Populism and the People’s Party

Populists believed national policies favored industry, banks, and the Northeast over farmers, who faced falling crop prices, debt, and high railroad rates. They sought to expand the money supply — especially through the free coinage of silver — to ease debts; to regulate or nationalize railroads and telegraphs; to institute a graduated income tax; and to make government more directly answerable to voters.

Farmers organized through cooperative Farmers’ Alliances and then turned to independent politics. Meeting in Omaha on the 116th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1892, the People’s Party declared that the nation had been “brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin” and that both major parties had permitted “grievous wrongs” against “a plundered people.”

Republicans were attacked by the Populists for serving the “moneyed” power of the Northeast, and Southern Democrats were put on notice as small farmers broke away. Both major parties, business interests, and much of the press in turn portrayed the Populists as dangerous radicals.

Though their presidential bids failed, the Populists set the stage for William Jennings Bryan’s Democratic campaign of 1896. Several of their demands were later written into the Constitution: a federal income tax (Sixteenth Amendment, 1913) and the direct election of senators (Seventeenth Amendment, 1913).

Historians debate Populism’s character: a democratic movement of producers against concentrated power, or one that also carried nativist and racial prejudices. The word “populism” is still used to describe movements that claim to speak for ordinary people against elites.