POPULISM

The election of 1890 stunned and bewildered both old parties. The Republicans lost their control of the Lower House, while the Democrats paid for their victory the price of a partial alliance with a new movement whose weight they could only estimate. Populism was engendered by local troubles in the West and South, but its name now acquired a national usage and its leaders were encouraged to attempt a national organization.

In a series of conventions, held between 1889 and 1892, the People's Party developed into a finished organization with state delegations and a national committee. At St. Louis, in December, 1889, the Farmers' Alliance held a national convention and considered the basis for wider growth. The outcome was an attempt to combine in one party organized labor, organized agriculture, and believers in the single tax. The leaders of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor were not averse to such common action, although the latter preferred their own Federation to any party. The dangers of political action, seen in the decline of the National Labor Union of 1866, did not check the desires of the Knights in 1889, although the leaders found it easier then, as later, to promise the support of organized labor than to deliver it at the polls. After the St. Louis Convention the name Farmers' Alliance merged into the broader name of the People's Party, though the attempt to win the rank and file of the unions failed.

In December, 1890, the farmers met at Ocala, Florida, to rejoice over the congressional victory and to plan for 1892. Since each of the great parties was believed to be indifferent to the people and corrupt, a permanent third party was a matter of conviction, and in May, 1891, this party was formally created in a mass convention at Cincinnati. Miscellaneous reforms were insisted upon here, but were overshadowed by the demands of the inflationists. James B. Weaver, of Iowa, the old presidential candidate of the Greenbackers, was a leading spirit at Cincinnati. His best-known aide was Ignatius Donnelly, of Minnesota, a devotee of the Baconian theory and of the "Lost Atlantis," who was now devoting his active mind to the support of free silver. A national committee was created after another meeting, at St. Louis in February, 1892, and on July 2, 1892, the party met in that city in its first national nominating convention.

The platform of the People's Party was based on calamity. "We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin," it declared. "Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislature, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized.... The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated; our homes covered with mortgages; labor impoverished; and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists."

The greatest of the evils in sight was "the vast conspiracy against mankind," which had demonetized silver, added to the purchasing power of gold, and abridged the supply of money "to fatten usurers." To correct the financial evils the platform demanded "the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the present legal ratio of sixteen to one," and an issue of legal-tender currency until the circulation should reach an average of fifty dollars per capita. Postal savings banks, a graduated income tax, and economy in government were the subsidiary demands.

No demand of the Populists attracted so much attention as this for free silver, but its platform touched reform at every angle. In the field of transportation it asked for government ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and telephones. It asked that land monopolies be prevented, that the public lands be in part regained, and that alien ownership be forbidden. It wanted the Australian ballot, liberal pensions, restriction of immigration, an eight-hour day, a single term for President and Vice-President, direct election of United States Senators, abolition of the Pinkerton detectives, and was curious about the initiative and referendum. It was in many respects a prophecy as to the workings of reform for the next twenty years.

The People's Party entered the campaign of 1892 with this platform and with the support of advanced reformers, with a considerable following in the West and South, and with James B. Weaver and James G. Field as candidates. Few of the workers for its ticket were politicians of known standing, and its voters had a preponderance of youth. In several Western States the Democratic party supported it with fusion tickets. In the South it often coÖperated with the Republicans. From the first the third party found it harder to stand alone than to unite with the weaker local party.

The disrupting force of hard times was increased by the acts of the Republican party. Harrison's first Congress had passed a series of laws that provoked opposition and criticism. The Interstate Commerce Law was still new when he took office. In quick succession in 1890 came the new States, and Oklahoma Territory, the Dependent Pensions Bill, the Sherman Anti-Trust Bill, the Silver Purchase Bill, and the McKinley Tariff. The dominant majority had used arbitrary methods to enforce its will and had given to its enemies more than one text. After 1891 the Democratic majority in the House reduced the Administration to the political incompetence that had prevailed from 1883 to 1889.

Benjamin Harrison gained little prestige as the result of the Administration. He had been nominated for his availability, and the campaign songs had said as much of his illustrious grandfather, the hero of Tippecanoe, as of himself. His appointments had pleased neither the politicians nor the reformers, while there was much laughter at the presence in the offices of numerous personal friends and relatives. The most notable of his appointments was the most embarrassing.

James G. Blaine, as Secretary of State, found no topic in foreign relations as interesting as the canal had been in his earlier term. The wranglings with Great Britain and Germany over their treatment of naturalized Americans had subsided. The fisheries of the North Atlantic had been temporarily settled by President Cleveland. The regulation of the seal fisheries of Bering Sea brought no new glory to Blaine.

There was no doubt that the seal herd of the Pacific was being rapidly destroyed by careless and wasteful hunters from most of the countries bordering on that ocean. On the American islands the herds could be protected, and here they gathered every summer to mate and breed. But the men who hunted with guns at sea, instead of with clubs on land, could not be controlled unless the world would consent to an American police beyond the three-mile limit. In an arbitration with Great Britain, at Paris, Blaine tried to prove that the seals were American, and entitled to protection on the high seas, and that the waters of the northern Pacific were mare clausum. The arbitration went against him on every material point.

The only episode that threatened war occurred in Chile. Here Harrison had sent as Minister Patrick Egan, a newly naturalized Irishman and follower of Blaine. In a revolution of 1891 Egan sided with the conservative party that lost. His enemies charged him with improper interest in contracts and with instinctive antagonism to British interests in Chile. After the revolution a mob in Valparaiso showed its dislike for Americans by attacking sailors on shore leave. Egan's extreme demands for summary punishment of the rioters were upheld by Harrison, who prepared the navy for war. Finally the Chilean Government was forced to make complete apologies.

In the same year an American mob in New Orleans lynched several Italians, and Blaine repelled with indignation the demand that indemnity be accorded before trial and conviction. He could not even promise trial because of the helplessness of the United States in local criminal proceedings. The Italian Minister, Baron Fava, was withdrawn from Washington on this account, and returned only when Congress had healed the breach by making provision for the families of the sufferers.

The internal relations of the Administration were not happier than the external. Harrison chafed under the influence of Blaine, and alienated so many of the regular Republican leaders that it became doubtful whether he could secure his own renomination. Both Quay and Platt had been offended, and the former had resigned his chairmanship of the National Committee after the failure of a political bank in Philadelphia. No one was anxious to manage the President's campaign, and he showed little skill in managing it himself. The future was still in doubt when, on June 4, 1892, three days before the meeting of the convention at Minneapolis, Blaine resigned his position without a word of explanation. Whether he was only sick and unhappy, or whether he desired the nomination, was uncertain.

The strength of Blaine and the rising influence of William McKinley were apparent in the Republican Convention. Harrison was renominated on the first ballot, but Blaine and McKinley received more than one hundred and eighty votes apiece. The former had reached the end of his career, and died the next winter. The latter was now Governor of Ohio. McKinley had lost his seat in the election of 1890, but had been raised to the governorship in the next year. He was chairman of the convention that renominated Harrison, reaffirmed the "American doctrine of protection," and evaded the issue of free silver.

The Democratic party had bred no national leader but Grover Cleveland since the Civil War, and he had earned the dislike of the organization before his defeat in 1888. His insistence upon the tariff offended the protectionist wing of his party, and he left office unpopular and lonely. He retired to New York City, where he took up the practice of law and regained the confidence of the people. Demands upon him for public speeches in 1891 revealed the recovery of his popularity. His friends began to organize in his behalf during 1892, and David B. Hill aided by his opposition.

The strength of Hill, who had been elected Governor of New York, and who was now Senator, was based upon Tammany Hall and those elements in the New York Democracy that reformers were constantly attacking. He was believed to have defeated Cleveland in 1888 by entering into a deal with the Republican machine by which Harrison received the electoral and he the gubernatorial vote of New York. Early in 1892, as interest in Cleveland revived, Hill called a "snap" convention and secured the indorsement of New York for his own candidacy. The solid New York delegation shouting for Hill was an item in Cleveland's favor at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. With tariff reformers in control, denouncing "Republican protection as a fraud, a robbery of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of a few," and reasserting Cleveland's phrase that "public office is a public trust," the convention selected Cleveland and Adlai E. Stevenson, of Illinois, as the party candidates. Its coinage plank, like that of the Republicans, meant what the voter chose to read into it.

There were two debates in the campaign of 1892. On the surface was the renewed discussion of the tariff, with the Republicans fighting for the McKinley Bill all the more earnestly because there was danger of its repeal, and the Democrats officially demanding reduction. "I would rather have seen Cleveland defeated than to have had that fool free-trade plank adopted," said one of the Eastern Democrats to "Tom" Johnson after the convention. But the Democratic protectionists were forced into surly acquiescence so long as Cleveland was the candidate and William L. Wilson the chairman of the convention. The partial insincerity of the tariff debate aided the Populists, who were directing a discussion upon the general basis of reform.

Cleveland was elected with a majority of electoral votes and a plurality of popular votes, but the vote for Weaver and Field measured the extent of the revolt against both parties. The Populists carried Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Kansas, gained twenty-two electoral votes, and polled over a million popular votes. Their protest, based on local hard times and discontent, probably defeated Harrison, while their organization was ready to receive a large following should the hard times spread.

Harrison was not unwilling to surrender the Government to Cleveland in March, 1893, for he had been struggling for weeks to conceal the financial weakness of the United States and to avoid a panic. The great surplus that had been a motive for legislation for more than ten years had nearly become a deficit. Continuous prosperity had tempted Congress to make lavish appropriations. The McKinley Bill had reduced the revenue through changes in the sugar schedule. The Pension Bill had used other millions. Internal improvements had been distributed to every section. The surplus, which had been at $105,000,000 for 1890, fell to $37,000,000 in 1891, and in the next two years to $9,900,000 and to $2,300,000. In the spring of 1893 the Treasury was so reduced that any unexpected shock might cause a suspension. Cleveland's first duty was with causes and cures.

The surplus had been affected both by increase in expenditures and by decrease in revenues. The latter had been due in part to the hard times, which had forced a curtailment of imports, with a resulting shrinkage in tariff receipts. At the same time an increasing nervousness, based upon the deterioration in quality of the assets of the United States, showed itself. The fear of free silver was hastening the day of panic.

Silver and gold had always been traditional American coins, but since 1834 little of the former had been coined or circulated, while between 1862 and 1879 neither variety of specie was ordinarily used as money. In 1873 a codification of coinage laws had omitted from the standard list the silver dollar, which had been unimportant for nearly forty years; and when, shortly thereafter, the decline in the price of silver made its coinage at the ratio of sixteen to one profitable, it was impossible. The demand for a restoration of silver coinage began with the silver miners who desired a stimulated market for their output. Some believed coinage would raise the price of bullion; others thought the Government would keep up the value of the silver coins, as it did the greenbacks, by redemption in gold. In 1878 a Free Coinage Act, pushed by R.P. Bland, was converted into the limited Bland-Allison Act. Under this the Treasury bought the minimum amount of silver bullion (two million dollars' worth) every month for twelve years, and protested continually that the silver coined from it was increasing the burden of redemption on the gold reserve. As the price of silver fell farther, the demand of the miners increased, and toward 1890 it was reinforced by the demands of inflationists who desired it for another reason.

In 1890 the free-silver movement was not political in the sense that parties had declared for or against it. In each great party it had supporters, and few politicians were actively opposing it. A movement in its favor, with the support of the Senate, was reshaped under the influence of Sherman, and became a law in July, 1890. Under this the Treasury was forced to buy 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month, and to pay for it in a new issue of treasury notes. For the next three years the United States kept at par with gold the Civil War greenbacks, the Bland-Allison silver dollars, and the treasury notes of 1890. Only by its constant willingness to pay out any form of money at the option of the customer could it prevent the Gresham Law from operating and the currency from declining to the bullion value of silver.

Every creditor feared the establishment of the silver basis because of the loss which it would entail upon him. His dollars would shrink from their gold value to their silver value. A depreciated currency was bad enough when unavoidable, but the deliberate adoption of it would be frank repudiation. Continually, after 1890, popular apprehension of this grew more acute, discouraging the undertaking of new enterprises and leading to the insertion of "gold clauses" in contracts. Gold was hoarded whenever possible. The receipts at the New York Custom-House, which had been mostly gold before 1890, contained less than four per cent of gold in the winter of 1892-93. As the Treasury found its expenditures nearing its receipts, and the proportion of gold in its assets lessening, business men were badly worried over the future of the currency, and an actual limit of available capital appeared.

For fourteen years there had been prosperity in the United States. Financial and economic disturbances had been relatively slight, and every year had seen a greater business expansion than the last. Investment for permanent improvement had passed the amount of annual savings, and before 1893 the United States as a community had approached the point at which its economic surplus would be exhausted and an enforced liquidation would be due. As banks curtailed in 1893 to save themselves, stringency became general, and depression turned to panic. In April the gold reserve in the Treasury, on which the whole volume of silver and paper depended, passed below $100,000,000, which business had come to regard as the limit of safety. In the summer Great Britain closed her Indian mints to silver and that bullion dropped farther in value. Before July there was panic and failure everywhere in the United States.

Panic had been imminent before Harrison left office and remained for Cleveland to confront. Already Cleveland had taken a solid stand against free silver and the silver basis. He saw in the Sherman Silver Purchase Act the most striking cause of danger, and summoned Congress to meet in August, 1893, to repeal it, while he maintained the gold reserve for the next two years by borrowing on bonds. For the first time since the Civil War his party controlled every branch of the Government, yet it now met an issue on which it had not been elected and over which it broke to pieces.

An angry minority opposed the Message in which Cleveland described the financial dangers and demanded the repeal of the Sherman Law. It was a sectional minority that included Western Representatives from both parties and many Democrats from the South. Men who had fought the Populists since 1890 now fraternized with them and raised their strength beyond their hopes. The President refused compromise, even to save his party from destruction, and found a majority for repeal among Easterners of both parties. The Sherman Law was repealed in November, and the liquidation following the crisis was effected during the next three years.

It was a bad beginning for tariff revision, to split the party at its first session and to drive into opposition those Democrats who were most genuinely interested in tariff reform. Cleveland had lost his influence with Western Democrats before the repeal of the McKinley Act was undertaken, and they, like the Populists, had decided that he was the tool of the corporations and the "gold-bugs" of the East. The anti-corporation feelings of the West were increased by the accident which threw the corporations and the farmers into different sides upon the silver question.

A tariff for revenue had been the winning issue in 1890 and 1892, and the Democratic organization was pledged to pass it. When Speaker Crisp made William L. Wilson chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means his act showed an intention to fulfill the pledge, for which purpose Wilson brought in his bill early in the regular session of 1893-94. Like previous bills, this tariff was passed in the House, rewritten in the Senate, and again changed in conference committee. "The truth is," confessed Senator Cullom long after, "we were all—Democrats as well as Republicans—trying to get in amendments in the interest of protecting the industries of our respective States." The surplus was no longer an argument in favor of reduction. The free-trade arguments were flatly contradicted by a group of Democratic Senators under whose leadership the bill lost most of its reducing tendency. Out of doors the Republicans attacked the measure and noisily charged it with having produced the panic of 1893. Fourteen years later a Republican President still described it as the measure "under the influence of which wheat went down below fifty cents." When it finally came to the President it was so little different from the McKinley Bill that he denounced it violently. He had tried in vain to hold his party to an honest revision, and now, in July, 1894, refused to sign the bill. It became a law without his signature. It contained no novelty but an income tax, which was a concession to the Populists and which the Supreme Court soon declared to be unconstitutional.

In the fight over the Wilson Bill, Cleveland affronted Eastern members of his party as he had the Western members, in 1893, over the Sherman repeal. In the summer of 1894 he offended the whole body of organized labor by intervening in a Western strike.

The panic of 1893 had unsettled labor and created a floating element among the unemployed. These drifted toward Chicago, attracted by the Columbian Exposition held there during that summer, and worried the police for many months. About Easter, 1894, an "Army of the Unemployed" marched on Washington under the command of Jacob S. Coxey. A few weeks later a strike occurred among the employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company. The American Railroad Union, under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs, established a sympathetic boycott against the Pullman cars. The Knights of Labor indorsed the strike, and railway travel was impeded over all the West. Around Chicago there was disorder and rioting which the Governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, did not suppress. He held the militia in readiness, but had not intervened when Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to remove obstructions to the carriage of the mails.

This federal intervention offended those who still adhered to the doctrine of state rights, and angered the strikers and organized labor as a whole. They believed the President was a tool of the railroads, and believed the same of the courts when a federal judge issued an injunction to Debs forbidding him to interfere in the strike. In the end the strikers lost, leaving Cleveland's conduct in maintaining the peace in sharp contrast with that of the Populist Governor of Colorado, who intervened in a great miners' strike at Cripple Creek to arrest, not the strikers who had seized control of the mines, but the sheriff and his posse who wished to dislodge them. "It is better, infinitely better," Governor Waite had declared, "that the blood should flow to the horses' bridles than that our national liberties should be destroyed." Congress made Labor Day a legal holiday in 1894, but failed to placate the unions.

By the summer of 1894 Cleveland's party was split beyond repair, and his friends were mostly among the Republicans. Consistent in his belief in sound money, tariff revision, and law and order, he had been forced by events to alienate the West, the East, and organized labor. His course had aided the Populist party by widening the belief that the Democrats had no interest in their welfare. The panic had aided it yet more, by multiplying the discontented who might be converted to the new faith. Every month the Populist party increased in strength, the East watching it with mingled fear and contempt and ignorance. The comic papers pictured as the typical Populist the raw-boned, booted, unkempt farmer, in shirt-sleeves and with flowing beard. It could not see the foundation of real reforms on which the movement stood. A satirist pictured the Populist as "The Kansas Bandit," declaiming

"The People's Party, to
Which me native instinct draws me because it
Loves the rule of mediocrity, is now on top. I
Love the rule of Ignorance."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE