“Populism” implies “The People.” Thus it is, in most quarters, a favorable sign or symbol, a sought-after asset in the public forum. Its fate is similar to that of “liberalism,” a favorable term that has come in the twentieth century to cover a very-different set of phenomena than it did in the nineteenth, to the point that its use can be extremely misleading. A few years on the hustings can destroy any political label. Consider the straightforward old Anglo-Saxon term Whig. Even at its clearest point of meaning, Edmund Burke had to appeal from the Old Whigs to the New. And it meant something different in America than it did in England; and something different in eighteenth century America than it came to mean in nineteenth century America.
My impression of European history is that since the seventeenth century there has been a struggle between various interests and ideologies to control the central state, and that the central state has been a given. But as I understand American Populism, from its beginnings to the present moment, it is an expression of hostility to state power and those who exercise it or seek to exercise it. It is no surprise then that most Populists have looked to Thomas Jefferson, the great original American critic of consolidated power, as their patron saint, and that the history of true Populism is closely connected to the concept of the American Constitution as a restraint on power rather than a grant of power. Populists regard state power as always corrupt and corrupting, which is an inheritance, I believe of the English “Country ideology” or opposition value system which the Americans absorbed deeply in the colonial period and which underlay the American War of Independence.
Populism in the strictest historical sense refers to the People’s Party which flourished in the later nineteenth century, in certain regions of the American Union. Which brings us to another part of my definition of Populism. It has always been, in this country, a regional and not a class phenomenon. I take this idea, as well as my title “Up at the Fork of the Creek,” from an early essay of the late M.E. Bradford.
Populism was weighted toward the South and West, a product of the culturally most conservative parts of American society. It was backward looking, even reactionary, like most normal societies throughout history. New forces had brought new conditions which seemed unsettling and unjust—according to old dispensations. Populism was, and is, a defensive attempt to correct these new forces.
But, of course, what has actually happened, is that millions of decent, sincere, often simple, Christians have been provoked into action by militant obscenity, blasphemy, and atheism (not to mention wholesale child murder) invading the public sphere and officially sanctioned by the ruling elite. They are quite right. Separation of church and state in American tradition has not meant banishing of all Christian values to the closet. All that is really desired is to restore the status quo ante.
Where the People’s Party put forward specific measures they were corrective—the direct election of Senators, cooperatives, free silver, regulation of railroads and banks in the interest of producers and consumers, income tax on great wealth—they were not forwarding a socialist society but reacting to abuses of state capitalism. The Republican party did not and never had favored an open economy. By free enterprise it meant private ownership with government support and subsidy. This is the only kind of free enterprise the Republican party has ever favored. And by charges of socialism leveled at the Populists, Republicans meant government acknowledgment of the complaints of agriculture and labor, which is the only kind of “socialism” the Republican Party has ever opposed.
We have here the essence of populism. Taylor defines its instincts and its political program. It is still a deeply embedded folk attitude among the American people. In the simplest terms, populism is the community defending itself against oppressive or inadequate agents of the state. “People” here is not a Marxist or even a particularly democratic term. It is a distinction between the body of the community and the wielders of state power and their beneficiaries.
The New England town meeting did involve direct democracy, but within a very limited and closed society. It was not populist. It was always infused by a sense of religious communalism and collectivism and purposefulness in terms of social regimentation and improvement. In New England, only when you get beyond the core, up into the wilds of New Hampshire, do you begin to find real populism. At any rate, New England died, for all practical purposes, a long time ago, and offers no model for modern America.
In fact, its inheritance offers the greatest obstacle to Populism; that overwhelming impulse for respectability and conformity which Alexis de Tocqueville saw as characteristic of Americans. He looked mostly at New England and New England influenced areas. Populism is not respectable. The Bryans, the Wallaces, the Huey Longs are not middle-class respectable. This is the largest single limitation on their success, the best weapon of the vested interests in putting down genuine populism. This is why innumerable beleaguered Midwestern farmers could not bring themselves to abandon the respectable Republican McKinley for the wild man Bryan in 1896. McKinley proved more “popular,” if not more “populist,” than Bryan.
The foundations, like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, as Wallace pointed out, enabled great fortunes to escape taxes and use their wealth to inordinately influence public policy against the wishes of the people. From the point of view of democratic philosophy his position is unfaultable, and it will make a great platform plank for a future Populist leader, if one should appear. The Liberals, who picture themselves as radical critics of privilege, have always, always, gotten along comfortably with great wealth and made use of it. Great wealth is the initial stage of the concentration of power and an essential means for the manipulation of society by safe reforms—those reforms that enhance the state and its guardians. Thus the pseudo-Populist Bill Clinton appointed a Wall Street operator as his chief economic adviser.
In America, as opposed to many countries in Europe, the question of minorities must always come up. Minorities are people and are a part of the polity. However, they are by definition, as minorities, not a part of the core people. It would be foolish to think that minorities could be enlisted on the side of populism. By their very status as vulnerable, minorities are the most pro-establishment part of the population. In the classic case of the African-Americans, they were first wards of the slaveholders; then of the Republican Party; and since the New Deal of the welfare state. As long as the status quo is reasonably good, and it has never been better for African-Americans in terms of benefits/burdens ratio, they are not likely to upset any apple carts. No group of Americans is more committed to the existing welfare state and more opposed to fundamental change.
Indeed, American colonial society was to a large extent made up of disinherited younger sons, displaced workers like the Scotch-Irish weavers, or in the case of the Washingtons a clergyman driven out of his parish by the Puritans—people unusually sensitive to abuses of power. Yet, though it had an always expanding edge, an escape valve of frontier opportunity, it was also a stable society. George Washington was the fifth generation of his family in America, as were many of his neighbors.
Not until the nineteenth century do we get thinkers who give us an abstract European view of the Declaration as a revolutionary program. This can only be done by filtering the Declaration, ahistorically, back and forth through the French Revolution and German transcendentalism. A philosophy which becomes as much a threat to the self-government and good sense of communities, as in the modern Liberal regime, as what was overthrown.
Eighteenth-century uprisings were in some important ways different from those of today…not all eighteenth-century mobs simply defied the law; some used extralegal means to implement official demands or to enforce laws not otherwise enforceable, others in effect extended the law in urgent situations beyond its technical limits. Since leading eighteenth-century Americans had known many occasions on which mobs took on the defense of the public welfare, which was, after all, the stated purpose of government, they were less likely to deny popular upheavals all legitimacy than are modern leaders…they could still grant such incidents an established and necessary role in free societies…. These attitudes…shaped political events of the Revolutionary era.
British officials complained constantly that Americans were “accustomed to live without law or gospel,” and they sought to bring “chaos into form” and to reduce “anarchy into regular Government.” But Americans did not live without law. There was no anarchy—there was simply less obedience than English officials were accustomed to receive.
The colonial revolts used to be well-known and celebrated in American history. The fact that they are nearly forgotten tells us something perhaps about the heavy weight of authority in our own time. Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia; the revolution of 1689 in Maryland; successful resistance of Massachusetts Bay colony against attempts to revoke their charter, 1635-1638; Leisler’s rebellion in New York, 1688; Culpeper’s rebellion in North Carolina, 1677-1680; the ejection of the proprietary government from South Carolina in 1721; the colonist’s reform of the proprietary regime in Georgia in the 1740s; the revolt of the frontier Paxton boys in Pennsylvania in 1763, which led a reluctant government to adopt new Indian policies and expand the franchise: the Regulator movements in the two Carolinas just before the Revolution.
To characterize a few of the most important: Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1675 came after the royal governor had failed to call elections for fifteen years and failed to authorize action against the Indians demanded by the settlers furthest west. Bacon organized his neighbors in the teeth of the governor’s authority and put down the Indians. When the governor declared him an outlaw, he ejected the governor from the capital. The matter ended more or less when Bacon died suddenly and his forces dispersed. This was not a proletarian social revolution but a disciplining of official abuses by the people.
If time allowed we might speak about Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain boys of Vermont who forced New York, New Hampshire, and the Congress to recognize them as a separate State; the “State of Franklin” in Tennessee, which, though abortive, forced North Carolina and the Congress to confirm the land policies it had advocated.
It was an enormity, a gratuitous act of power very much like busing in a later time. Nobody likes it except the ruling elite who do not participate in it. It exists simply to prove that they can do anything they want to us and we have to take it. The regions affected by the whiskey tax understood perfectly what was afoot—all classes. No one could be found to enforce and prosecute except outside appointees—something Americans not long before had conducted a successful war against.
But what is most interesting is the contrast between the official story that has dominated the accounts of establishment historians since the time, and what actually happened, which was, indeed, a populist triumph. According to the official account, a riotous revolt against just federal law broke out in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. President Washington sent out the army and dispersed the mobs and upheld the majesty of the government. According to John Marshall’s biography of Washington and other Federalist accounts, the new Union was thus saved from anarchy and impotent government.
Republished with gracious permission from The Abbeville Review (November 2016).
This is one of the most worthwhile stimulants to thinking that I have seen on this website.