Going to See the Wizard

Agrarian Discontent and Populism

Published Published

19001900

Released 1940

ON THE FARM

High Plains Settlement: A 70 Year Mistake

• Homesteaders and the Great Plains 1870s• 1878-1887 “Rain follows the Plow”• Drought: 1887, 1889-1890

– “In God we trusted; in Kansas we busted.”

• 1893 Depression and Grain Prices– 1875 Wheat $1.05 per bushel– 1895 Wheat $ .67 per bushel

• Farmer Complaints in the 1890s

Farm Activism

• The Grange (1867)

• Farmers’ Alliance– Cooperatives– Southern Alliance, Colored Farmers’ Alliance,

National Farmers’ Alliance– 1890 election

• The Populist Party

The Ideals of Populism

• Rejection of gilded age materialism

• Criticism of capital’s treatment of labor

• Opposition to accumulations of wealth

• Critique of the business cycle

• “the race question”

POPULIST PARTY’S OMAHA PLATFORM

• Free and Unlimited Coinage of Silver• A Progressive Income Tax• Government Ownership of the Telegraph

and Railroad Systems• Restrictions on Immigration• End of Injunctions Against Labor Unions

Successes and Failures of the Election of 1892

William Jennings Bryan William McKinleyTHE ELECTION OF 1896

William Jennings Bryan William McKinley

Contest between the “producing masses” and the “idle holders of idle capital”

First priority of government is to “make the masses prosperous.”

“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Ruby Slippers?

Silver

or

“I don’t mind my legs and arms and body being stuffed, because I cannot get hurt. If anyone treads on my toes or sticks a pin into me, it doesn’t matter, for I can’t feel it. But I do not want people to call me a fool, and if my head stays stuffed with straw instead of with brains, … how am I ever to know anything?”

“Don’t mind Toto,”said Dorothy, to her new friend; “he never bites.”

Populist Party?

“If the elephants and the tigers and the bears had ever tried to fight me, I

should have run myself…”

“It seems … they must be more cowardly than

you are if they allow you to scare them so easily.”

Electoral Map (1896)

Results of the 1896 Election

• Republicans control White House from 1896-1912

• Until the Great Depression urban workers and Catholics vote Republican

• New election laws in the South designed to restrict 3rd parties exclude African-Americans.