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Reviewed by:
  • For the People: American Populist Movements From The Revolution To The 1850s
  • Charles Postel
For the People: American Populist Movements From The Revolution To The 1850s. By Ronald P. Formisano. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2008.

The tumultuous first eighty years of the United States produced a varied procession of grass roots social mobilizations—from Shays's Rebellion, to the Anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Anti-Masons, New York's Anti-Renters, Rhode Island's Dorr war, and the Know-Nothings. In the usual treatment, such movements play multiple roles as historical losers, political outliers, flights of fantasy, radical utopians, dangerous reactionaries, and, more generally, speed bumps along the rushing advance of the American republic.

In a fine work of synthesis, Ronald Formisano puts these grass roots mobilizations at the center of political developments. It turns out, for example, that Daniel Shays's band of protestors in western Massachusetts was but a small part of a much broader pattern of backwoods and extralegal movements that extended from the Carolinas to Vermont. As popular movements shifted to mainly electoral and political strategies in the first decades of the nineteenth century, these often non-party mobilizations made mass politics considerably more complex than the usual party binaries.

This is the first in a two volume work on nineteenth century social movements in which Formisano seeks to shed light on both left and right-leaning mobilizations that have emerged in recent years in the United States and Europe. He argues that the earlier movements followed a pattern of being simultaneously liberal and illiberal, progressive and reactionary. This argument is most effective when applied to the Anti-Masons—the subject of the book's three most vital chapters. Taking Anti-Masonry seriously, Formisano offers especially keen insights about religion and gender. The result is a nuanced treatment of an influential movement that displayed tendencies that were at once egalitarian and authoritarian, democratic and intolerant.

Formisano demonstrates a masterful knowledge of the historical literature, and produces a compelling narrative. Part of his success is due to the way he fashions the concept populist. He explains that from the early nineteenth century what might be called [End Page 150] a populist rhetorical style became a mainstay of American political culture. But his interest is populist social movements, which he defines as originating in grass roots mobilizations that invoked the name of the people against the usurpations of political, economic, or other elites. Although representative government offered the promise of popular sovereignty, in its realization the promise was often deferred by the powerful. Populist movements, Formisano explains, emerged to bridge this gap between promise and reality.

Formisano cautions that his historical subjects "would not have recognized the terms 'progressive' or 'reactionary' much less have understood the ideological dichotomy that contemporary liberals and conservatives extrapolate from them." (135) But in places he might have paid more heed to his own warning. His efforts to measure widely divergent historical phenomena across a reactionary-to-progressive spectrum can make for a confining pattern, a pattern that tends to understate the centrality of slavery. Similarly, he provides inadequate explanation for placing Free Soil and related movements of the "people" against the "Slave Power" outside of populist authenticity. These reservations aside, this is a wise, significant, and thought-provoking book that takes social movements out of the shadows and places them squarely in the middle of American politics.

Charles Postel
California State University, Sacramento
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