Populism and Imperialism: Politics, Culture, and Foreign Policy in the American West, 1890–1900 by Nathan Jessen (review)

Few Pulitzer Prize–winning books have had so much to answer for, or been answered so emphatically, as Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform. Considering how many misunderstandings of Populism it unleashed, it is a wonder that more sympathetic historians have not started muttering about the “Crime of ’55,” the way free-silver advocates did the “Crime of ’73.” Hofstadter’s picture of the movement as speckled with backward-looking cranks, conspiracy theorists, and anti-Semites has undergone serious modification, but in one respect—its implication of the Populists in America’s imperial adventure at the turn of the century—it has awaited challenge. Nathan Jessen’s Populism and Imperialism not only knocks that misconception to flinders, it shows how far radical reform’s enemies used overseas adventures to smother it in the American flag.

As Jessen would argue, no major political movement so challenged the fundamental premises of a corporate America as the People’s Party did. Nor, in spite of its defeat in the 1896 “battle of the standards” was it as doomed to irrelevance and extinction as historians imagine. Indeed, from the Great Plains west, it throve, even with standpat Republicans controlling Washington. Its nemesis came only as America plunged into a war, ostensibly to unshackle Cuba, and, in the name of national security and the protection of overseas markets, grabbed Hawaii and gained title to Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Populists shared a sympathy for oppressed Cubans, but they had signed on for a war of liberation, not subjugation, nor for one paid for by consumers, while bondholders made out like bandits. Contrary to myth, most Populists set their face against empire from the first. Seeing colonization as a threat to democracy at home and a boon to plutocracy and militarism everywhere, they insisted on Hawaiians’ and Filipinos’ right to rule themselves and warned that the wealth-holders wanted empire for the cheap labor that would crush out American wages earthward. In this, they found a widened common cause with Democrats like William Jennings Bryan.

A fatal commitment! As early as 1898, Republicans had inflicted devastating losses on the party by accusing it of failing to rally around the flag. By 1900, the cry that Populists and anti-imperialist Democrats were treasonous, latter-day Copperheads, had risen tempest-loud, and all the louder because the boasted “full dinner pail” that Republicans were touting brimmed over only for the privileged corporations. With some silver Republicans and even a few Populist leaders joining the expansionists, the remnant found themselves so discredited that by 1901, scarcely a corporal’s guard of the party held public office anywhere. Not for the last time would economic conservatives use cultural and patriotic hysteria to protect their vested interests from challenge.

Jessen’s account is meticulously precise and stupendously well researched, perhaps the first political history of the imperial foray in two generations to let fact rather than preconception and theory define its narrative. As a rehabilitation of western reformers’ latter-day reputation and a re-thinking of the anti-imperialist movement, it is wholly convincing. One might quibble that it may understate economic factors and intraparty dissensions in the Populist decline too far; it may also overlook how far, at least in some states, a new commitment by major parties to a reform platform offered restless voters another alternative to the status quo. None of this depreciates Jessen’s contribution at all. Buyers of Populism and Imperialism will consider it a conquest worth keeping.