This Day in Labor History: July 4, 1892. The People's Party Convention begins in Omaha. Who's ready to spend Independence Day talking about some angry farmers? Let's do this!
The late 19th century was pretty tough for rural people. For farmers in the Midwest, the promise of Republican free labor ideology proved as much of a lie as it had to urban workers.
Free labor ideology was the idea that the nation was grounded in independent white laborers working hard as free producers. That's why many Northerners hated slavery--because it threatened whites. But after the Civil War, monopoly destroyed this idea of free labor.
Both farmers and urban workers were impoverished and exploited by the corrupt capitalism of the Gilded Age. Southern farmers struggled with the aftermath of the Civil War and bottomed out cotton prices after the British expanded cotton production to their colonies in the 1860s.
Perhaps the biggest culprit for farmers’ troubles was the railroad. Since railroads gave favorable rates to big capitalists, it made up lost profits by charging high rates to farmers who depended on the railroad but did not have the power to challenge it.
On top of railroad price gouging, high tariff rates meant that farm equipment was expensive. When the government stopped printing paper money after the Civil War, cash supplies dwindled.
Finally, the government going on the gold standard in 1873 meant that, while the economy as a whole became more stable, money was in extremely short supply for the poor and for farmers.
Throughout the 1870 and 1880s, farmers organized themselves into groups to fight the poverty they faced and lack of control over their own lives they felt.
The first Farmers Alliance was formed in 1876 in Lampasas, Texas. The Farmers Alliance is the most direct link to the People’s Party, but there were all sorts of groups–the Agricultural Wheel and the Grange, as well as Colored Farmers’ Alliances for African-American farmers.
During the late 1880s, Farmers’ Alliance members began reaching out to the growing number of reformers and working-class activists.
People like Knights of Labor leader Terence Powderly began encouraging the Alliance to mount a political challenge to the corrupt 2-party system of the Gilded Age, when neither party represented working-class interests.
And before people start talking about the supposedly corrupt 2-party system today, it is nothing like the Gilded Age.
Thus in 1892, the Farmers Alliance and its allies met in Omaha to articulate a political platform and nominate a presidential candidate. The Omaha Platform demanded much that reformers would take up over the next thirty years.
It called for the 8-hour day, government control of railroad and communication networks, direct election of senators, civil service reform, the graduated income tax, and the abolition of national banks.
It also supported the coinage of silver, which would create inflation, allow farmers to pay off their substantial debts, and alleviate the very real shortage of currency the U.S. faced in the 1890s.
The People’s Party, becoming commonly known as the Populists, nominated James B. Weaver for president.
A Civil War officer and veteran of the battles of Fort Donelson and Shiloh, Weaver became disenchanted with Republican corruption during the Grant Administration and became a member of the Greenback Party, which articulated much of the People’s Party financial platform.
Weaver served as a member of Congress from Iowa as a Greenbacker. Incidentally, his great-grandson Jim Weaver was the Democratic member of Congress from Oregon who in the 80s denounced the Rajneeshis from the House floor, for those of you who recently watched the Netflix series.
The People’s Party was quite popular among southern farmers. But the white elite was still consolidating their control in the post-Reconstruction period and saw it as a major threat to be crushed, and not only because they tentatively worked with African-Americans.
Widespread intimidation and voter fraud almost certainly robbed Weaver of winning Alabama, and quite possibly several other southern states as well. Weaver did however win Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, and Nevada, as well as electoral votes in Oregon and North Dakota.
He received 22 electoral votes overall, making him the only 3rd party candidate to win electoral votes between 1860 and 1912.
It seemed the Populists would build on their Omaha Platform in the mid-1890s, with the Panic of 1893 driving working Americans into looking for any alternative to Gilded Age political norms.
But the seeds of decline were already sown. The Panic placed extra emphasis on the silver plank, which attracted more members in the West and even among rich silver interests, but which became another of the cure-all tonics that plagued critiques of Gilded Age capitalism.
The farmers also had a difficult time reaching out to urban workers, in part because they were white Anglo-Saxon racial conservatives who were quite uncomfortable with the increasingly polyglot America of the late 19th century
When William Jennings Bryan co-opted the silver plank for the Democrats in 1896 and then betrayed the Populists by nominating an opponent of labor unions as vice-president, the Populists basically died.
Many members rejoined the party of their youth, others, such as Tom Watson, turned on their former African-American allies and became virulent white supremacists. Weaver himself rejoined the Democrats.
Yet the challenge to unregulated capitalism articulated by Populists was far more influential than it receives credit for. Over the next 30 years, much of the Omaha Platform became law, including government regulation of railroads, the income tax, and direct election of senators
It is also important for us today to remember that labor is not just urban workers and labor unions, but that there are many different labor histories, including that of small farmers in states with historically low unionization rates and not much recent history of radicalism.
OK, now that we are done, feel free to blow off your fingers with fireworks tonight. Back tomorrow with a discussion of the National Labor Relations Act.
