Another Look at the “Hard Side” of Populism

Historians mainly remember Richard Hofstadter’s depiction of Populism in The Age of Reform (1955) for its critique of what he called Populism’s “soft side,” an anxiety-ridden, conspiracy-minded movement of agrarian radicals who feared that the march of progress was leaving them behind. Less well remembered is Hofstadter’s depiction of Populism’s “hard side,” represented by the farmer as “a harassed little country businessman,” who understood himself to be part of a market economy and who focused his energies on “agricultural improvement, business methods, and pressure politics.”¹ Drawing his examples of hard side Populism from the two decades after the demise of the People’s party, Hofstadter argued that after 1896 agrarianism as a “mass movement” (a primitive form of collective action in the social science terminology of the 1950s) yielded to modern methods through which farmers influenced federal legislation and the markets in which they competed.

In an important new national study, Charles Postel locates the origins of this hard side of Populism squarely within the experience of the People’s party and, especially, of the Farmers’ Alliance. Unlike Hofstadter, Postel sees continuity between the Alliance-Populist agenda and early-twentieth-century agribusiness. Populists, Postel contends, were forward-looking men and women who embraced the Enlightenment idea of progress, not backward-looking yeoman trapped in the amber of agrarianism. They were comfortable with modern means of transportation, communications, and mass media, and they shaped “the weapons of protest out of the modern materials of technological, organizational, and ideological innovation” (p. viii). In other words, the Pops tried to beat the captains of industry at their own game.

After reading The Populist Vision, it is tempting to cite Dorothy’s comment to her little dog after the cyclone had deposited them in Oz: “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” These are not exactly the Populists of Hicks, Hofstadter, or Goodwyn. Kansas is not the normative Populist state here, nor are Texas or Georgia, but California. The central characters are not William Jennings Bryan, Tom Watson, or Mary Elizabeth Lease, but Charles Macune, father of large-scale economic cooperation in the “Southern” Farmers’ Alliance, and Marion Cannon, Los Angeles booster, California cooperative and Alliance leader, and Populist Congressman.

Many who have written about Populism will find their oxen being gored by Postel. This is a good thing, for his is a book well worth arguing with. Postel makes a compelling case for reconsidering parts of the major narratives of Populism and he offers fresh insights into the emergence of modern agribusiness as part of industrial America in parallel with the expansion of the national state. He joins a growing list of scholars who are connecting the study of historical social movements with a new generation of social science theory far different from the structural-functionalism which gave Hofstadter a scientific vocabulary in the 1950s.

The Alliance-Populist agenda as outlined by Postel is familiar: “The power of the Populist movement lay in the efforts of common citizens to shape the national economy and governance” through large-scale cooperatives and a legislative program which, if enacted, would have expanded the role of the federal government in regulating transportation, communications, and finance, and strengthened existing agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Postal system (p. 4). Less familiar is Postel’s analysis of the mindset of Populist organizational leaders and intellectuals: “A firm belief in progress gave them confidence to act. Because they believed in the transforming power of science and technology, they sought to attain expertise and knowledge for their own improvement. Because they believed in economies of scale, they strove to adapt the model of large-scale enterprise to their own needs of association and marketing. Because they believed in the logic of modernity, the Populist ‘clodhoppers’ attempted to fashion an alternative modernity suitable to their own interests” (p. 4).

While acknowledging that this alternative modernity had some roots in older traditions, Postel denies explanatory...