In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

“A HOST OF STURDY PATRIOTS” The Texas Populists Gregg Cantrell Despite claims to the contrary, it was really no coincidence that two separate conventions were being held on consecutive days in Dallas in August 1891. One was the annual gathering of the state Farmers’ Alliance, the massively popular self-help organization that, although officially nonpartisan, had increasingly served as a political protest vehicle for struggling farmers over the previous several years. The other was the founding convention of the Texas People’s (or Populist ) Party. “I want to emphasize the fact that the alliance has nothing on earth to do with the people’s party convention,” declared Alliance leader Harry Tracy, “and is in nowise responsible for its being held in Dallas at the time of the meeting of the state alliance.” Tracy was speaking a bit disingenuously, and former Alliance state lecturer William Lamb—now a Populist organizer—knew it. When a Dallas Morning News reporter pointed out to him that the Alliance had “adopted demands that can only be secured through legislative enactments,” Lamb admitted that this was indeed the case. “Will those demands be granted by either of the old parties?” asked the reporter. “They will not,” Lamb replied. “That being the case,” continued the reporter, “what remains for the alliance as a non-partisan organization but to vote with your party?” “That’s all that is left for it,” Lamb forthrightly conceded.1 And so it was. Most of the founders of the Texas People’s Party were indeed Alliancemen, and the platform they adopted incorporated all of the Alliance’s political demands. It is an oversimplification, though, merely to say that the Alliance “went into politics” in 1891. The Popu- 54 Gregg Cantrell list platforms of the 1890s may have been forged over the previous decade by the various state and national conventions of the Farmers’ Alliance , but these in turn had borrowed heavily from the platforms of the Greenback, Independent, and Union Labor political insurgencies of the 1870s and 1880s, and also from the Knights of Labor. Not surprisingly , most Populist leaders had been active in the Alliance, the Knights, or in various third-party political campaigns. Many had been involved in more than one of these movements, and some in all of them. The birth of the Texas People’s Party, then, was the culmination of a quarter-century of political insurgency in the Lone Star State.2 Nationally, the central document of the People’s Party was the Omaha Platform, written in 1892 at the party’s first national convention —a gathering in which Texan delegates played conspicuous roles. This brief but eloquent document called for sweeping reforms in three broad categories: finance, transportation, and land. Of these, the financial planks received the most attention. They demanded “a national currency, safe, sound, and flexible, issued by the general government”—in other words, a system of paper (or “fiat”) money, not redeemable in gold or silver. The platform also endorsed the controversial Subtreasury Plan (or “a better system”) of the Farmers’ Alliance, whereby farmers would store staple crops in government warehouses, use the crops as collateral for low-interest government loans, and then have the crops released onto the market in an orderly fashion when prices were best, thus relieving the yearly harvest-season price collapse . The platform called for the free and unlimited coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, economy in government, and the establishment of postal savings banks. By increasing the amount of money in circulation and thus causing inflation, these measures would provide relief to debt-strapped farmers who for years had been forced to repay loans in appreciated dollars at harvest time. These measures would also remove the country’s financial system from the hands of private bankers and place it under the control of the government.3 Recognizing the monopolistic nature of the nation’s railroad industry , the Populist transportation plank called for government ownership of the railroads, a measure backed by Texas Populists, who had witnessed the failure of mere government regulation to control predatory pricing and other unfair practices. Similarly, the plank called for government ownership of the telephone and telegraph systems, which by their very nature tended to be monopolistic.4 The land plank also echoed the antimonopoly theme of the financial and transportation planks, calling for a prohibition on alien landowning and demanding that all lands held for speculative purposes by railroads and other corporations be “reclaimed by the govern...

Share