Sen. Bob Kerrey has got to be a populist: his native heath is Nebraska, populism’s sacred soil. Iowa’s Sen. Tom Harkin is the real McCoy, a “prairie populist” like his pinup, George McGovern. Last week Harkin, that horny-handed son of toil and of Congress (where he has toiled much of his working life) spent a day wearing work boots and gloves and blue jeans and a hard hat, stringing wire at a Los Angeles construction site. Dipping a toe into the proletariat is a familiar shtick for politicians.
Arkansas’s Gov. Bill Clinton is said to be in the “Southern populist tradition” (by way of Oxford and Yale), but an aide says Clinton’s is middle-class populism, “whereas Harkin is much more of a labor-capital kind of populism, and therefore much more of a class message,” which certainly clears that up. Virginia’s Gov. Douglas Wilder and California’s former governor Jerry Brown are called populists because they are running against “Washington.”
No one has done that recently, other than Carter, “the populist from Plains,” and Reagan, and a dozen others. Resentment of power concentrated in the East has been a theme of populists back to Wisconsin’s La Follettes and to the fountain of the faith, the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan. He rode the populist horse to three resounding defeats at the hands of … the people.
For about five decades Democrats have been awkward when posing as tribunes of “the people” because Democratic presidential candidates have had such unpleasant experiences with the popular vote. Since FDR, only twice have Democrats topped 50 percent of the popular vote. LBJ, aided by tragedy and Goldwater, got 61.1 percent; Carter, aided by Watergate and OPEC, got 50.1.
“Populism” is by now another word pounded to mush by careless usage, but today’s Democrats obviously think it can help them. The most successful populist of this half century was a Democrat: George Wallace. He shaped the vocabulary, and hence the agenda, of national politics. He could give today’s Democratic populists a lesson in Washington-bashing. Remember his 1968 promise to toss the pointy headed bureaucrats’ briefcases into the Potomac? But to day’s Democrats are implausible Washington-bashers. Their party is primarily responsible for Washington’s swollenness and hubris. Besides, America arguably has only one arrogant, entrenched, exploitative and corrupt governing class and Harkin is in it: Congress.
But people who adore “the people” must be swell people, right? Not necessarily. Populism has a chip on its shoulder and self-pity in its heart. Its fuel is resentment, usually of some conspiracy directed from afar by an alien elite. Populism often has been xenophobic, racist, nativist (“The scum of creation has been dumped on us,” cried Tom Watson), anti-Semitic (Mary Lease called President Cleveland “the agent of Jewish bankers and British gold”) and paranoid. Still, real populism, that of the late 19th century, at least had the dignity of moral seriousness about the country’s core values in an era of wrenching social change.
The issues were money and morality. The debt-laden West wanted cheap money and inflation. The lending East wanted “sound money.” The West thought civic virtue was being corrupted as the speculative capitalism of soft-handed and hard-hearted men overwhelmed the honest labor of Jeffersonian yeomen. The East thought its concrete canyons of finance were incubating the future.
A Nebraskan who was a young delegate at the Populist Party’s 1892 convention later said that Nebraska was then only nominally owned by its settlers, most of them Civil War veterans who got land under the Homestead Act. “Actually, Nebraska was owned by the big insurance companies of the East and by the railroads that traversed the country between Kansas and South Dakota. " They owned all three branches of the state governments “lock, stock and barrel. " They raised rates with impunity and dodged liability for their negligence. The Union Pacific alone had been given 4,845,977 acres of Nebraska-one tenth of the state–including every other section along its right of way for 24 miles on each side of the track. The insurance companies held mortgages. Between 1889 and 1893 11,000 farm mortgages were foreclosed in Kansas alone.
The Populist Party was the most successful third party in American history. It sowed the political system with people and ideas. That young Nebraska delegate of 1892 persevered in politics and 40 years later was floor manager for FDR at the 1932 convention that nominated FDR for president. Other than free coinage of silver and nationalization of the railroads, most of the Populist Party’s program (railroad and grain elevator regulation, initiative and referendum, popular election of senators, federal income tax, women’s suffrage) became law.
And what do today’s ersatz populists advocate to ennoble the nation? Tax breaks for the middle class.
The Populist Party’s 1892 platform said: “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench…The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army is established to shoot them down…From the same prolific womb of governmental injustices we breed the two great classes–tramps and millionaires.” The language was overheated, but at least it was heated by honest passions stirred by huge problems.
Today, if your thinking is shallow, your passions are synthetic and your vocabulary is stunted, your idea of trenchant social criticism will be to shout “Bullshit!” and ridicule the names George Herbert Walker Bush and J. Danforth Quayle. That is no way to run for president of the student body, but it is how Harkin is running for president of the United States. In 1968 George Wallace said, “Hell, we got too much dignity in government.” He should be happier now.
