Populists, "the Reading Party"

Historiography

The Populist Vision

Charles Postel, 2007

This book won the Bancroft Prize, and if good histories are measured by how much they challenge long-held misconceptions, it deserved to win. It is about “how Americans responded to the traumas of technological innovation, expansion of corporate power, and commercial and cultural globalization in the 1880s and 1890s.” Populists, Charles Postel said, were “influenced by modernity and sought to make America modern” (my emphasis). Throughout the book, Postel showed rural people embracing change, and especially technological change that made their work and lives easier and more rewarding. This view, he said, challenged the dominant strain of thought (especially by Richard Hofstadter) that saw rural people and especially populists as cranky victims of change, who looked back nostalgically to an earlier age when the rest of the nation shared their agrarian “producer” philosophy. A key example Postel cited was the populist approach to railroads. Nowhere did Postel find the suggestion that this new technology hadn’t radically improved life in the countryside. The issue was, how should these enterprises be organized, and for whose benefit?

This is a refreshing change. Postel gave regular people a lot of credit for intelligence, political awareness, and active involvement in the key issues of the day. He began his introduction with a description of how a voluntary association of florists (a cooperative) “embraced the new technology” of the telegraph, which had “annihilated time and space”. They standardized their businesses and products to allow the customer to order uniform products that could be delivered across town or across continents: FTD. Populists "believed in the transforming power of science and technology,” Postel said. “They believed in economies of scale...they believed in the logic of modernity”. Just as important, he showed that they understood these issues, perhaps better than we do now. “Populism was known as ‘a reading party’ and a ‘writing and talking party’.” It is as important to understand what the Populists “were for” as what they were against, said Postel. If they were pessimistic (as Frederick Jackson Turner and Hofstadter claimed), then it was with Hamlin Garland’s “kind of pessimism which is really optimism...that is to say, people who believe the imperfect and unjust can be improved upon”

Postel also explored the connections between Populists and labor activists. Although the standard story is that they could never get together because farmers were proprietor/employers and wage workers were not, Postel found many examples of cooperation, especially with rural workers. “Farmers were often part-time coal miners, and coal miners often farmed to supplement their diet and income”.  This approach shows a greater sensitivity to conditions on the ground than many other historians who stuck blindly to the categories. But Postel was also quick to point out problems with the populist vision, such as when it veered toward racism and advocated majoritarian, government/industrial organization on a scale that would later (elsewhere) be called fascist.

If farmers had any antipathy toward universities, Postel said, it was only because rather than catering to their needs, the schools “seemed to lavish resources on future lawyers, doctors, ministers, and other professionals”.  So once again, their objection was not to change, but to who benefits from the change. Farmers took their educations into their own hands. Learning was the “great equalizer in commerce, technology, and social standing,” so they “built lecture circuits across some thirty states, and a network of approximately one thousand weekly newspapers”.

I have to pause here for a moment. This jumped out at me when I first read the book, as I thought about preparing to be a college-level teacher. It jumps out at me again now, as I think about the possible end of that career and focus more on Lifelong Learning. To some extent, the early-20th-century rise of professionalism and universities in America killed off this 19th century type of self-education. But today, the internet opens a possibility for people to take control of their own educations once again. I think educators need to spend some quality time thinking about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and for whom?

Postel mentioned a lot of interesting people and things to research someday: Charles Macune, Luna Kellie, Marion Cannon, National Cordage and the National Union Company (did the 1893 National Cordage bankruptcy precipitate the stock market crash?), the Gulf and Interstate Railway Company (north-south transcontinental), William Peffer, 2nd class postage and RFD, Anna Fader Haskell (who sounds like a 19th century female version of Tyler Durden, and doesn’t even have her own wiki page!), Marion Todd (1893, Railways of Europe and America), Daniel Weaver (a Chartist who tried to organize coal miners in the 1860s), and of course Clarence Darrow v. William Jennings Bryan at the Skopes Monkey Trial (1925), and Eugene V. Debs.