October 2, 2007
Abraham Lincoln, Southern Conservative: An Interview with Orville Vernon Burton (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 07:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. “The Populists,” you write, “were the last of Lincoln’s people, the last whose concerns for racial justice and millennial perfection were based on faith in the goodness of the common man.” Were the Populists a mere fringe group, or did they have lasting impact on the government’s racial and social policies? The Populists were not a fringe group but a viable third party. I painted the Populists with a broad brush, but I found in them real potential for continued strength—except for the seemingly inevitable politics of division. Divisions existed among the various coalitions composing the movement. Midwestern and Western Populists were very different from those of the former Confederacy. Race relations among Populists continued to be very divisive. The goals of industrial labor could clash with the goals of small farmers. It is ironic that when urbanization and industrialization were growing at such a rapid pace and revolutionizing the country, the momentous political protest movement began with farmers who were being left behind. Just as America was becoming decidedly more urban and industrial, abandoning its Jeffersonian heritage of the independent farmer, it was those very farmers who launched the most significant third-party protest. And yet, very much like Lincoln, all Populist groups believed that people, rural and urban, black and white, should be rewarded for hard work. Also, like Lincoln, they believed in the rule of law and a fair system, especially a fair economic system. I use Lincoln as a fulcrum to understand the period of history after the Age of Jackson. During the Age of Lincoln, family, community, and church were responsible for morality; henceforth, government became the conservator of moral order. In one of Lincoln’s wonderful stories, from an 1859 letter, he tells how two drunks in long overcoats got in a fight and afterwards discovered that in the tussle they had ended up exchanging overcoats. Lincoln argued that the party of Jefferson and Jackson had done just that with his own Republican Party. Republicans were “for both the man and the dollar, but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.” The Populists were the last group to place the man before the dollar. The Populists were also the last political party before the modern civil rights movement that centered much of its energy on the question of African-American polity, one of the issues that defined the Age of Lincoln. I end this period with the demise of the Populist Movement, because that marked a fundamental change in attitude between government and citizenry. Also changed forever was the world of mass politics. Whereas Abraham Lincoln addressed his audiences at length as one concerned citizen to another, politics became more professional. The barbecues, parades, and rallies for the entire community, where speakers educated, entertained, and established a real personal bond with their electorate, passed away with the Populists. Government became more businesslike and bureaucratic. More and more Americans seemed increasingly content to leave government to the legislators and education to the new universities. As social problems grew ever more complex, public officials and private citizens grew to rely upon a range of new professional organizations for information, guidance, regulation, and policy. A new faith in science and experts replaced millennial idealism and belief in the common citizens’ ability to solve problems. Having been driven to the excess of civil war by religious fervor to rid society of its sins, now experts would regulate those excesses. The end of the Populists signaled the end of power for a yeoman class who sought to extend the personal, virtuous, face-to-face social relations they had grown up with as rural, evangelical Protestants. With the party’s demise went the hope of restructuring the American economic system along more egalitarian lines. Future reform efforts would take a less millennial approach. New reformers would not trust and encourage the spark of God in the spirit of the common man. Whether the Progressives of the early twentieth century or the New Dealers of the 1930s, reformers would seek to control and rein in both the masses and the magnates. Whereas Populists wanted fair elections so that all could vote, including African-Americans, modern reformers looked to a bureaucratic state to regulate and to control, not trusting the instincts of the common folks but only of the “best people.” Nationwide, reformers were obsessed with lower orders (immigrants, African-Americans, poor workers) voting. Reforms in the electoral process purposefully entrenched ruling elites. Disfranchisement, or more technically franchise restriction, was the product of an attempt by the upper and middle class to restrict the franchise of those people who were most prone to vote Fusionist or Populist. Aims centered on protecting freedoms and voting rights for African-Americans, and for all citizens, lost out to expanding the interests of corporations and trusts. Today the term “populist” is sometimes used to slander a candidate, suggesting that he is provincial or appealing to the populace instead of listening to the studied experts. Sad to say, the divisions that fractured the Populist Party still reverberate today. As the historian C. Vann Woodward showed in his biography of the Populist leader Tom Watson, this idealistic agrarian reformer became a race-baiting, anti-Semitic demagogue. Yet there is no evidence in the scholarship or in the Populist literature itself that Populists were any more anti-Semitic, anti-black, or anti-foreign than any other group in the society at the time, and there is some evidence that they were less so. Populist ideals also still reverberate. Just as in the Age of Lincoln, moral choice, democratic citizenship, and equality still mingle. “Determine that the thing can and shall be done,” wrote Lincoln, “and then we shall find the way.”
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