American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898 [Book review]

Abstract

Deserving wide adoption as a text or supplementary course reading because of its clarity, comprehensiveness, and length (208 short pages plus a 20-page bibliography, but no footnotes), this fascinating overview by the author of the standard history of the Farmers' Alliance demonstrates the limits of a cultural approach to Populism. Sympathetic to the Populists' humane impulses but critical of them for alleged racism and sexism, McMath believes that they were doomed to failure because they represented the preindustrial "republican" ideology of "producerism" and because they could not sustain a "movement culture" or transform or surmount their language of protest once they entered the gritty political arena of posturing and compromise. Drawing many of their ideas from Jacksonian trade unionists and contemporary intellectuals, and appealing (McMath thinks) more to farmers' desire for independence than to their self-interest, the Populists were anachronistic in the world of industrial capitalism, not forerunners of Progressivism and the New Deal, as John D. Hicks contended.

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