The Louisiana Populist Movement, 1881–1900 (review)

In this richly detailed book, Barnes succeeds in providing an intriguing study of the Louisiana Populist movement. Although her study, and its immediate subject matter, is restricted to the latter part of the nineteenth-century South, her tale is actually a timeless one. Barnes’ larger project is to understand how and why plain people (1) fail to recognize and act on common class interests over emotional wedge issues such as race, or (2) allow their legitimate material grievances to be redirected into faux-populistic outrage that targets the wrong adversaries. In Tea-Party America, Barnes’ work has obvious, distinct, and sad echoes.

Barnes is curious about the enduring question of how people of modest means—poor, plain, working-class people—may attempt to improve their circumstances and those of their children through collective action. Unlike most other authors, Barnes is concerned with a social movement generally considered to have been “unsuccessful,” purposely choosing an ostensible failure on the grounds that it may be able to teach us something that a universally acknowledged “success” cannot.

After an initial chapter exploring the three leading social-movement theories (resource mobilization, political process, and framing), Barnes’ next eight chapters painstakingly detail the Louisiana Populist movement from its pre-conditions and early Farmers’ Union years, raising the issues of biracial cooperation, the shift from economic cooperation to politics, and variances in political strategies. Succeeding chapters address mobilization, political opportunity, and framing with reference to the national election years of 1892 and 1896, as well as the state elections of 1894, and discuss the problems surrounding the fusion of the Democratic and the People’s parties as generated by free-silver advocates.

One of the book’s more important conclusions concerns the Populists and race. Barnes concludes that the mobilization of Louisiana farmers into the Populist movement was undermined by a contemporary drive for disfranchisement that decimated the potential voter base (and political opportunity/process) of the movement. Here Barnes’ work stands in stark contrast to the more sanguine estimations of Woodward, Kousser, Perman, Hair, and others, who endowed poor-white farmers with a racial egalitarianism and enlightenment that, Barnes argues, did not exist in Louisiana (233–234).¹ She also posits that a bitter framing dispute between free-silver fusion and anti-fusion factions impeded the movement, taking specific issue with the work of Hicks and Hofstadter.² She is not shy about pointing out differences of interpretation with other scholars, even those with whom she largely agrees, such as Goodwyn and McNall.³

The author’s writing is clear, concise, and balanced, and the end product is an excellent example of the melding of the disciplines of history and sociology. Historians, though generally good story tellers, sometimes allow their works to become dominated by facts and details at the expense of a greater analytical arc and a wider audience. By the same token, sociologists and other social scientists, though generally skilled at mathematical modeling and the quantification of human behavior, sometimes struggle to connect abstract theories and elegant data sets with work grounded in original sources—material that can bestow the scholarship with an unmatched level of authority. Happily, Barnes’ detailed study is solidly grounded in the relevant primary and archival sources as well as responsive to the analytical framework provided by social science—specifically, the use of the three social-movement theories mentioned above. A particularly ambitious goal of the book is to demonstrate that treating these theories in a complementary fashion is more fruitful than “depicting them as competing theories or selectively employing one or the other” (xiii).