POPULISM
The election of 1890 stunned and bewildered both old parties. The
Republicans lost their control of the Lower House, while the Democrats
paid for their victory the price of a partial alliance with a new
movement whose weight they could only estimate. Populism was engendered
by local troubles in the West and South, but its name now acquired a
national usage and its leaders were encouraged to attempt a national
organization.
In a series of conventions, held between 1889 and 1892, the People's
Party developed into a finished organization with state delegations and
a national committee. At St. Louis, in December, 1889, the Farmers'
Alliance held a national convention and considered the basis for wider
growth. The outcome was an attempt to combine in one party organized
labor, organized agriculture, and believers in the single tax. The
leaders of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor
were not averse to such common action, although the latter preferred
their own Federation to any party. The dangers of political action, seen
in the decline of the National Labor Union of 1866, did not check the
desires of the Knights in 1889, although the leaders found it easier
then, as later, to promise the support of organized labor than to
deliver it at the polls. After the St. Louis Convention the name
Farmers' Alliance merged into the broader name of the People's Party,
though the attempt to win the rank and file of the unions failed.
In December, 1890, the farmers met at Ocala, Florida, to rejoice over
the congressional victory and to plan for 1892. Since each of the great
parties was believed to be indifferent to the people and corrupt, a
permanent third party was a matter of conviction, and in May, 1891, this
party was formally created in a mass convention at Cincinnati.
Miscellaneous reforms were insisted upon here, but were overshadowed by
the demands of the inflationists. James B. Weaver, of Iowa, the old
presidential candidate of the Greenbackers, was a leading spirit at
Cincinnati. His best-known aide was Ignatius Donnelly, of Minnesota, a
devotee of the Baconian theory and of the "Lost Atlantis," who was now
devoting his active mind to the support of free silver. A national
committee was created after another meeting, at St. Louis in February,
1892, and on July 2, 1892, the party met in that city in its first
national nominating convention.
The platform of the People's Party was based on calamity. "We meet in
the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and
material ruin," it declared. "Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the
legislature, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The
people are demoralized.... The newspapers are largely subsidized or
muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated; our homes
covered with mortgages; labor impoverished; and the land concentrating
in the hands of the capitalists."
The greatest of the evils in sight was "the vast conspiracy against
mankind," which had demonetized silver, added to the purchasing power of
gold, and abridged the supply of money "to fatten usurers." To correct
the financial evils the platform demanded "the free and unlimited
coinage of silver at the present legal ratio of sixteen to one," and an
issue of legal-tender currency until the circulation should reach an
average of fifty dollars per capita. Postal savings banks, a graduated
income tax, and economy in government were the subsidiary demands.
No demand of the Populists attracted so much attention as this for free
silver, but its platform touched reform at every angle. In the field of
transportation it asked for government ownership of railroads,
telegraphs, and telephones. It asked that land monopolies be prevented,
that the public lands be in part regained, and that alien ownership be
forbidden. It wanted the Australian ballot, liberal pensions,
restriction of immigration, an eight-hour day, a single term for
President and Vice-President, direct election of United States Senators,
abolition of the Pinkerton detectives, and was curious about the
initiative and referendum. It was in many respects a prophecy as to the
workings of reform for the next twenty years.
The People's Party entered the campaign of 1892 with this platform and
with the support of advanced reformers, with a considerable following
in the West and South, and with James B. Weaver and James G. Field as
candidates. Few of the workers for its ticket were politicians of known
standing, and its voters had a preponderance of youth. In several
Western States the Democratic party supported it with fusion tickets. In
the South it often cooperated with the Republicans. From the first the
third party found it harder to stand alone than to unite with the weaker
local party.
The disrupting force of hard times was increased by the acts of the
Republican party. Harrison's first Congress had passed a series of laws
that provoked opposition and criticism. The Interstate Commerce Law was
still new when he took office. In quick succession in 1890 came the new
States, and Oklahoma Territory, the Dependent Pensions Bill, the Sherman
Anti-Trust Bill, the Silver Purchase Bill, and the McKinley Tariff. The
dominant majority had used arbitrary methods to enforce its will and had
given to its enemies more than one text. After 1891 the Democratic
majority in the House reduced the Administration to the political
incompetence that had prevailed from 1883 to 1889.
Benjamin Harrison gained little prestige as the result of the
Administration. He had been nominated for his availability, and the
campaign songs had said as much of his illustrious grandfather, the hero
of Tippecanoe, as of himself. His appointments had pleased neither the
politicians nor the reformers, while there was much laughter at the
presence in the offices of numerous personal friends and relatives. The
most notable of his appointments was the most embarrassing.
James G. Blaine, as Secretary of State, found no topic in foreign
relations as interesting as the canal had been in his earlier term. The
wranglings with Great Britain and Germany over their treatment of
naturalized Americans had subsided. The fisheries of the North Atlantic
had been temporarily settled by President Cleveland. The regulation of
the seal fisheries of Bering Sea brought no new glory to Blaine.
There was no doubt that the seal herd of the Pacific was being rapidly
destroyed by careless and wasteful hunters from most of the countries
bordering on that ocean. On the American islands the herds could be
protected, and here they gathered every summer to mate and breed. But
the men who hunted with guns at sea, instead of with clubs on land,
could not be controlled unless the world would consent to an American
police beyond the three-mile limit. In an arbitration with Great
Britain, at Paris, Blaine tried to prove that the seals were American,
and entitled to protection on the high seas, and that the waters of the
northern Pacific were _mare clausum_. The arbitration went against him
on every material point.
The only episode that threatened war occurred in Chile. Here Harrison
had sent as Minister Patrick Egan, a newly naturalized Irishman and
follower of Blaine. In a revolution of 1891 Egan sided with the
conservative party that lost. His enemies charged him with improper
interest in contracts and with instinctive antagonism to British
interests in Chile. After the revolution a mob in Valparaiso showed its
dislike for Americans by attacking sailors on shore leave. Egan's
extreme demands for summary punishment of the rioters were upheld by
Harrison, who prepared the navy for war. Finally the Chilean Government
was forced to make complete apologies.
In the same year an American mob in New Orleans lynched several
Italians, and Blaine repelled with indignation the demand that indemnity
be accorded before trial and conviction. He could not even promise trial
because of the helplessness of the United States in local criminal
proceedings. The Italian Minister, Baron Fava, was withdrawn from
Washington on this account, and returned only when Congress had healed
the breach by making provision for the families of the sufferers.
The internal relations of the Administration were not happier than the
external. Harrison chafed under the influence of Blaine, and alienated
so many of the regular Republican leaders that it became doubtful
whether he could secure his own renomination. Both Quay and Platt had
been offended, and the former had resigned his chairmanship of the
National Committee after the failure of a political bank in
Philadelphia. No one was anxious to manage the President's campaign, and
he showed little skill in managing it himself. The future was still in
doubt when, on June 4, 1892, three days before the meeting of the
convention at Minneapolis, Blaine resigned his position without a word
of explanation. Whether he was only sick and unhappy, or whether he
desired the nomination, was uncertain.
The strength of Blaine and the rising influence of William McKinley were
apparent in the Republican Convention. Harrison was renominated on the
first ballot, but Blaine and McKinley received more than one hundred and
eighty votes apiece. The former had reached the end of his career, and
died the next winter. The latter was now Governor of Ohio. McKinley had
lost his seat in the election of 1890, but had been raised to the
governorship in the next year. He was chairman of the convention that
renominated Harrison, reaffirmed the "American doctrine of protection,"
and evaded the issue of free silver.
The Democratic party had bred no national leader but Grover Cleveland
since the Civil War, and he had earned the dislike of the organization
before his defeat in 1888. His insistence upon the tariff offended the
protectionist wing of his party, and he left office unpopular and
lonely. He retired to New York City, where he took up the practice of
law and regained the confidence of the people. Demands upon him for
public speeches in 1891 revealed the recovery of his popularity. His
friends began to organize in his behalf during 1892, and David B. Hill
aided by his opposition.
The strength of Hill, who had been elected Governor of New York, and who
was now Senator, was based upon Tammany Hall and those elements in the
New York Democracy that reformers were constantly attacking. He was
believed to have defeated Cleveland in 1888 by entering into a deal with
the Republican machine by which Harrison received the electoral and he
the gubernatorial vote of New York. Early in 1892, as interest in
Cleveland revived, Hill called a "snap" convention and secured the
indorsement of New York for his own candidacy. The solid New York
delegation shouting for Hill was an item in Cleveland's favor at the
Democratic Convention in Chicago. With tariff reformers in control,
denouncing "Republican protection as a fraud, a robbery of the great
majority of the American people for the benefit of a few," and
reasserting Cleveland's phrase that "public office is a public trust,"
the convention selected Cleveland and Adlai E. Stevenson, of Illinois,
as the party candidates. Its coinage plank, like that of the
Republicans, meant what the voter chose to read into it.
There were two debates in the campaign of 1892. On the surface was the
renewed discussion of the tariff, with the Republicans fighting for the
McKinley Bill all the more earnestly because there was danger of its
repeal, and the Democrats officially demanding reduction. "I would
rather have seen Cleveland defeated than to have had that fool
free-trade plank adopted," said one of the Eastern Democrats to "Tom"
Johnson after the convention. But the Democratic protectionists were
forced into surly acquiescence so long as Cleveland was the candidate
and William L. Wilson the chairman of the convention. The partial
insincerity of the tariff debate aided the Populists, who were directing
a discussion upon the general basis of reform.
Cleveland was elected with a majority of electoral votes and a plurality
of popular votes, but the vote for Weaver and Field measured the extent
of the revolt against both parties. The Populists carried Colorado,
Idaho, Nevada, and Kansas, gained twenty-two electoral votes, and polled
over a million popular votes. Their protest, based on local hard times
and discontent, probably defeated Harrison, while their organization was
ready to receive a large following should the hard times spread.
Harrison was not unwilling to surrender the Government to Cleveland in
March, 1893, for he had been struggling for weeks to conceal the
financial weakness of the United States and to avoid a panic. The great
surplus that had been a motive for legislation for more than ten years
had nearly become a deficit. Continuous prosperity had tempted Congress
to make lavish appropriations. The McKinley Bill had reduced the revenue
through changes in the sugar schedule. The Pension Bill had used other
millions. Internal improvements had been distributed to every section.
The surplus, which had been at $105,000,000 for 1890, fell to
$37,000,000 in 1891, and in the next two years to $9,900,000 and to
$2,300,000. In the spring of 1893 the Treasury was so reduced that any
unexpected shock might cause a suspension. Cleveland's first duty was
with causes and cures.
The surplus had been affected both by increase in expenditures and by
decrease in revenues. The latter had been due in part to the hard times,
which had forced a curtailment of imports, with a resulting shrinkage in
tariff receipts. At the same time an increasing nervousness, based upon
the deterioration in quality of the assets of the United States, showed
itself. The fear of free silver was hastening the day of panic.
Silver and gold had always been traditional American coins, but since
1834 little of the former had been coined or circulated, while between
1862 and 1879 neither variety of specie was ordinarily used as money. In
1873 a codification of coinage laws had omitted from the standard list
the silver dollar, which had been unimportant for nearly forty years;
and when, shortly thereafter, the decline in the price of silver made
its coinage at the ratio of sixteen to one profitable, it was
impossible. The demand for a restoration of silver coinage began with
the silver miners who desired a stimulated market for their output. Some
believed coinage would raise the price of bullion; others thought the
Government would keep up the value of the silver coins, as it did the
greenbacks, by redemption in gold. In 1878 a Free Coinage Act, pushed by
R.P. Bland, was converted into the limited Bland-Allison Act. Under this
the Treasury bought the minimum amount of silver bullion (two million
dollars' worth) every month for twelve years, and protested continually
that the silver coined from it was increasing the burden of redemption
on the gold reserve. As the price of silver fell farther, the demand of
the miners increased, and toward 1890 it was reinforced by the demands
of inflationists who desired it for another reason.
In 1890 the free-silver movement was not political in the sense that
parties had declared for or against it. In each great party it had
supporters, and few politicians were actively opposing it. A movement in
its favor, with the support of the Senate, was reshaped under the
influence of Sherman, and became a law in July, 1890. Under this the
Treasury was forced to buy 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month, and to
pay for it in a new issue of treasury notes. For the next three years
the United States kept at par with gold the Civil War greenbacks, the
Bland-Allison silver dollars, and the treasury notes of 1890. Only by
its constant willingness to pay out any form of money at the option of
the customer could it prevent the Gresham Law from operating and the
currency from declining to the bullion value of silver.
Every creditor feared the establishment of the silver basis because of
the loss which it would entail upon him. His dollars would shrink from
their gold value to their silver value. A depreciated currency was bad
enough when unavoidable, but the deliberate adoption of it would be
frank repudiation. Continually, after 1890, popular apprehension of this
grew more acute, discouraging the undertaking of new enterprises and
leading to the insertion of "gold clauses" in contracts. Gold was
hoarded whenever possible. The receipts at the New York Custom-House,
which had been mostly gold before 1890, contained less than four per
cent of gold in the winter of 1892-93. As the Treasury found its
expenditures nearing its receipts, and the proportion of gold in its
assets lessening, business men were badly worried over the future of the
currency, and an actual limit of available capital appeared.
For fourteen years there had been prosperity in the United States.
Financial and economic disturbances had been relatively slight, and
every year had seen a greater business expansion than the last.
Investment for permanent improvement had passed the amount of annual
savings, and before 1893 the United States as a community had approached
the point at which its economic surplus would be exhausted and an
enforced liquidation would be due. As banks curtailed in 1893 to save
themselves, stringency became general, and depression turned to panic.
In April the gold reserve in the Treasury, on which the whole volume of
silver and paper depended, passed below $100,000,000, which business had
come to regard as the limit of safety. In the summer Great Britain
closed her Indian mints to silver and that bullion dropped farther in
value. Before July there was panic and failure everywhere in the United
States.
Panic had been imminent before Harrison left office and remained for
Cleveland to confront. Already Cleveland had taken a solid stand against
free silver and the silver basis. He saw in the Sherman Silver Purchase
Act the most striking cause of danger, and summoned Congress to meet in
August, 1893, to repeal it, while he maintained the gold reserve for the
next two years by borrowing on bonds. For the first time since the Civil
War his party controlled every branch of the Government, yet it now met
an issue on which it had not been elected and over which it broke to
pieces.
An angry minority opposed the Message in which Cleveland described the
financial dangers and demanded the repeal of the Sherman Law. It was a
sectional minority that included Western Representatives from both
parties and many Democrats from the South. Men who had fought the
Populists since 1890 now fraternized with them and raised their strength
beyond their hopes. The President refused compromise, even to save his
party from destruction, and found a majority for repeal among Easterners
of both parties. The Sherman Law was repealed in November, and the
liquidation following the crisis was effected during the next three
years.
It was a bad beginning for tariff revision, to split the party at its
first session and to drive into opposition those Democrats who were most
genuinely interested in tariff reform. Cleveland had lost his influence
with Western Democrats before the repeal of the McKinley Act was
undertaken, and they, like the Populists, had decided that he was the
tool of the corporations and the "gold-bugs" of the East. The
anti-corporation feelings of the West were increased by the accident
which threw the corporations and the farmers into different sides upon
the silver question.
A tariff for revenue had been the winning issue in 1890 and 1892, and
the Democratic organization was pledged to pass it. When Speaker Crisp
made William L. Wilson chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means his
act showed an intention to fulfill the pledge, for which purpose Wilson
brought in his bill early in the regular session of 1893-94. Like
previous bills, this tariff was passed in the House, rewritten in the
Senate, and again changed in conference committee. "The truth is,"
confessed Senator Cullom long after, "we were all--Democrats as well as
Republicans--trying to get in amendments in the interest of protecting
the industries of our respective States." The surplus was no longer an
argument in favor of reduction. The free-trade arguments were flatly
contradicted by a group of Democratic Senators under whose leadership
the bill lost most of its reducing tendency. Out of doors the
Republicans attacked the measure and noisily charged it with having
produced the panic of 1893. Fourteen years later a Republican President
still described it as the measure "under the influence of which wheat
went down below fifty cents." When it finally came to the President it
was so little different from the McKinley Bill that he denounced it
violently. He had tried in vain to hold his party to an honest revision,
and now, in July, 1894, refused to sign the bill. It became a law
without his signature. It contained no novelty but an income tax, which
was a concession to the Populists and which the Supreme Court soon
declared to be unconstitutional.
In the fight over the Wilson Bill, Cleveland affronted Eastern members
of his party as he had the Western members, in 1893, over the Sherman
repeal. In the summer of 1894 he offended the whole body of organized
labor by intervening in a Western strike.
The panic of 1893 had unsettled labor and created a floating element
among the unemployed. These drifted toward Chicago, attracted by the
Columbian Exposition held there during that summer, and worried the
police for many months. About Easter, 1894, an "Army of the Unemployed"
marched on Washington under the command of Jacob S. Coxey. A few weeks
later a strike occurred among the employees of the Pullman Palace Car
Company. The American Railroad Union, under the leadership of Eugene V.
Debs, established a sympathetic boycott against the Pullman cars. The
Knights of Labor indorsed the strike, and railway travel was impeded
over all the West. Around Chicago there was disorder and rioting which
the Governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, did not suppress. He held the
militia in readiness, but had not intervened when Cleveland sent federal
troops to Chicago to remove obstructions to the carriage of the mails.
This federal intervention offended those who still adhered to the
doctrine of state rights, and angered the strikers and organized labor
as a whole. They believed the President was a tool of the railroads, and
believed the same of the courts when a federal judge issued an
injunction to Debs forbidding him to interfere in the strike. In the end
the strikers lost, leaving Cleveland's conduct in maintaining the peace
in sharp contrast with that of the Populist Governor of Colorado, who
intervened in a great miners' strike at Cripple Creek to arrest, not the
strikers who had seized control of the mines, but the sheriff and his
posse who wished to dislodge them. "It is better, infinitely better,"
Governor Waite had declared, "that the blood should flow to the horses'
bridles than that our national liberties should be destroyed." Congress
made Labor Day a legal holiday in 1894, but failed to placate the
unions.
By the summer of 1894 Cleveland's party was split beyond repair, and his
friends were mostly among the Republicans. Consistent in his belief in
sound money, tariff revision, and law and order, he had been forced by
events to alienate the West, the East, and organized labor. His course
had aided the Populist party by widening the belief that the Democrats
had no interest in their welfare. The panic had aided it yet more, by
multiplying the discontented who might be converted to the new faith.
Every month the Populist party increased in strength, the East watching
it with mingled fear and contempt and ignorance. The comic papers
pictured as the typical Populist the raw-boned, booted, unkempt farmer,
in shirt-sleeves and with flowing beard. It could not see the foundation
of real reforms on which the movement stood. A satirist pictured the
Populist as "The Kansas Bandit," declaiming
"The People's Party, to
Which me native instinct draws me because it
Loves the rule of mediocrity, is now on top. I
Love the rule of Ignorance."
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
F.J. Turner discussed "The Problems of the West," in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ for September, 1896, and C. Becker has interpreted a similar
point of view under the title "Kansas" in the _Turner Essays_ (1910).
Wildman and McVey are valuable guides. The external facts of the
Populist movement are accessible in the _Annual Cyclopaedia_; Stanwood,
_History of the Presidency_; Annual Reports of the Secretary of the
Treasury; and Richardson, _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_.
Standard writings on the silver problem are J.L. Laughlin, _History of
Bimetallism in the United States_ (1886, etc.), and F. W. Taussig,
_Silver Situation in the United States_ (1893). Useful details are added
in the biographies of Blaine, Bland, Sherman, and Vance. W.E. Connelley,
_Ingalls of Kansas_ (1909), has included much material upon Populism,
including E. Ware's satirical verses, _Alonzo, or the Kansas Bandit_.
Light is thrown upon Governor J.P. Altgeld and his influence in the
Democratic party by B. Whitlock, "Forty Years of It" (1914), and C.
Lloyd, _Henry Demarest Lloyd_. The _Memoirs of a Varied Career_, William
F. Draper (1908), gives a glimpse of the rigid protectionist attitude. A
stimulating novel, based upon municipal politics in the nineties, is
P.L. Ford's _The Honorable Peter Stirling_ (1894).