booker t washington.jpg (4368 bytes)
Booker T. Washington 

The Populist Movement

2/12/02

 

Scott Joplin,
  Maple Leaf Rag (1897)

 

I. Sources of Rural Poverty
       A. Globalization -> deflation
        B. Colonial Condition of the South
                lack of banks, crop lien, lack of mechanization, racism, fencing laws
       C. Conditions in the West
                railroads, big farmers, drought & grasshoppers       

II. The Rise of the Populists
        A. The Farmers Alliance
        B. Populists [See: Black Populism in North Carolina]
                Populist Party Platform - 1892 - Tom Watson
        C. The question of ethnicity and race 
                Interracial Cooperation
                Mary Elizabeth Lease    
                Lynching

III. Democratic Backlash in the South
        A. Disfranchisement
        B. Jim Crow: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

IV. Atlanta Compromise (1895)
        A. Booker T. Washington
        B. W.E.B. DuBois

V. Election of 1896
        A. Fusion: Bryan and Silver
        B. McKinley and the Republicans

VI. Beyond Jim Crow and Lynching

 

 

I. Sources of Rural Poverty

Workers were not the only civic group to organize in the late nineteenth century in an effort to bring pressure on those who dominated the economic culture of the day. Farmers did too. But whereas some workers -- like Terence Powderly, Samuel Gompers, and Eugene Debs -- believed that they could better their conditions by organizing against leaders of the economy, farmers went further. They were the first major group, after African Americans during Reconstruction, to try to reshape American political culture in such a way as to advance their interests.

At first glance it is a little difficult to locate the source of the farmer's discontent. Gross statistics indicate that in many ways farmers were better off in 1900 than they had been in 1870. 

 Why then, we should ask, was there protest amidst this plenty? There are two answers -- both related to the technological revolution we have been discussing..  

 
A. Globalization -> Deflation

Globalization brought with it falling prices. With the exception of a few short years, the entire final quarter of the l9thc represented a period of continuous deflation throughout the world.  In agriculture, deflation derived not only by globalization, but also by increased production brought by westward migration and mechanization. 

Added to the problem of low returns on their investments, farmers had to face an additional problem - tight money. While expanding production increased the demand for money, the gold supply which was the basis of American commerce stayed relatively stable. Two things are different today:

To American farmers the stability of gold accelerated the decline of their income. 

The problem of tight money was made worse because farmers often had to borrow in competition with other farmers -- at planting time -- when interest rates were highest and sell in competition with other farmers -- at harvest time -- in a glutted market. Whatever problem the factory owner had in fitting his supply to prevailing demand - the farmer had in spades. Thus life was always harder for the farmer than for the factory owner. And this disparity was made all the worse by the fact that the farmer was trying to pay off his debt with deflated dollars (explain by contrast with today's student loans).


B. Colonial Condition of the South - Conditions were particularly bad in the South because of the colonial condition of that region. 

10965: Color lithograph by Currier and Ives of a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1884 (also on powerpoint)

1. Fiscal Crisis: In the aftermath of Appomattox the people of the defeated Confederacy had very little either of capital itself or of the institutions dealing in it -- banks. 

    Emancipation had erased the slave system's massive investment in human capital (about $3 billion), and surrender had not only invalidated all Confederate currency, it had also engendered a wave of Southern bank failures.

    Lack of Banks/Money: Furthermore, because the South had been out of the nation when the national banks were established by Congress during the war, they started off the post-war period badly behind in a fiscal sense. To illustrate how far behind the South was:

    Having to Borrow from North at high Interest: To get money to do business or to plant cotton Southerners had to borrow from northern banks. On these northern loans Southerners had to pay 18% interest (compared with 5-6% in the North and 8% in the West). Thus in the competitive struggle of the new industrial era the South started out way behind the North.

2. Crop lien : Farmers were especially hard hit by this colonial system because they had to borrow to live until their cotton crop could be harvested. Each spring farmers went to the local store to request goods on credit. The storekeepers, who were themselves paying 18% or more for credit extended through northern banks, bought goods and "furnished" them on credit to farmers, taking a lien on the farmer's crop for security. Because the farmer had to buy on credit, his standard of living was severely limited by the interest he had to pay for the food, clothing and tools that he needed. By the end of the year the money he received for his crop had to cover not only the previous year's debt and the cost of the goods for the current year, but interest as well. That interest sometimes ran to 100% of the cost of his goods.

Often, at harvest time, the farmer discovered that his debt to the merchant exceeded his income from the cotton crop. For many farmers this scenario was played out 5, 10, even 15 years in a row. They had been reduced to peonage.

Farmers responded by planting more, but doing so simply depressed the price of cotton. Throughout the final decades of the 19thc, farmers kept planting more and more cotton, and the price of cotton kept falling lower and lower -- in part because farmers were increasing the supply of cotton in the US, but also because India, Brazil, and Egypt were producing increasing quantities of cotton as well. Gradually, more and more farmers were pulled into debt - first the blacks and then the whites as well.  

There were those who urged the farmer to diversify and grow other crops as well as cotton, but it was not so clear that planting another crop – say corn -- would improve the farmer’s lot. 

Storekeepers in debt to northern banks demanded:  "No cotton, no credit."

Many small landowners sold off part of their land to pay their debts -- Farms got smaller and smaller, as farmers became ever more dependent on cotton. 

 
3. Lack of mechanization: As if the situation was not bad enough, southern agriculture fell further behind the rest of the nation because of its failure to mechanize. While farmers on the western plains were investing in huge plows and mechanical reapers, southerners persisted in plowing, hoeing, and picking by hand.

Economic historians have suggested several reasons why southerners lagged in mechanizing.

 (a) First, of course, southerners had no money to invest in new machinery.

 (b) Second, even if they had borrowed the money, cotton was more resistant to mechanization than was wheat, for instance. [BUT NOTE: In the 1950s when 70% of California's cotton crop was being harvested mechanically, only 2% of Alabama's crop was being harvested mechanically.]

(c) Third, southern farms were small; half were worked by families. And the farms worked by blacks were smallest of all. Southern farmers therefore could not take advantage of economies of scale and therefore had little inducement to mechanize.

(d) Fourth, the poor quality of southern education, especially the poor quality of the education available to blacks, slowed the adoption of modern farming methods. 

(e) And fifth, discrimination against African Americans, who were a third of the southern population, exacerbated all of these other factors -- holding the South back still further. 

  • White planters were morbidly afraid of turning blacks into migrant farmers, moving from farm to farm as agricultural needs demanded.

  • Determined to keep black workers under close supervision, they passed vagrancy laws, limited blacks' access to education, and discriminated against them in land sales. This discrimination was expensive for the South as a whole and held the region back for many decades.

4. Fencing Laws: One final feature of southern agriculture bedeviled the poor southern farmer, as well as Hispanic farmers in the Southwest - the fencing laws. Before the Civil War there had been no fences defining property lines. Slaves and small farmers took advantage of their absence by allowing their pigs to range freely. The end of slavery, however, brought an end to large landowners' willingness to share their lands with others. They started fencing them in and passing laws that barred access to what had once been common lands.

Fencing pigs in had a devastating effect on pigs and the farmers who kept them. Pigs don't do well in the heat. They can't sweat. To keep cool they must dampen their skin with external moisture. They prefer to do this by wallowing in fresh clean mud, but they will cover themselves with their own urine and feces if they have to. This led to disease and gradually to extinction. It also led to spreading disease among poor farmers. Their new diet of penned pork and milled corn imported from outside the South led to pellagra and other nutrition deficiency diseases.

 
B. Conditions in the West

Those who could manage to leave went to Texas (GTT - gone to Texas - was scrawled across many a door, nailed shut by southerners who had given up on their homeland). Vagrancy laws and inferior education made it more difficult for blacks than whites to escape, but some did so.

Unfortunately, conditions in the West were not always that much better:

1. Freight rates: First there was the railroad. The further west the farmer moved, the higher the railroad rates got.  In 1877 the Burlington charged nearly four times as much for hauling freight west of the Missouri as for hauling it east. It did so, not because it was hostile to western farmers, but because west of the Missouri railroads could carry freight only one way: from farm to market; the cars usually traveled back to the farms empty. To make up for lost income, they had to charge more to carry the agricultural goods to market. But in the farmers' view, the railroads were simply taking advantage of their weakness.

2. Agribusiness: In addition to high freight rates, the small farmer had to deal with the competition of agribusiness -- huge, corporate farms with capital to mechanize. Especially on the western plains where wheat became the cash crop, the individual, yeoman farmer found it hard to compete. It took expensive machinery to harvest wheat as efficiently as the agribusinesses did and a great deal of land to produce enough money to pay for the machinery. Success depended upon land and machinery.  Small farmers who sought loans to by more land and machinery had to compete with big businesses who could negotiate more favorable rates.

 10868: Wheat harvesting in Dakota Territory in 1877 using a McCormick cord-binder harvester. With this machine two men and a team of horses could harvest 20 acres of wheat a day. With the increased efficiency made possible by such machinery, the cost of wheat dropped $3.65 to $.65 a bushel between 1831 and 1880. (also on powerpoint)

3. Droughts and Grasshoppers: To the problems of high freight rates, and competition with big farmers, western farmers had to deal with droughts, grasshoppers, prairie fires, cyclones -- in short, a host of natural disasters that plagued farmers in the land beyond the hundredth meridian. Widespread settlement took place during the 1870s, a period of unusually favorable weather conditions, including ample rain. From the mid-1880s through the early 1890s, however, one natural disaster after another struck, and farmers who had borrowed money to buy or improve land found that they could not pay back their loans.

 10879: Here we see farmers clearing a field of grasshoppers in 1875. (powerpoint picture of corn field, stripped by grasshoppers)


II. The Rise of the Populists

A. Farmer's Alliance: Poverty among farmers in the West and the South led them to organize. The farmers' first response was local. In 1877 in western Texas a group of poor farmers banded together and named themselves the Farmer's Alliance. They sought to escape the furnishing merchant by establishing cooperatives, but they did not have enough capital among themselves to succeed. By 1890 the farmers had come to the realization that local self-help would not pull them out of poverty - they needed a national movement of workers - the poor farmers and the urban laborers.

 
B. Populist Party: And thus the People's Party or Populist Party was formed. For about a decade the Democrats had been overwhelmingly the party of the South, and the Republicans had been overwhelmingly the party of the West. But neither party was ever as united as its party's leaders would have liked. In the South, small white farmers, ground down by poverty, deeply resented the political power of the furnishing merchants and landowners who controlled the Democratic party. It was the landowners who passed the fencing laws that made it impossible to raise pigs as freely as they once had. And it was the furnishing merchants who charged high interest on their food and supplies. To many poor farmers, the Democrats were the enemy.

For poor farmers in the West, on the other hand, the dominant party, the Republicans, came to stand for the hated railroads and bankers. Poor western farmers (many of the them originally from the South) joined with poor southern farmers in an alliance that had never been imaginable during the years of sectional conflict that preceded the Civil War when free farmers in the West hated all southerners for being slaveholders.

Populist Demands: In 1892 the Populist Party met in Omaha, Nebraska.  They nominated Tom Watson, a Congressman from Georgia for the presidency and identified the following demands:

C. The Question of Ethnicity and Race: The leaders of the Populist Party were whites, but, especially in the South, poor black farmers formed a natural constituency of the Populist Party. 

    1) In the South -- Some populist leaders -- Tom Watson most prominent among them -- called for an interracial alliance between poor white and black farmers against the economic interests that oppressed them.  

[pictured here: 11009] -- Tom Watson

This alliance was occasionally successful.  For the most part, however, economic suffering exacerbated old hatreds more than it helped people overcome those antipathies.  These hatreds were manifest throughout the South and West. 

   2) In the West, Mary Elizabeth Lease, pictured here (also powerpoint picture)-- 11008 was famous for saying to the farmers of Kansas, "What you need to do is raise less corn and more hell." Less well remembered were her next lines: "What you need to do is kill fewer hogs and more Jews." [Discuss the basis of this anti-Semitism: Wall Street Bankers – the primary source, they thought, of their problems -- about 1/3 of major bankers wereJews].

    3) Lynching: In the years after the Civil War the image of the black as a shuffling, obedient figure lingered in the white mind. But in the 1890s, Democrats succeeded in pushing that image aside in favor a different, deeply disturbing image - that of the black rapist. Notice: blacks became not simply a threat to white’s political power but to female virtue as well.

 11024: This is a lynching in Marion, Indiana (undated). (Powerpoint image from Georgia, circa 1900 from "Without Sanctuary"(2000)

What accounts for this change? Why did blacks come to represent such a violent, sexual threat to southern whites? There is no evidence that the black rape of white women was on the increase. Rather the black rapist image seems to have been a fantasy - inspired perhaps by many white southern males' sense of powerlessness in the face of economic crisis and political conflict – Remember that in 1893 the long-term economic decline of the South and West was exacerbated by the worst Depression the country had ever seen. [Note that lynching is significantly worse in the black belt, where blacks outnumbered whites, than it was in the urban areas or upcountry.] In some ways the 1890s can be seen as a moment of crisis in the evolution of ideas about manhood in American society. Lynching embodied the complex interaction of gender and race at a time of industrialization and economic crisis

Sadly, many of the very whites who sought to organize blacks in the Populist movement quickly turned on them and condoned lynching when the political tide turned against them. Men like Tom Watson of Georgia, turned on African Americans with a vengeance when their support for Populism waned.

At the turn of the century lynching reached epidemic proportions, with between 100-250 per year [2-5 each week]. Unable to control their own destinies, white men killed black men in revenge. Interestingly, not only did lynching imagined rapists keep blacks in their place, it kept white women in their place as well.

 
III. Democratic Backlash in the South

The Populist Party lasted only four years. So new and fragile an alliance proved no match for the established Democrats and Republicans. In the South, landowners undermined Populist strength by forcing their black workers to vote Democratic or to risk losing jobs or farms. When that didn’t work they mounted a single-minded campaign to portray black men as bent on raping white women.

A. Disfranchisement: To insure their political dominance, Democratic leaders took an additional step. They called a series of constitutional conventions throughout the South. Democratic leaders called conventions to draft new state constitutions under which both blacks and many poor whites were denied their right to vote. Disfranchisement came in a variety of guises:

1) Property and literacy tests (also controlled many poor whites)

2) Grandfather clauses (declared unconstitutional in 1915)

3) poll tax

4) white primary

In Louisiana the number of black voters registered in 1896: 130,000: in 1904: 1,300


B. Jim Crow: In the midst of the Populist-Democratic battles and the rising wave of lynchings came the passage of Jim Crow legislation. A generation after the ending of slavery, the South found another means of racial control in these laws that enforced the separation of blacks from whites in social life.

Although informal segregation had been developing for a long time, especially in the growing cities of the South, by the 1890s states were beginning to pass laws requiring segregation in public accommodations. One of the earliest was an 1890 Louisiana railroad car segregation statute passed to "promote the comfort of passengers." Louisiana blacks were a highly vocal group and they quickly set up a test case and took it to the Supreme Court. The case was to be the most important civil rights case for nearly a century following the Civil War. It was known as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Jim Crow laws segregated every aspect of public life – to the point where separate warehouses were needed for textbooks destined for African-American and white schools. 

 
IV. Atlanta Compromise:

It was in this context of economic crisis and political conflict between Populists and Democrats that Booker T. Washington gave his address before the Atlanta Cotton Exposition in 1895.

11022 – Cotton Exposition

        11023 -- 

(powerpoint images of Booker T. Washington, 1890, and history class at Tuskegee Institute in 1902)

Washington was the founder of Tuskegee Institute,  a prominent black college in Alabama. He enjoyed strong ties to northern white philanthropists and politicians and counted Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Columbia's Seth Low and Teacher's College James Russell among his associates. 

His address at Atlanta must be seen in the context of the white backlash against the Populists in these years. Washington's address came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise because he seemed to concede the white South's ability to impose Jim Crow and to disenfranchise blacks. What he asked in return for this recognition was that whites leave blacks alone to build their own institutions. 

In some ways his position was a fore-runner of the position taken by black nationalists a century later: an abandonment of the integrationist dream in favor of self-reliance.

 11186 – W.E.B. Dubois

Washington came in for stiff criticism from another black leader, W.E.B. DuBois. Born in Massachusetts and educated in Germany, DuBois was the first African American to win a doctorate from Harvard and one of the foremost sociologists and historians of his generation. Where Washington sought compromise, DuBois insisted on fighting for black rights. He was author of Souls of Black Folk (1903) - "the problem of the 20th cnetury is the problem of the color line. One of the founders of the NAACP.  

In fairness to Washington, it should be noted that he lived in the black belt of Alabama where lynching was a most serious danger to blacks. DuBois lived in the relatively safer city of Atlanta, Georgia, and later, New York. [Note: By the 1930s DuBois is urging the NAACP to abandon its legal strategy in favor of focusing on the economic problems of blacks.]

 
IV. Election of 1896

When Populists realized that they were not strong enough to advance their programs alone, they fused with Democrats in 1896 in return for Democratic support of an expanded currency through the free minting of silver. Many Populists hoped that free silver would prove the foot in the door to greater reform. In Chicago, the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan.

11019 – William J. Bryan: (also Powerpoint - 1907) Speaking for both poor farmers and poor laborers, he lambasted the bankers and businessmen of the Republican Party who stood by the gold standard. In one of the great perorations in political oratory he exclaimed of his Republican foes: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

Note the religious imagery.   Populism was, to a significant degree, a religious crusade against the materialism and perceived moral bankruptcy of industrial capitalism.  This crusading spirit did much to attract women to the populist cause, and it is therefore not surprising that Mary Elizabeth Lease, one of populism's most powerful orators was a woman.  It helped, as well, that Bryan supported woman's suffrage.

The election of the Republican William McKinley ended populism's religious crusade and all talk of free silver.

11193 – (Powerpoint) McKinley in 1900 campaign.

11021 – map of 1896 election – (Powerpoint) note that workers vote Republican [farmers want inflation, but that means that the workers’ bread will cost more; their interests are not really aligned.]

 
VI. Beyond Jim Crow and Lynching

In many ways the 1890s represents the nadir of race relations in modern America. In those years white-dominated southern states denied blacks their right to vote, imposed segregation on them, and terrorized them with lynchings. The rest of the country stood by. It was as though the Civil War had never been fought, the postwar amendments never passed. It was in this context that Columbia University's John W. Burgess wrote his book Reconstruction and the Constitution (1902).

But there were glimmers of hope, even in these dark years, of a better tomorrow. One small example can be seen in the music of the African-American composer Scott Joplin. Born in Texarkana, Texas in 1868 – the year the 14th Amendment was ratified -- Scott Joplin grew up in a musical family. A prodigy, he attracted the attention of a local German music teacher, who gave him a classical music education. Seeking greater opportunity, and perhaps a safe haven from the violence of his home state, Joplin worked his way north along the Mississippi, supporting himself by playing in saloons and in concert bands. He worked in Sidalia, St. Louis, Kansas City, as well as in Chicago. He took further music lessons and began to meld African rhythms with the European music he was studying. In 1897 he wrote The Maple Leaf Rag. In 1904 it became the first song in American history to sell more than a million copies. This is perhaps a small matter, but it is a hopeful one. I think it reveals a countervailing trend in American society, even at time when race relations could hardly have been worse. So I would like to leave you today with the sound of Joplin’s music.

 ****

 

TWO THOUGHTS FOR DISCUSSION THIS WEEK: 

l) workers liked cheap food and high wages. (high prices for farmer meant expensive clothes and bread for the worker)

2) farmers hated tariff because it meant expensive machinery. Worker liked high tariff because it protected his wages. Not until the New Deal would workers and farmers unite behind the Democrats.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Populism Images

10965: Color lithograph by Currier and Ives - Mississippi cotton plantation1884.

 

10868: Wheat harvesting in Dakota Territory in 1877 using a McCormick cord-binder harvester.

 

10879: Here we see farmers clearing a field of grasshoppers in 1875.

 

11008 -- Mary Elizabeth Lease

 

11024 -- This is a lynching in Marion, Indiana (undated).

 

11009 -- Tom Watson

 

11025 – convicts are working on a Mississippi levee in Louisiana in 1898.

 

11022 – Cotton Exposition

 

11023 – Booker T. Washington

 

11186 – W.E.B. Dubois

 

11019 – William J. Bryan

 

11193 – McKinley in 1900 campaign.

 

11021 – map of 1896 election