Too Popular for the People?

BRIAN: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And today, we’re talking about the history of American populism.

PETER: Hey, guys. We got a call from Denver, and it’s Heather. Heather, welcome to BackStory.

CALLER: Thank you. It’s fun to be here.

PETER: You got a question for us. Lay it on.

CALLER: OK. Well, I’ve been reading a book called Railroaded by Richard White. It’s about the transcontinental railroads. In the late 19th century, the railroad corporations were the big bad guys.

But what I found out is that sometimes they supported populist candidates if they thought that the populist policies would hurt their rival corporation– kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So I’m wondering, how long can a populist movement actually stay populist before it gets co-opted by the powerful?

PETER: How about it? Genuine populism out there, guys.

ED: Yeah. The populism that Heather’s actually asking about did start in an authentic way, and it took it a long time to develop. And I think it’s been a major topic of the discussion of the history of populism about exactly when did populism lose its soul. And people see it at different times for different subjects– from the perspective of African Americans, it lost its soul pretty quickly. They really start excluding African Americans. And from the viewpoint of women, they were excluded pretty early on.

So Heather, I think the question is as soon as populism stopped being a self-help movement and went into the political sphere, it was very hard for it to resist the siren of political seduction.

BRIAN: And Heather, let’s take the other side of your equation. I agree with it. Those corporate interests, they’re not one set of interests. Let’s go back to your topic of railroads. If you were a department store that was beginning to get into shipping goods around the country and beginning to take advantage of postal delivery to rural areas, you didn’t want high railroad rates. You wanted to bust those railroads. The whole notion that there was one corporate interest, I think, is one of the great myths of American history.

ED: Or as Heather points out, that there was even one railroad interest.

BRIAN: Or there was even one railroad interest.

ED: You want to about a cutthroat business– these people would do anything for a comparative advantage.

BRIAN: Yeah. And smart businessmen always played popular opinion in ways that were going to help their bottom line.

PETER: And the same goes for smart politicians. At the beginning of American national history, I think a lot of populist movements as we know them begin with fractures in the elite– that is, between Loyalists and Patriots in the run-up to the Revolution. There was popular action on the streets, Heather, directed toward a variety of things, from whore houses and to other issues that got the people riled up. But the savvy Patriot leaders saw that this was a force that could be turned against the British imperial regime.

So I think we have to look at it more as an interactive phenomenon– maybe not from the very beginning, because there’s local grassroots mobilization, as Ed is suggesting. But it is always vulnerable to appropriation and co-optation?

CALLER: Well, do you think that a really populist movement can’t really get anywhere until it somehow gets into the power structure?

ED: I think– to go back to the case of the railroads, Brian’s point of view about shippers– also, if you’re a voter, what you want is the darn railroad to come to your county, because if it doesn’t, you have no prospect of economic prosperity coming forward. So I think that the paradox here is that populism– which we see as opposed to interests– has to become popular in order to accomplish its goals. And as soon as it does, it enters a sphere that it doesn’t control.

CALLER: Yeah.

PETER: Hey, Heather, you happy?

CALLER: I’m happy.

PETER: That’s what we look for at BackStory.

BRIAN: That was terrific.

CALLER: OK, great. Thanks a lot, guys. Bye.

PETER: If you have a question for us about an upcoming topic, leave a message on Facebook or our website, backstoryradio.org. You can also tweet us at backstoryradio. We have shows coming up on the history of disability America and the legacy of the Confederacy.