Within the last year or so the New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger has written of President Nixon’s “evident populist feeling,” and another Times man, Anthony Lewis, remarked that Lyndon Johnson was “beyond doubt a genuine populist.” A number of observers have stressed the “populist strain” in the “Kingfish” from Louisiana in the iQ3o’s, Senator Huey Long; in Wisconsin’s Communistphobe of the igso’s, Senator Joseph McCarthy; in the 1968 Democratic Presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey; and in the Alabama candidate for President in 1972, Governor George Wallace. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV, campaigning for the West Virginia governorship, discovered that he had “populist instincts,” while Mayor John Lindsay of New York City and Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, seeking the White House, took to making pronouncements about who was the true believer—”populist” McGovern attacking Lindsay as a “Park Avenue populist” and “populist” Lindsay denouncing George Wallace as a “phony populist.” The Philadelphia Bulletin referred to the city’s new mayor, Frank Rizzo, as an “urban populist”; delegates from seven national organizations assembled in Dallas to launch a “new populism.” And the Harvard research psychiatrist Robert Coles, having intensively interviewed many middle Americans of the early 1970’s, summarized that among “ordinary” or “average” Americans, “everywhere I hear a kind of populism expressed.”

The word populism is coming back in a rush. The whole raft of references provokes another look at that phenomenon of the 1980’s, the People’s Party of the United States—more generally known as the Populist Party—which has long seemed about as pertinent to contemporary affairs as buckboards, Lydia Pinkham pills, or President Benjamin Harrison.

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