Dollars & Sense: The Populist Moment

[marmar]

The Populist Moment
by Dollars and Sense


This is the first in a series of blog posts by former D&S collective member Thad Williamson, who is teaching a course on social movements at the University of Richmond, where he teaches at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies. His first post, on Laurence Goodwyn's classic The Populist Moment, which is well worth reading if you haven't already. —CS


Over thirty years after its publication, Lawrence Goodwyn's The Populist Moment remains not only gripping history but a powerful statement about the meaning of democracy. The story Goodwyn tells is by equal measures uplifting (as we consider the audacity of what the Populists tried to achieve) and dis-spiriting (as we consider the comparative narrowness of our conventional discussions about reform). The continuing relevance of the book however lies not primarily in our emotional reactions to Goodwyn's account, but in what we can learn from it about what a serious movement to challenge the fundamental structure of the American political economy would need to entail.

Goodwyn—an emeritus professor of history at Duke University—issued The Populist Moment in 1978 as an abridged version (merely 349 pages) of his study Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America, which originally appeared in 1976 with a length of 718 pages. The shorter edition consists of nine chapters culled from the full-length book, shorn of footnotes, photographs, and appendices. Even in reduced form, however, the abridged version effectively presents an epic story about the efforts of "plain people" to overcome enormous cultural and political obstacles and create a political economy that worked in their interests.

The Populist movement set out to abolish the structural arrangements reproducing and exacerbating rural poverty in the United States. The most promising of these features consisted of the "crop lien" system whereby cashless farmers (whether or not they owned land) found themselves continually indebted to local merchants and other lenders. Without cash on hand to obtain goods, goods were borrowed at marked-up prices for merchants, who collected in the form of crops at harvest time. Typically, poor farmers ended up still in debt to "the man" at the end of this annual ritual. This situation amounted to a system of de facto serfdom.

Exacerbating the difficulty was the national currency policy pursued after the Civil War, which saw the gradual contraction of the effective money supply and a return to the gold standard in 1879. The scarcity of currency helped creditors while damaging debtors, in two ways: as money got more valuable, the real value of loans owed increased over time; and the high value of money in turn meant that agricultural prices would trend downward over time. Farmers in debt were thus compelled to pay back loans worth more than the initial dollar amount, and to do so through the sale of crops that got steadily lower prices over time. In addition, farmers faced a variety of shipping fees and related costs imposed by railroad monopolies and grain elevator companies, making it essentially impossible for farmers to do more than (at best) tread water. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/blog/2009/09/populist-moment.html