Populism: America’s Largest Mass Democratic Movement

 

The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America

by Lawrence Goodwyn

Oxford University Press (1978)

Book Review

The Populist Moment describes the rise and fall of the 19th century populist movement, the largest mass democratic movement in US history. At its zenith during the 1896 election, the populist People’s Party had two million members.

Author Lawrence Goodwyn credits the rise of the agrarian populist movement to two major factors: 1) the unwillingness of the Eastern banking establishment to issue adequate credit to small family farmers and 2) the sudden contraction of the money supply caused by pressure on the post-Civil War government to repay bonds it floated for $450 million of treasury notes (aka Greenbacks) Lincoln used to pay for the Civil War.

Goodwyn also blames the systematic failure of commercial banks to issue adequate credit for the ultimate consolidation and centralization of farming in the US, leading to the eventual rise of industrial agriculture.

The Call to Prohibit Private Banks from Issuing Money

The populist movement started in Texas in 1878 as the Alliance. At first the group focused on forming cooperative buying committees, trade stores and crop insurance schemes to circumvent the crop-lien system that caused so many farmers to lose their land. Their chief organizing strategy was to send farmer-lecturers throughout Texas and eventually other parts of the South, Midwest and West. The banks, railroads, grain elevators and supply merchants responded by secretly conspiring to freeze them out. In turn the Alliance formed the People’s Party, whose main platform called for ending commercial banks’ ability to issue money.*

Goodwyn provides a detailed state-by-state history of the leadership struggles in the Alliance and in the People’s Party. Both made concerted efforts to reach out to Negro farmers and tenant farmers and to industrial workers, represented by the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor, in the cities.

Overcoming Cultural Oppression

The book concludes by tracing the rise of the liberal and progressive movements that followed the demise of the People’s Party. The primary focus of these later movements has been to “humanize” industrial capitalism – as opposed to attacking the fundamental structure of capitalism (like populist movement). Goodwyn blames the absence of comparable mass movements in the twentieth century on the profound psychological oppression that occurs in modern industrialized society.

According to Goodwyn, the values of the corporate state totally dominates modern American intellectual life, as citizens of industrialized society are taught rules of conduct (in schools, churches and the media) that intimidate them and condition them not to rebel.  The Alliance overcame these cultural barriers by training and dispatching farmer-lecturers to teach farmers collective self-confidence and self-assertion – ie that the banks, rather than farmers themselves, were responsible for their predicament. Up to this point in time, no democratic mass movement has attempted a similar program of mass education.

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*Contrary to popular belief, money used to run the global economy isn’t issued by governments but by private banks. Although most people think banks only loan out money they hold on deposit, loans are actually  created out of thin air via a bookkeeping entry.  Because this is where roughly 97% of money comes from, private banks have ultimate control over the amount of money in circulation. They exert enormous political power by shrinking the money supply to cause recessions and expanding it to cause inflation. See How Banks Invent Money Out of Thin Air , Stripping Banks of Their Power to Issue Money and 97% Owned

The Role of Youth in Making Revolution

(Sharing more of my research for my new novel A Rebel Comes of Age)

Much has been made of the role of youth in sparking the “Arab Spring” revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. The willingness of Arab citizens to rebel against some of the world’s most oppressive regimes is a new and significant phenomenon. It highlights the distinction between political and psychological oppression. Psychological repression is a state of wholesale resignation, when a population believes any resistance will be totally crushed.

The Role of Youth in Sparking Revolution

Youth are nearly always the engine behind any movement to throw off psychological oppression. Older people have an overwhelming drive for “business as usual.” Austrian-born child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim credits this drive for the failure of European Jews to resist the Nazi campaign to enslave and exterminate them. Teenagers, in contrast, possess an illusion an illusion of immortality. They often find it difficult to grasp the finality of death.

Lessons from History: Soweto and the Intifada

Both the 1976 Soweto uprising in South Africa and the first Palestinian Intifada (1987) were initiated by teenagers. Both South Africa and Palestine were riding the crest of a baby boom and faced high youth unemployment. In addition, both the South African townships and occupied Palestine faced a general breakdown in parental authority. In both settings, parents traveled long distances (to Johannesburg or Israel). A whole generation of children, were left on their own to raise themselves. The link between the breakdown of parental authority and youth rebellion is a major theme of my first novel The Battle for Tomorrow.

The Anti-Apartheid Movement

The 1976 Soweto uprising is widely credited as the start of mass popular resistance to apartheid. The students who started it came from a generation that essentially raised themselves. Strict pass laws implemented in the 1950s forced many black residents to give up to their homes in South African cities and move to black-only townships or Bantustans, where there was no work. The only work open to black men was in remote work camps at the gold and diamond mines. While Sowetan women worked as domestics and nannies for white families in Johannesburg and only returned to their own children on weekends.

In 1976 Soweto teenagers had a lot in common with homeless teens, third world street children and “young carers” (children who care for parents with physical or mental disabilities or drug and alcohol problems). Forced to look after themselves from an early age, it’s typical for these teenagers to exhibit  precocious maturity.

Conditions that Politicized the Bantu Schools

The event the triggered the 1976 uprising was a decree requiring that all Bantu schools teach their subjects in Afrikaans (the language of the original Dutch settlers of South Africa), rather than English. Owing to atrocious conditions in the Bantu schools, students were already highly politicized. While education in white schools was free, black parents were charged 51 rand a year (a half month’s salary) The Bantu schools were also incredibly overcrowded, with sixty or more students per class and teachers who often had no education qualifications.

The prelude to the June 16 uprising was a classroom boycott in early June of seventh and eight graders at Orlando West Primary School. Students from seven other Soweto schools immediately joined in. On Sunday June 13th, 400 students met in Orlando (hard to imagine without cellphones Facebook  or Twitter) to call for a mass boycott and demonstration for June 16^th. They also made a pact not to inform their parents, who they believed would try to stop them.

On June 16, fifteen to twenty thousand students age 10-20 in school uniform met at Orlando West Secondary school to march to the stadium. When the students refused to disperse, the police opened fire, killing several. The others went wild, throwing rocks and bottles at the police and setting fire to all symbols of apartheid – government buildings, liquor stores, beer halls and trucks, buses and cars belonging to white businesses.

Where Deadly Police Force Fails

The next morning rioting spread to other townships, as well as to Pretoria, Durban and Capetown with “colored” (mixed race) and Indian students also joining the rebellion. The police were totally unable to quell the rioters, even with force, owing to the students’ greater numbers and their total disregard for their own safety. It would take sixteen months for peace to be restored in the townships.

(To be continued, with a discussion of the role of teenagers in the Palestinian  Intifada.)

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In A Rebel Comes of Age, seventeen-year-old Angela Jones and four other homeless teenagers occupy a vacant commercial building owned by Bank of America. The adventure turns deadly serious when the bank obtains a court order evicting them. Ange faces the most serious crisis of her life when the other residents decide to use firearms against the police SWAT team.

$3.99 ebook available (in all formats) from Smashwords:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/361351