"This Spreading Radicalism": Hamlin Garland's A Spoil of Office and the Creation of True Populism

"THIS SPREADING RADICALISM": HAMLIN GARLAND'S A SPOIL OF OFFICE AND THE CREATION OF TRUE POPULISM Quentin E. Martin Loyola University-Chicago A Spoil ofOffice (1892), Hamlin Garland's most sustained Populist novel, captures as no other work of American fiction does the tremendous growth and difficulties of the post Civil War agrarian uprisings in the West. Set in the years 1877 to late 1884, it describes the crest and decline of the Grange movement and the beginnings of the Farmers' Alliance, parent of the Populist Party. The difficult path toward Populism is embodied in the protagonist, Bradley Talcott, who develops from an ignorant Iowa farmhand into a United States Congressman and Alliance supporter; the other main character, Ida Wilbur, embodies a similar development from a young and somewhat naive Grange lecturer into an impassioned feminist and Alliance organizer. By the end of the novel, Bradley and Ida—like the agrarian West they live in, are dedicated to, and symbolize—are transformed: they have become Populists.1 Despite the novel's importance, though, it remains virtually forgotten and uniformly misread. The most recent study of the book, by Eberhard Alsen, is nearly 30 years old and shows little interest in the dominant subject matter of the novel, namely the political uprising in the West. Alsen, with an avowedly and insistently political novel in front of him, avoids any discussion of politics. Indeed, he claims that the novel is not really political at all, but rather one about courtship and the development ("rise") of the protagonist. The agrarian uprising "only serves as a historical background"; what is most interesting about the book is how "it illustrates Garland' s development as a writer," as shown by Garland's revision of it in 1897, five years after it was originally published.2 The many cuts in this later edition, especially at the end of the book, reveal a writer who, in Alsen's view, is wisely moving away from issues of "social and economic injustices to a more general and humanitarian concern for the physical suffering that the farmers of that time had to endure." To Alsen' s way of thinking, the shift from the specifics of mere economic injustice to general humanitarian themes marks an important aesthetic advance, and renders the 1897 edition "much superior to the original version."3 30Quentin E. Martin This essay argues that the exact opposite is true, that the 1892 version is clearly superior: Garland' s pmning ofIda's political speeches and his other cuts and changes de-politicize and de-radicalize the text; a fundamentally political novel is shorn of much of its essential politics . By 1897, Garland had accepted the notion, one that would affect his fictional practice for the following two decades, that politics necessarily weakens one's art. As he later wrote of Spoil, "the controversial side ofmy book killed it. I included too many political arguments."4 The same belief that politics and art are contradictory has dominated the criticism ofSpoil and ofGarland's work in general. Even Garland's best critics have proven unable to perceive the most elementary issues and virtues of Spoil. Donald Pizer, for example, claims that "despite the excellence ofA Spoil ofOffice as contemporary social history, it is undoubtedly a failure as a novel."5 V. L. Partington, writing in the late 1920s, surprisingly makes the same art-versus-politics distinction, calling Spoil "a social tract rather than a work of art."6 Edward Wagenknecht, following suit, claims that Spoil is "forward-looking sociologically but undistinguished as fiction."7 Garland himself repudiated the novel as nothing more than "a partisan plea for a stertorous People's Party" and refused to reprint it in the 1922 Border edition of his works.8 To be sure, Spoil is far from perfect. Perhaps the most grievous drawback is that in this frankly political novel, the politics, even in the 1892 edition, are oftentimes poorly explained. The scenes set in the political capitals of Des Moines and Washington, D.C., for example, contain some quotable speeches on political corruption, but never go much beyond that. Bradley's legislative experiences are rarely described , his legislative proposals never given in any detail, and...