Revising Populism

Historiography

Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917

Elizabeth Sanders, 1999

Elizabeth Sanders argued that “agrarian movements constituted the most important political force driving the development of the American national state in the half century before World War I.” This story had not been well told, she said, because of a “strong urban labor bias” among social historians and because Marxist-derived social theory perceived the “industrial working class” as the only “significant constituency” opposing the state and its ruling “hegemonic capitalist class.” Sanders said “the dynamic stimulus for Populism and Progressive Era state expansion was the periphery agrarians’ drive to establish public control over a rampaging capitalism.” In 1910, she said, “fewer than 9 percent of nonagricultural workers were members of trade unions,” so the agrarians were well-placed to drive their reform message into the mainstream. And they did just that: “the Democratic Party of the post-1896 period was an overwhelmingly agrarian vehicle that carried the legacy of populism.” This rings true with my own findings in Peppermint Kings, where the rural A. M. Todd became a “fusion” congressman at the end of the nineteenth century and founded the Public Ownership League in the early 20th.

Sanders argument was based on a very specific definition of agrarianism, that I think holds a lot of explanatory power. “The term ‘agrarian,’” she said, “is used here to reference those agricultural regions...that were devoted to one or two cash crops produced for national and international (as opposed to local) markets.” Sanders distinguished these “peripheral” agrarians from the more prosperous (?), diversified farmers of perishable and “truck” products for local markets. These “hinterland” farmers were dependent on their urban centers and their political behavior reflected this identification. In contrast, “periphery agrarians were more bound to the fate of a single crop (whose price was set in a world market), more distant from crop marketing, storage, and distribution centers; more likely to be dependent on a single rail line and monopolistic or oligopolistic purchasers.” In short, the powerless producers of undifferentiated staples we normally think of, when reading accounts of the farm movement.

I like the distinction she made between “hinterlands” and the “periphery”. But for me, the really interesting element of the story might be this wedge Sanders opened between these different types of farmers, as well as between different types of cities.  Centers that served rich agricultural areas (Minneapolis, Spokane, even Chicago) displayed different political patterns than eastern cities whose economies relied less on agricultural processing. These “centers” had hinterlands as well as peripheries of course. But their economies were dominated by the processing of raw materials (grain, lumber, meat) produced in far-flung peripheries rather than adjacent hinterlands. “Because of these differences in city functions, the urban-rural distinction per se has limited explanatory power in American politics,” Sanders said. And farmers operating in the corn belt, responsible for “the greatest concentration of corn and meat production in the world,” clearly lived different lives and as a result had different political motivations. The fact that the South, “by virtue of its size and the intensity of its grievances...almost inevitably led the periphery voting bloc in Congress,” may be a clue to a relatively unexplored division between farmers. Rather than thinking of them as sharing a common agenda, maybe we should be looking for the differences of opinion and political priorities that caused some of their major farmers organizations to adopt an apolitical stance.

Sanders suggested that political constituencies might be grouped like economic “trading areas,” citing Bensel’s Sectionalism and American Political Development and his use of Rand McNally trade area maps. This seems like it might be a promising way to look at some of the issues I found in my own research, which covered a group of farmers and rural businessmen who seem to be unaccounted-for in the traditional story of agrarian radicalism. Sanders concluded that the agrarian-labor coalition failed because it was “rent by class, ethnic, and regional political economy differences that diminished their capacity for economic and political mobilization and -- particularly in the case of southern racial segregation -- their moral authority.” But most interesting, Sanders suggested that although the peripheral agrarians naturally advocated national government action to right the wrongs of the production/distribution/finance system, they did not support the Progressive-style discretionary bureaucracy they ultimately got. They believed “Policy-making should not be the province of ‘experts’ socially and geographically far removed” from their constituents; it should be “local, decentralized, ad-hoc.” So the question (and the story waiting to be told) is, wanting what they wanted, how is it they got what they got?

Responses to Roots of Reform were mixed, but mostly positive. In the American Historical Review, David Vaught (author of Cultivating California and After the Gold Rush) said Sanders was merely repeating the arguments of progressive historians like John D. Hicks and Solon Buck. He questioned her division of the nation into industrial core, agrarian periphery and (disposable) diverse regions, based on a 1919 census she admitted reflected World War I industrial concentration. And he said she attributed politicians’ positions to regionalism, when in many cases they may have been based more on party loyalty. Most of all, Vaught regretted the lack of either farmers or laborers in the story. In the Journal of American History, James Weinstein (socialist author of The Decline of Socialism in America, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State and The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left) calls the book a tour de force that made “an irrefutable case for the importance of agrarian movements” in shaping reform. He called attention to Sanders’ point that although the agrarians wanted a strong state, “they opposed executive branch bureaucracies. They sought an expanded ‘statutory’ state. Their reforms required minimal regulation,” Weinstein said. This is a key point -- the growth of bureaucracy was not an inevitable result of agrarian claims for social justice. The idea that it was, is a case of the winners writing the history. Finally, in the Journal of Southern History, Ronald Formisano suggested that Sanders’ “key assumption” that members of Congress were “exquisitely sensitive” to their constituents is too narrow; but he praised the book’s revision of the traditional separation of the Populist from the Progressive movement. Roots of Reform, he said, “should have a powerful impact on the content delivered by textbooks and lecturers in survey courses.” That’s an interesting conclusion, from the perspective of how changes in the consensus narrative find their way into the classroom and popular history.