Populism, Progressivism and Trumpism: Third Party, Inter-Party and Intra- Party Candidates in Campaigns for the American Presidency
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Republican presidential nominee Donald trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at the presidential debate at Hofstra university, new york, 26 September 2016. Populism, Progressivism and Trumpism: third party, inter-party and intra- party candidates in campaigns for the American presidency Michael Dunne explores ox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. Since these words were first recorded many centuries ago, they have been used both to the complexities of celebrate the popular will and to warn against it: the contrary fate of many American presidential Vaphorisms. It is a racing certainty that some commentators on the result of the current election to be the 45th president of the United States will succumb to the temptation political campaigning to quote this adage, particularly if Donald J. Trump defeats Hillary Rodham Clinton in the popular vote. (Technically success in the nationwide popular vote does not over the last 200 years. guarantee entry into the White House; but only in very rare cases is the discrepancy an issue, the most recent being the ‘Dubya’ Bush-Al Gore election of 2000: the first time since 1888.) A Trump victory, ‘trumping’ indeed almost all the professional pundits’ predictions when he began his latest campaign for the presidency in the summer of 2015, would be ascribed to the pent-up yet neglected anger and resentment of the majority – President Richard Nixon’s once ‘silent majority’ – of the American people. ‘Populism’ would have triumphed. For those commentators with a penchant for Latin and hostile to Trump, vox populi would be heard as vox diaboli: the voice of the Devil. American political jargon is rich and known throughout the world. The late eighteenth century gave us ‘gerrymandering’ and ‘caucuses’ from the chicanery and intrigues of New England politics; the ‘spoils system’ came with the election of President Andrew Jackson in 1828; the Civil War-era showed Confederate- sympathising ‘copperheads’ and Northern ‘carpet-baggers’. Then the ‘mugwumps’ reappeared, the 1830s sobriquet borrowed from the Algonquin language to describe self-satisfied political ‘big shots’, re-defined in 1884 to mock fastidious Republicans either reluctantly voting for Democratic candidates or sitting on the electoral fence – with their mug on one side and their rump on the other! Shortly thereafter ‘populism’ entered the American political lexicon in the 1890s. The term has never died out; it has moved abroad while remaining at home; and it has yet to shake off its early, pejorative connotations either at home or abroad. 12 The Historian – Autumn 2016 Populism as a socio-political term predated the 1890s but, Grover Cleveland-Benjamin Harrison presidential (1888) campaign then, the country in question was not the United States but poster about the trade policy of the two candidates. The map Tsarist Russia. Emerging shortly after the Emancipation of the supports the work of the Harrison campaign. Serfs in 1861, the narodniki (champions of the people: narod) promoted what an American might have described as latter-day peasant-based Jeffersonianism. But any resemblance ended in the 1880s when these Russian ‘populists’ turned to more openly revolutionary violence, including the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, himself the Emancipator of the Serfs. In the United States the abolition of slavery and the subsequent ‘Reconstruction’ of the South did not in themselves lead directly to populism; but the nationwide economic depression of the 1870s and the longer-term structural problems within agriculture, not least from competition in a global market, produced various social and political groupings (the Granger movement, the Greenbackers, the Farmers’ Alliance) which co-existing with the growing trade unions merged into what became the first version of American populism. The People’s Party of America was formally organised in February 1892 in St Louis, Missouri. Its origins in the agricultural discontent of the previous decades were unmistakeable; and blended into the movement and soon to be part of its official programme was a mainly Western demand for devaluing the gold-based dollar, the most common remedy proposed being the re-monetising of silver (usually at a silver to gold ratio of 16:1) to reverse the ‘Crime of ’73’ abolishing the iconic silver dollar. Such deliberate inflation (or cheapening) of the currency, its advocates argued, would boost agricultural prices and so restore price ‘parity’ with the manufactured goods farmers needed to purchase in order to live and to work their land. Historians no less than contemporaries have debated the argument, invariably siding with the ‘sound-money’, gold- standard proponents of the time. For observers of intra-party struggles, the rise of third parties and populism in particular, the plausibility of the scheme is less important than its political consequences. ‘Gold bugs’ were to be found in both the 1892 People’s Party campaign poster promoting James Weaver for Republican and Democratic parties; likewise the ‘Silverites’. But President of the united States. neither in the Solid Democratic South nor in the predominantly Republican East and North did either party relish a split on (what would now be called) monetary policy. Republicans, largely identified as economic conservatives and defenders of the gold standard (and the protective tariff for manufactured goods) regained the White House in 1888 by winning in the constitutionally crucial Electoral College while losing in the popular vote by less than 1%. (The margin of Republican defeat in 1884 had been even smaller.) Of course, under the federal electoral system, winning in the more populous states was the key to winning in the Electoral College, and thus the presidency. But divisions within individual states risked the ultimate goal of garnering a majority in the Electoral College. Hence both major parties tried to straddle the issue, though various acts of Congress and executive decisions by successive administrations failed to satisfy either side in the inflation controversy. Southern discontent was least attracted to the forming of a third party, since this might help the cause of African-American equality: the Democrats were determined to preserve their hold on the ‘lily white’ South, while Republicans were content with the ‘benign neglect’ (another Nixon-era phrase) of equal rights for the former slaves. Even so, in July 1892 the newly-formed People’s Party held its first national convention to nominate candidates for president and vice-president and to protest against a political and economic system which had created ‘two great classes – tramps and millionaires’.1 Heading the ticket was James B. Weaver, a former Union officer and Greenback congressman from Iowa with a reputation for monetary and corporate reform; his running-mate was James G. Field, a former Confederate officer and attorney general of Virginia. Uniting the two important ‘sections’ (or social-regional groupings) of The Historian – Autumn 2016 13 Bryan’s famous ‘cross of gold’ speech gave him the presidential nomination and swung the party to the silver cause. the Midwest and Upper South, this pairing of one-time military adversaries constituted the classic ‘balanced’ ticket. While predominantly a rural insurgency, the People’s Party hoped to gain the support of ‘urban workmen’ in the North and East, declaring ‘the interests of rural and civic labor are the same.’ Instead Labour as a constituency backed the Democrats: the Republicans were seen to support reactionary and strike-breaking capitalists, notably in the bloody Homestead confrontation; while the Populist programme threatened to increase food prices. But Weaver (who had run on a ‘soft-money’ platform in 1880 for the Greenback Party) and the Populists were not disgraced, gaining a higher percentage of the popular vote (8.5%) than any third party since the fateful election of 1860 and Abraham Lincoln’s entering the White House with barely 40% of the votes cast. Presidential elections are rarely won or lost on ‘single’ issues, 1860 being the most notable exception; and while the Populists were one extreme of the inflationary spectrum, the Democratic Party tried to find a middle point between them and the Republicans, softening their stance on silver in the agrarian and Western states where the late nineteenth-century version of present-day quantitative easing had its strongest supporters. (Bankers were just one of the farmers’ bogeymen, along with railroad-owners, wholesalers and mortgage-lenders.) The platforms of the two major parties in 1892 hedged on the gold-silver issue and specified many more ‘planks’ on both domestic and foreign politics than in the more focused Populist manifesto. But it was the vigour, the roughness of the Populist campaign which registered unfavourably with its opponents and gave a pejorative cast to the word itself. (The revolutionary trajectory of the Russian narodniki also played its his defeated opponent, the Republican their presidential candidate to succeed part, with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, Benjamin Harrison, had served one Cleveland, Bryan was only 36 and had speaking of a ‘vague terror’ stalking term in the White House; neither served just four years in the House the American land.) Echoing Lincoln’s was said to have much of a personal as a Representative from Nebraska. Gettysburg Address, one of the most following, one being said to lack The Democrats – to the disgust of prominent Populist campaigners, Mary friends, the other being described as Cleveland – had now taken up the Lease of Kansas (remembered for surrounded by enemies! What if one or silver cause. (Officially the Republicans urging farmers to ‘raise less corn and other of the major parties took up the would promote silver only as part of an more hell’), lambasted a ‘government silver cause (and monetary inflation) international agreement; and dissatisfied of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for seriously? The Democrats seemed the Westerners split off to form a National Wall Street’.2 Nor were the Populists more likely; for the gold-bug Cleveland Silver Party.) When the proposed finished.