THE POPULIST CONVENTION
From the New York “Sun,” July 4, the early 1890s:
KANSAS KICKING
_Cranks’ Convention in Tumult at Topeka_
_Wild Asses of Prairie Bray_
_Millennium by Majority Vote Scheduled for Next November_
Topeka, Kan., July 3. (Special to the “Sun.”) The open season for
devil-hunting is on in Topeka today. From Nemaha County on the North to
Comanche on the South, from Cherokee County on the East to Cheyenne on
the West, the hunters are pouring into their state capital; money-devil
hunters and speculator-devil hunters, railroad-devil hunters and
rum-devil hunters. The streets of the city swarm with them, the lobbies
of the hotels are packed with them, spell-binders and oratorical
wizards, political quack-doctors and prohibitionist cranks, long-haired
men and short-haired women, partisans of free money, free land and free
love. For months they have been looking forward to this convention,
which is to wrest the powers of government from the hands of a predatory
plutocracy; today, if there is a lunatic in Kansas who is not in Topeka,
it is only because the Wall Street devil has got him behind bars in one
of the asylums.
The lobby of the American House this evening is more like the menagerie
tent of a circus than like anything else ever seen in the effete East.
The convention opens at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and tonight every
orator has a last chance to save the nation before the platform is made
up. Audiences are not necessary, everybody talks at once, and there are
a dozen men delivering exhortations, standing on the leather seats of
hotel-lobby chairs. Here is “Sockless” Jeremiah Simpson, expecting to be
nominated for Congress tomorrow. Coatless and tieless, his collar wilted
flat, he shouts to the corn-field cohorts his denunciations of the
blood-sucking leeches which have picked the bones of the farmers of
Kansas. Here is Isaiah Woe, weird figure having whiskers almost to his
belt and pants almost to his shoe-tops, waving his skinny arms and
justifying his surname--“Woe, woe, woe--woe unto this and woe unto
that--woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write
grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from
judgment, and to take away the rights from the poor of my people, that
widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!”
Isaiah is known as a “prophet” among this prairie population; he roars
the grievances of the dear peepul of the prairie-country, and shakes the
hayseeds and corn-dust out of his white whiskers until his audience
really believes it sees a halo about his head. He does not hesitate to
claim divine inspiration, declaring to the mob: “The Lord hath anointed
me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the
broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.”
Isaiah has no rival in lung-power, unless it be Micah, the Pottawatomie
Prophet--“Mournful Mike,” as he is known in the state capital. This aged
replica of Uncle Sam is out on a cracker-box in front of the Elks’ Club,
and your reporter took down some of his sentences verbatim: “They build
up Washington with blood, and New York with iniquity. The heads thereof
judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the
prophets thereof divine for money.... Therefore shall Washington for
your sake be plowed as a field, and New York shall become heaps, and the
buildings of Wall Street as the high places of a forest.”
There is a regiment of such calamity howlers and kickers, thirsting for
the blood of the money-devil. There is Elijah, known as the “boy orator”
from Kiowa County, and Angry Amos, the “Wild Man of Neosho.” There is
one John, who calls himself the Baptist, and has adopted the singular
habit of dipping his followers into water--though it must be stated that
few of them show the effects after a blistering hot day in Topeka. It is
reported and generally believed that the water-dipping prophet lives
upon the locusts which infest the Kansas corn-fields, together with wild
honey furnished by friendly bees in the cottonwoods along the creek
bottoms. Apparently, however, the prophet has not brought along a supply
of his customary provender, for your correspondent observed him this
afternoon partaking of sinkers and coffee in the railroad restaurant,
with a bunch of other wild asses from the prairie.
Kansas is scheduled to have a new political party tomorrow; a party of
the peepul, to be run by prophets, none of whom will take their salaries
when they get elected to office. And what is to be the platform of this
party? Well, the government is to fix the price of wheat, and
freight-rates are to be reduced to a point which will compel holders of
railway securities to live on locusts and wild honey. All interest on
money is to be abolished; the prophets of the Lord call it “usury,” and
the plank in their platform on the subject reads as follows:
“If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou
shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he
may live with thee: Take thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear
thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any
money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.”
And if that be not enough, bond slavery is to be forbidden by law, and
beginning with the year 1900, and every fifty years thereafter, all
debts are to be forgiven, and everybody is to have a fresh start. Well
may Jabez Smith, chairman of the State Committee of the Republican
party, watching this outfit of wild men and listening to their
conglomeration of lunacy, lift up his hands and cry out: “Was ist los
mit Kansas?” ...
* * * * *
Such was news according to the New York “Sun” of Charles A. Dana’s time;
the sort of news from which I got all my political ideas during boyhood.
Seven times every week I would read articles and editorials in that
tone, and laugh with glee over them; and then, every Sunday morning and
evening I would go to church, and listen while the preacher read the
words of Jeremiah and Isaiah and Micah and Elijah and Amos and John the
Baptist, and I would accept them all as the divinely inspired words of
God. How was I, poor lad, to know that the very same prophets were back
on earth, living the very same lives and making the very same
speeches--trying to save America, as of old they had tried to save
Judea, from the hands of the defilers and the despoilers?