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- From: nyxfer%panix.com@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (N.Y. Transfer)
- Subject: HIST:How Capitalists Rule/Pt.12
- Message-ID: <1992Aug28.201010.25721@mont.cs.missouri.edu>
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- Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 20:10:10 GMT
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- Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit
-
- 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.
-
- -30-
-
- (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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