Losing the Center: The Decline of American Liberalism, 1968–1992

3. Too Big to Fail: Fred Harris and the New Populism

3 too Big to Fail Fred Harris and the New Populism the jailers released the prisoner so he could to testify before the senate. Clad in a plaid short-sleeve shirt, the sixth-generation farmer explained to the Washington powerbrokers: “You know, justice is not always brought and set in your lap. sometimes, you have to stand up and reach for it.”1 Wayne Cryts should know. in February 1981, he faced down a slew of federal agents as his ragtag band of five hundred farmers liberated thirty-one thousand bushels of soybeans from a Missouri grain elevator.2 igniting this entire episode was a grain company’s bankruptcy. When the Puxico, Missouri, granary went belly-up, legal possession of the soybeans stored in its silos went to the banks rather than the actual owners— the farmers. outraged, Cryts organized a fleet of three hundred trucks to take back the cultivators’ property. When authorities jailed him on criminal and civil contempt charges, Cryts became an instant folk hero. With farmers picketing his Arkansas prison and planning “tractor protests” in support of the “Bean Day” action, Congress hurriedly rewrote bankruptcy laws.3 Altering the insolvency statutes, however, failed to stanch the tumult. During the early 1980s, high interest rates and sluggish commodity prices led to record farm foreclosures.4 in the face of such adverse circumstances , farmers organized similar Bean Day revolts. one midwestern agriculturalist captured the essence of this nascent populist movement: “We’re trying to unite the farmer, the small businessman and the urban American and tell them if we don’t survive . . . they won’t either.”5 At the apex of this rural upheaval, a presidential election commenced. Pitting a wealthy Californian against a rural midwesterner, the match seemed a perfect opportunity to coalesce a populist coalition. Despite Wayne Cryts and a record spate of farm foreclosures, ronald reagan demolished Walter Fred r. harris clasps LaDonna harris’s arm during his presidential campaign, summer of 1975 (courtesy Carl Albert Congressional research and studies Center) Too Big to Fail 59 Mondale. even more puzzling, the gipper won farmers and the white working class. so much for Bean Day. Fifteen years earlier, in 1969, Charlie stenvig had signaled a white ethnic revolt. simultaneous with and part of this upheaval was a wider white working-class defection from the Democratic Party. While white ethnics hail from cities in the north and the industrial Upper Midwest, the largely Protestant and nonunionized white working class, like Wayne Cryts, reside in the rural farmlands, small towns, and downscale suburbs of the south, Appalachia , and the Lower Midwest. scarcely a neat and tidy demographic category, the white working class is real, nonetheless. From “nascar Dads” to “reagan Democrats,” psephologists regularly create media-savvy synonyms for the white working class en masse. such a large grouping can scarcely be one cohesive thing. Unlike white ethnics, the white working class rarely, if ever, engages in recognizable identity politics. instead of hyphenated Americans, low Protestant churches and Dale earnhardt sr. are their cultural markers. though they eschew ethnicity, these Middle Americans share a common heritage and cultural bond: scotchirishness and Jacksonian populism. Jacksonian Populism Scotch-Irish is an Americanism denoting backcountry settlers’ mixed heritage and region. As Protestants from northern ireland and the scottish lowlands, they bore a cultural legacy remarkably distinct from their fellow British colonists.6 emigrating in great waves throughout the eighteenth century, the scotch-irish flowed into the Appalachian and Allegheny backcountry before settling in West Virginia, Kentucky, southern indiana and illinois, tennessee, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, and texas.7 A “folk community” bound by poverty, pride, and militant Christianity, this immigrant grouping established the cultural basis for what became Jacksonian populism.8 extending far beyond those professing scotch-irish heritage and their original settlements, Jacksonian populism became the default ethos of what is now called Red America. though populism remains an inchoate and protean movement, the Jacksonian variety originated as an expression of scotch-irish cultural and political values—an instinct more than an ideology . Jacksonian populists have long claimed that “the powers that be are transgressing the nation’s founding creed.”9 in this way, they constantly see 60 Losing the Center large institutions (government or corporate) as inevitably aligned against the interests of the majority. spawning copycats throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Jacksonian populism remains vibrant. As the imagined tribune of the people , these populists employ a changeable...