Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T06:48:56.081Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

David Peal
David Peal
Affiliation:
The Institute for Historical Study
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A Populist newspaper in North Carolina commented in 1890 that agrarian unrest was common just about everywhere, in “high tariff and low tariff” countries as well as in “monarchies, empires, and republics.” Historians of this discontent have neglected the international dimension of protest that was so striking at the time. The countries that produced the most vigorous agrarian movements, Germany and the United States, have been especially well protected from the scrutiny of comparison. One reason for this neglect is that scholars in both countries emphasize their nations' peculiarities and capacity to make their own histories. The most influential study of American Populism, for instance, is still John D. Hicks' The Populist Revolt (1931). Hicks ascribed the movement to the closure of the frontier, the “safety valve” once thought to be the special feature of American history. Most scholars today reject the “Turner thesis,” but continue to see populism as uniquely democratic. Just as American Populists have been celebrated as “good guys,” German agrarian leaders have been demonized. The marked anti-Semitic aspect of agrarian movements in the 1890s has led historians to link them more or less directly to national socialism, the arguably unique “outcome” of German history. Whatever the sources of this exceptionalism, the constrained view has distorted the understanding of a crucial historical conjuncture.

Type
The Traditions of Populist Politics
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , April 1989 , pp. 340 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

I would like to thank the following people for their help and suggestions in the development of this article: Ruth Bleasdale, Jack Crowley, Geoff Eley, J. Morgan Kousser, John O'Brien, Jane Parpart, Norman Pereira, Lawrence Stokes, and Graham Taylor. I would especially like to thank the Killam Trust of Canada and the Dalhousie University History Department for giving me the chance to prepare, present, and refine this paper.

1 Hicks, John D., The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis, 1931), 54;Google Scholarcf. Buck, Solon, The Agrarian Crusade (New Haven, 1920), 99;Google ScholarMitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (Oct. 27, 1894).Google Scholar

2 Woodward, C. Vann, “The Comparability of American History” in The Comparative Approach to American History, Woodward, , ed. (New York 1968), 3–17, 346–58.Google Scholar On comparing Southern history: idem., Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986),Google Scholar ch. 7. On German exceptionalism: Eley, Geoff and Blackbourn, David, The Peculiarities of German History (New York, 1984).Google Scholar Kenneth Barkin makes a strained case for comparing Populism with Germany's elite League, Agrarian in “A Case Study in Comparative History: Populism in Germany and America,” in The State of American History, Bass, Herbert J., ed. (Chicago, 1970), 373–404.Google Scholar For a comparison of elites based on a caricature of Germany: Wiener, Jonathan, “Planter Persistence and Social Change: Alabama, 1850–1870,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7:2 (1976), 235–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On prewar anti-Semitism, see my Anti-Semitism and Rural Transformation in Kurhessen: The Rise and Fall of the Böckel Movement (Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, Columbia University 1985), intro.Google Scholar

3 On the “Great Depression” as a “cause” of anti-Semitic politics, see the highly influential book by Rosenberg, Hans, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit: Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft, und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1967);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Geoff Eley criticizes this approach in his essay, “Hans Rosenberg and the Great Depression of 1873–1896,” in his From Uniication to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston and London, 1986), 23–41,Google Scholar esp. 32ff. On the incidence of Populism: Argersinger, Peter, Populism and Politics: William Alfred effer and the People's Party (Lexington, 1974), 60ff;Google ScholarTurner, James, “Understanding the Populists,” Journal of American History, 67:2 (1980), 354–73;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMayhew, Anne, “A Reappraisal of the Cause of Farm Protest in the United States,” Journal of Economic History, 32:2(1972), 464–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a non-reductionist political analysis that argues that Populism filled the need for opposition where the Republicans were weak, the Democrats divided, and suffrage unrestricted, see Kousser, J. Morgan, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven and London, 1974).Google Scholar

4 Goodwyn, LawrenceDemocratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford and New York, 1976), xviii;Google Scholar abridged as The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford and New York, 1978).Google Scholar Cf. Turner, , “Understanding the Populists”Google Scholar and Montgomery, David, “On Goodwyn's Populists,” Marxist Perspectives, 1 (spring 1978), 166–73.Google Scholar Stanley Parsons et al. argue that the cooperative movement was small, did not “precede” Populist politics, and did not have the educative impact claimed by Goodwyn. Their criticism identifies the Southern Farmers Alliance too narrowly with the cooperative movement and relies excessively on Dun & Company's Mercantile Agency Reference Book. A rating in this book was used by a merchant as the basis of bank credit—the sort of credit cooperators wanted to dispense with. The book listed successful enterprises, not failed or planned ones—the ones that counted, politically. The undercapitalization of many cooperatives, and other signs of frailty revealed by Parsons et al., does not contradict Goodwyn's contention that farmers faced formidable enemies, could not make it on their own, and needed to go into politics. Finally, as a political movement, Populism predated the cooperative movement only in Kansas, an exception discussed below. Throughout the South the key years of politicization were 1891–92—after the Alliance failed. Goodwyn himself shows that the earliest Alliance program contained political demands. Parsons etal. are on firmer ground in doubting the linkage between cooperative failure and radical consciousness, which Goodwyn only asserts. “The Role of Cooperatives in the Development of the Movement Culture of Populism,” Journal of American History, 69:4 (1983), 866–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 This paper does not define populism, but seeks to establish the comparability of the Böckel movement with Southern populism and to see it in a new light. On populism, I learned much from Laclau, Ernesto, “Towards a Theory of Populism,” in his Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London, 1977), esp. 143–76,Google Scholar and Cameron's, Margaret more empirical Populism (London, 1981).Google Scholar

6 Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York and Oxford, 1984), ch. 1–2;Google ScholarPeal, , Anti-Semitism and Rural Transformation, 29ff.Google Scholar On poor whites: Berlin, Ira, “White Majority,” Social History, no. 5 (May 1977), 653–59;Google Scholar Harry Watson, “Conflict and Collaboration: Yeomen, Slaveholders, and Politics,” Ibid., 10:3 (1985), 273–98; Key, V. O., Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949), Pt. I.Google Scholar

7 Hahn, , Southern Populism, 44, 302ff; Peal, , Rural Transformation, 32ff, 211–2, Appendix, xiii, xv.Google Scholar

8 Ransom, Roger L. and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1977), 164 (Otken);Google ScholarClark, Thomas D., Pills, Petticoats, and Plows: The Southern Country Store (Indianapolis and New York, 1944), 315.Google Scholar

9 Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 180;Google ScholarHicks, , Populist Revolt, 43;Google ScholarGoodwyn, , Democratic Promise, 26ff;Google ScholarShannon, Fred A., The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York, 1945), 90ff.Google Scholar

10 Ransom, , Sutch, , One Kind of Freedom;Google Scholar for criticism, see “One Kind of Freedom: A Symposium,” Explorations in Economic History, 16:1 (1979);Google ScholarWright, Gavin, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986), esp. 106–15.Google Scholar

11 Ford, Lacy K., “Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History, 71:2 (1984), 306,CrossRefGoogle Scholarpassim: Hahn, , Southern Populism, 143ff.Google Scholar Nine of ten landholders owned their farms in the 1850s; six to eight of ten owned farms in the 1880s. Ibid. 158–65; Hair, William, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877–1900 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 156–57.Google Scholar In general: Mayhew, Anne, “A Reappraisal of the Cause of Fann Protest.”Google Scholar

12 Woodman, Harold D., “Post Civil-War Southern Agriculture and the Law,” Agricultural History, 53:1 (1979), 319–37.Google Scholar

13 Hahn, , Southern Populism, 283.Google Scholar

14 Palmer, Bruce, “Man over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill, 1980);Google ScholarMartin, Roscoe, The People's Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics (Austin, 1933), 166 (usury);Google ScholarArgersinger, Peter, “Pentecostal Politics: Religion, the Farmers' Alliance, and the Gospel of Populism,” Kansas Quarterly, 1:4 (1969), 30, passim.Google Scholar

15 From Otken, Charles, The Ills of the South,Google Scholar excerpted in A Populist Reader, Tindall, George B., ed. (New York, 1966), 47–48.Google Scholar

16 On the anti-usury campaign, see my “Anti-Semitism by Other Means? The Rural Cooperative Movement in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, 32 (1987), 135–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Jews, On rural, see my Rural Transformation, 36ff.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 96ff; Richarz, Monika, “Jewish Social Mobility in Germany during the Era of Emancipation (1790–1871),” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, 20 (1975), 69–77;CrossRefGoogle ScholarJeggle, Utz, Judendorfer in Württemberg (Tübingen, 1969), 188–89.Google Scholar Emancipated Jews' mobility was galling but was possible; emancipated slaves were unable to accumulate assets and become independent. Ransom, and Sutch, , One Kind of Freedom, 81ff;Google ScholarFields, Barbara J., Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1985), 146ffGoogle Scholar (violence against blacks), 177ff; (black ownership) blacks were “shot, whipped or otherwise molested” by whites in Louisiana, citation from Hair, , Bourbonism and Agragrian Protest, 189;Google ScholarRosengarten, Theodore, All God's Dangers (New York, 1974), 192;Google ScholarWilliamson, Jeff, The Crucible of Race: Black, White Relations in the American South since Reconstruction (New York, 1984), 45ff, 250.Google Scholar

19 The Georgia homestead exemption act of 1841 kept mortgages and foreclosures to a minimum in the Upcountry, but was revised by Democrats in 1877. Hahn, , Southern Populism, 75ff, 193ff.Google Scholar

20 Der Wucher auf dem Lande, in Schriften des Verein für Socialpolitik, Vol. 35 (Leipzig, 1887);Google ScholarPeal, , “Anti-Semitism by other Means?”Google Scholar

21 Brocke, Bernhard vom, “Marburg im Kaiserreich, 1866–1918,” in Marburger Geschichte, Dettmering, Erhart and Grenz, Rudolf, eds. (Marburg, 1980). 476,Google Scholar 482ff; Schlau, Wilfried, Politik und Bewusstsein: Voraussetzungen und Strukturen politischer Bildung in ländlichen Gemeinden (Cologne, 1971), 402ff;Google Scholar sources and criticism in Peal, , Rural Transformation, 104 ff.Google Scholar

22 On the slaves' encounter with new social relations, see Fields, , Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 157ff;Google ScholarWoodman, Harold D., “Sequel to Slavery: the New History Views the Post-Bellum South,” Journal of Southern History, 43:4 (1977), 541,Google Scholarpassim; Handlin, Oscar, “Reconsidering the Populists,” Agricultural History, 39:2 (1965), 70;Google ScholarHandlin, , “Good Guys and Bad,” Truth in History (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 332–52.Google Scholar

23 Goodwyn, , Democratic Promise, 120; Hicks, 105.Google Scholar

24 McMath, Robert, Jr., “Sandy Land and Hogs in the Timber: (Agri-) Cultural Origins of the Farmers' Alliance in Texas,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, Hahn, Steven and Prude, Jonathan, eds. (Chapel Hill and London, 1985), 205–29.Google Scholar

25 Schwartz, Michael, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers Alliance and Cotton Tenancy (New York, 1976), 209–10,Google Scholar 255ff; McMath, Robert C., Jr., Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers' Alliance (Chapel Hill, 1975), 42–43; Hahn, 275.Google Scholar

26 Smith, Ralph, “‘Macuneism’, or the Farmers of Texas in Business,” Journal of Southern History, 13:2 (1947), 227–28;Google ScholarHair, , Bourbonism, 155–56;Google ScholarGoodwyn, , Populist Moment, 29–30, 57 (“monopoly”), 68.Google Scholar

27 Saloutos, Theodore, Farmer Movements in the South, 1865–1933 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), 91–101;Google ScholarGoodwyn, , Populist Moment, 74ff;Google ScholarSchwartz, , Radical Protest, ch. 14–15;Google ScholarSmith, , “Macuneism,'” 228ff;Google ScholarMcMath, , Populist Vanguard, ch. 4.Google Scholar

28 McMath, , Populist Vanguard, 7.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 64.

30 Ibid., 136; Palmer, , “Man over Money”,Google Scholar ch. 10; Argersinger, , “Pentecostal Politics”;Google ScholarPeller, Gary, “Creation, Evolution, and the New South,” Tikkun, 2:5 (1987), 72–76.Google Scholar

31 Smith, , “ ‘Macuneism,’” 233ff;Google ScholarSaloutos, , Farmer Movements, 90ff. Goodwyn neglects Macune's incompetence and unpopularity.Google Scholar

32 Goodwyn, , Populist Moment, 75ff;Google ScholarHicks, , Populist Revolt, 136;Google ScholarMcMath, , Populist Vanguard, ch. 4.Google Scholar

33 Schwartz, , Radical Protest, 114–15;Google ScholarWoodward, , Origins, 193;Google ScholarWoodman, Harold, “Postbellum Social Change and its Effects on Marketing the South's Cotton Crop,” Agricultural History, 56:1 (1982), 215–30;Google ScholarMcMath, , Populist Vanguard, 44–45;Google ScholarHolmes, William F., “The Demise of the Colored Farmers' Alliance,” Journal of Southern History, 41:2 (1975), 187–200;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcMath, Robert, Jr., “Southern White Farmers and the Organization of Black Farm Workers,” Labor History, 18:1 (1977), 115–19;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKirwan, Albert D., Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876–1925 (Lexington, 1951), 60–63Google Scholar (Alliance and disenfranchisement). Ironically, early disenfranchisement in Mississippi made Populism a neglible factor in that state. See Kousser, , Shaping of Southern Politics, 144, passim.Google Scholar

34 McMath, , Populist Vanguard,Google Scholar ch. 5; Shaw, Barton C., The Wool-Hat Boys: Georgia's Populist Party (Baton Rouge and London, 1984), 42–44, 52;Google ScholarMartin, , People's Party in Texas, 165ff (evangelical appeal).Google Scholar

35 Turner, , “Understanding the Populists,” 363ff (incidence of Populist voting), 368ff (distance and political alienation), and passim.Google Scholar

36 Peal, , Rural Transformation, 160–62;Google ScholarLevy, Richard S., The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven, 1975), 55ff.Google Scholar

37 Peal, , Rural Transformation, 173–75.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., ch. 5.

39 Ibid., 299–300.

40 Ibid., 307–8.

41 Ibid., 308ff.

42 Ibid., ch. 6.

43 Woodward, , Origins, 244;Google Scholar ch. 1–3; Key, , Southern Politics, 553;Google ScholarRogers, William Warren, The One-Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865–1896 (Baton Rouge, 1970), ch. 3.Google Scholar

44 Hahn, , Southern Populism, 193ff, 223–24,Google Scholar chap. 7 (grazing restrictions); idem., “Common Right and Commonwealth: The Stock-Law Struggle and the Roots of Southern Populism,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, Kousser, J. Morgan and McPherson, James M., eds. (New York and Oxford, 1982), 51–88.Google Scholar On the comparable division of communal forests in Germany: Peal, , Rural Transformation, 216–19.Google Scholar

45 Hair, , Bourbonism, 48–51, 60ff, 111–12,Google Scholar 124ff, 26ff, passim; Woodward, , Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel (London, Oxford, New York, 1938),Google Scholar ch. 4, 6, 8; Turner, , “Understanding,” 368 (quote).Google Scholar

46 Goodwyn, , Populist Moment,Google Scholar ch. 5; Woodward, , Origins, 240ff;Google ScholarSchwartz, , Radical Protest, 268,Google Scholar ch. 17; Hahn, , Southern Populism, 218Google Scholar (caucuses); Holmes, William F., “The Southern Farmers' Alliance and the Georgia Senatorial Election of 1890,” Journal of Southern History, 50:2 (1984), 210–11.Google Scholar

47 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 148ff.Google Scholar

48 Goodwyn, , 131–32, 210, passim;Google ScholarArgersinger, , Populism and Politics, 51–53, 62.Google Scholar

49 Woodward, , Origins, 243ff; Hicks, 229ff, 439–44.Google Scholar

50 Shaw, , Wool-Hat Boys, 69–72;Google ScholarHair, , Bourbonism, 228 (rhetoric),Google Scholar 262 (lynchings); Martin, , People's Party in Texas, 181–82, 236–37;Google ScholarHackney, Sheldon, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton, 1969), 43.Google Scholar For the divisions in the Southern elite and references: Cell, John W., The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South, (Cambridge, 1982), 161ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 Rogers, , One-Gallused Rebellion, 222ff,Google Scholar 283ff, 312; Woodward, , Tom Watson, 238–39, 241–42, 269ff.Google Scholar

52 Woodward, , Tom Watson, 223.Google Scholar

53 Hicks, , Populist Revolt, 263, 337 (electoral maps).Google Scholar

54 Shaw, , Wool-Hat Boys, 69 (quote).Google Scholar

55 Woodward, , Tom Watson, 220ff, 239–40;Google ScholarWoodward, , Origins, 254ff.Google Scholar Woodward's favorable view has been attacked by Crowe, Charles, “Tom Watson, Populists, and Blacks Reconsidered,” Journal of Negro History, 55:2 (1970), 99–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Shaw, , Wool-Hat Boys, 83,Google Scholar 109, 114. Cf. Palmer, , “Man over Money”, ch. 5, 165–66;Google ScholarWoodward, , Thinking Back, 36ff.Google Scholar

56 Saunders, Robert, “Southern Populists and the Negro, 1893–1895,” Journal of Negro History, 54:3 (1969), 240–61,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 245ff; Shaw, , Wool-Hat Boys,84ff, 120, 138–39.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., 101f, 106ff; Palmer, , “Man over Money”, 154ff (on “Jeffeesonian Democrats” and the new middle class in Alabama).Google Scholar

58 Goodwyn, , Populist Moment,Google Scholar ch. 8; Woodward, , Watson, ch. 16–17;Google ScholarWoodward, , Origins;Google ScholarHicks, , Populist Revolt, ch. 11, 13–14.Google Scholar

59 Woodward, C. Vann, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd. rev. ed. (New York, 1974), 82–83;Google ScholarCell, , Highest Stage,Google Scholar ch. 4; Williamson, Joel, in Crucible of Race, challenges the “Jim Crow” thesis by leaving politics out of his account of the emergence of “radical racism.”Google Scholar

60 Fields, Barbara, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, Reconstruction, Kousser, and McPherson, , eds., 159.Google Scholar On the violent aftermath of Populism in North Carolina: Abramowitz, Jack, “The Negro in the Populist Movement,” Journal of Negro History, 38:3 (1953), 285;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKousser, , The Shaping of Southern Politics, 186–192;Google ScholarCell, , Highest Stage, 178–79,Google Scholar 185; cf. Goodwyn, L, “Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study,” American Historical Review, 76:5 (1971), 1435–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 On Saxony: Levy, , Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Parties.Google Scholar In general: Suval, Stanley, Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill and London, 1985). In annexed regions, affiliations were arguably even weaker.Google Scholar

62 Eley, Geoff, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismark (New Haven, 1980), 31.Google Scholar

63 Brocke, vom, “Marburg im Kaiserreich,” 461.Google Scholar

64 Quoted in Peal, , Rural Transformation, 185.Google Scholar

65 As Conservatives became more anti-Semitic, Böckel branded them “only mot-Semites”. As they set up cooperatives, he declared that only he cared about the people. Ibid., 187–91.

66 Ibid., 166, n.32.

67 Ibid., 187, 258–70; Peal, , “Anti-Semitism by other Means?”Google Scholar

68 Puhle, Hans-Jürgen, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus, 2nd ed. (Bonn, 1975).Google Scholar For a local study: Hunt, James, “The ‘Egalitarianism’ of the Right: The Agrarian League in Southwest Gernany, 1893–1914,” Journal of Contemporary History, 10:3 (1975), 513–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69 Peal, , Rural Transformation, 167–68, 311–12, 379–88;Google Scholar on BdL racism: Puhle, , Agrarische Interessenpolitik, 113–40;Google ScholarFricke, Dieter, “Die Organisation der antisemitischen Deutschsozialen Reformpartei, 1894–1900,” Zeitschrifi für Geschichtswissenschaft, 29:5 (1981), 432ffGoogle Scholar (text of the 1899 tract, “Theses on the Jewish Question,” calling for the “destruction” of Jewry in the twentieth century). On “paternalist” racism (which ended with the Civil War in the U.S.) and “competitive” racism (which followed the defeat of Populism): Berghe, Pierre van den, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York, 1967);Google ScholarMason, Philip, Patterns of Dominance (London, 1970), 60ff.Google Scholar

70 Goodwyn, , Populist Moment,Google Scholar ch. 1; Eley, , Reshaping the German Right, ch. 1.Google Scholar

71 Massing, Paul, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York, 1949), 47 (“bridge”).Google Scholar Conservative is in quotes to indicate the sponsorship, not content, of anti-Semitism. Levy finds no variation in content, only in strategies for reaching anti-Semitic ends—by politics or through agitation and violence. My view stresses changes of content within politics. Levy, , Downfall of Anti-Semitic Parties;Google ScholarPeal, , Rural Transformation.Google Scholar On the “new” racism of the 1890s: Mason, Philip, Prospero's Magic (Oxford, 1962);Google ScholarCell, , Highest Stage, 172f;Google ScholarWoodward, , Strange Career, 72–74.Google Scholar

72 In 1912, Marburg witnessed a resurgence of populism, with Böckel's bid for his old seat. He lost, but the episode was telling. After 1918, the countryside was aswarm with völkisch groups that the Right could harness only with difficulty.

73 Key, , Southern Politics, 504–8, 533–35.Google Scholar Kousser attributes the drop in turnout to changes in suffrage laws in Shaping of Southern Politics, 12ff, 43–44, 55–56, 173ff, 195, 208, etc. In Germany, turnout dropped in the aftermath of the Böckel movement, but climbed steadily in the Reichstag elections of 1903, 1907, and 1912. Peal, , Rural Transformation, 413–81.Google Scholar

74 Blackbourn, David, “The Politics of Demagogy in Imperial Germany,” Past and Present, no. 113 (Nov. 1986), 152–84.Google Scholar On the isolated labor market as the distinguishing feature of the Southern economy: Wright, , Old South, New South.Google Scholar On suffrage and demagogy: Kousser, , Shaping of Southern Politics, 80, 231ff.Google Scholar

75 Hofstader, Richard, Age of Reform (New York, 1955), 67ff,Google Scholar 77ff. Pollack, Norman, “Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism,” American Historical Review, 68:1 (1962), 78;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, The Populist Response to Industrial America (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 1–12;Google Scholaridem., “Fear of Man: Populism, Authoritarianism, and the Historian,” Agricultural History, 39:2 (1965), 59–67.Google Scholar In “The Populist and the Intellectual,” American Scholar, 29:1 (Winter 1959–1960), 55–72,Google Scholar Woodward doubts the importance of anti-Semitism relative to racism; cf. Thinking Back, 40. On Donnelly's anti-Semitism: Handlin, Oscar, “American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the Twentieth Century,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 40 (June 1951), 338ff.Google Scholar

76 After discussing the murder of several Jewish merchants, Hair concludes: “None of its orators or publicists appear to have ever attacked Jews as such; the references to Baton Rothschild as the head of the ‘money power’ assailed him because he was an international banker, not because of his religion.” Hair, William, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 160.Google Scholar Walter Nugent trivializes similar episodes in The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago and London, 1963), 108–115, 192;Google Scholar cf. Handlin's, criticism in “Reconsidering,” 68–9;Google Scholar Ransom and Sutch gloss over an anti-Semitic comment by an English traveler in Mississippi, One Kind of Freedom, 122, 342–43,Google Scholar n.35. Cf. Woodward, , Origins, 188,Google Scholar n. 42. Woodward ascribes Watson's role in the Frank lynching to his post-Populist crankiness: Tom Watson, ch. 23; cf. Dinerstein, Leonard, The Leo Frank Case (New York and London, 1968).Google Scholar For more on Southern antiSemitism, see the essays by Shapiro, Edward S. and Jeansonne, Glen, in Anti-Semitism in American History, Gerber, David A., ed. (Urbana and Chicago, 1986), and Gerber's introductory essay, p. 49, n. 71.Google Scholar

71 Blackboum, , “Politics of Demagogy,” 172.Google Scholar

78 Heberle, Rudolf, Landbevölkerung und Nationalsozialismus: Eine soziologische Untersuchung der politischen Willensbildung in Schleswig-Holstein 1918–1933 (Stuttgart, 1963), 170;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKocka, Jürgen, Alltagsgeschichte der NS-Zeit: Neue Perspektive oder Trivialisierung? (Munich, 1984), 53Google Scholar (on unreliability of Hessian peasants' diagnosis of their own situation); Moeller, Robert, “Peasants and Tariffs in the Kaiserreich: How Backward were the Bauern?,” Agricultural History, 55:4 (1981), 370–84 (a defense of rational peasantry). In the manner of Pollack, some historians have begun to diminish the importance of anti-Semitism in German populism.Google Scholar