This is the entire Introduction to the book, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, by Lawrence Goodwyn (Oxford University Press, 1978).
This book is about the flowering of the largest democratic mass movement in American history. It is also necessarily a book about democracy itself. Finally it is about why Americans have far less democracy than they like to think and what would have to happen to alter that situation.
The passionate events that are the subject of this book had their origins in the social circumstances of a hundred years ago when the American population contained huge masses of farmers. A large number of people in the United States discovered that the economic premises of their society were working against them. These premises were reputed to be democratic — America after all was a democratic society in the eyes of most of its own citizens and in the eyes of the world — but farmers by the millions found that this claim was not supported by the events governing their lives.
The nation’s agriculturalists had worried and grumbled about “the new rules of commerce” ever since the prosperity that accompanied the Civil War had turned into widespread distress soon after the war ended. During the 1870’s they did the kinds of things that concerned people generally do in an effort to cope with “hard times.” In an occupation noted for hard work they worked even harder. When this failed to change things millions of families migrated westward in an effort to enlist nature’s help. They were driven by the thought that through sheer physical labor they might wring more production from the new virgin lands of the West than they had been able to do in their native states of Ohio and Virginia and Alabama. But, though railroad land agents created beguiling stories of Western prosperity, the men and women who listened, and went, found that the laws of commerce worked against them just as much in Kansas and Texas as they had back home on the eastern side of the Mississippi River.
So in the 1870’s, the farmers increasingly talked to each other about their troubles and read books on economics in an effort to discover what had gone wrong. Some of them formed organizations of economic self-help like the Grange and others assisted in pioneering new institutions of political self-help like the Greenback Party. But as the hard times of the 1870’s turned into the even harder times of the 1880’s, it was clear that these efforts were not really going anywhere. Indeed, by 1888 it was evident that things were worse than they had been in 1878 or 1868. More and more people saw their farm mortgages foreclosed. As everyone in rural America knew, this statistic inexorably yielded another, more ominous one: the number of landless tenant farmers in America rose steadily year after year. Meanwhile, millions of small landowners hung on grimly, their unpaid debts thrusting them dangerously close to the brink of tenantry and peonage. Hard work availed nothing. Everywhere the explanation of events was the same: “Times were hard.”
Then gradually, in certain specific ways and for certain specific reasons, American farmers developed new methods that enabled them to try to regain a measure of control over their own lives. Their efforts, halting and disjointed at first, gathered form and force until they grew into a coordinated mass movement that stretched across the American continent from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific. Millions of people came to believe fervently that a wholesale overhauling of their society was going to happen in their lifetimes. A democratic “new day” was coming to America. This whirlwind of effort, and the massive upsurge of democratic hopes that accompanied it, has come to be known as the Populist Revolt. This book is about that moment of historical time. It seeks to trace the planting, growth, and death of the mass democratic movement known as Populism. MORE…