophobic campaign, but won the support of low-income voters from a range of ethnic backgrounds as he demonized undocumented immigrants and made outlandish, racist claims about Ohio residents from Haiti, sticking to his longtime narrative that immigration—not corporate greed—is to blame for the country's housing crisis, economic inequality, and stagnant wages.

"The task for the Democrats is what it should have been all along: remaking the party into the party of the bottom 90%... the party that rejects Elon Musk and the entire American oligarchy."

As numerous progressives have pointed outsince the election, the Biden administration has introduced a host of pro-worker policies and Harris unveiled numerous economic justice proposals during her brief campaign—but her decision to campaignwith billionaire businessman Mark Cuban and unveil a more Wall Street-friendly tax proposal have been criticized moves that highlighted the Democratic Party's close ties to rich donors and muddied her message to working families.

With the Democratic Party still taking part in the "one-sided class war" referenced by Fain, the UAW leader said that the union "stand[s] today where we stood last week."

"We stand for bringing back American jobs," said Fain. "We stand for taking on corporations that break their promises to American workers. And we stand against the same things we've always stood against. We will never support the destruction of the union movement. We will never support efforts to divide and conquer the working class by nationality, race, and gender. We will never support handouts to the ultra-wealthy or paying for it by cutting crucial federal investments."

"We are unafraid to confront any politician who takes actions that harm the working class, our communities, and our unions," he said.

Fain's comments came as progressive lawmakers including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) spoke at an event titled Delivering for the Working Class.

While the caucus is set to be in the minority in the House and Senate for at least the next two years, the senators used the event to rally Democratic leaders to "learn the right lessons" from Trump's victory.

As Democrats decide who they answer to, Warren asked, "Is it going to be a handful of billionaires? We know what kind of policy they want to set. Or are we going to show voters that Democrats are the ones who are willing to unrig this economy?"

Sanders suggested that Fain's rallying of the UAW's more than 400,000 members will also be a key to fighting Trump's agenda, including Republicans' plans to make cutsto Social Security and Medicare and hislikely reversalof Biden's pro-worker policies.

"The antidote to enormous economic and political power on the part of the few is mass organizing at the grassroots level among working people—to stand up and fight for an economy that works for all," said Sanders.

Just after the election last week, Sanders became one of the first members of the Democratic caucus to release a statementon the party's major losses, driving home the same message he has repeated during his decades in public service: "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."

On MSNBC on Wednesday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the election results in several red states proved that many of Trump's supporters prioritized working class issues.

"Voters actually want the populist, popular ideas that we have been pushing at the Progressive Caucus, certainly, for quite some time," said Jayapal. "They went to the ballot in three states that voted for Donald Trump... and they voted for a higher minimum wage, they voted for paid sick leave."

Voters in Alaska and Missouriapproved ballot measures requiring a higher minimum wage and demanding that employers provide paid sick leave; Nebraska voters also supported a measure allowing workers to earn paid sick leave.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Thursday also took a close look at voting figures, writing at his Substack newsletter that the election didn't deliver "a very big mandate" to Trump as the president-elect claimed, or even "a 'red shift' to Trump and the Republicans."

"It was a blue abandonment," he wrote. "We now know that 9 million fewer votes were cast nationwide in 2024 than in 2020. Trump got about a million more votes than he did in 2020 (700,000 of them in the seven battleground states). That's no big deal... The biggest takeaway is that Biden's 9 million votes disappeared... So what happened to the 9 million?"

Reich posited that 9 million potential voters refused to vote for Trump, but also didn't turn out for the Democratic Party because they were left thinking, "They don't give a damn about me."

"The task for the Democrats is what it should have been all along: remaking the party into the party of the bottom 90%—the party of people who don'tlive off stocks and bonds, of people who are not CEOs or billionaires like Mark Cuban, the party that rejects Elon Musk and the entire American oligarchy," he wrote. "Instead, the Democratic Party must be the party of average working people whose wages have gone nowhere and whose jobs are less secure."

He continued:

Blue-collar private-sector workers earned more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are earning now in 2024. This means today's blue-collar workers are on average earning lessin real dollars than their grandparents earned 52 years ago.

Yet the American economy is far larger than it was 52 years ago. Where did the additional money go? To the top. So what's the Democrats' task? To restructure the economy toward more widely shared prosperity.

In his statement on Wednesday, Fain said the lives and daily struggles of many working class voters are unchanged after the election.

"Today, our members clock in to the same jobs they clocked into last week," said Fain. "You face the same threats—corporate greed, Wall Street predators, and a political system that ignores us. And we are driven by the same force, as outlined in our UAW Constitution generations ago: 'The hope of the worker in advancing society toward the ultimate goal of social and economic justice.'"

Fain urged union members to get involved in "political action on every level of government, in every state, in every sector has an impact on every contract, every organizing drive, and every standard we win as a union," while Sanders implored the Democratic Party to urgently "determine which side it is on in the great economic struggle of our times."

"It needs to provide a clear vision as to what it stands for," wrote Sanders in a Boston Globe op-ed on Tuesday. "Either you stand with the powerful oligarchy of our country, or you stand with the working class. You can't represent both."

NOW READ:It's time for Democrats to declare class warfarethom FDR

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https://kpfa.org/area941/program/letters-politics-history-collection/page/8/

A History of Populism

03.06.21 Guest: Thomas Frank, historian, writer and journalist.  Author of many books including What’s the Matter with Kansas and his latest The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.

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greg c ref

Omaha Platform - Wikipedia

The Omaha Platform was the party program adopted at the formative convention of the Populist (or People's) Party held in Omaha, Nebraska on July 4, 1892.

Origin

The platform preamble was written by Ignatius L. Donnelly. The Omaha platform was seen as "The Second Declaration of Independence," as it called for reestablishing American liberty.^[1] The planks themselves represent the merger of the agrarian concerns of the Farmers' Alliance with the free-currency monetarism of the Greenback Party while explicitly endorsing the goals of the largely urban Knights of Labor.

In the words of Donnelly's preamble, the convention was "assembled on the anniversary of the birthday of the nation, and filled with the spirit of the grand general and chieftain who established our independence, we seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of the plain people, with which class it originated."

The Omaha Platform called for a wide range of social reforms, including a reduction in the working day, a "safe, sound, and flexible" national currency, assistance to farmers with the financing of their labours, "fair and liberal pensions to ex-Union soldiers and sailors," the direct election of Senators, single-terms for Presidents and Vice-Presidents, "the legislative system known as the initiative and referendum," "the unperverted Australian of secret ballot system," the nationalization of the railroads, the telegraph, and the telephone systems, a postal savings, "a graduated income tax," and "the free and unlimited coinage of silver."

In referencing the Omaha Platform, Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska suggested the wealth of the "super rich" had to begin flowing "to all the people, from whom it was originally taken."^[2]

The Populist, or People's, Party went on to capture 11 seats in the United States House of Representatives, several governors and the state legislatures of Kansas, Nebraska and North Carolina. 1892 Presidential nominee and former Greenbacker James B. Weaver received over a million popular votes, and won four states (Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, and Nevada) and 22 electoral votes.

The Party's legislative majorities were thereafter able to elect several United States Senators. Taken as a whole, the electoral accomplishments of the Populist Party represent the high water mark for a United States third party after the Civil War. In 1896, the Populists abandoned the Omaha Platform and endorsed Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan on the basis of a single-plank free silver platform.

Goals

The first goal of the Omaha Platform was to increase the coinage of silver and gold at a 16:1 ratio. The Omaha Platform suggested a federal loans system so that farmers could get the money they needed. The platform also called for the elimination of private banks. The platform proposed a system of federal storage facilities for the farmers' crops. The objective was to allow the farmers to control the pricing of their products. The Omaha Platform proposed a special taxing system for them so that they would have to pay taxes depending on how much money they made. They also sought for an eight-hour workday and the direct election of senators, as opposed to their being elected by state legislatures. These main goals of the Omaha Platform were all focused on helping rural and working-class Americans. After 1894, Populists emphasized the demand for free coinage of silver rather than other goals, such as state-run railroads.

Dissolution

The platform did not appeal to the more urban areas of the country where wage earners were working industrial jobs.^[3] The platform's only clear attempt to appeal to northerners in the east was the clause mentioning pensions to ex-Union soldiers.^[4] The Populist Party dissolved before World War II as members were unable to meet in Omaha for the party's semi-centennial celebration, and for the reason that many of the party's values have been accepted by other, more dominant political parties.^[5]

See also

• Ocala Demands

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not vetted

https://www.c-span.org/video/?468443-2/pitchfork-populism

JANUARY 23, 2020

PitchforkPopulism

Political analyst Bradford Kane offered his thoughts on the future of America’s political landscape following the Trump presidency.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/its-a-wonderful-life-for-bankers/

no lnx

‘It’s a Wonderful Life’… for bankers

Written by Christopher W. Shaw / Common Dreams December 27, 2019

Christmas movies provide a yearly opportunity to imagine a more caring society.  Among the favorites that are watched year after year, It’s a Wonderful Life stands out for stressing the importance of banking to such a society.  The film’s hero George Bailey is an honest and generous Main Street banker who has helped struggling working people achieve their dreams of homeownership.  Yet Bailey is on the brink of committing suicide before discovering just how much his life has meant to the local community. On this fateful night, an alternative future is revealed in which Bailey never existed, and his beloved hometown of Bedford Falls has fallen into the clutches of the greedy Henry Potter, owner of the town’s largest bank and a man who cares nothing for the public welfare.  Without Bailey to finance the hopes and aspirations of his neighbors, Potter has created an unrecognizable town that is defined by corruption, slum housing, pawn shops, and seedy bars.

While we often consign the subject of finance to bankers, the annual tradition of watching It’s a Wonderful Life serves as an unexpected reminder of just how much power finance exerts over all of our lives.  The figures of Bailey and Potter represent contrasting models for how banking can be conducted.  Bailey’s bank is an asset to Bedford Falls, while Potter’s bank exploits the community. Bailey’s bank provides depositors with safety and makes affordable loans available to working people, while Potter’s bank focuses solely on benefiting its owner.  Potter will fund only those projects that produce the most profit for himself, and he has no regard for the impact his decisions have on others.

It’s a Wonderful Life may be fiction, yet its release in 1946 registered a half-century long struggle to make banking democratic.  During the Gilded Age, when working people thought of bankers they envisioned Henry Potter. Americans were more likely to see J. P. Morgan as a personification of greed than to honor his business achievements.  Such economic disasters as the Panic of 1907 and the Great Depression exposed the banking system’s flaws, inspiring everyday Americans to engage in regular discussions of financial policy and proposed banking reforms.  All too frequently, small depositors lost their life’s savings in bank failures that resulted from mismanagement and even fraud. And banks typically declined to extend the affordable small loans necessary for homeownership and operating farms.

For decades, working people sought to have the national government make banks safer and loans more accessible.  Labor union and farm organization meetingsroutinely backed these reforms. The residents of one Nebraska town declared their support for federal farm loans “at a low rate of interest.”  Among the voices that promoted the idea that government should guarantee bank deposits was the Chicago Federation of Labor, which insisted such a program would be “comprehensive and effective.”  Meanwhile, bankers vehemently opposed these policy proposals as government overreach.

Amid the severe economic crisis and banking meltdown of the early 1930s—when thousands of banks failed—grassroots agitation for financial reform produced mailbags filled with letters and telegrams demanding government action.  In response to the constituent mail piling up on Capitol Hill and at the White House, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reformed the banking system so that it better served ordinary citizens. Roosevelt signed a law creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect bank depositors.  The New Deal also introduced important measures that provided farmers and homeowners with reliable supplies of low-cost credit.

Thanks to New Deal financial reform, by the 1940s bankers started looking less like Henry Potter and more like George Bailey.  Grassroots engagement with financial issues had made banking more humane. For the first time in American history, bank failures became rare events.  Farmers benefited from easier access to credit and homeownership would rise significantly. Once achieved, however, ordinary citizens started to take this reformed financial order for granted.  Working people began to neglect financial issues following World War II, leaving an opening forindustry lobbyiststo direct banking policy. By the close of the twentieth century, deregulation had allowed the Potters of the banking world to resume their former practices. The economic crisis of 2008 led many Americans to consider the degree that their nation has come to look less like Bedford Falls and more like Pottersville. When voters cheer on Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for criticizing Wall Street, it’s a call to bring back George Bailey.

Christopher W. Shaw is the author of Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Follow him on Twitter: @chris_w_shaw.

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1119 aha why is okla the ctr of evil, what's the matter w/ kansas, but both oil state; 5 hr drive 366 mi dallas to wichita; all 3 stacked, kind of cohesive unit geographically; tx okl mate, panhandle.

https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2007winter_pratt.pdf

Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives

Won the Heart of America (2004) argues that leftwing politics once

were commonplace in the Sunflower State.1

It is an intriguing idea and serves as the point of departure for this historiographical essay on Kansas radicalism. In these pages "radicalism" refers to a leftwing

political position beyond that of liberalism, a position that often embraced

government ownership and socialism, seeking to control or abolish big

wealth and private economic concentration. Radicals were not a monolithic

group, as they frequently differed among themselves on objectives and tactics, and many of them sought to work within the ranks of broader, less

ideological groupings at particular times.

Groups in which Kansas radicals participated included the People's Party, Knights of Labor, Socialist

Party, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), Nonpartisan

League, Communist Party, and mainstream unions such as the United Mine

Workers.

Kansas was probably the most radical state in the Union in the 1890s,

and leftwing efforts there continued for several decades. "For much of the

twentieth century," wrote Fred Whitehead, "the state of Kansas has suffered the reputation of being a conservative bastion, yet during the 1880s,

through the Populist movement of the following decade, and even until

the anti-radical repressions of World War I, it was a dramatic laboratory

of social experimentation, free thought, and wild political insurgency."2

In no other state were the Populists as successful at the ballot box, electing a

number of congressmen, two U.S. senators, and two governors, not to mention hundreds of other public officials, including the chief justice of the state supreme court. Prior to World War I, Kansas Socialists held picnics, turned out to hear party notables such as Eugene Debs and Kate Richards O’Hare, and, perhaps most important for their cause, published the Appeal to Reason, the single most successful leftwing newspaper in American history. The radical IWW was also quite active in the state during the second decade of the twentieth century, organizing thousands of harvest hands and oil field workers. But U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 marked the beginning of the end of Kansas radicalism. By the early 1920s, the Sunflower State was well on the way to becoming the conservative bastion to which Whitehead alludes. Never again would Kansas be identified in the public mind with leftwing politics. Thus, Kansas radicalism is largely a topic confined to the years between 1880 and 1920. That said, however, a closer look at the sources reveals leftwing sentiment and efforts before and after those years. For the remainder of this essay, I examine how historians have treated Kansas’s radical past,...

William C. Pratt is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a member

of the Board of Trustees of the Nebraska State Historical Society. His current research focuses upon

the agrarian left in the Upper Midwest. In the spring of 2007, he was a senior Fulbright lecturer at the

University of Warsaw, Poland.

1. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). The concept of a "lost world" introduced in the

title of the present article is borrowed from Robert McMath's "The Populist Southwest: A Lost

World," The Progressive 42 (December 1978): 53-55.

2. Fred Whitehead, "The Kansas Response to the Haymarket Affair," ...

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https://journals.openedition.org/ideas/6472

...

Third, Hofstadter's claims about the Populists as the fountainhead of American bigotry, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism have been refuted in depth in the scholarship.2 But Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser have adopted a twist on the same argument. American Populists, they claim, have always been informed by "producerism," the notion of the people as "producers" who are "squeezed between a corrupt elite above them and a racialized underclass below them" (Mudde C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C., 2017: 23-4). This claim about the Populists is also made by the analyst Chip Berlet, who defines producerism as the idea that hardworking Americans, defined as white males, engage in scapegoating as they fight perceived "parasites at the top and bottom of society" (Berlet, C., 2012: 47-66). Indeed, that is a good description of the late nineteenth century logic of white supremacy in the Democratic Party and ethno-cultural bigotry in the Republican Party, a logic that also afflicted the trade unions, and professional societies of the time. The Populists did, indeed, speak in the name of producers, but what makes the Populists historically significant was the extent to which their egalitarian commitments ruptured this exclusive logic. This included organizing the “tramp armies” of the unemployed and destitute, and providing a political home for hundreds of thousands of women seeking economic independence and equal citizenship. Its declarations about racial inclusion were less bold, and were too often self-contradictory. Nonetheless, key Populist constituencies openly challenged a narrow producerism as so defined.

20This especially holds for the Knights of Labor, which rejected trade unionism based on the "aristocrats of labor," in favor of “industrial organization” based on "the salt of the earth," that is "the millions of unknown toilers who do the work of the world" (Powderly, T., 1940: 42; Powderly, T., 1880; Knights of Labor, 1886). At its core, the Knights was an organization of the Irish and other mainly immigrant laborers who mined coal and laid railway tracks. But in line with its egalitarian doctrine of inclusion across sex, race, and skill, it also enrolled cooks, washerwomen, housekeepers, seamstresses, ditch diggers, and cotton pickers, including overworked and underpaid black women and men of the rural South. At its height the Knights of Labor was not only the biggest labor organization in U.S. history (and probably world history) to that point, it was also the most inclusive large-scale institution of its era. Recognizing this inclusiveness, Friedrich Engels described the Knights of Labor as "the first national organization created by the American working class as a whole" (Engels, F., 1987: 130-40, 140).

21There was, however, a gaping hole in the Knights' egalitarian ethos, and that was its hostility to Chinese immigration. Although Chinese workers joined the Knights in New York, on the West Coast the organization fought hard for Chinese exclusion. The false accusation leveled against the Chinese was that they were, like convict labor, unfree "bound" labor. But two things happened when the Knights of Labor united with the Farmers' Alliance to form the People's Party. On the one hand, unity with the white farmers fractured the Knights' connection with the black poor in the South. And on the other hand, influenced by white farmers in California who depended on Chinese labor, as well as other reformers interested in Asia for humanitarian and spiritual reasons, the forging of the People's Party dampened the agitation for Chinese exclusion. In a word, this story is complicated, but the decontextualized notion of producerism tells us little about its dynamics (Postel, C., 2019: 231-37, 302-05; Postel, C., 2007: 185-86, 264).

The U.S. Populist Legacy

22In one of its last acts, the Knights of Labor facilitated an electoral agreement between the white Populists and the black Republicans of North Carolina, overturning at the ballot box the corrupt, pro-corporate, and racist tyranny of the Democratic Party. But the Democrats got their revenge in a self-styled "white supremacy campaign" that unleashed the Wilmington massacre of 1898, and drove the Populist-Republicans from office with rifles and torches. From that time until the 1960s, the Democratic Party established an anti-pluralist, murderously repressive monopoly of power in the states of the former Confederacy, and it did so as the self-described party of white supremacy. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, was entirely the product of that Democratic Party. Yet, for Mudde, Judis, and others, George Wallace represents late twentieth-century U.S. populism (Mudde C. & C. Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017: 25; Judis J., 2016: 32-8). But Wallace, in style and substance, was cut from the same mold as the Democrats who launched the "white supremacy campaign" against the North Carolina Populists. Blaming the Populists and not their Democratic enemies for Wallace is an ahistorical travesty. Similarly, Republican businessmen and academics, not Populist dirt farmers, spearheaded xenophobic campaigns against Jewish, Italian, and other European immigrants. Madison Grant, a New York Republican millionaire, scientific racist and virulent anti-Semite, did as much as anyone to put the politics of preserving the “Nordic master race” in the center of American politics. And the notion that the Populist legacy gave the world Trump, another racist Republican millionaire from New York, is beyond inexplicable (Spiro, J., 2009).

23It is inexplicable because the Populists actually left a clearly distinguishable legacy in American politics. With the demise of the People's Party, with a few notable exceptions, the Populists either went with Eugene V. Debs into the Socialist Party, or entered the progressive or farmer-labor wings of the Democratic and Republican Parties.In the early twentieth century, the Populist strongholds of Oklahoma and Kansas provided the Socialist Party with some of its best recruiting grounds. Progressive legislative reform of the early twentieth century mapped closely along the congressional lines of farmer-labor Populism. Lyndon Johnson, the New Deal liberal who signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and thus earned the hatred of Wallace and his ilk, learned his politics at the knee of his grandfather, a Populist cotton farmer from central Texas. Perhaps most significantly, during the Depression, the United Mine Workers, the inheritors of the Knights of Labor's ideals of egalitarian and inclusive organizing, unleashed the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the labor movement that helped spark the civil rights revolution and that was at the center of mid-twentieth century progressive and social-democratic politics. This Populist legacy is reflected in today's campaigns of Bernie Sanders andElizabeth Warren, with Sanders hanging a picture of the labor Populist and Socialist Eugene V. Debs on his office wall, and with Warren proposing post-office banking and similar proposals once sustained by the Populists and Socialists of her native Oklahoma. In short, the Populist tradition is part of a broad political current as stable, deep, and constant as any other political current in American history (Miller, R., 1987; Argersinger, P., 1995: 173; McMath, R., 1993: 206; Sanders, E., 1999; Cantrell, G., 2014; Kelley, R., 1990: 138-51).

...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/deep-and-boiling-anger-towards-political-establishment-still-widespread-poll/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/deep-and-boiling-anger-towards-political-establishment-still-widespread-poll/

no lx

‘Deep and boiling anger’ towards political establishment still widespread: poll

Written by Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams August 26, 2019

If you’re feeling anger the political system being rigged to benefit those at the top, a new poll reveals you’re far from alone.

Released Sunday, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 70 percent of Americans said they felt “angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power.” That figure, based on polling conducted Aug. 10-14, is barely different from the 69 percent who said they felt that way in an October 2015 poll.

“Four years ago, we uncovered a deep and boiling anger across the country engulfing our political system,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, which conducted the survey with the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies. “Four years later, with a very different political leader in place,” said Horwitt, “that anger remains at the same level.”

Other questions asked by the pollsters reveal more pessimism.

Sixty-seven percent said they do not feel confident that our children’s generation will face a better life than ours; that’s up from the 61 percent who felt that way in 2017.

Respondents’ views of race relations were grim as well.

The poll finds that 60 percent believe race relations are bad in the nation. That view was expressed by 56 percent of whites, 81 percent of African Americans, and 61 percent of Hispanics.

Since President Donald Trump took office, 56 percent said race relations have gotten worse. While 47 percent of whites felt that way, 86 percent of African Americans and 74 percent of Hispanics said race relations worsened under Trump.

Views on the issue were markedly different under Trump’s predecessor.

In November 2011, 19 percent said race relations had gotten worse under then-President Barack Obama; 13 percent expressed that view in January 2009.

Some of the new poll’s other findings indicate less gloom.

It also shows that 57 percent of Americans expressed satisfaction with the state of the U.S. economy. Sixty-nine percent also expressed satisfaction with their person financial situation. Despite those views, more than half—56 percent—said they felt “anxious and uncertain because the economy still feels rocky and unpredictable,” causing fears about being able to pay bills.

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Inequality, an Am Dilemma 18xx-96

chls Postel sp SFS

grange, AA, knights of labor

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-august-26-2019/

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see Bernie, progressive wing

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hightower-democracy-dying-america-were-now-under-rule-trumps-cronies

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Populist alliances of ‘cowboys and Indians’ are protecting rural lands

Zoltan Grossman, Evergreen State College

By appealing to the hearts and minds of their white neighbors, Native Americans are carving out common ground. Together, these different groups are building unity through diversity.

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uber1 history:

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1399

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bk hist of populism uc berk

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-august-28-2018/

3 conds, eg inflexible response to demands/problem

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shay's rebellion militia paid for by wealthy? hvy tax in economic hard times?

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-28-2018/

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Goodwyn was the modern-day guru of American Populism. He'd been on the front lines of both progressive academics and activism for more than six decades, blending his work as a renowned scholar of the 19th century Populist movement with his own practice of populism as a strategist and foot soldier in the civil rights, labor, and other grassroots social movements of his time. In 1976, he literally rewrote the textbooks with his path-changing work, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment In American History.

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overview

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/the-agrarian-and-populist-movements/

Decreases in crop prices and crop failures in the 1880s bred economic discontent among farmers that led to the formation of the Populists.

Assess the economic conditions that led to discontent in the 1890s

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Key Points

• Low inflation and a scarcity of paper money increased farmers’ debt burden during the 1880s, while decreasing real wages and crop prices.
• The Populist Party emerged out of the Farmers’ Alliances and the agricultural distress of the 1880s.
• Supporters of the Populist Party and many Democrats favored silver, while Republicans and financial interests advocated the gold standard.
• In 1896, the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, argued against the nation crucifying itself on a “cross of gold.”
• The improvement of U.S. finances in 1897 and the Spanish American War in 1898 drew attention away from Populist issues.
• Under the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, the government increased its purchasing of silver while depleting its stock of gold.

Key Terms

• gold standard: A monetary system in which the value of circulating money is linked to the value of gold.
• Panic of 1893: An economic depression in the United States, beginning in 1893 and marked by the collapse of railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing, which set off a series of bank failures.
• McKinley Tariff: An act of the U.S. Congress, framed by Representative William McKinley and designed to protect domestic industries from foreign competition, that raised the average duty on imports to almost 50 percent.

Agricultural Distress

The economic transformation taking place during the Gilded Age created prosperity and new lifestyles for some, but these changes also had a widespread negative impact in areas dominated by farming. Although crop diversification and the greater focus on cotton as a cash crop offered some potential for farmers to get ahead, other forces worked against that success. For instance, while technology greatly increased the amount a farmer could harvest, it also created large surpluses that could not be sold. Farmers struggled due to debt and falling prices. The crop failures of the 1880s greatly exacerbated the situation.

During the late 1880s, a series of droughts devastated the West. To make matters worse, the McKinley Tariff of 1890 was one of the highest the country had ever seen. This was detrimental to American farmers, as it drove up the prices of farm equipment. By 1890, the level of agrarian distress was at an all-time high.

Agrarian Movements

This high level of agricultural distress led to the birth of several farmer movements, including the Grange movement and Farmers’ Alliances. The Grange was a secret order founded in 1867 to advance the social and economic needs of farmers. In addition to farming practices, the Grange provided insurance and aid to its members. The association grew swiftly during early years, and at its peak, had approximately 1.5 million members. The original objectives of the Grange were primarily educational, but these were soon de-emphasized in favor of an anti-middleman, cooperative movement. Collectively, Grange agents bought everything from farm machinery to women’s dresses, and purchased hundreds of grain elevators, cotton and tobacco warehouses, and even steamboat lines. They also purchased patents to enable the Grange to manufacture its own farm machinery. In some states, these practices led to ruin, and the name, Grange, became a reproach.

The Farmers’ Alliances were political organizations with elaborate economic programs. According to one early platform, the alliance’s purpose was to, “unite the farmers of America for their protection against class legislation and the encroachments of concentrated capital.” Their program also called for the regulation—if not the outright nationalization—of the railroads; currency inflation to provide debt relief; the lowering of the tariff; and the establishment of government-owned storehouses and low-interest lending facilities. These requests were known as the “Ocala Demands.” From these elements, a new political party, known as the “Populist Party,” emerged.

The Populist Party and the Currency Question

The pragmatic portion of the Populist platform focused on issues of land, railroads, and money, including the unlimited coinage of silver. During the Civil War, the United States switched from bimetallism to a fiat money currency to finance the war. After the war, the government passed the Fourth Coinage Act in 1873 and soon resumed payments without the free and unlimited coinage of silver. This put the United States on a monometallic gold standard. This angered proponents of the free coinage of silver known as the ” Silverites.”

To understand exactly what is meant by “free coinage of silver,” it is necessary to understand the way mints operated in the days of the gold standard. Essentially, anyone who possessed uncoined gold, such as successful prospectors, could bring it to one of the U.S. Mints and trade it for its equivalent in gold coins. Free silver advocates wanted the mints to accept silver on the same principle, so that anyone would be able to deposit silver bullion at a Mint and in return receive nearly its weight in silver dollars and other currency.

The Populists showed impressive strength in the West and South in the 1892 elections. It was the currency question, however, pitting advocates of silver against those who favored gold, that soon overshadowed all other issues. Agrarian spokesmen in the West and South demanded a return to the unlimited coinage of silver. Convinced that their troubles stemmed from a shortage of money in circulation, they argued that increasing the volume of money would indirectly raise prices for farm products and drive up industrial wages, thus allowing debts to be paid with inflated dollars.

Conservative groups and the financial classes, on the other hand, believed that such a policy would be disastrous. They insisted that inflation, once begun, could not be stopped. Railroad bonds, the most important financial instrument of the time, were payable in gold. If fares and freight rates were set in half-price silver dollars, railroads would go bankrupt in weeks, putting hundreds of thousands of men out of work and destroying the industrial economy. They claimed that the gold standard was the only currency that offered stability.

The financial panic of 1893 heightened the tension of this debate. Bank failures abounded in the South and Midwest. Unemployment soared and crop prices fell sharply. The crisis, and President Cleveland’s inability to solve it, nearly broke the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party, which supported silver and free trade, absorbed the remnants of the Populist movement as the presidential elections of 1896 neared. The Democratic convention that year was witness to one of the most famous speeches in U.S. political history. Pleading with the convention not to, “crucify mankind on a cross of gold,” William Jennings Bryan, the young Nebraskan champion of silver, won the Democrats’ presidential nomination. The remaining Populists also endorsed Bryan, hoping to retain some influence by having a voice inside the Bryan movement. Despite carrying most of the South and West, Bryan lost the more populated, industrial North and East—and the election—to the Republican William McKinley whose campaign slogan was “A Full Dinner Pail.”

...

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the good fight podcast

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-23-2018/

A conversation on liberal and illiberal democracies and the rise of populism with Yascha Mounk.  He is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America. He is the author several books including of The Age of Responsibility, Stranger inMyOwn Country and his latest The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It.

==

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hightower

Knowledgeable and trusted local groups have been key to the recent election victories by bona fide progressives. These groups build relationships through work in their communities, know whom to speak with and can tackle the intensive work of going door to door. Several national organizations understand the power of a local focus and have invested in identifying amazing grassroots partners -- their 2017 results speak to the potential of this emerging network. Groups like Our Revolution, Working Families Party, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, People's Action, Progressive Democrats of America, Democracy for America and the Movement Voter Project are just some of the organizations doing important work.  As the Movement Voter Project put in its recent report, "Failure is not an option. Not for our children. Not for our grandchildren."

==

populism traditional foe:

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaug-2016/populism-with-a-brain/

National Review recently described Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as “two populist peas in a pod.” This was not a compliment. Across the political spectrum, people stick the “populist” label on politicians they see as exploiting the worst resentments and envies of some tribe or another. The segregationist George Wallace, by this reckoning, was a populist. So, too, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Yet there is a richer tradition of populism in the United States that has new relevancy today. The term itself dates to the early 1890s, when, as the historian Michael Kazin notes, journalists used it to describe members of the newly formed People’s Party. These Populists with a capital P were men and women who, like us, faced an America in which monopolists were fast tightening their grip on all realms of the economy and concentrating immense wealth and political power.

These first Populists drew upon a political philosophy with roots back to the American Revolution. Part of this tradition is familiar—a belief that government must be run by the people. Populists called for direct election of senators and led the push for referendums and initiatives to bypass corrupt legislatures. But another part is largely forgotten—that the people are sovereign over the economy and have a responsibility to structure marketsto promote the common good.

This was the “democratic republicanism” of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It holds that, just like political power, economic power must be distributed as widely as possible. Thus, the Populists focused much of their energy on combating efforts to monopolize commerce and natural resources, especially land. They also closely studied how to govern large corporations,and strongly supported unionization of workers and farmers to counter the power of concentrated capital.

In almost every key respect, the Populists succeeded in their revolution. In 1896 they captured the Democratic Party and ran William Jennings Bryan for president. He lost the election, but over the next sixteen years, even as the plutocrats tightened their grip, Bryan helped keep the fires of rebellion burning.

The turning point came in 1913 when Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, guided closely by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, enacted key parts of the Populist agenda, modernizing anti-monopoly law, creating the Federal Reserve System, and reforming trade policy. It was these years that teed up the achievements of the 1930s, when the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and Populist members of Congress like Wright Patman carried anti-monopoly principles back into almost every realm of American life.

By the 1960s, the anti-monopoly movement championed by the Populists existed no more, but largely because it had become thoroughly institutionalized. In 1962, the Supreme Court upheld an antitrust case, brought by the Eisenhower administration, that prevented the merger of two shoe companies because it would have given a single distributor a 2 percent share of the national market.

It is important to understand what the Populists were not. In 1892 they did call for public ownership of railroads, but the movement generally looked askance at “socialistic” actions that might undermine wide-scale ownership of private property. Populists also parted company with those who, like Teddy Roosevelt, argued that the way to control Big Business was to regulate it with Big Government. Populists did favor using the federal government, but mainly to break up monopolies so as to make them small enough to be regulated by competition in open markets.

Some historians have judged all Populists by the actions of a racist minority. It is true that one early Populist leader, Tom Watson, later became one of the most virulent segregationists and anti-Semites in American history. And Woodrow Wilson himself segregated the U.S. government and U.S. military. But most Populists kept their focus on restructuring the economy to better promote equality and democracy. In many regions, Populists pioneered inter-racial organizing, often drawing the ire of established political groups. In one county in Texas, Democrats formed a “White Man’s Union” specifically to combat the alliance of whites and blacks in the local People’s Party.In the late 1970s, policymakers in both parties, under the banner of “free markets” and “deregulation,” began dismantling the economic regime put in place by the Populists and their followers. The concentration of wealth that resulted is now so extreme that even the Economist has chided Americans for failing to stand up to monopoly.

The Populists would certainly have supported Sanders’s call for public financing of campaigns and his embrace of “Break Up the Banks.” But the men and women who rose against America’s oligarchs of a century ago would have been deeply dismayed that no candidate in 2016 has taken a strong stand against monopoly.

And so we ask: If a candidate for office in 2016 were truly guided by traditional American Populist principles, what would he or she aim to do?

1. PROTECT DEMOCRACY BY RESTORING MARKET COMPETITION

In the campaign of 1912, Woodrow Wilson made one of the most powerful attacks on monopoly in American history. Wilson condemned monopolists for harming not only the economy but also democracy. “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government,” Wilson said. “[W]hat we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.”

Here is the Populist philosophy of competition at its purest. To ensure the liberty of the individual and protect democracy, citizens must force the powerful to compete. Adam Smith’s economics plays a role. But it is the stark realism of Jefferson and Madison, with their intense distrust of concentrated power, that governs. The fundamental aim of government is to extend the system of checks and balances to the political economy, and to break or neutralize all big concentrations of private power.

As Senator John Sherman, author of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, put it, “It is the right of every man to work, labor, and produce in any lawful vocation and to transport his production on equal terms and conditions and under like circumstances. This is industrial liberty, and lies at the foundation of the equality of all rights and privileges.”

In this tradition, breaking up monopoly has little to do with promoting efficiency or better deals for consumers, and everything to do with protecting political equality, self-government, and democratic institutions. As Brandeisexplained, “The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted . . . not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” The way to “save the people from autocracy,” he said, is precisely by building “friction” into the system.

Over the following decades, these principles guided how Americans distributed economic power and protected industrial liberty. Despite wave after wave of technological change, concentration declined in almost every realm of the economy.

But in the 1970s, a small group of intellectuals—some, like Alfred Kahn, with roots in mainstream liberalism; and others, like Robert Bork, with roots in conservative Chicago school economics—systematically targeted the achievements of the Populist tradition. While anti-monopoly laws remained on the books, they were reinterpreted in ways that defeated their historical purpose. No longer would the aim be to promote economic and political liberty. Instead, according to guidelines enacted in 1982 by Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, big corporations would be allowed to get bigger so long as they did not immediately hike prices to the “consumer.”

In retrospect, the evidence is close to irrefutable that adoption of this philosophy of “efficiency” unleashed a process of concentration that over the last generation has remade almost the entire U.S. economy, and is now disrupting our democracy.

What would a True Populist do today? Immediately restore America’s traditional anti-monopoly philosophy, most importantly in the guidelines that determine how enforcers view the purpose of these laws, and start breaking uptoday’s monopolies.

2. USE TRADE POWER TO RESTORE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

The Boston Tea Party, every schoolchild knows, struck a blow for America’s independence from Britain. Less well known is that the Tea Partiers were specifically protesting domination by corporations.

As Samuel Adams and John Hancock put it in a 1773 letter, the Tea Act was dangerous precisely because, in giving a huge tax break to the British East India Company, it was “introductive of Monopolies which, besides the trains of evil that attend them in a commercial view, are forever dangerous to public liberty.”...

For the next 200 years, these twin goals—independent citizens in an independent nation—shaped America’s trade policies. The basic aim was to protect the freedom of action of the United States and of individual Americans. The method was to break or deflect the power of all foreign state-directed, or “mercantilist,” trading systems. The principles were those of anti-monopoly, extended to the international sphere.

Populists opposed any permanent tariff wall that would reinforce the power of domestic monopolists. At the same time, they were aware, as were Americans of all stripes, that monopoly abroad was just as big a threat as monopoly at home. That’s why both Democratic and Republican presidents straight through Ronald Reagan aggressively used everything from temporary embargoes to temporary tariffs and quotas to disrupt attempts by trading partners to monopolize control over any vital manufactured good.

But starting in the 1990s, the U.S. largely abandoned any effort to use trade policy as a weapon against monopoly. Instead, in joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Clinton administration and Congress effectively outsourced the making of trade policy to a body dominated by immense international trading companies. Even when headquartered in the United States, these giants have little inherent concern for the independence of America as a nation or of Americans as individuals.

As a direct result, America today has been made to rely on single offshore sources for many of the basic goods we use every day. In the case of democratic allies like Japan and Germany, the risks of such dependence are limited. In the case of China—which now controls production of most or all of U.S. supplies of many vital drugs and electronics—the threats to U.S. political sovereignty are potentially immense.

Populists were aware that monopoly abroad was just as big a threat as monopoly at home. They applied the principles of anti-monopoly to international trade.

Almost as shocking, recent U.S. administrations have allowed foreign state enterprises to essentially rule large swaths of the U.S. economy, and many of the people who work in those industries. Control of America’s big beer, beef, and processed food sectors, for example, is increasingly in the hands of Brazilian state corporations like Anheuser-Busch InBev and JBS. Chinese state corporations control much of America’s porksupply, and have gained leverage over Hollywood’s cultural production through control of AMC theaters.

What would a True Populist do today? Not erect protectionist tariffs like those proposed by Donald Trump. Nor simply bad-mouth the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. A True Populist would abandon the WTO and apply the principles of anti-monopoly to international trade, to protect America and Americans from all foreign monopoly.

3. BAN PRICE AND DATA DISCRIMINATION

By the time the Populists took their stand, Americans had been fighting railroad tycoons for a generation. The problem, in their eyes, was not merely that the railroad monopolists charged too much. It was that these absentee corporations had the power to control, through the common railway practice of charging different people different prices for the same service, whether they and their communities succeeded or failed.

Charles Francis Adams Jr., the grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of one of the founders of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, helped lead the railroad reformers. Adams described the practice of price discrimination as “favoritism of the grossest character,” which turned the railway into “a law unto itself.” The fortunes of even large cities including Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cincinnati rose and fell according to how various railroad financiers, or “robber barons,” set their rates.

Some observers called for public ownership of railroads, pointing to the model that since ancient times has applied to most roads and highways. Most reformers, however, settled on an all-American approach that combined private ownership of the railroad with strict bans on most price discrimination. Drawing on the legal tradition of “common carriage,” under which American and English governments had for centuries prohibited private carters, cabbies, and innkeepers from charging different prices to different customers, railroads would be banned from favoring some shippers and passengers over others.

The reformers generally recognized that railways should be allowed to offer different terms to different classes of goods—charging less, say, for timber than for manufactured goods. But they condemned all discrimination within any given class, which the railway scholar Arthur Hadley described as the “most serious evil.”

Many states formed railroad commissions to enforce this principle of nondiscrimination, which, as Adams put it, should aim to permit “an unchecked flow of travel and commerce, the continuation of which may with safety be calculated upon.” With passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the principle became federal law.

By 1913, this approach to railway regulation was so successful that, once in office, Wilson and Brandeis began to extend common carrier rules to many other realms of commerce—from electricity to retailing. The very first lines of the Clayton Antitrust Act set out to eliminate “discrimination in price, services, or facilities.”

Populists passed laws that prevented railroads and other monopolistic corporations from favoring some customers over others. But today, price discrimination by monopolists is increasingly the rule.

Yet in today’s America, price discrimination by monopolists is increasingly the rule. In hospital care, insurance, seeds, cable, and even books and news stories, we see monopolists discriminating among producers and increasingly among consumers. And with the rise of Big Data, the ability of today’s biggest companies to discriminate profitably grows almost by the day. The one exception is telecommunications, where the FCC’s “net neutrality” rules have restored traditional order to large parts of the industry.

What would a True Populist do today? Immediately apply common carrier principles to every realm where we see monopoly combining with Big Data, and ban individualized price and data discrimination—against both the producer and the consumer—everywhere.

4. BREAK UP AMAZON, FACEBOOK, GOOGLE, AND COMCAST

By the time Woodrow Wilson took office, Americans had long since learned that simply outlawing price discrimination was not always enough to ensure that a monopolist in control of a vital service would treat all customers the same.

The lesson was driven home by the rise of Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil. In both instances, their bosses—Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, respectively—had captured de facto control over the railways that carried their goods to market. In both cases this control enabled them to exclude their rivals from the market and thereby to concentrate power and control.

The result was a new focus on banning certain forms of “vertical integration,” as when a railroad buys a coal mine and then favors that mine in ways that harm other coal mines that depend on the railroad to get their product to market. The goal was to prevent the actions of the monopolist from being warped by any “conflict of interest.”

Into the 1970s, America had hundreds of populist laws to ensure that farming, banking, services, and light manufacturing would remain open to the smallholder and controlled by the community.

At the federal level, the first effort to draw clear lines between particular types of business dates to the National Bank Act of 1863, which limited bankers to “the business of banking.” But it wasn’t until around 1912 that Americans made a concerted effort to ban vertical integration by other private providers of vital services.

Now courts blocked big manufacturers from buying retailers and using them to exclude rivals, as in the American Tobacco case of 1911. And Congress used the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 (and later the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936) to prevent giant trading companies and retailers from leveraging each other’s power. And Congress and the Roosevelt administration in 1935 banned electrical utilities from investing in unrelated businesses like street trolleys.

When it came to production goods like cars or chemicals, enforcers largely allowed managers of a corporation to decide what manufacturing activities to bring in-house. But for corporations that provided vital services to other firms, enforcers all but banned most direct ties. Their goal, as with anti-discrimination laws, was to ensure that such vital middlemen treat every customer the same.

This practice remained in effect even after the overturning of most other traditional anti-monopoly law in the early 1980s.The Reagan administration pushed for de-integration of AT&T in 1982. The FTC in the 1990s continued to enforce clear lines of separation between drugmakers, drug managers, and drugstores. In 1998, the Clinton administration demanded the complete separation of Microsoft’s DOS business from its browser business.

But about fifteen years ago, the Bush administration dropped the guard against vertical integration. Since then Comcast, which distributes television shows, has been allowed to merge with NBC, which produces shows. Amazon, the dominant retail marketplace for books, has been allowed to go big time into publishing books. And Google, which dominates search, has been allowed to compete directly with companies like Yelp, which rely on Google’s search engine.

What would a True Populist do today? Break up Amazon, Facebook, Google, Comcast, and any other essential network monopoly by banning them from owning companies that depend on their services.

5. LOCALIZE BANKING, RETAIL, AND FARMING

The spirit of America, Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1913, lies in “the enterprise of the people throughout the land. . . . [I]f America discourages the locality, the community, the self-contained town,” he said, “she will kill the nation.”

Wilson’s localism was not simply nostalgia for an age of general stores and town wheelwrights. Instead he was articulating a core principle of “democratic republicanism.” This holds that to be truly free, the citizen must be independent and self-governing, and must share equally in ruling a political community that controls its own fate.

A century ago, both the citizen and the community were under grave threat. Giant corporations increasingly determined how the farmer and skilled laborer worked and lived, and distant lords wielded growing sway over the local community. Just as Wilson took office in 1913, the Woolworth’s chain store corporation opened an immense office tower in Lower Manhattan. Here was a physical manifestation of concentrated power, the wealth of hundreds of American communities piled into the tallest structure on earth, on Wall Street.

True Populists would be appalled that most of the work of the federal government is today outsourced to contractors, whose employees outnumber the ranks of actual government workers by nearly fourfold.

Louis Brandeis, in 1933, described the threat posed by such giants. Speaking of the authors of an anti–chain store law, he said, “They may have believed that the chain store, by furthering the concentration of wealth and of power and by promoting absentee ownership, is thwarting American ideals; that it is making impossible equality of opportunity; that it is converting independent tradesmen into clerks; and that it is sapping the resources, the vigor and the hope of the smaller cities and towns.”

Beginning under Wilson and continuing into the 1970s, Americans passed hundreds of laws to ensure that farming, banking, services, and light manufacturing would remain open to the smallholder and controlled by members of the community. These included the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, to preserve competitive markets for the farmer; the McFadden Banking Act of 1927, to prevent banks from expanding across state borders; and the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, to stem the rise of giant retailers like the A&P.

The laws worked. Between 1920 and 1980 the percentage of the market controlled by the top four meatpackers fell from more than 80 percent to about 25 percent. In 1966, the Supreme Court blocked a merger that would have combined 7.5 percent of the Los Angeles grocery market under one roof. And the resulting competition drove down prices in almost every sector of the U.S. economy.

But since the 1970s, both Democrats and Republicans have undone almost all these laws. The result has been a concentration of power and wealth that would have horrified True Populists. In groceries, pharmacies, hardware, and office supply, control has been consolidated in as few as one or two giants. So, too, wealth—the Walton family alone is now as rich as 140 million other Americans combined. And with the rise of online goliaths like Amazon, which aims to be the “Everything Store,” control will only be yet further concentrated.

What would a True Populist do today? Besides neutralizing large online retailers, a True Populist would revive the laws Americans used to localize banking, farming, and retail through the heart of the twentieth century.

6. MAKE ALL GOVERNMENT PUBLIC

In his 1904 book, The Shame of the Cities, the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens described how the “privatization” of government services had corrupted communities across America. Describing St. Louis, he wrote, “Along about 1890, public franchises and privileges were sought, not only for legitimate profit and common convenience, but for loot. . . . The riff-raff . . . drove out the remaining respectable men, and sold the city—its streets, its wharves, its markets, and all that it had—to the now greedy business men and bribers.”

Populists and reformers in all parties used various means to push such forms of corporate self-dealing out of government, sometimes under the banner of “No use of public powers or public property for private profit.” One early example was the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, a bipartisan move to ensure that public officials were fully independent of private corporations.

In the case of companies that provide vital services like gas, water, and electricity, the Populists took a similar but more hybrid approach. As with railways, the Populists often chose to leave these businesses in private hands, then focused closely on preventing all discrimination in pricing and service. One goal was to ensure that executives received some sort of reward for good management. Another was to limit the ability of the masters of these public monopolies to exploit the power inherent in the monopoly to serve themselves or their friends. In the early years of the twentieth century, many communities established independent public service commissions to formalize this work.

But beginning in the 1970s, this legacy of Populism came under assault across America. In the name of “efficiency,” policymakers in both parties “privatized” more and more government functions, and more and more control over public utilities.

Today, most of the work of the federal government is outsourced to contractors, whose seven million employees outnumber the ranks of actual government workers by nearly fourfold. Similarly, hundreds of localities have cut regulation of monopoly utilities, like electricity.

One result is precisely the self-dealing that Populists worked so hard to abolish. Many of today’s federal contractors pay themselves lavish incomes, even though all or most of their work comes from the government. The CEO of Lockheed Martin, the federal government’s largest contractor, earned $20 million last year—100 times what taxpayers gave Defense Secretary Ash Carter, whose department oversees most of Lockheed’s work. Similarly, the managers of many utilities pay themselves kingly salaries for overseeing public businesses. The results can lead to a grotesque warping of incentives. In the nation’s capital, the CEO of the Washington Metro earns close to $400,000 annually; the CEO of the local electrical utility Pepco made $15.4 million in 2014.

What would a True Populist do today? Insist that the managers of any corporation receiving more than a quarter of its revenues from taxpayers—including defense contractors, universities, and hospitals—work at government wages. And require that the bosses of local public utilities earn no more than the public servants who regulate them.

7. PROTECT THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS

In 1892, the banker J. P. Morgan, taking advantage of an economic bust, bought up the patents of that most prolific of American inventors, Thomas Edison. He later combined Edison’s patents with those of George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla and launched a new company, General Electric.The banker was now boss, and the industrial corporation was his tool.

By 1912, what to do with such industrial monopolies had become a major topic of debate. Most Americans welcomed such technological marvels as the mass-produced light bulb, telephone, automobile, and steel girder. But many also fretted about how to govern these immense corporations, which exerted so much power over people and places.

Teddy Roosevelt believed that the answer was to use the federal government to directly regulate the industrial corporation. But the idea of combining the power of the federal government with that of the giant corporation horrified the Populists. It is far safer, Brandeis said, to “regulate competition” than to “regulate monopoly.”

Over the next generation, the Populists came up with two answers. One was introduced by Thurman Arnold, the head of antitrust under Franklin Roosevelt. Arnold’s idea was to have at least three or four corporations manufacturing any particular item. This achieved Brandeis’s goal of external regulation through competition, but it also left the industrial corporations big enough—both horizontally and vertically—to provide scientists and engineers enough room and resources to work their wonders, at scale.

The second answer was to check the power that financiers and speculators exercised over the internal operations of corporations so that scientists and engineers, as well as their managers and frontline workers, could do their jobs. Rigorous antitrust enforcement suppressed the flow of mergers—hence the need for finance. But the Populists reinforced that measure with other actions. This included the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which stated that banks couldn’t use depositors’ money to make deals, and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, which buttressed the power of small shareholders. It also included support for unionization by skilled workers, to empower them to better resist the demands of the financier.

Since the 1980s, however, a general reversal of these policies has once again shifted power over the industrial corporation into the hands of the financier. One result is what’s happened to Pfizer. In 1950, it was this company’s scientists who discovered the antibiotic oxytetracycline. But in recent years, Pfizer’s managers have devoted themselves mainly to putting cash into the hands of the bankers who now effectively control the company. One way they have done so is by engineering a long line of giant mergers and then firing thousands of scientists. As one of Pfizer’s own top executives wrote, the impact of these firings “on the R&D of the organizations involved has been devastating.”

What would a True Populist do today? Besides forcing all industrial corporations to compete (see #1), a True Populist would use labor law and securities law to shift power away from the predatory financier to the scientist, engineer, and skilled worker.

8. TAKE BACK LEISURE

On July 4, 1915, Louis Brandeis delivered a holiday oration at Faneuil Hall in Boston that gave voice to an ideal deeply shared by his fellow Populists. “A short workday is as essential as adequate food and proper conditions of working and of living,” Brandeis declared. “The worker must, in other words, have leisure.”

By leisure, Brandeis did not mean idleness. As his biographer Jeffrey Rosen explains, he meant the free time necessary to pursue one’s deeper needs and to play a meaningful role in the life of one’s family and community. “Leisure,” Brandeis said, “means ability to work, not less, but more, ability to work at something besides breadwinning. . . . Leisure, so defined, is an essential of successful democracy.”

In America, this vision dates back to the Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Jefferson’s idea that Americans had a right to “the pursuit of happiness.” As the historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt details in Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, from the founding until about forty years ago Americans defined progress mainly as the attainment of more time to pursue what really matters in life—like one’s family, one’s community, one’s arts, one’s hobbies, or one’s god.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this meant fighting not merely for higher wages but also for an eight-hour workday and a forty-hour workweek. It meant fighting for the end of child labor and the ability to retire. It meant supporting unions. In many communities, it even meant “blue laws,” which closed stores on certain days and after certain hours, so people could have that time free.

And the policies worked. Between 1830 and 1930, the average American’s working hours fell nearly in half. Indeed, by the 1960s, futurists were predicting that, thanks to ever-increasing automation, the principal challenge facing the next generation of Americans would be what to do with an abundance of free time.

Populists found ways to check the power of financiers so that scientists, engineers, frontline workers, and professional managers could do their jobs. Productivity never grew faster.

Yet today, even as American workers as a whole produce almost three times more in an hour than did their counterparts in 1960, they are typically working at least as long and often much longer. Among adults working full-time in the U.S., the average workweek is now forty-seven hours, with fully a quarter working at least sixty hours. Worse, many workers now have virtually no control over their schedule, as they are required to remain on call for shifts that could come at any time of day or night. The resulting conflicts between work and family life are now widely seen as a spreading crisis that is particularly hard on women and children and on social institutions that depend on volunteers to donate time.

What would a True Populist do today? Besides restoring competition for labor (see #1 and #5), a True Populist would immediately push to cut the workweek back to forty hours. He or she would do so by promoting a living wage and stronger unions, and by cracking down on companies like Uber that deny their workers labor protection by misclassifying them as contractors.

9. KEEP PLANES, TRAINS, AND ROBOTIC CARS OUT OF THE HANDS OF PLUTOCRATS

As Americans glimpsed the possibilities for mass air travel in the 1930s, they faced the same challenge their parents had confronted with railroads. If airlines were allowed to monopolize, they would discriminate in ways that determined which cities, which businesses, even which individuals, rose or fell.

Populists defined progress mainly as the attainment not of more stuff, but of more time to pursue to what really matters- like devoting more attention to one’s family.

In many other countries, the result was public ownership. But Americans wanted to preserve a role for private initiative, so they applied the same model of competition they had mastered with railroads. As expressed in the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, the goal was to promote “adequate, economical, and efficient service by air carriers at reasonable charges, without unjust discrimination, undue preferences or advantages, or unfair or destructive competitive practices.” In effect, this meant that private airlines operated flights, while a government board ensured the service was of high quality and fairly distributed.

The airline industry soared, and America did as well. Airfares fell dramatically, and by 1977, 63 percent of Americans over the age of eighteen had taken a trip on an airplane, up from 33 percent in 1962. Regulators succeeded in keeping all cities more or less equally connected to the world.

But in the late 1970s, the Carter administration repealed this body of law, in the name of “deregulation.” In the years since, airlines have been allowed to consolidate to a degree unknown even to the railroad barons. Today four super-carriers control 80 percent of traffic, and enjoy outright monopoly on many routes.

These monopolists do just what monopolists of the past did. They charge different passengers different prices for the same flight. They cut the quality of air service even as they pocket record profits. And they discriminate among people who live in different cities, cutting service and hiking fares to places like St. Louis, Memphis, and Minneapolis, in ways that make it harder to attract and keep business.

Bad as all this is, the future looks even bleaker. On-demand transport and self-driving cars are fast ushering in the next major transportation revolution. These services have the potential to fundamentally alter how people and goods travel. Yet the destruction of the principles used to run the U.S. airline network has created an intellectual and legal void. As a result, a few private corporations, such as Google and Uber, are left free to write the rules of twenty-first-century transportation, with little coherent consideration for the interests of the American public or the individual American citizen.

The basic problem is that these private for-profit monopolists are increasingly able to combine their control of mapping software, the operating systems of vehicles, and the vast reams of information they collect on each rider in ways that give them alone the power to regulate who goes how fast, by what route, and at what cost.

What would a True Populist do today? Restore public regulation of all transportation to ensure fair service for all Americans.

10. POWER (AND IDEAS) FROM THE PEOPLE

In September 1932, campaigning in Oregon, Franklin Roosevelt described how he wanted to develop the nation’s electrical infrastructure. After railing against “public utility barons,” and dubbing one magnate’s empire a “monstrosity,” he detailed the principles that guided his thinking.

First, the supply of electricity should be “satisfactory and cheap” as well as “fair,” with no discrimination by region, business, or household. Second, although electricity should generally remain “a function for private initiative,” when a community is not happy with the service or rates offered by a private company “it has the undeniable right” to set up a “governmentally owned” system. Third, when power is generated from a public resource like water, that power is, Roosevelt said, “our power.”

Over the coming decades, these principles shaped thinking at both the federal and state levels. To this end, Congress and the White House in 1935 broke up electrical utilities along state lines, to keep them small enough to regulate effectively. And in 1936, they passed the Rural Electrification Act to help citizens organize and pay for locally owned electric cooperatives.

The result was something new in the world—universal, world-class, affordable, fairly distributed power. This system was a main factor behind the flourishing of the twentieth-century U.S. economy, and of communities and families from coast to coast.

Then, in the 1980s, two new visions of America’s power future began to compete.

One looked to update Roosevelt’s original vision for America’s electrical system to take advantage of new technologies. An early result was a 1992 law designed to separate the business of distributing electricity from the business of generating electricity. The goal was to create markets to promote the building of cleaner and cheaper power plants. More recently, with the advent of affordable solar and wind power, it meant a more radical vision, in which every home, every farm, even every car, could become a generator of electricity, with the electrical network serving as a commonly owned balancer of supply and demand—or, more simply, a two-way open-access highway for electricity.

Uber and self-driving cars are ushering in a transportation revolution, yet without the guidance of the Populists principles Americans long used to keep monopolists from controlling our mobility.

The other vision of America’s electricity future was to restore multistate centralized giants run largely by financiers.This vision was brought into effect by a 2005 law, the Energy Policy Act, strongly supported by then Vice President Dick Cheney, which undid most of the 1930s-era prohibitions on size and ownership. Since then a growing number of corporations, such as Exelon and Duke Energy, have focused on buying up smaller, neutral utilities wherever they can. They then use these local monopolies to block the introduction of new technologies and to force entire communities to consume power generated by antiquated coal and nuclear plants.

What would a True Populist do today? In addition to prohibiting discrimination (see #3) and banning vertical integration (see #4), a True Populist would follow Roosevelt’s lead. This means doing whatever it takes to provide world-class power and broadband service to all Americans. And it means freeing Americans to generate and share power (and ideas) in whatever way they will.

Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman

Barry C. Lynn directs the Open Markets Program at New America and is the author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.

===

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_movement

The farmers' movement was, in American political history, the general name for a movement between 1867 and 1896. In this movement, there were three periods, popularly known as the Grange, Alliance and Populist movements.

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The Grange

The Grange, or Order of the Patrons of Husbandry (the latter official name of the national organization, while the former was the name of local chapters, including a supervisory National Grange at Washington), was a secret order founded in 1867 to advance the social needs and combat the economic backwardness of farm life. It was founded by Oliver H. Kelley, at that time an official working in Washington DC for the Dept. of Agriculture. He had been sent to Virginia to assess Southern agricultural resources and practices. He found them to be generally poor, and became determined to found an organization of farmers for the dissemination of information. As a Government official from the North, he must have received a generally hostile reception, but he was a Mason, and ended by founding his organization on the structure of that order.^{[citation needed]} In addition to farming practices, it was to provide insurance and benevolent aid to members. He was in correspondence with his niece during the early period and both promoted the equal status of women and the principle of equal pay for equal work. The Grange grew remarkably during the early years: at its peak, its membership rose to approximately 1.5 million. The causes of its growth were much broader than just the financial crisis of 1873; a high tariff, railway freight rates and other grievances were mingled with agricultural troubles like the fall of wheat prices and the increase of mortgages.

The condition of the farmer seemed desperate. The original objects of the Grange were primarily educational, but these were soon overborne by an anti-middleman, co-operative movement. Grange agents bought everything from farm machinery to women's dresses; hundreds of grain elevators and cotton and tobacco warehouses were bought, and even steamboat lines; mutual insurance companies were formed and joint-stock stores. Nor was co-operation limited to distributive processes; crop reports were circulated, co-operative dairies multiplied, flour mills were operated, and patents were purchased, that the Grange might manufacture farm machinery.

The outcome in some states was ruin, and the name, Grange, became a reproach. Nevertheless, these efforts in co-operation were exceedingly important both for the results obtained and for their wider significance. Nor could politics be excluded, though officially taboo, for economics must be considered by social idealists, and economics everywhere ran into politics. Thus it was with the railway question.

Railways had been extended into frontier states; there were heavy crops in sparsely settled regions where freight-rates were high, so that given the existing distributive system there were over production and waste; there was notorious stock manipulation and discrimination in rates; and the farmers regarded absentee ownership of railways by New York capitalists much as absentee ownership of land has been regarded in Ireland. The Grange officially disclaimed enmity to railways: Though the organization did not attack them, the Grangers, through political farmers clubs and the like, did. In 1867, the Grange began efforts to establish regulation of the railways as common-carriers, by the states. Such laws were known as Granger Laws, and their general principles, endorsed in 1876 by the Supreme Court of the United States, have become an important chapter in the laws of the land.

In a declaration of principles in 1874 Grangers were declared not to be enemies of railroads, and their cause to stand for no communism nor agrarianism. To conservatives, however, cooperation seemed communism, and Grange laws agrarianism; thus, in 1873-1874, the growth of the movement aroused extraordinary interest and much uneasiness. In 1874, the order was reorganized, membership being limited to persons directly interested in the farmers' cause (there had been a millionaire manufacturers Grange on Broadway), and after this there were constant quarrels in the order; moreover, in 1875, the National Grange largely lost control of the state Granges, which discredited the organization by their disastrous co-operation ventures. Thus, by 1876, it had already ceased to be of national political importance.

About 1880, a renaissance began, particularly in the Middle States and New England; this revival was marked by a recurrence to the original social and educational objects. The national Grange and state Granges (in all, or nearly all, of the states) were still active in 1909, especially in the old cultural movement and in such economic movements, notably the improvement of highways as most directly concern the farmers. The initiative and referendum, and other proposals of reform politics in the direction of a democratic advance, also enter in a measure into their propaganda.

The Alliance

The Alliance carried the movement further into economics. The National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, formed in 1889, embraced several originally independent organizations (including The Agricultural Wheel) formed from 1873 onwards; it was largely confined to the South and was secret. The National Farmers Alliance, formed in 1880, went back similarly to 1877, was much smaller, Northern and non-secret. The Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union (formed 1888, merged in the above Southern Alliance in 1890) was the second greatest organization. With these three were associated many others, state and national, including an annual, non-partisan, deliberative and advisory Farmers National Congress. The Alliance movement reached its greatest power about 1890, in which year twelve national farmers organizations were represented in conventions in St Louis, and the six leading ones alone probably had a membership of 5,000,000. As with the Grange, so in the ends and declarations of the whole later movement, concrete remedial legislation for agricultural or economic ills was mingled with principles of vague radical tendency and with lofty idealism. Thus, the Southern Alliance in 1890 (the chief platforms were the one at Ocala, Florida, and that of 1889 at St Louis, Missouri, in conjunction with the Knights of Labor) declared its principles to be:

(1) To labour for the education of the agricultural classes in the science of economical government in a strictly non-partisan way, and to bring about a more perfect union of such classes. (2) To demand equal rights to all, and special privileges to none. (3) To endorse the motto: In things essential, unity; in all things, charity. (4) To develop a better state, mentally, morally, socially and financially - - - (6) To suppress personal, local, sectional and national prejudices.^[1]

For the Southern farmer a chief concrete evil was the crop-lien system, mortgages on their future crops for furnished supplies by which cotton farmers fell into debt to country merchants. In the North the farmer attacked a wide range of capitalistic legislation that hurt him, he believed, for the benefit of other classes, notably legislation sought by railways.

Practically all the great organizations demanded the abolition of national banks, the free coinage of silver, a sufficient issue of government paper money, tariff revision, and a secret ballot (the last was soon realized). Only less commonly demanded were an income tax, taxation of evidence of debt, and government loans on lands. All of these were principles of the two great Alliances (the Northern and the Southern), as were also pure food legislation, abolition of landholding by aliens, reclamation of unused or unearned land grants (to railways, e.g.), and either rigid federal regulation of railways and other means of communication or government ownership thereof. The Southern Alliance put in the forefront a subtreasury scheme according to which cheap loans should be made by government from local sub-treasuries on non-perishable farm products (such as grain and cotton) stored in government warehouses; while the Northern Alliance demanded restriction of the liquor traffic and for (a short time) woman suffrage. Still other issues were a modification of the patent laws (e.g., to prevent the purchase of patents to stifle competition), postal currency exchange, the eight-hour day, inequitable taxation, the single tax on land, trusts, educational qualification for suffrage, direct popular election of federal judges, of senators, and of the president, special-interest lobbying.^{[citation needed]}

The Populists

In 1889-1890, with the rapid growth in membership, the political (non-partisan) movement developed astonishing strength; it captured the Republican stronghold of Kansas, brought the Democratic Party to vassalage in South Carolina, revolutionized legislatures even in conservative states like Massachusetts, and seemed likely completely to dominate the South and West. All its work in the South was accomplished within the old-party organizations, but, in 1890, the demand became strong for an independent third party, for which various consolidations since 1887 had prepared the way. By 1892, a large part of the strength of the farmers organizations, with that of various industrial and radical orders, was united in the People's Party (perhaps more generally known as the Populist Party), which had its beginnings in Kansas in 1890, and received national organization in 1892.

The People's Party emphasized free silver, the income tax, eight-hour day, reclamation of land grants, government ownership of railways, telephones and telegraphs, popular election of federal senators, and the initiative and referendum. In the presidential election of 1892, it cast 1,041,021 votes (in a total of 12,036,089), and elected 22 presidential electors, the first chosen by any third party since 1856. In 1896, the People's Party fused with the Democratic Party in the presidential campaign, and again in 1900. During this period, the greatest part of the People's Party was reabsorbed into the two great parties from which its membership had originally been drawn; in some northern states apparently largely into the Republican ranks, but mainly into the Democratic Party, to which it gave a powerful radical impulse.^{[citation needed]}

Influence

The Farmers' movement was much misunderstood, abused and ridiculed by the societal forces it challenged. However, it accomplished a vast amount of good. The movement—and especially the Grange, for on most important points the latter movements only followed where it had led—contributed the initial impulse and prepared the way for the establishment of traveling and local rural libraries, reading courses, lyceums, farmers institutes (a steadily increasing influence) and rural free mail delivery (inaugurated experimentally in 1896 and adopted as part of the permanent postal system of the country in 1902); for agricultural exhibits and an improved agricultural press; for encouragement to and increased profit from the work of agricultural colleges, the establishment (1885) and great services of the United States Department of Agriculture, -- in short, for an extraordinary lessening of rural isolation and the betterment of the farmers opportunities; for the irrigation of the semi-arid West, adopted as a national policy in 1902, the pure-food laws of 1906, the interstate-commerce law of 1887, the railway-rate laws of 1903 and 1906, even the great Bureau of Commerce-and-Labor law of 1903, and the **Anti-trust**laws of 1903 and later.The Alliance and Populist movements were bottomed on the idea of "ethical gains through legislation."^[1]

In its local manifestations the whole movement was often marked by eccentric ideas, narrow prejudices and weaknesses in economic reasoning. It is not to be forgotten that owing to the movement of the frontier the United States has always been "at once a developed country and a primitive one. The same political questions have been put to a society advanced in some regions and undeveloped in others. ... On specific political questions each economic area has reflected its peculiar interests" (Prof. F.J. Turner).^[1] That this idea must not, however, be over-emphasized, is admirably enforced by observing the great mass of farmer radicalism that has, since about 1896, become an accepted Democratic and Republican principle over the whole country. The Farmers movement was the beginning of widespread, effective protest against "the menace of privilege" in the United States.^[1]

See also

• United Farmers of Ontario
• United Farmers of Alberta

References

1. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_movement#cite_ref-britannica_1-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_movement#cite_ref-britannica_1-2) ^d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_movement#cite_ref-britannica_1-3)  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Farmers' Movement". Encyclopædia Britannica. 10 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 181–182.

Further reading

• Goodwynn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. Oxford University Press, USA (November 30, 1978). ISBN 0-19-502417-6.

Encyclopædia Britannica (v.5, p. 182) states that: American periodicals, especially in 1890-1892, are particularly informing on the growth of the movement:

• F. M. Drew in Political Science Quarterly (1891), vi. p. 282
• C. W. Pierson in Popular Science Monthly (1888), xxxii. pp. 199, 368
• C. S. Walker and F. J. Foster in Annals of American Academy (1894); iv. p. 790
• Senator W. A. Peffer in Cosmopolitan (1890), x. p. 694

and on agricultural discontent:

• • Political Science Quarterly, iv. (1889), p. 433, by W. F. Mappin; v. (1890), p. 65, by J. P. Dunn; xi. (1896), pp. 433, 601, xii. (1897), p. 93, and xiv. (1899), p. 444, by C. F. Emerick
• Prof. E. W. Bemis in Journal of Political Economy (1893), i. p. 193
• A. H. Peters in Quarterly Journal of Economics (1890), iv. p. 18
• C. W. Davis in Forum (1890), ix. pp. 231, 291, 348

External links

• National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry - Accessed January 14, 2012
• The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry History - Accessed January 14, 2012
• full texts of primary sources on the Grange - Accessed January 14, 2012
• History of Farmer's Alliance - Accessed January 14, 2012
• Text of Ocala Demands at MSU - Accessed January 14, 2012
• The Omaha Platform: Launching the Populist Party - Accessed January 14, 2012
• The Rise and Fall of Populism in the South - Accessed January 14, 2012

Categories: 

• Economic history of the United States
• Defunct American political movements
• History of the United States (1865–1918)
• Agrarian politics
• History of agriculture in the United States

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