Penguin History of the United States of America (80 page)

The Omaha platform remains an impressive document even today. It opened with a stirring preamble written by Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, which set forth the Populist attitude as clearly as possible:

We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislatures, the Congress, and even touches the ermine of the bench
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… The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated; our homes covered with mortgages; labour impoverished; and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labour beats down their wages; a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down,
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and they are rapidly degenerating into European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes – tramps and millionaires.

There followed a long list of the changes favoured by the Populists: ‘a national currency, safe, sound and flexible’; ‘the sub-treasury plan of the Farmers’ Alliance, or some better system’ (this was a plea for help to the farmers with the financing of their labours); ‘the free and unlimited coinage of silver’; ‘a graduated income tax’; a postal savings bank; ‘all land now held by railroads and other corporations in excess of their actual needs, and all lands now owned by aliens, should be reclaimed by the government and held by actual settlers only’; the nationalization of the railroads, the telegraph and the telephone systems; ‘the unperverted Australian or secret ballot system’; ‘the further restriction of undesirable immigration’; a shortening of the working day; the disbanding of the Pinkertons; ‘the legislative system known as the initiative and referendum’; Presidents and Vice-Presidents to be elected for one term only, and Senators to be directly chosen by the people. An earlier endorsement of votes for women was dropped from the programme and a tactful endorsement of ‘fair and liberal pensions to ex-Union soldiers and sailors’ was included – in American politics there has never been any advantage in opposing veterans’ benefits.

What is impressive about the Omaha platform is how much ground it covers. For good or bad (the plank about immigrants can hardly be called liberal) it drew up the agenda on which reformers were to operate for the next twenty years. This was in large part the work of the miscellaneous reformers who rallied to the Populist standard in the eighties; but it speaks very well for the intelligence and public spirit of the farmers that they should enthusiastically lend themselves to a programme which read like rank revolutionism in the conditions of 1892. They were not just a selfish single interest, lobbying for more money. They wanted to redeem the soul of America.

This became ever clearer as the great crusade went on. Nothing like it had been seen since 1840. A succession of remarkable orators suddenly strode the land. There was ‘Sockless Jerry Simpson’, who got his nickname because he taunted an opponent with wearing silk stockings and himself was said to wear no socks at all. There was ‘Pitchfork Ben’ Tillman, already mentioned. There was Tom Watson of Georgia, and General Weaver himself. The most remarkable portent was perhaps Mrs Mary Lease of Kansas. The People’s party had shirked the duty of furthering women’s suffrage, but it had nevertheless produced the first really effective and important woman politician. Mrs Lease was of Irish birth, appearance and temperament; she had a scorching tongue and abounding energy; it was she who told the farmers to raise less corn and more hell, which became the slogan of the movement. ‘The people are at bay,’ she cried. ‘Let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware!’ She became a political power in her own right; she and her associates, by giving voice to the anxieties and preoccupations of millions, changed the course of American history, though at the price of personal failure.

They were helped in their battle by the turn of events. Honest, obstinate Grover Cleveland had scarcely taken office again when the panic of 1893 erupted. It was followed by a depression which lasted for four years. Today, the causes do not seem very mysterious. As usual, the unregulated capitalist cycle had led to over-expansion – that is, businessmen had bought and built more than they could pay for – which was necessarily followed by a sudden contraction as individuals, banks and companies found themselves in difficulties for money. Even in 1893 there were some radical groups who saw the downturn in these terms. But there are fashions in economics as in everything else, and in the last years of the nineteenth century far too many Americans, as it happened, were obsessed with the currency question and, whether they were radical or conservative, interpreted everything that occurred in terms of gold and silver. The first consequence of this obsession was the destruction of President Cleveland.

Cleveland had become President originally because of his reputation for total honesty in a corrupt age; and during his first term he had demonstrated that the reputation was well deserved. He had struggled against the grosser forms of patronage, against the Congressional habit of ladling out pensions to all who could make a case, however bogus, that they had earned them
by their sufferings for the Union in the Civil War, and against the chaotic way in which Congress settled the tariff. The Democrats were supposed to be the low-tariff party, the Republicans the protectionists; but whenever the subject came up for debate all party consistency was thrown to the winds in the scramble for special treatment. Every state, and therefore every Congressional delegation, was split between protectionists and free-traders; individual Senators and Congressmen voted as they thought would best please their constituencies. No rational tariff was possible in the circumstances, and, as Cleveland saw, the result was oppressive to consumers and helpful only to monopolists. But when he came out in open opposition to the excessively high tariff he only injured himself. All the special interests turned against him, and in 1888, although he increased his popular vote and popular majority, he only won a minority in the electoral college.

His stand on the tariff seemed to be vindicated when the Republicans pushed through the notorious McKinley Tariff of 1890 (named after its architect, the Republican Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee) which blatantly favoured the special interests; indignation about this was no doubt one of the reasons why Cleveland was elected in 1892. The day after he took office panic broke out on Wall Street.

As always in such crises, the word went out that business confidence must be restored (it would have been considered wild socialism to suggest that what needed restoring was public confidence in business). Cleveland, like some other conservative statesmen at other times and places, sacrificed everything to achieve this end, and failed. Businessmen continued timid; that is, they would not invest because they did not see much chance of profit and because many of them were bankrupt; the economy did not revive. Instead the mystic message came to Wall Street that all would be well if Cleveland defended the gold standard; that is, if he maintained the ability of the US Treasury to pay its bills in gold, rather than silver or paper money; and he believed what he heard, believed it a great deal too fervently. There was not much room for ideas in Cleveland’s massive head, but when one had battered its way in it could never be dislodged. Cleveland became the leading ‘gold-bug’. He called Congress into special session to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which had put a certain amount of the white metal into circulation as coins; and after a bruising political battle the Act was revoked, to the great disgust of the Western and Southern wings of the Democratic party, which were hearing mystic messages of their own about the importance of’free silver’. The economy did not revive. Cleveland tried to lower the tariff, but another frightful Congressional scrimmage (some 600 amendments were proposed to the administration bill) resulted in a tariff very little different from the Republican one that it replaced, except that it included provisions for a federal income tax. This tax was promptly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (Mr Justice Harlan again dissenting), less on legal grounds than because of the political prejudices of an exceedingly reactionary bench. The economy did
not revive. A drain of gold from the Treasury continued, faith in the credit of the U S government began to weaken and in desperation Cleveland called in J. P. Morgan. The government issued four bond issues, to be paid for in gold, between 1894 and 1896; Morgan marketed them on Wall Street (for a consideration); at great cost, enough gold was raised to meet the government’s obligations. Then new gold discoveries in the Klondike and South Africa vastly increased the supply of the precious metal, and the gold standard was safe until 1929. The economy did not revive – at least not during Cleveland’s administration.

The political consequences of this story were of profound importance. Given the primitive administrative machinery which was all that the administration had to work with, the economic convictions of the President and the attitudes of the bankers on Wall Street (where further disruptive panic would have followed any unorthodox move on Cleveland’s part) and in the City of London, it is difficult to see how the bond issues could have been avoided. To Western and Southern Democrats, however, they were merely proof that Cleveland had betrayed them. Then, the gold-bug administration showed itself stonily indifferent to the sufferings of ordinary Americans in the depression. A wave of strikes swept across the country in 1894 in an attempt to deter employers from laying off their workers. The Cleveland administration’s sole contributions to the crisis were the invention of the labour injunction and the dispatch of federal troops to break the railroad strike in Chicago, overriding both the Constitution and the protests of the Governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld. The Congressional elections in the autumn were disastrous for the Democrats, and although the Populists also lost ground, their ideas did not: both main parties by now contained large numbers of Populist fellow-travellers.

The People’s party, in fact, had a great opportunity before it. Discontent was now as vigorous and vocal in the East and in the cities as in the West and South; socialist ideas were gaining ground, many of which were similar or identical to Populist proposals. A serious bid for the support of industrial labour would have met many obstacles – not least the caution of Samuel Gompers – but might have won extraordinary rewards. Unfortunately the metallic obsession proved even more ruinous to the progressives than to the conservatives.

Behind the cry of ‘free silver’ lay the all-too-concrete interests of the miners and mine-owners of the Rockies. If gold was for the time being too scarce, silver was too plentiful: its producers were desperate to keep its price up. They were well able to finance a propagandist campaign which could appeal to the inflationist traditions of the frontier. The original Populists were, as a matter of fact, really advanced thinkers on the currency question, looking forward to the day when what their opponents disdainfully called ‘fiat money’ – greenbacks – would replace the fetish of metal, and government could regulate the amount of money in circulation simply by the issue of paper backed only by its own credit – the system that is now universal.
(The system breeds its own difficulties, not least a permanent inflationary tendency which no one living today is likely to regard lightly, but at least it is an improvement on a money supply randomly determined by the amount of precious metal that happens to be available at any one moment.) However, they were forced on to the defensive and then swept aside by the mania for silver which swept the West and South during the mid-nineties. The rest of the Populist programme came under fire: what votes were in it? Said General Weaver, ‘I shall favour going before the people in 1896 with the money question alone, unencumbered with any other contention whatsoever.’ Unfortunately silver as an issue had no appeal to the industrial workers whatever – rather the reverse, for the gold-bugs told them again and again that industry would be ruined unless the threat to dilute the currency with silver coins was beaten back. What the workers wanted was work, and an end to the labour injunction; questions to which the silverites were deaf. So the Presidential election of 1896 turned into a grand battle between the sections: between East and West, North and South; between the new urban industrial society and the old agrarian world. It settled, in a sense, the future identity of the Democratic and Republican parties; it eliminated the People’s party for ever; and it was economically entirely irrelevant, though it turned entirely on questions of economics.

The Republican campaign was dominated not by the candidate, William McKinley (1843–1901), another worthy mediocrity, but by his puppet-master, Marcus Alonso Hanna (1837–1904), a successful businessman who was also a politician with flair. Hanna knew better than to believe all the panic-mongering that was going on among the influential, but he took care to encourage it, for it would help his candidate. He exacted unprecedentedly large contributions from big business (Standard Oil and the House of Morgan were made to hand over a quarter of a million dollars each) and spent lavishly, while carefully coaching his man as to how to behave. McKinley waged the classical ‘front-porch’ campaign, staying sedately at home in Ohio, where he received an endless flow of delegations. They addressed him in speeches previously arranged, and sometimes written, by the candidate’s advisers, and received suitable replies. Meanwhile a flying squad of Republican orators went up and down the land, lecturing insistently on the importance of the gold standard. (Republicans who believed in silver had walked out of the nominating convention and now worked for the opposition.)