populism

n.

1. 1. A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.
   2. The movement organized around this philosophy.
2. Populism The philosophy of the Populist Party.

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(1) A movement in the United States that gave expression to the grievances and disillusionment of (largely Western) farmers, who felt themselves oppressed by debt and let down by dishonoured promises of cheap land and cheap railroad rates. The movement began in the 1870s, peaked with the Populist Party's running of a candidate for President and electing four Senators in 1892, took a leading role in the Democratic Party in 1896, and gradually merged into the more broadly based progressive movement.
(2) A democratic and collectivist movement in late nineteenth-century Russia. ‘Populist’ is a direct translation of Russian Narodnik, first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in an 1895 article by one of the leading populists, P. Milyoukov.
(3) More generally, support for the preferences of ordinary people. The meaning has always been somewhat derogatory (‘pander to Populism’, 1893, is the earliest reference in OED). In so far as a specific set of populist beliefs can be identified, they involve defence of the (supposed) traditions of the little man against change seen as imposed by powerful outsiders, which might variously be governments, businesses, or trade unions. These beliefs are disproportionately prevalent among the petite bourgeoisie. Although the Russian populists were intellectuals going among the peasantry, most populism is anti-intellectual in tone. Movements which have been generally regarded as populist include Peronism, Poujadism, and the US Presidential campaigns of Ross Perot 1992 and 1996. Politicians of any party may appeal to populist sentiment when it suits them, and denounce such appeals when that suits them.

Populism arose in the late 1880s and 1890s as a movement of farmers, laborers, and other reformers protesting the inequities of American life. The late nineteenth century was an era of rapid innovations in telecommunications, steam transport, industrial organization, and global trade. The Populists believed that these changes unfairly benefited the leaders of industry and finance, and impoverished the men and women of the farms and workshops that produced the nation's wealth. Because of this belief, scholars have often described Populism as an expression of the resistance of tradition-bound small producers to the modernizing ethos of progress. Yet many late-nineteenth century farmers and laborers showed as much commitment to the ideals of progress as any other group of Americans. Instead of rejecting change, the Populists sought to put their own stamp on the technical and market revolutions. Farmers, mechanics, and other ordinary citizens were confident that they could collectively shape commerce and government to serve their own interests. Therein lay the significance of the Populist movement.

After the Civil War (1861–1865), the combination of Indian removal and railroad expansion opened up vast areas of the trans-Mississippi West to wheat and other staple-crop farming. In the South, too, cotton growing expanded into new territory. The global market for American cereals and fibers, however, failed to keep pace with the rapid growth of American agriculture, which placed a steady downward pressure on market prices. Between 1870 and 1890, the wholesale index of farm products in the United States declined from 112 to 71. For many farmers, their highly mortgaged and indebted farms offered scant prospects of sustainability, much less of prosperity.

Farmers' Alliances

Reform-minded farmers resorted to organization. In the upper Midwest, they affiliated with the Northwestern Farmers' Alliance led by Milton George, and with the Illinois-based Farmers' Mutual Benefit Association. The National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union, or Southern Alliance, represented the largest and most influential farm organization. Originating in Texas, the Southern Alliance organized farmers from Georgia to California, and from the Dakotas to New Mexico. By 1890, it claimed over 1,200,000 members in twenty-seven states.

Charles Macune, the president of the Southern Alliance, believed that farmers had to organize as a business interest on a par with other commercial interests. Accordingly, farmers' organizations lobbied to raise the position of agriculture in the national economy. They sought diffusion of commercial, scientific, and technical knowledge. They advocated cooperative business principles and experimented with large-scale incorporated enterprises to regulate cotton and other agricultural markets. They also pressed for an expanded government role in the farm economy. They took the federal postal system as a model of potential reform, and demanded postal savings banks, a postal telegraph, and nationalized railways. Macune also proposed a subtreasury system that would provide low-interest federal loans on staple crops to be stored in federal warehouses.

Farm reformers also sought rural education. They campaigned for public schools and colleges. At the same time, the Alliance movement itself was to serve as "the most powerful and complete educator of modern times." The Alliances created an extensive system of literature networks, lecture circuits, and adult education across much of rural America. Farmwomen took part in this educational work in numbers then unmatched by any secular mobilization of women in American history. Roughly one out of four Alliance members was female. Their ranks included the famous orator Mary Lease, the editor Annie Diggs of Kansas, Marion Todd of Illinois, and Bettie Gay of Texas. Women often joined the rural reform movement in pursuit of female suffrage and temperance. They also sought to ease the burdens of rural labor and realize a more independent, modern life.

The Alliance movement organized along strict racial lines. Many rural reformers advocated Chinese exclusion, and the Southern Alliance enforced a "whites only" rule. Although blacks joined their own Colored Farmers' Alliance, the white and black Alliances were very separate and unequal. In part, this reflected the gap between white Alliance members, who tended to be middling farmers with property, and black Alliance members, who tended to be poor renters working white owners' land as tenants or sharecroppers. It also reflected the commitment of the white Alliance to segregation and white supremacy.

The People's Party

The Alliance movement originally embraced a policy of nonpartisanship, which meant effecting reform by supporting sympathetic candidates within both the Democratic and the Republican Parties. Many reformers, however, grew discontent with this policy, convinced that the existing parties were too bound by graft and corruption to challenge corporate privilege. Such discontent provided the impulse for a third party. After a series of preliminary meetings, farm, labor, and other reform groups held the founding convention of the People's Party of the U.S.A., also known as the Populist Party. in Omaha, Nebraska, in July 1892. The Populist platform contained the fundamental Alliance demands regarding money, transportation, and land. This included the subtreasury plan, an expanded national currency and the coinage of silver to stimulate the economy and provide debt relief, a graduated income tax, government ownership of the telegraph, telephones, and railroads, and the prohibition of speculative land ownership by railroad corporations and foreign investors. The People's Party also favored the adoption of the secret ballot, direct election of Senators, legislation by referendum, and other measures to break the corrupting influence of corporate lobbyists over the political process.

Populist efforts to win the support of the labor movement produced mixed results. Most urban wage earners, especially in the Northeast, where Populism had only minimal organization, showed little interest in the third party. The Populists, who were mainly native-born and Protestant, never succeeded in appealing to large numbers of Catholic and immigrant workers. Nonetheless, especially with the onset of a severe economic depression in 1893, significant sections of the labor movement looked to Populism for answers. In Chicago and other cities, socialists and trade unionists made political agreements with the People's Party.

More importantly, miners and railroad workers—two of the largest and most dynamic forces in the labor movement—shared much in common with the rural Populists. They, too, sought systematic organization as a counterbalance to corporate power. They, too, believed in government intervention in the form of regulation and mandatory arbitration, and they believed in public ownership as the ultimate means to restrain the corporations. Mine workers provided the main support for the People's Party in several Midwestern and Rocky Mountain states. Many railroad employees also joined the third-party effort. The Populists supported the railroad workers in the great Pullman strike during the summer of 1894. After the suppression of the strike by federal authorities, the imprisoned leader of the railroad workers, Eugene V. Debs, emerged as one of the most highly regarded champions of the People's Party. Jobless workers also looked to the Populists. Jacob Coxey, a People's Party candidate from Ohio, led the "Industrial Armies" on a march to Washington to demand a federal "Good Roads" bill to provide jobs for the unemployed.

Populism also provided a meeting ground for the nation's nonconformists, iconoclasts, and free thinkers. It attracted advocates of every type of social and mental innovation. Of these, the most influential were the adherents of the economic panacea movements, such as the Single Tax leagues inspired by the tax doctrines of Henry George, and the Nationalist clubs that pursued the state-capitalist utopia sketched in Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward (1888). The People's Party also embraced religious nonconformists. Populists were often raised in Protestant homes and held strong religious beliefs. Yet many reformers abandoned ideas of traditional piety in favor of a social gospel more fitting to the demands of secular reform. Other Populists embraced agnosticism, spiritualism, mental science, and other belief systems that they considered to be more suitable to a scientific age.

Fusion and Decline

The People's Party stirred deep anxiety among upper-and middle-class Americans. The political establishment attacked the Populists as "cranks and heretics" who threatened to subvert the republic with "anarchy and lawlessness." Nevertheless, Populism scored a number of electoral victories. William A. Peffer of the Kansas People's Party gained a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1890. In the 1892 presidential election, the Populist candidate James B. Weaver of Iowa carried six states with twenty-two electoral votes. That same November, the Populists elected two governors, Davis Waite of Colorado and Lorenzo D. Lewelling of Kansas. Populists in the U.S. Congress included Thomas E. Watson of Georgia, Marion Cannon of California, and "Sockless Jerry" Simpson of Kansas.

These modest achievements, however, only underscored the formidable institutional obstacles facing a third party that attempted to crack the winner-take-all, two-party system. Populism struggled to present itself as a viable political alternative. By 1896, many supporters of the People's Party favored electoral combination, or fusion, with one of the dominant parties. Fusion led to the election that fall of seven senators and thirty-two congressmen supported by the Populists. Fusion also led to Populist endorsement of the 1896 Democratic presidential candidate, Nebraska Congressman William Jennings Bryan. The Democratic-Populist Bryan campaign focused on the single issue of coining silver, leaving aside the more substantial Populist reforms. Bryan's defeat at the polls delivered a mortal blow to the Populist cause. Although the People's Party did not formally disband until the beginning of the new century, it lost political credibility. The Populist experiment had run its course.

Bibliography

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Barthelme, Marion K. Women in the Texas Populist Movement: Letters to the Southern Mercury. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997.

Goodwyn, Lawrence. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Hicks, John D. The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931. Reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Larson, Robert W. Populism in the Mountain West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.

McMath, Robert C., Jr. American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1896. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Ostler, Jeffrey. Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, 1880–1892. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993.

Scholars differ on the question of when the tendency known as populism (narodnichestvo) was most significant in Russian social and political thought. Some suggest that populism was prominent from 1848 to 1881; others, that it was a revolutionary movement in the period between 1860 and 1895. Soviet scholars primarily focused on the 1870s and 1880s. There is also disagreement about what populism represented as an ideology. There are three ways of looking at it: as a reaction against Western capitalism and socialism, as agrarian socialism, and as a theory advocating the hegemony of the masses over the educated elite.

As this should make evident, populism meant different things to different people; it was not a single coherent doctrine but a widespread movement in nineteenth-century Russia favoring such goals as social justice and equality. Populism in Russia is generally believed to have been strongly influenced by the thinking of Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who during the 1850s and 1860s argued that the peasant commune (mir) was crucial to Russia's transition from capitalism to socialism via a peasant revolution.

There were three strands in the Russian populist movement. The first, classical populism, was associated with Peter Lavrovich Lavrov (1823 - 1900), a nobleman by birth who had received a military education and later became a professor of mathematics. Lavrov was an activist in the student and intellectual movement of the 1860s, and a consequence was forced to emigrate from Russia in 1870. His experience in the Paris Commune during the 1870s convinced him of the need for change, especially in the aftermath of the Great Reforms of the 1860s. In his Historical Letters (1868 - 1869), Lavrov stated that human progress required a revolution that would totally destroy the existing order. Again in his Historical Letters (1870) and in his revolutionary journal Vpered (Forward) from 1870 to 1872, Lavrov argued that intellectuals had a moral obligation to fight for socialism, and in order to achieve this goal they would have to work with the masses. As he saw it, preparation for revolution was the key. In The State in Future Society, Lavrov outlined the establishment of universal suffrage, the emergence of a society in which the masses would run the government, and above all, the introduction of the notion of popular justice.

The second type of Russian populism was more conspiratorial, for it grew out of the failure of the classical variant to convert the majority of the Russian people to socialism via preparation and self-education. The major thinkers here were Peter G. Zaichnevsky (1842 - 1896), Sergei G. Nechaev (1847 - 1883), and Peter Nikitich Tkachev (1844 - 1885). Zaichnevsky, in his pamphlet Young Russia, called for direct action and rejected the possibility of a compromise between the ruling class (including liberals) and the rest of society. He argued that revolution had to be carried out by the majority, using force if necessary, in order to transform Russia's political, economic, and social system along socialist lines. Not surprisingly, Zaichnevsky's ideas are often seen as a blueprint for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Nechaev pointed to two lessons that could be learned from the failure of classical populism: first, the need for tighter organization, stricter discipline, and better planning, and second, the effort to go to the people had proved that the intelligentsia were very remote from the masses. In his Catechism of a Revolutionary, Nechaev argued that individual actions must be controlled by the party and advocated a code for revolutionaries in which members were dedicated, committed to action not words, adhered to party discipline, and above all, were willing to use every possible means to achieve revolution. Finally, Tkachev, who is probably the most significant of the three chief conspiratorial populists, advocated a closely knit secret organization that would carry out a revolution in the name of the people. For obvious reasons, he is often described as the forerunner of Vladimir Lenin or as the first Bolshevik. All three of these thinkers envisioned a revolution by a minority on behalf of the majority, followed by agitation and propaganda to protect its gains. The similarity to the events around the 1917 October Revolution is evident.

Populists of the classical and conspiratorial varieties rejected terrorism as a method, and Tkachev maintained that it would divert energy away from the revolution. The terrorist wing of Russian populism, however, insisted that agitprop and repeated calls for revolution would accomplish nothing, and therefore direct action was essential. This position was associated with the two main groups that grew out of the Land and Freedom (Zemlya i Volya) organization, People's Will (Narodnaia Volya), and Black Partition (Cherny Peredel). The failure of the earlier populist movements and the situation in late nineteenth-century Russia (i.e., no political parties or real trade unions, government intervention in every area of life) led to a direct attack on the state, culminating in the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881. Although the clamp-down and greater censorship that followed this event reduced the degree of terrorism, they did not eliminate it altogether, as shown by the emergence of a workers' section and young People's Will after 1881.

The populists did not accept the idea that the Russian people had a unique character or destiny. Instead they emphasized Russia's backwardness, but in their view it was not necessarily a disadvantage, because backwardness would enable Russia to avoid the capitalist path and embark upon agrarian socialism based on a federal structure of self-governing units of producers and consumers. When this did not come to pass, some populists turned to more extreme measures, such as terrorism. All in all, the lessons learned from the failure of populism paved the way for a gradual move toward the emergence of social democracy in Russia during the 1890s.

Bibliography

Geifman, Anna. (1993). Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894 - 1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Offord, Derek. (1987). The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Pipes, Richard. (1964). "Narodnichestvo: A Semantic Inquiry." Slavic Review 23(3):441-458.

Venturi, Franco. (1983). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in 19th Century Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wortman, Richard. (1967). The Crisis of Russian Populism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

—CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

The belief that greater popular participation in government and business is necessary to protect individuals from exploitation by inflexible bureaucracy and financial conglomerates. “Power to the people” is a famous populist slogan.

Dansk (Danish)
n. - populisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
volksheid, grofheid, populaire benadering

Français (French)
n. - populisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Populismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - λαϊκισμός

Italiano (Italian)
populismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - populismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
популизм

Español (Spanish)
n. - populismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - populism

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
平民主义, 平民论, 民粹派

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 平民主義, 平民論, 民粹派

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 인민당의 주의[정책]

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 人民主義

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) مبادئ حزب الشعب الأمريكي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮חתירה של פוליטיקאי לתמיכה עממית-המונית, גישת העממיות, פופוליזם‬

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