The People’s Politics

In The Populist Moment (1978), Lawrence Goodwyn observed that because “movements of mass democratic protest . . . represent a political, an organizational, and above all, a cultural achievement of the first magnitude” they are “overwhelmingly difficult for human beings to generate.” He then argued for late–nineteenth-century Populism as a rare flash in time when rank-and-file citizens marshaled their aspirations for an egalitarian society, gathered their wits and resources, and confidently set out to remake their world.¹ Appropriately published thirty years after Goodwyn’s work, Ronald Formisano’s masterful For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s shares its predecessor’s respect for “the people” but less of its cautious tone. Whereas Goodwyn talked in singular terms about his subjects, as if they were the exception to the rule of American politics, Formisano talks about his as if they were the norm. Work through history, he suggests, and you will encounter many “populist moments” and locate countless citizens that attacked politics with the same vigor as those who lined up behind William Jennings Bryan. In Formisano’s estimation, the bold and fully engaged activism threaded through Goodwyn’s story of participatory democracy represents a pattern, not an anomaly, in American history.

This is not necessarily a path-breaking claim, but the scholarly course Formisano carves out from here truly sets him apart. As he discusses extensively in his sweeping introduction, several first-rate scholars have teased out a populist style in American politics. In most cases, however, populism has emerged from these studies as something vague and abstract, a loose sentiment that appears “everywhere, and nowhere” (pp. 2–3). As a result, “authentically populist” movements have gotten lost in the morass. But what does “authentically populist” mean? Formisano agrees that “populism” is enigmatic and difficult to pin down, but he is willing to employ it as an organizing principle that connects political activism across time. He does not go so far as to define it “as a general phenomenon according to some essential features”; as with other terms like “democracy,” the concept “is indeterminate and susceptible to many meanings” (p. 3). Yet, if not wanting to ascribe an essence to “populism,” he is willing to allocate it an internal consistency and portray it as an identifiable entity that shapes political development in ways not so dissimilar from other dominant traditions like “liberalism” and “republicanism.” Wanting to be clear in his caution, though, Formisano emphasizes that his is not a study of populism per se, but rather of populist movements, social and political organizations that shape ethereal ideals of individual rights, local autonomy, direct democracy, and organic community into oppositional crusades against centralized power. His principal goal is to provide a long historical account of how these mobilized “masses of ordinary people, arising at least initially from the grass roots and invoking the name of ‘the people’” have profoundly shaped their environment, to the degree where they have been a “central element, if not the dominant theme of” political culture in the United States (pp. 3, 6).

For the People is only the initial installment in what could eventually be a multivolume history, but it is a critical first step. As Formisano emphasizes, the populist imperative emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the scope of this book. Echoing Edmund Morgan, he explains that in the years preceding the Revolution colonial leaders crafted a useful “fiction” of popular sovereignty to justify separation from Britain. Popular sovereignty was a problematic ideal, of course, because it masked the unworkable logistics of a government run truly by and for the people, yet it still gained traction after independence as a way for Americans to understand their recent past and conceive of their nation’s future. As state-building proceeded, the paradox became exposed with every attempt by government—real or perceived—to impose order on society. Citizens who had internalized the principles of the Revolution were not about to...