Thread by @EricLondonSEP

Thread on Tom Watson, William Jennings Bryan and the Democratic Party's use of racial politics to crush Populism in the 1880s/90s:

C. Vann Woodward showed in his landmark "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," segregation, and all that it entailed, took decades to implement.

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It was not until the first years of the 20th century that it reached its full dimensions—the near-total segregation of public space, the stamping out of democratic rights, and the ready use of violent “southern justice” and the lynch mob to prop it all up.

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And it came in direct response to a political movement of poor whites and blacks that posed an existential threat to slavocracy’s heirs in “the New South.”

The post-Reconstruction development of the class struggle across the US, including in the South...

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...gave impetus to a powerful tendency among black and white workers and poor farmers toward unity against the corporations. It was this objective process which organically undercut the racial politics of the Southern Democratic elites.

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Faced with the threat posed by the Farmers Alliances and Populist movements of the post-Reconstruction period, rich whites, aided by the strikebreakers in the Ku Klux Klan, asserted that efforts to mobilize small farmers and workers against the big landowners...

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...and the corporations (especially in unity with black sharecroppers) threatened the system of “white supremacy.”

Woodward describes how thousands of poor white and black farmers filled the small towns of Georgia in the early 1890s...

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...traveling great distances to hear Congressman Tom Watson declare that the People’s Party opposed racism and would “make lynch law odious to the people.” Woodward wrote of southern Populism at its apex:

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[Woodward]: "Under Watson’s tutelage the Southern white masses were beginning to learn to regard the Negro as a political ally bound to them by economic ties and a common destiny, rather than as a slender prop to injured self-esteem in the shape of ‘White Supremacy.’...

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[Woodward cont'd] Here was a foundation of political realism upon which some more enduring structure of economic democracy might be constructed. Never before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they did during the Populist struggles."

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The catastrophic breakup of this burgeoning alliance was in large part the product of widespread farmer dissatisfaction with the People’s Party’s rotten “fusion” with the Democratic Party, both in the 1894 midterm elections and in 1896 with the party’s nomination of...

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...Nebraskan agrarian Democrat William Jennings Bryan as its presidential candidate, who had previously secured the nomination of the Democratic Party. This event, hypocritically facilitated by Watson himself, deflated the Populist wave and opened up a period of bitter...

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...reaction across the country. This should serve as a historical lesson for those who argue today that “left” causes will be aided by working within the confines of the Democratic Party.

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In the South, the Democratic Party capitalized on the mood of defeat to drastically expand Jim Crow segregation, making a breakthrough in their decades-long effort to divide poor whites and blacks against one another.

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In May 1896, when the plan for Bryan’s nomination was far advanced, the Supreme Court gave pseudo-legal cover to the doctrine of “separate but equal” in its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

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The historian Robert Wiebe wrote that “the movement for Jim Crow revived after 1896.” Referencing the decline of Populism, Wiebe adds:

"The viciousness with which Southern farmers and townsmen attacked the Negro after 1896 told a story of the community’s failure…

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[Weibe cont'd]: "Along with that lingering suspicion of immigrants came an increasingly elaborate race theory, designed to cover all peoples, and the spread of a cold, formalized anti-Semitism. Throughout America a residual fear had shrunk the outer limits of optimism."

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Tom Watson, as Woodward explains, became a vicious racist, rejoining the Democratic Party & notoriously inflaming the public against Jewish factory manager Leo Frank when the latter was falsely charged w/ the 1913 murder of a 13-year-old white girl, Mary Phagan, in ATL.

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Watson called Frank a “libertine Jew” and demanded his death in his newspaper, the Jeffersonian, contradicting his earlier statements by writing, “Lynch law is a good sign; it shows that justice lives among the people.” A mob killed Frank on August 17, 1915.

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