The Conscience of a Liberal

Gilded Age and the Progressive Era up to a third of voters in New Jersey, which was very much a swing state at the time, regularly took cash for their votes.

Ballot-box stuffing was also widespread—and not just in areas dominated by urban machines, though most box stuffers were too bashful to say bluntly, as William Marcy Tweed did, “The ballots made no result; the counters made the result.” There was also extensive use of intimidation to keep the other party’s voters away from the polls. And as a last resort entrenched political groups sometimes simply overruled the will of the voters. For example, in 1897 the Indiana legislature simply unseated several Populists, even though it admitted that they had won a majority of the votes in their districts.

Again, both parties engaged in these tactics, though the financial edge of the Republicans probably meant that they came out ahead in the competitive corruption of politics at the time. More generally electoral fraud reinforced the advantages that money and organization carried: Elections were often decided not by who had the more popular platform, but by who was better prepared to rig the polls. At the same time, it greatly reduced the chances for electoral success of a platform that truly reflected the interests of the majority of the population.

It would be wrong, however, to think of the Long Gilded Age as an era in which there were heated clashes, in which the egalitarian impulses of the populace were forcibly suppressed by the forces of the elite. The truth was that most of the time the system’s inherent bias against any form of populism (with a small p—I’m not referring to the specific programs of the Populist Party, of which more below) was so strong and obvious that politicians didn’t even try to challenge the inequalities of the economic order.

Ironically the extreme weakness of populism in Gilded Age America made politics a more relaxed affair in certain respects than it is today. Most of the time, the conservative forces that sustained the Long Gilded Age didn’t require an equivalent to today’s disciplined movement conservatism to triumph. There was no need for an interlocking set of special institutions, Mafia-like in their demand for loyalty, to promulgate conservative thought, reward the faithful, and intimidate the press and any dissenters. There was no need to form alliances with religious fundamentalists, no need to exploit morality and lifestyle issues. And there was no need to distort foreign policy or engage in convenient foreign wars to distract the public.

The election of 1896 was the striking exception to the long-standing pattern of relaxed oligarchy. For a moment, it seemed as if Populism with a capital P really did represent a serious challenge to plutocratic rule. Populism failed, however, and not just because of a political system tilted in favor of those with money and organization. Populism lacked the kind of leadership that could bridge the divisions among the various groups whose interests would have been served by change. It was shipwrecked on the shoals of ethnic and geographic diversity.

The Problems of Populism

Business interests and the wealthy had good reason to be terrified in 1896: Many Americans were very angry about their situation. Farmers, suffering from falling prices and the burden of debt, were in an uproar. So were many industrial workers, who either lost their jobs or faced wage cuts in the slump that followed the Panic of 1893. The brutality with which the Homestead strike and the Pullman strike were suppressed was unusual even in an age when the use of force against workers was common.

Yet in the end, William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat who also received the nomination of the Populist Party, was defeated. Lack of money and extensive voter fraud were significant factors in his defeat. It’s also clear, however, that Bryan failed to assemble the nation’s disgruntled groups into an effective coalition.

That’s not surprising. The losers from the Gilded Age economic order—the groups that would eventually benefit enormously from the New Deal—were divided along three fault lines that may have been unbridgeable in 1896. Moreover, they certainly weren’t bridgeable by someone like Bryan.

The first and most important of these divides was between city and country. Although the United States was an industrial powerhouse by 1896, the majority of the population still lived close to the land. In 1890, 64 percent of Americans lived in rural areas, and another 14 percent lived in towns of fewer than 25,000 people. The political influence of urban dwellers grew more important over time, but rural and small-town America still contained the great majority of voters as late as 1930.

Nonetheless an effective progressive coalition needed urban workers—a purely rural movement wasn’t strong enough to win the White House. But the Populists came from rural and small-town America, and few knew how to reach out to potential urban allies. Bryan chose to base his campaign almost entirely on the issue of Free Silver, which was, in effect, a call for inflationary policies that would reduce the burden of debt on farmers. It was an issue that meant nothing to urban workers.

One reason that farmers and urban workers were unable to make common cause was the cultural and social gap that lay between immigrants and the native born. The immigrant share of the population peaked in 1910 at 14.7 percent, with the vast majority in urban areas and particularly concentrated in the biggest cities. In that year 41 percent of New Yorkers were foreign born.[7] And these immigrants were foreign indeed to the Americans of the heartland. The Irish were considered alien well into the twentieth century: The 1928 campaign of Al Smith, an Irish American Catholic, was greeted with burning crosses. And by then the Irish were an old, well-established part of the American ethnic mix—not like the Italians, Poles, Jews, and others who made up much of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century immigration. These immigrants were treated with the same kind of horror, the same claims that they could never become real Americans, that now characterizes the most extreme reaction to Mexican immigrants.

In the 1920s the mutual incomprehension of rural America and the immigrants was made even worse by Prohibition. It’s hard now to appreciate the depth of the fear of alcohol, so extreme that it provoked a constitutional amendment. (We should always remember that the big issues that we think should have dominated past American politics have often been crowded off the public stage by disputes that seem bizarre in retrospect.) And the temperance movement tended to flourish in the same places that bred agrarian revolt: Kansas was both the birthplace of Populism and the birthplace of Prohibition. You could say that Prohibition was the original “values” issue, one perfectly calculated to drive a wedge between poor Protestant farmers and poor urban workers, many of whom came from Catholic cultures in which alcohol was a normal, accepted part of life. To be fair, though, both major parties were divided over Prohibition.

Most deadly of all was the division between poor whites and blacks. As a practical matter this was a problem only for Southern populists, since blacks were a tiny minority outside the South before the 1920s. In the South, however, blacks—consisting overwhelmingly of impoverished farmers—were a third of the population. Was it possible for white farmers, who shared many of the same economic interests, to make common cause with those of a different color?

In the long run the answer was no. One of the themes of this book will be the extent to which racial antagonism has had a pervasive and malign effect on American politics, largely to conservative advantage. Yet it’s possible to glimpse another path that could have been taken. In a remarkable 1892 article, “The Negro Question in the South,” Tom Watson of Georgia, leader of the Southern Populists, called for an alliance between the races:

Why should the colored man always be taught that the white man of his neighborhood hates him, while a Northern man, who taxes every rag on his back, loves him? Why should not my tenant come to regard me as his friend rather than the manufacturer who plunders us both? Why should we perpetuate a policy which drives the black man into the arms of the Northern politician?…There never was a day during the last twenty years when the South could not have flung the money power into the dust by patiently teaching the Negro that we could not be wretched under any system which would not afflict him likewise; that we could not prosper under any law which would not also bring its blessings to him….

The conclusion, then, seems to me to be this: The crushing burdens which now oppress both races in the South will cause each to make an effort to cast them off. They will see a similarity of cause and a similarity of remedy. They will recognize that each should help the other in the work of repealing bad laws and enacting good ones. They will become political allies, and neither can injure the other without weakening both. It will be to the interest of both that each should have justice. And on these broad lines of mutual interest, mutual forbearance, and mutual support the present will be made the stepping-stone to future peace and prosperity.[8]

But Watson’s proposed alliance never materialized. When Bryan won the 1896 nomination as the candidate of both the Populist and the Democratic parties, allowing him to run on two party tickets simultaneously, Watson