12 - The New Parties
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how capitalists rule/part 12
The Republocrats
Part 12:
The New Parties
By Vince Copeland
The election of 1896 is often called a "watershed election." It was more than that. It featured the revolt of the majority of the Democratic Party against its Wall Street-dominated leadership. And the results of this revolt provide valuable, if generally unheeded, lessons for today's Democrats.
To understand the nature of the revolt it is necessary to review the political and economic situation in the United States during the 1880s and 1890s. A big change was taking place.
While big business was busy shaping and disciplining the Republican and Democratic parties, the people themselves were becoming less convinced that these now traditional leaders were the last word in government.
In 1880, the industrial working class had rushed onto the political stage of history almost as suddenly, if not yet as completely or effectively, as the middle class had done in 1856 and 1860. The brand new Labor Greenback Party sent 14 representatives to Congress in 1878 and caused many a worried headache in the ranks of the capitalist plunderers.
The country was not yet molded into any kind of self-satisfaction about "democracy." The people had many grievances that were not being satisfied, and it was all too obvious that the big capitalists were getting immensely rich out of the people's misery.
In 1877, the same year as the Great Betrayal, a national railroad strike led to pitched gun battles in several cities. Veterans of the Civil War fought on both sides in this one, too. The so-called "National Guard," which was invented as an anti-strike instrument at about this time, shot down innumerable strikers.
The class struggle continued to rage throughout the next decade. As capital grew, so did its inevitable concomitant, human labor. This labor was paid miserably out of proportion to the big fortunes being made. This was all too obvious in the big cities, where slums festered and mansions were ever more splendid and ornate.
The angry farmers
The farm protest at this time was more massive and more effective than the labor opposition, which joined with it in the Greenback Labor Party and subsequent parties. The total population of the country, according to the census of 1880, was 50 million. There were 22 million living on farms, with 5 to 10 million more in villages and very small towns connected with farming. (Today, with a total population five times as great, there are only 2 million farms in the whole country.)
The farmers in the North and particularly in the West were a very different breed than those who had rallied around Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. In Jackson's time only those on the eastern seaboard were very concerned about the world market, although many in the Midwest were transporting some of their produce to seaboard cities.
Now, in the age of the transcontinental railroad and trans-Atlantic steamboat lines, the homesteaders in the West were as dependent upon the world market as were the ships and sailors of their age or the merchants and slave masters of the previous period. The new Southern share croppers, mostly Black, were even more vulnerable because of the close profit margins imposed on them by the former masters.
The bottom drops out
The railroads, after "opening up" the West, were now transporting great amounts of grain to the East to compete with grain from Russia, Canada and other countries. Of course, prices fell. Wheat went from $1.19 a bushel in 1881 to 40 cents a bushel in 1890. Corn slipped from 63 cents in 1881 to 26 cents in the same period, while the farmers' expenses remained the same or higher.
The wheat speculators regularly made a profit by purchasing the crop at harvest time and selling in midwinter. The poor farmers could not afford to do this; many were the homesteaders who went back East. As the signs on their covered wagons said, "In God we trusted; in Kansas [or Nebraska, Oklahoma, etc.] we busted."
Hatred for the railroads, the mortgaging bankers and Wall Street was greater and more consistent in the western farmlands than anywhere else in the United States. The farm families could get out their pencils and calculate exactly how much the railroads had taken from them; they were more sensitive to the vagaries of the market than anybody except the most sophisticated brokers and merchants.
By 1890 it was estimated that in Nebraska there was a mortgage for every three persons--that is, more than one to a family.
While they were very poor, they were educated enough in the grammar schools of the time to be able to articulate their grievances. Today, even the smallest farmers have to operate with a capital of $20,000 or more if they produce for the market. But at that time the scale of production was much smaller. Mechanization was only partial and horses were the motive power for nearly everything.
While the farmers were very hard-working people, who labored with their whole family from before sunrise to after dark, their mentality was that of the small shopkeeper rather than the industrial wage worker. Their biggest grievance was over the exorbitant cost of paying their debts.
Most of them had borrowed money inflated by the costs of the Civil War, but were now compelled to pay back their debts in more expensive gold. They thought the solution for this would be to make silver a medium of payment equal to one-sixteenth of an ounce of gold.
The trouble was that on the world market silver was not worth that much, so the money kings in the United States would not hear of such a solution.
The farmer-labor alliance
The farmers saw labor as an ally in the fight against Wall Street. But labor in the long run had no real interest in the silver question and in fact needed the best form of money it could get since the workers lived on wages. Nevertheless, the Wall Street enemy did unite the two classes and the farmer-labor alliance lasted for a long time.
This movement peaked in 1892 with the formation of the Peoples Party (often called the Populists), which gathered up several previously established opposition parties into one. The Peoples Party program, called the Omaha program after the city in which it held its first convention, included the following demands:
- popular election of U.S. senators;
- nationalization of the railroads, telegraph and telephone;
- abolition of trusts (monopoly businesses);
- outlawing absentee ownership of land [in order to perpetuate the small farm and stop agribusiness];
- an eight-hour day for labor;
- the secret ballot;
- free and unlimited coinage of silver, and
- passage of an income-tax amendment.
The last demand was aimed exclusively at the wealthy, since it was inconceivable at that time that anyone but the rich had any income to tax!
This platform was mercilessly attacked, especially in the East, as outright communism. But it captured more than a million votes for its presidential candidate, Gen. James B. Weaver, at a time when the electorate was barely 10 percent of what it is today. The party won 22 electoral votes and eight Populists were elected to the House of Representatives.
Predominantly Populist governments were elected in Colorado, Kansas and North Dakota. According to one estimate, there were as many as 50 state officials and 1,500 county officers elected from the party.
In the Old South, where the Populists had harder going because of the growing terrorism of the KKK and similar agents of reaction, they nevertheless made surprising progress. But due to the stranglehold of the dug-in Democratic Party, they won no big elections.
The Black Populists
The southern Populists claimed a million members. This included women, both Black and white, who could not legally vote and a large number of Black men who supposedly had the franchise but were illegally prevented from voting.
The Black component was undoubtedly the most dynamic or potentially dynamic. It had joined in a body known as the Colored Alliance. The white leaders of the Peoples Party recognized this and were very well aware of the oppression.
Milford W. Howard, a Populist member of Congress from Alabama elected in 1894, was one who showed a highly sophisticated understanding of the ruling class' use of the race issue to divide the masses and stay on top. He wrote in his book, "The American Plutocracy":
"In the North, the shibboleth has been, `Vote as you shoot.' In the South it has been `Down with the carpet bagger and the Yankee.'
"Every four years there has been a great commotion throughout the country, and the Democrats nominate a candidate for President and the Republicans nominate a candidate. And then both parties go to the plutocracy and say, `We must have campaign funds with which to wage this fight.' They get the money, and then the loudmouthed campaign orators go out to harangue the people, and each abuses the other's party, and says the leaders are the meanest men on earth, and that the members of the party are all too corrupt to occupy even a humble place in one corner of His Satanic Majesty's Kingdom, and they proceed to wave the bloody shirt on the one side in the wildest alarm, while the followers on the other side shout at the top of their voice `N....r! N....r!' and when the people are all worked up, almost to a frenzy, the wily old plutocrats get together and determine which candidate shall be elected and at once go to manipulating and wire-pulling so that they can accomplish their purpose." (Quoted by Norman Pollack in "The Populist Mind")
Ignatius Donnelly, another of the Peoples Party leaders and a very popular writer of the day, said:
"We propose to wipe the Mason-Dixon line out of politics; to give Americans prosperity [so that] the man who creates shall own what he creates; to take the robber class from the throat of industry; to take possession of the government of the United States and put our nominee in the White House."
Soldiers to protect the strikers
Some Democrats, notably Gov. John P. Altgeld of Illinois, Gov. George G. Waite of Colorado and Rep. William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, were greatly influenced by the Populist movement, although they did not leave their party.
Governor Waite, for example, was probably the only governor in U.S. history to call out the National Guard to protect strikers rather than to shoot them down. In 1903, the Rockefellers, Guggenheims and other corporate moguls who owned the mines in Cripple Creek, Colo., hired hundreds of armed deputies to break a strike there. The local authorities instructed the police to cooperate with the strike breakers. But with Governor Waite's help, the miners won this standoff.
In 1892, Governor Altgeld pardoned the remaining Chicago Haymarket martyrs. They had been framed for a bomb-throwing incident in 1886, even though some of them were not even at the scene of the bombing. Four of their number had already been executed.
Altgeld went beyond the act of pardon, writing a lengthy and powerful criticism of the trial judge's conduct of the trial and an expos of the media-manufactured hysteria that led to the verdict. This finished him as a friend of big business and led to his eventual political downfall.
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(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@igc.apc.org".)
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