Pundits and Populism

William Jennings Bryan (Chicago Historical Society).












A history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago has weighed in with a thought-provoking essay on populism and its portrayal by the nation's political pundits.

Leon Fink writes that the image of "populists, tarred in the 1890s as a party of unkempt, uneducated madmen whose hatred for the rich would unleash anarchy on the Republic, lives on in the minds of contemporary detractors as an ignorant rabble simplistically dividing the country between Main Street and Wall Street."

As Fink points out, this kind of commentary continues a longstanding tradition dating back to the late 19th century, when agrarian radicals who denounced the nation's banking system and related economic were dismissed as ignorant rubes -- or worse.

In the years after the Civil War, advocates of greater use of paper greenback dollars to alleviate the deflationary pressures crushing farmers were characterized in the pages of the Methodist Christian Advocate as immoral. The publication argued that "atheism is not worse in religion than an unstable or irredeemable currency in political economy."

Variations on that theme continued through the end of the century. In the superheated presidential campaign of 1896, when Democrat William Jennings Bryan embraced the populist doctrine of "free silver" as a means of expanding the nation's currency, the Leon, Iowa, Decatur County Journal characterized supporters of the doctrine as "long haired, beer guzzling anarchists."

The populists (the lower-case "p" referring to both the party and its antecedents in the late 1870s and 1880s) of the era recognized the damage these kinds of critiques caused. The nation's newspapers, James B. Weaver complained in the early 1880s, "made business men believe that we were a set of hare-brained fanatics."


Weaver fought back by editing a newspaper of his own, the Iowa Tribune, devoted to the economic and political programs favored by agrarian radicals. In 1892, he published A Call to Action, articulating a wide-ranging populist critique of institutions ranging from the banking system to the Supreme Court.

Other populists responded by making tactical adjustments. As historian Michael Kazin has pointed out, Bryan avoided speaking on free silver when campaigning among wage-earning industrial workers in the urban North who rightfully feared the impact of inflation.


The monetary doctrines of 19th-century populists were only part of an ambitious political program that addressed a broad range of economic, social and political problems that emerged as the United States evolved into an industrial economy. That is often ignored by critics past and present.


The 1880 Greenback-Labor Party platform, for example, called for an eight-hour day, a graduated income tax, regulation of working conditions in the nation's factories and an end to child labor. The party further demanded that "every citizen of due age, sound mind, and not a felon, be fully enfranchised."



The monetary theories of 19th-century agrarian radicals have been largely forgotten, but in other important respects their ideas live on. Whether that's good or bad is for others to judge, but one thing is clear: populists and their antecedents forever changed the political landscape of the United States. Not bad for a set of hare-brained fanatics.


Sources:


Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.


McPherson, Edward. A Handbook of Politics for 1880: Being a Record of Important Political Action, National and State, from July 1, 1878, to July 1, 1880. Washington D.C.: James J. Chapman, 1880.


Mitchell, Robert B. Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver. Roseville, Minn.,2008.



_______. "Get Ready for '96: The Decatur County Press, Partisanship, and the Presidential Campaign of 1896." Iowa City: Iowa Heritage Illustrated, 84 (Fall 2003).

American Talleyrand

Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois voted with the Greenbacks in the Forty-sixth Congress but later served as Grover Cleveland's vice president. Library of Congress.


The members of Congress who voted on Rep. James B. Weaver’s financial resolution when it was debated on April 5, 1880 included some of the most prominent political names of the era: Richard “Silver Dick” Bland of Missouri, Thomas Reed of Maine, Joseph Blackburn and John Carlisle of Kentucky, and James A. Garfield of Ohio.

But one name stands out, not because of any prominent role he played in floor debate, but because of his subsequent career.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson, patriarch of the prominent family of Illinois Democrats that has produced a presidential candidate and U.S. senator, supported and voted with the small Greenback-Labor Party caucus during the Forty-sixth Congress.

When the House finally debated on the financial resolution introduced by Weaver, Stevenson voted for the measure endorsing the proposition that the government, rather than national banks, should exercise control over the currency.

So did a number of Democrats – including Bland and, ironically, given his previous whispered contempt for the Greenbacks, Blackburn.

Perhaps more tellingly, one year earlier when lawmakers chose the speaker of the House, Stevenson voted with the Greenbacks for their candidate, Hendrick Wright of Pennsylvania, instead of Democrat Samuel Randall.

Stevenson played no part in the floor debate regarding Weaver’s Greenback resolution, nor did he regularly participate when the House found itself debating monetary questions. He kept a low profile and maintained his ties to the Democratic establishment.

Stevenson’s capacity for keeping his own counsel is on display, ironically, in his memoir, Something of Men I Have Known. Published in 1909, at the end of a distinguished political career, it could have been a revealing look back at the political battles of the Gilded Age and his role in them.

Instead, Stevenson carefully confines himself to reminiscences about the figures large and small he encountered during his career. There are discussions of Randall and Garfield, the Republican leader of the Forty-sixth Congress (both subjects of earlier posts). Stevenson recalls figures from antebellum Illinois politics, including Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.

There is a chapter devoted to Grover Cleveland – “Cleveland as I Knew Him” – and brief references to some of the political controversies of the Cleveland years. But Stevenson refrains from any detailed discussion of those events.

That is a pity, because the Illinoisan was in the middle of many of them.

When he returned to the Democratic fold in the 1880s, Stevenson served the party as a partisan patronage enforcer. In the role of assistant postmaster general during Cleveland's first term, Stevenson purged almost 40,000 Republican postmasters in small towns across the United States and replaced them with Democrats.

In 1892, he rallied to the Democratic standard once again, joining Cleveland on the Democratic ticket as the vice-presidential nominee. Stevenson traveled throughout the South warning voters that support for the Populist ticket headed by Weaver increased the likelihood of a Republican victory – and with it, passage of legislation to protect the voting rights of blacks.

Stevenson's political career took one final twist eight years later when he was picked as the party’s vice-presidential candidate again – this time running with William Jennings Bryan.

“Possessing both strengths and weaknesses, Stevenson must be analyzed within the complicated political context in which he lived and the ambiguities of his beliefs and policies," Leonard Shiup has written about Stevenson in an article on the Illinois Periodicals Online Web site. Stevenson, Shiup concludes, "embodied the contradictions of an age that was simultaneously resisting and welcoming the ongoing change of society.”

Back in his Illinois hometown, Stevenson was known as the “Sage of Bloomington.” But his capacity for aligning himself with progressives such as the Greenbacks and more conservative figures such as Cleveland earned him another nickname that referred to the prominent French diplomat who served both his king and the revolutionaries who overthrew him: “American Talleyrand.”

Sources:

Government Printing Office. Congressional Record. Washington D.C.: 46th Congress.

Shiup, Leonard. "The Political Triumphs and Tragedies of the First Adlai E.
Stevenson." Illinois Periodicals Online. http://www.lib.niu.edu/index.html

Stevenson, Adlai E. Something of Men I Have Known. Chicago: McClurg & Co., 1909.

"Gross and Uncomplimentary Exaggerations"

Thomas Nast’s impression of Rep. James B. Weaver’s struggle to get the House to vote on his Greenback financial resolutions as reprinted in A Call to Action.



As Rep. James B. Weaver struggled in the winter of 1880 to get a vote on his Greenback financial resolutions in the House, the matter suddenly became fodder for mirth.

Harper’s Weekly, the influential magazine of news, opinion and literature, featured a cartoon caricature of Weaver on the House floor making the case for the Greenback program to a chamber full of uninterested and unhappy lawmakers.

The sketch by Thomas Nast elevated the legislative battle into a topic of national conversation, but not in a way Weaver liked.

Nast portrays Weaver as an ass in Roman garb. Bored and disconsolate lawmakers cover their ears. The speaker’s back is turned. The caption, “I shall sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid,” comes from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” and is uttered by the comic character Bottom the Weaver. At Weaver’s feet is a book entitled “A Midwinter’s Night Dream.”

The drawing was not flattering. It was not intended to be.

Ridicule was Nast's stock in trade, art historian J. Chal Vinson has written. Nast employed it with tremendous effectiveness during as the United States emerged from the trauma of civil war. An ardent Unionist who rose to fame with his war-time caricatures, Nast remained a loyal servant of the Republican cause until 1884.

Nast made the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey famous symbols of the two parties, helped bring down Boss Tweed in New York and mercilessly lampooned Horace Greeley in the editor's ill-starred 1872 presidential campaign. By 1880, Nast stood at the height of his influence and built a fortune totaling $125,000.

Nast’s rendering of Weaver as an asinine buffoon braying about Greenback monetary policy reflected the conventional wisdom of the day – and immediately became a topic for discussion on the House floor.

Weaver tried to turn it to his advantage by pretending to defend the honor of House Speaker Samuel Randall of Pennsylvania.

“A gross misrepresentation is going all over the country through the figures of a cartoon by Nast, which represents the speaker with his back toward me,” Weaver told the House on March 1. “That is not a fact.”

Rep. James A. Garfield, the Republican leader from Ohio, seized the opportunity to mock both Weaver and the Democratic speaker, Samuel Randall of Pennsylvania.

“Which figure represents you?” Garfield inquired. Drawing on his command of scripture, Weaver responded with a reference to a story from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Numbers.

“The large figure with the long ears, of course, represents me. You know that the ass in the Bible saw the angel before Balaam, his rider, saw him.”

Weaver seems to have been conflicted about the image. His decision to include it in his memoir and manifesto, A Call to Action, suggests that he found it, at some level, flattering. But his description of the drawing – “a scurrillous travesty” – also indicates that Nast’s sting continued to irritate a full 12 years after the cartoon was published.

“Prominent caricaturists were employed by the monopoly organs to fill the illustrated weeklies with gross and uncomplimentary exaggerations of the author and the scope of his resolutions,” Weaver wrote. “The imaginative genius of Nast was called upon to swell the volume of misrepresentation and ridicule.”

Satirizing Weaver and the Greenbacks may have been one of the few things Nast and the management at Harper's could agree on as the 1870s drew to a close. Harper's publisher George William Curtis wanted less vitriol from the cartoonist. Nast became disillusioned with the Republican Party, and ultimately broke with the GOP when it nominated James G. Blaine in 1884.

"In the essence of Nast's success was the ability to communicate ideas in graphic form," Vinson has written. "His cartoons for the most part were not illustrations of captions, dependent on writing for their impact. His figures never needed an identifying tag. The force of the work was in the drawing itself."

There was no mistaking what Nast thought of Weaver or the Greenback monetary program.

Sources:

Mitchell, Robert B. Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver. Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2008.

Vinson, J. Chal. "Thomas Nast and the American Political Scene." American Quarterly (9), Johns Hopkins University Press (Autumn 1957).

Weaver, James B. A Call to Action. Des Moines, 1892.