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

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890sAuthor(s): David PealSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 340-362Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178812 .

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

The Institute for Historical Study

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 Popu- lism, 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.2

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

2 C. Vann Woodward, "The Comparability of American History" in The Comparative Ap- proach to American History, Woodward, ed. (New York 1968), 3-17, 346-58. On comparing Southern history: idem., Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986), ch. 7. On German exceptionalism: Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German

0010-4175/89/2712-2346 $5.00 ? 1989 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

340



THE POLITICS OF POPULISM 341

This article seeks to place the movement launched by Otto B6ckel, Ger- many's first anti-Semitic Reichstag deputy, in its broad contemporary context, instead of viewing it in light of its imputed Nazi outcome. The aim is to clarify the conditions in which anti-Semitic slogans and programs entered political life in Germany and to throw light on the failure and legacy of the Bockel movement. Populism in the American South (the cotton states from Texas to the Carolinas) lends itself well to comparison. Both movements acquired institutional form in the late 1880s, mobilized small farmers on the margins of political and economic life, adopted similar schemes of cooperative organization, and brought forth charismatic leaders skillful at playing on popular grievances and ranging "the people" against their alleged enemies. Both failed within a decade. Racism pervaded both movements and was perhaps their principal legacy.

Despite exceptionalism and real differences in national histories, studies of the two movements have been based on similar assumptions. Populist politics have been consistently portrayed as a direct response (political mobilization) to economic difficulty: in the South, to an exploitive credit system; in Ger- many, the "Great Depression" (1873-1896) is invoked to explain the out- break of anti-Semitic politics. Yet the method works only when comparison is suppressed: Why were anti-Semitic politics not uniformly distributed among German regions during the depression? Why was American Populism not universal among distressed regions in the South and West?3

Lawrence Goodwyn adopts a method both less reductionist and better suited to comparison. In The Populist Moment, he locates the roots of Southern Populism in agricultural cooperation: economic factors are displaced to the

History (New York, 1984). Kenneth Barkin makes a strained case for comparing Populism with Germany's elite Agrarian League in "A Case Study in Comparative History: Populism in Ger- many and America," in The State of American History, Herbert J. Bass, ed. (Chicago, 1970), 373-404. For a comparison of elites based on a caricature of Germany: Jonathan Wiener, "Planter Persistence and Social Change: Alabama, 1850-1870," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7:2 (1976), 235-60. On prewar anti-Semitism, see my Anti-Semitism and Rural Trans- formation in Kurhessen: The Rise and Fall of the Bockel Movement (Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, Columbia University 1985), intro.

3 On the "Great Depression" as a "cause" of anti-Semitic politics, see the highly influential book by Hans Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit: Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft, und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1967); Geoff Eley criticizes this approach in his essay, "Hans Rosenberg and the Great Depression of 1873-1896," in his From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston and London, 1986), 23-41, esp. 32ff. On the incidence of Populism: Peter Argersinger, Populism and Politics: William Alfred Peffer and the People's Party (Lexington, 1974), 60ff; James Turner, "Understanding the Populists," Journal of Ameri- can History, 67:2 (1980), 354-73; Anne Mayhew, "A Reappraisal of the Cause of Farm Protest in the United States," Journal of Economic History, 32:2 (1972), 464-75. 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 J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven and London, 1974).



342 DAVID PEAL

experience of cooperators; "economic background" and Populist politics are mediated by consciousness shaped by cooperative organizations that failed. "To describe the origins of Populism in one sentence, the cooperative movement recruited American farmers, and their subsequent experience within the cooperatives radically altered their political consciousness." Through comparative analysis, the present article first evaluates the economic and cooperative explanations of populist politics, then develops a more satisfying political explanation that throws light on populist racism.4

"Politics" in this article means electoral politics: How did popular movements become populist parties? How did they compete with other parties? Why did they fail? Populist parties did not pursue electoral politics as usual. Their leaders used the popular perception of the inadequacies of existing parties to lend weight to their own claims to represent marginal rural groups. Electoral politics, providing both a vehicle of protest and means of empower- ment for the marginal and underrepresented, were used to challenge the domination of elites. Unlike traditional politicians, the populist leaders in Germany and the United States, independently of each other, invented a "new" politics congenial to new voters, featuring mass rallies, lively news- papers, grass-roots clubs, and a folksy rhetoric. These new methods set the terms of politics practiced at that time and forced other parties to change their programs, as well as their styles. The tension between old and new politics is a key to understanding the role of racism in populist politics.5

4 Lawrence Goodwyn Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford and New York, 1976), xviii; abridged as The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford and New York, 1978). Cf. Turner, "Understanding the Populists" and David Montgomery, "On Goodwyn's Populists," Marxist Perspectives, 1 (Spring 1978), 166-73. Stanley Parsons et al. argue that the cooperative movement was small, did not "pre- cede" 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 formida- ble 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 et al. are on firmer ground in doubting the linkage between cooperative failure and radical consciousness, which Goodwyn only asserts. "The Role of Cooperatives in the Develop- ment of the Movement Culture of Populism," Journal of American History, 69:4 (1983), 866- 85.

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




MERCHANTS, THE MARKET, AND PEASANT CULTURE

The two movements are comparable by virtue of the structural likeness of their rural social base. Populist votes were concentrated in hill districts like Georgia's Upcountry; anti-Semitic votes, in Kurhessen in central Germany.6 Household autonomy was an ideal in Kurhessen and the hill districts, as in most peasant societies, but Georgians were more successful at achieving it, as measured by land distribution and farm size.7 Even in the eighteenth century, only a minority of Kurhessian peasants lived from farming; grazing, seasonal migration, and mercenary soldiering was the lot of the rest. The regions varied in other ways, of course. Kurhessians held land in strips scattered among two or three communal fields, and lived in compact, stratified villages of long settlement. Georgians farmed consolidated holdings of comparable size, living in homesteads clustered loosely by kinship. Seen as a whole, the regions were dominated by the ethos and household orientation of more or less independent peasants. The movements are also comparable because they took place in regions poorly integrated into their larger national societies, a fact revealed by the expansion of market relations and recognized by populists. Both movements can be situated in the tension-field between backward regions and "exceptional" nations.

Studies of these regions at a time of rapid change have been characterized by scholars' exceptionalism, reductionism, and also by their partiality toward the "people's" diagnosis of their own economic situation. This applies par- ticularly to perceptions of merchants. To gain access to the reality of populist politics, it is necessary to cut through the anti-merchant bias on the part of Populists and their historians.

Southern farmers in the 1880s hated merchants. Low cotton prices, expen- sive supplies, costly corn-in each case, the exactions of a middleman could be held responsible, the "economic background" brought home. The new system of store credit secured by a lien on the cotton crop was singled out for harsh criticism. Populist sympathizer Charles Otken wrote in 1894 of the "vast credit system whose tremendous evils and exorbitant exactions have brought poverty and bankruptcy to thousands of families, . . . crushed out all

independence and reduced its victims to a coarse species of servile slavery."8

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

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

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



344 DAVID PEAL

Historian C. Vann Woodward confirms this view, isolating the lien system as a root "evil" of the post-bellum South.9 Economists Ransom and Sutch go farther and seek to prove that shopkeepers' control of credit amounted to an intentional monopoly in the black belt, the fertile, low-lying districts once dominated by cotton plantations. Shopkeepers, they argue, extended credit to cash-poor black croppers only against cotton, punishing clients who took their business elsewhere. They deliberately discouraged corn-and-hogs husbandry, while subjecting debtors to the risks of soil depletion and low prices. ? Historians of the poorer, less commercialized white hill country, the Populist heartland, link the expansion of cotton growing there to other factors, like the new railways, which lowered the costs of fertilizer and corn imports. Cotton growing there, too, led to dependence on cotton and "bondage" to merchants.

All of these views neglect merchants' risks and costs, assume intentional malice, and fail to consider circumstances in which farmers would need to borrow or want to grow cotton. Despite the harshness in the operation of the lien laws, it is incontestable that without the laws, credit would have been unavailable, because of the devaluation of land after the war. When lien laws were abolished in 1877, debtors pressed for their reintroduction.12 Only by neglecting these factors does it make sense to endorse the contemporary view of competition as "the life of trade," but "the death of the farmer."'3

Historians have accepted the descriptive accuracy of anti-merchant senti- ment with little criticism, but popular economic thinking is arguably of greater value in providing insight into the assumptions of smallholders unac- customed to commercial norms. As Bruce Palmer shows, Populists valued occupations involved in the production of tangible wealth (agriculture and some sorts of manufacturing), and they defined themselves within a local web of personal ties among small producers. They did not reject the market, but dreamt of a localized market society based on agriculture, not wage labor.

9 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 180; Hicks, Populist Revolt, 43; Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, 26ff; Fred A. Shannon, The Farm- er's Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860-1897 (New York, 1945), 90ff.

10 Ransom, Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, for criticism, see "One Kind of Freedom: A

Symposium," Explorations in Economic History, 16:1 (1979); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986), esp. 106- 15.

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

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

13 Hahn, Southern Populism, 283.




The reverse of their ideal of the sturdy yeoman was their stereotype of the merchant as parasitic "usurer." This anti-commercial idiom itself points to the novelty of the market: storekeepers were mediators of the "system," but

they seemed like its embodiment.14 This is evidence not of irrationality and much less of mercantile tyranny, but of vulnerability articulated in familiar cultural terms. Moreover, commercial behavior was becoming the social as well as legal norm. To cite Otken again:

Neither the merchants . . . nor the farmers . . . are to blame for this state of things; but the commercial contract, under articles they formed a joint copartnership to do business, deserves full and signal justice. It is a covenant to which the parties of the first part are thoroughly organized, thoroughly systematic in keeping accounts, thoroughly ac- quainted with the cost and selling price of merchandise. ... The parties of the second part are thoroughly unorganized, thoroughly unsystematic, thoroughly uninformed as to prices and as to their ability to pay them . . 15

The lien system, then, brought together economic unequals: "thoroughly unorganized" small producers and "thoroughly systematic" merchants; farmers not yet knowledgeable of the rules of the game in the commercial

economy; and rational, experienced merchants. The B6ckel movement shared a root hostility to the merchant with Southern

Populism.16 Here, too, the hostility was linked to credit scarcity; but again the link was indirect, symptomatic rather than factually accurate. In the late nineteenth century, the primary source of short-term credit was the smalltown Jewish cattle trader and product dealer, whose clients could rarely pay in full. 17 Much of the resentment of the post-bellum storekeeper arose from his

novelty, his upstart ability (like Flem Snopes in William Faulkner's novel, The Hamlet) to insinuate himself into the marrow of community life. Ger-

many's rural Jews were no less indispensable, but the resentment ran deeper and farther back, and the Jews never became insiders. From the old regime until the mid-nineteenth century, scores of edicts had equated "Jew" and "usurer" and protected gentiles from usury. These edicts combined Christian Jew-hatred with the anti-commercial bias characteristic of precapitalist peasant society in the German states.

Annexed by Prussia in 1866, Kurhessen was subject at once to the new framework of liberal capitalism. Laws now recognized the principle of indi- vidual equality, and, in 1869, Jews were emancipated. Building on their

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

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

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

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



346 DAVID PEAL

historical concentration in the commercial sector of the rural economy, Jewish traders now mediated between the villages and the larger expansive economy, and they prospered relative to their neighbors. The disparity was sharpened during the agricultural depression of the 1880s. Especially galling, mobile Jews were able to rise above the station accorded them by earlier edicts and customary norms. Popular antipathy to Jewish usury was not abolished when Jews were emancipated.18 While Jews did not encourage commercial farming, they did mediate the commercialization of economic life. High Prussian taxes, low product prices, and growing habituation to purchased farm supplies and "luxury" goods led peasants, especially smallholders, into protracted indebtedness. Since traders secured credit against land, not crops, the mortgage came to mean much the same in rural Germany as the lien in the South: the slippery slope to ruin. 19 Study after study-culminating in the influential Usury in the Countryside (1887)-depicted a "typical" process: an invari- ably Jewish trader secures his claims against his debtor's land, renews the contract on prohibitive terms, then willfully forecloses and sells the land to new "tributaries."20

Some scholars still accept Usury in the Countryside without criticism, assuming that the anti-Semitic movement had an immediate economic cause. This not only misses the crucial issue-the novelty of the market-but is also belied by the evidence: foreclosure did not pay and its incidence decreased in the 1880s.21 In Kurhessen as in the South, familial ruin seemed implicit in

every transaction with a merchant. Household autonomy, once elusive, seemed increasingly out of reach. Peasants in both places shared inexperience relative to the rational agents of the market. White smallholders and Klein- bauern, as well as landless former slaves, entered into capitalist social rela-

18 Ibid., 96ff; Monika Richarz, "Jewish Social Mobility in Germany during the Era of Emancipation (1790-1871)," Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, 20 (1975), 69-77; Utz Jeggle, Judendorfer in Wiirttemberg (Tibingen, 1969), 188-89. 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; Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1985), 146ff (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; Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers (New York, 1974), 192; Jeff Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black, White Relations in the American South since Recon- struction (New York, 1984), 45ff, 250.

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.

20 Der Wucher auf dem Lande, in Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik, Vol. 35 (Leipzig, 1887); Peal, "Anti-Semitism by other Means?"

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




tions from a structurally weak position, and at a time of falling product prices and rising costs.22 Without alternative credit sources or steady income, peasants' worries about losing property or not being able to acquire it became general. This anxiety was the Populists' capital.

COOPERATIVE CRUSADES COMPARED

Since Hicks, most historians have assumed that cooperation was a direct response to mercantile exploitation. Goodwyn goes farther. He argues that the experience of cooperation and the educational work of the Southern Farmers Alliance (SFA) lecturers and editors implanted the ideal of a humane, cooperative alternative to capitalism; the organization's failure brought home the ugliness of the system and the necessity of political activism. "The spark that lit the fuse of agrarian discontent" was the message offered by the (SFA): "join the Alliance, build a cooperative, and get free of the credit merchants."23

The preceding argument suggests a less linear, more complex linkage between cooperatives and politics. First, cooperatives were not simply economic in purpose, but were also set up to promote mutuality and counteract the cultural tendency of liberal capitalism. Second, less an alternative to the new system of capitalist social relations, cooperatives gave members the means to overcome their substantive inequality and compete in the market. Finally, in the Bockel movement, cooperatives did not so much anticipate politicization as provide an all-purpose political organization; politics "came first." In both countries, cooperation and politics were arguably parallel, not sequential, responses to isolation and material vulnerability reinforced by political marginality.

The Texas Alliance was founded in 1877 as a fraternal club of upcountry Greenbackers opposed to the use of barbed wire by cattlemen. This practice impeded access to pasture and water, aggravating the effects of the poor harvests of the late 1870s. Even before the breakthrough of commercial agriculture, then, farmers experimented with cooperative methods of protect- ing their landed independence. It was only in the mid-1880s (a time of labor conflicts, falling cotton prices, and rising debt) that the Alliance took root. Alliance leaders and editors developed a program of community and sectional self-help, then sent lecturers across the South to organize sub-alliances in 1887-88. Mobilizing yeomen as well as some planters, absorbing similar organizations in North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Alliance was

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

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



348 DAVID PEAL

nationally incorporated and numbered over a million members in 1890.24 Encouraged by SFA lecturers and writers, sub-alliances formed cooperative

stores where goods were bought wholesale and resold to members for cash, while the profit was shared and cooperators assumed responsibility for de- fault.25 In some states, sub-alliances went beyond "furnishing," to the bulk- ing and marketing of cotton. Undercapitalized, poorly coordinated, undersold by merchants, these local stores were not very successful. Members quickly learned how costly it was to carry each other to harvest. The hallmark of Alliance activity was a series of state and sectional enterprises that tried to overcome local obstacles by instituting a "a monopoly" of Southern agriculture.26 In 1888-89, SFA members in four states established "exchanges" to centralize the marketing of cotton and deal directly with large merchants. The Texas Exchange worked out of a four-story building in Dallas and conducted a million dollars worth of business in its peak year, 1888. Exchange managers weighed, classified, and priced members' cotton, then shipped it to

Europe when prices were highest. In a show of force, the SFA coordinated in 1889 a successful interstate boycott of the jute trust that supplied bagging for cotton bales.27

The enthusiasm generated by Alliance activities arose from more than the

bracing experience of the "cooperative crusade" against mercantile tyranny. The sub-alliance was also one of the many voluntary fraternal and charitable clubs that flourished along the frontier in the 1870s. Like the clubs, sub- alliances met secretly and instituted ritual to create "community out of the

heterogeneous mass of settlers."28 The Alliance message found the greatest resonance among smallholders, especially women, in isolated or newly set- tled regions like Georgia's Upcountry and Alabama's wiregrass counties, where the organization latched onto existing patterns of mutuality. The tone of sub-alliance gatherings transcended the narrowly economic: at school, church, and home members joined for song and uplift as well as for lessons in

crop diversification. "You cannot imagine what a kindred feeling has sprung up among us," wrote one sub-alliance secretary to the North Carolina Al-

24 Robert McMath, 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, Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds. (Chapel Hill and London, 1985), 205-29.

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

26 Ralph Smith, "'Macuneism', or the Farmers of Texas in Business," Journal of Southern History, 13:2 (1947), 227-28; Hair, Bourbonism, 155-56; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 29-30, 57 ("monopoly"), 68.

27 Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South, 1865-1933 (Berkeley and Los An-

geles, 1960), 91-101; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 74ff; Schwartz, Radical Protest, ch. 14-15; Smith, "'Macuneism,'" 228ff; McMath, Populist Vanguard, ch. 4.

28 McMath, Populist Vanguard, 7.




liance headquarters. "Bless the name of the Alliance . . . it is next to religion with us, as its Constitution partakes so much of the faith, hope, and charity commended in the Bible."29 Such rhetoric appropriated and redefined the "one-value system" of the rural white Protestant South, and its exuberance challenged genteel elite religiosity.30

Since the Alliance served several purposes, its success (or failure) can be measured in many ways. Its business record bespeaks a fiasco: The SFA was defunct by 1892-93. As a "business organization for business purposes," the SFA lacked experienced managers.31 More important, the credit scarcity that ruined local cooperatives undermined state exchanges. Only by pledging crops could they secure the necessary credit. Since the Texas Exchange could not mobilize adequate cash or membership dues to finance the marketing of cotton or wholesale purchases, Macune devised a "joint-note" plan, by which sub-alliances secured joint orders by a lien on the cotton crop of local "responsible" farmers. Bankers, however, viewed these notes as inadequate collateral and would not lend against them-whether out of conspiracy, as Goodwyn argues, or because it was too risky, is moot.32

One obstacle to economic success was racism. If it had focused solely on ending peonage, the SFA would have mobilized blacks as well as whites, but the Alliance served only farmers who controlled their own crop: white yeomen. Black croppers and tenants shared yeomen's enemies (merchants and planters) and sought independence, but were barred from membership in sub- alliances. To accommodate them, a Colored Farmers' Alliance (CFA) was created as an appendage of the white organization, but relations between the two were hostile, with economic conflict aggravating racial antagonism. The SFA, made up of small employers, opposed CFA cotton workers' strikes; its Mississippi branch was a "driving force" in calling for the first Southern constitutional convention to disfranchise blacks. Negro emancipation did not imply social acceptance any more than Jewish emancipation did in Germany. Arguably, sub-alliance clubbishness institutionalized exclusiveness and undermined the SFA's material goals.33

29 Ibid., 64. 30 Ibid., 136; Palmer, "Man over Money", ch. 10; Argersinger, "Pentecostal Politics"; Gary

Peller, "Creation, Evolution, and the New South," Tikkun, 2:5 (1987), 72-76. 31 Smith, "'Macuneism,'" 233ff; Saloutos, Farmer Movements, 90ff. Goodwyn neglects

Macune's incompetence and unpopularity. 32 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 75ff; Hicks, Populist Revolt, 136; McMath, Populist Van-

guard, ch. 4. 33 Schwartz, Radical Protest, 114-15; Woodward, Origins, 193; Harold Woodman, "Post-

bellum Social Change and its Effects on Marketing the South's Cotton Crop," Agricultural History, 56:1 (1982), 215-30; McMath, Populist Vanguard, 44-45; William F. Holmes, "The Demise of the Colored Farmers' Alliance," Journal of Southern History, 41:2 (1975), 187-200; Robert McMath, Jr., "Southern White Farmers and the Organization of Black Farm Workers," Labor History, 18:1 (1977), 115-19; Albert D. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925 (Lexington, 1951), 60-63 (Alliance and disenfranchisement). Ironically,



350 DAVID PEAL

Racism and the failure to institutionalize commercial functions weighed more heavily than a conspiracy of traders in undermining the SFA. One result was politicization, but this result was neither direct nor necessary. In part, it was the enthusiasm and evangelism of sub-alliance culture more than any lesson about the system that was transferred to politics as cooperatives failed. In part, Populism had little to do with any aspect of SFA success or failure. The Populist revolt in Georgia was largely unrelated to prior Alliance activities; the fiery Georgia Populist, Tom Watson, did not even belong to the SFA.34 In Texas (and probably elsewhere) the crucial variable in populist success was not the extent of mortgage debt or the educational impact of the Alliance, but the sheer social and physical distance from centers of admin- istrative and commercial power. Populism sank roots among backwoodsmen who felt themselves "effectively excluded by town-oriented political oper- ators."35 The point becomes clearer in an examination of Kurhessen, a region that shared with the Southern hill districts a tenuous connection with its larger society. From this relative isolation sprang both cooperation and Populism.

A cooperative crusade accompanied the Bockel movement, but politics did not flow from cooperation as one would expect by Goodwyn's model. Bockel voiced the anxieties of smallholders without mediation. After gaining promi- nence as a speaker in anti-Semitic circles in Kassel and Berlin, the 26-year- old folksong collector took his creed to the Marburg countryside in the 1887 Reichstag campaign. With great elan, he conveyed to smallholders the plight of the self-sufficient peasant entrapped by the predatory Jew, who reduced peasants to "tributaries." Believing that Jewish emancipation had em- powered an inferior race, Bockel wanted to turn back emancipation and revoke the liberal laws that supposedly benefited only Jews. Thus, while playing out the democratic implications of liberal equality for peasants, he attacked the extension of equality to Jews. This campaign was innocent of organizational groundwork. In 1880-81, large farmers and state officials in the area did try to combat usury by setting up credit cooperatives like those started by Friedrich Raiffeisen in the Rhineland, but efforts from above were defeated by distrust and divided leadership in the villages. The suddenness of Bockel's political breakthrough, mobilizing groups whose grievances had been long unattended, may account for some of the appeal of the abrasive racial ideology.36

early disenfranchisement in Mississippi made Populism a neglible factor in that state. See Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 144, passim.

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

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

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




Racism was not all Bockel offered; voters wanted more. In stumping the villages he became more and more the brash populist, attacking town notables and espousing social reforms having little to do with anti-Semitism.37 Along with his populist tone and promises went sponsorship of grass-roots organizations. The most important of these was the Central German Peasants' Associa- tion (Mitteldeutscher Bauernverein [MDBV], 1890-94), which, by 1892-93, encompassed some 500 cooperative Ortsgruppen (German sub-alliances). Unlike the SFA in the United States, the MDBV was only one of many Bauern- vereine in Germany, which never overcame confessional and regional differences to congeal into a single movement with a common social and political program.38 One obstacle to such a merger was the MDBV's commitment to independent politics. Other peasant unions maintained an apolitical stance or were loosely affiliated with established conservative parties. This political mission shaped its economic program. To break the supposed monopoly of "usurers,"' the MDBV coordinated the capital-intensive trade in farm supplies, especially fertilizer, long a preserve of Jewish merchants. Eager to displace Jews, MDBV leaders neglected the more fundamental, but less lucrative cooperative credit business, and they ignored cooperative marketing, since commercial farming had made little inroad in the hills.39

Like the SFA, the MDBV did not restrict itself to combatting merchants. To isolated villagers, leaders also offered camaraderie. "People's festivals" featured brass bands, marches, picnics, speechmaking, and disastrously un- successful "Jew-free" cattle markets. In this way, anti-Semites succeeded in bringing together villagers by identifying a shared enemy. Anti-Semitic mutuality, too, was linked with larger political goals. The MDBV, an organization that brought villagers together against Jews, served as an all-purpose anti- Semitic political organization. Cells were mobilized to do the day-to-day political work of rallying activists, getting out the vote, raising funds, mobilizing youth, and disrupting enemies' rallies. The MDBV itself was adduced as evidence of the value of anti-Semitic politics. By voting anti-Semite, villagers could continue to enjoy both the material benefits of bulk fertilizer purchases and the cozy exclusiveness of Germanic sociability.

The MDBV's failure was a root of the demise of the Bockel movement. First, its aims worked at cross-purposes. This organization of smallholders was ill-suited to finance the campaigns of an expansive political movement, yet B6ckel and his minions used the MDBV for just this purpose.40 More fundamentally, the MDBV like the SFA, lacked the credit underpinnings to attain its economic goals. All evidence points to its inability to compete with

37 Peal, Rural Transformation, 173-75. 38 Ibid., ch. 5. 39 Ibid., 299-300. 40 Ibid., 307-8.



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"usurers." Jewish merchants simply had longer experience, wider horizons, knew their clients better, and were better capitalized. The drought-induced fodder scarcity of 1893-94 exacerbated this weakness. Strained by the drought and three political campaigns, the MDBV failed its members when they most needed help.41 Contrary to what one would expect by Goodwyn's model, German populism broke into politics without a cooperative crusade and ended despite, or because, of one.42 The political phases of Southern and German Populism were ultimately political in nature.

POPULIST POLITICS

In Germany, unification hastened the nationalization of politics: the domination of national issues, interest groups, and parties and the rise of patriotic and

imperialist clubs, but, in the South, after the humiliations of defeat and Reconstruction, Democrats conducted politics against the national grain, in willful sectional isolation. Germany's Reichstag, with its democratic suf-

frage, was the target of anti-Semitic politics. Southern Populists divided their

energies between Democratic state legislatures and Congress. The national focus and multi-party environment of German populism suggests a greater scope and openness in German politics, yet, by taking part in national politics, German populists were also subject to state opposition. By contrast, Southern Populists benefited from the state-rights zeal of their Democratic adversaries and enjoyed virtual immunity from federal opposition. Despite these important differences, populists in both countries confronted similar constellations of local elites, and followed parallel political trajectories.

After Reconstruction, Democrats and industrialists evinced reconciliation with the Union by celebrating business and advertising Southern opportunities to Northern investors. Their slogans of white supremacy and states rights, however, were used to create sectional consensus and enforce the post- Reconstruction "taboo against insurgency" (V. O. Key, Jr.): that division of the white South would bring about "negro domination." They did not state that it would also threaten existing concentrations of power. Political change meant cultural danger:

Changing one's party in the South of the nineties involved more than changing one's mind. It might involve a falling-off of clients, the loss of a job, of credit at the store, or of one's welcome at church. It could split families, and it might even call in question one's loyalty to his race and his people.43

When the cultural sanctions in support of one-party rule failed, force and

fraud were employed without reservation.

41 Ibid., 308ff. 42 Ibid., ch. 6. 43 Woodward, Origins, 244; ch. 1-3; Key, Southern Politics, 553; William Warren Rogers,

The One-Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865-1896 (Baton Rouge, 1970), ch. 3.




Despite the taboo, antagonisms did emerge within the white South in the 1870s and 1880s: most acutely along the fault line between hill district and black belt, but increasingly between hill towns and villages as well. The laws upholding the lien were the clearest evidence that smallholders were ill served by Democratic politics. To defend the inviolability of contracts, mercantile and landed interests also pressed state legislatures to abolish usury laws and increase the extent of mortgageable property. In defense of private property, smallholders' access to grazing land was curtailed, striking directly at their independence.44 At the state level, the tax code favored business, while public education was a low priority. State regimes further alienated yeomen by granting vast tracts of land to railways and timber companies. Overall, these conflicts between "backwoods farmers and courthouse elites" produced the "rage and alienation" that powered Populism.45

The SFA provided the organizational framework of this broad-based political alienation. Its dilemma was to achieve parity for farmers-without betray- ing white supremacy. At the state level, conservative Democrats dominated politics, while precinct politics was in the hands of courthouse elites, whose caucuses provided no scope for popular participation. The solution was to support only Democrats who backed the SFA program-nationalization of railways and establishment of federal warehouses (sub-treasuries)-and to mobilize sheer numbers at the polls. At first, the tactic worked. In 1890, the sub-treasury plan apparently had the backing of at least four governors, eight legislatures, and forty-four U.S. Congressmen. Yet Georgia's "Alliance leg- islature" failed to support a bill revoking the charter of a railway engaged in monopolistic practices, then elected a notorious Bourbon (patrician Demo- crat) as U.S. Senator. The record was similarly disappointing elsewhere. Confusion at the state level resulted from the nature of the SFA demands, which required federal, not state, measures. Indirection was compounded by Alliance leaders' reluctance to carry their reform of the party of white supremacy too far.46

In 1891-92, speakers from the SFA's radical wing fanned out across the South, channeling enthusiasm and calling for a new party to apply pressure on

44 Hahn, Southern Populism, 193ff, 223-24, 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, J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds. (New York and Oxford, 1982), 51-88. On the comparable division of communal forests in Germany: Peal, Rural Transformation, 216-19.

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

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



354 DAVID PEAL

the federal government to print greenbacks and create sub-treasuries.47 It took two party-political developments to precipitate the break from the Southern Democratic party. First, the Populists' upset 1890-91 victories in Kansas, where the SFA had just begun to make inroads, placed pressure on Southern leaders to follow a similar course. Kansas provided a model for insurgency and a rationale for dissociation from the Democrats, for the sake of a cross- sectional political movement took away the ability of Republicans of the North and West to cry "bloody shirt," claiming that Populists were helping Democrats split the Union.48 Then, in 1892, in the midst of a depression, the Democrats nominated "gold-bug" Grover Cleveland for President, enraging Populists of every stripe. These realities overcame the reluctance of SFA leaders, who dominated the first convention of the People's Party in Omaha on July 4, 1892. SFA President Leonidas Polk of North Carolina would have been the party's nominee, but died weeks before the convention.49

The record of the People's Party in Southern politics has been chronicled in the classic histories. Here, two patterns emerging from the elections of 1892 and 1894 must be stressed. First, the new party elicited massive opposition from the Democrats and the social elites who ruled the party. Deeply divided in the 1880s, Democrats were now forced to set aside differences. They fought back with charges of racial treason and with violence; assaults and murders accompanied campaigns in most states.50 Populist Tom Watson was

deprived of victories in Georgia Congressional races by open fraud.5' Subtler means of influence were more pervasive. Georgia Populists were "turned out of church, driven from their homes, and refused credit because of their be- liefs."52 Second, despite phony vote counts, the Populist party enlarged its share of the vote between 1892 and 1894, winning the North Carolina legisla- ture by cooperating with Republicans and gaining more than 35 percent of the vote in the 1894 state races in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.53

While the Democrats used white supremacy to rally whites and discredit Populists, the new party was not above similar appeals. Electoral success probably resulted from some degree of voter support for sub-treasuries and

47 Goodwyn Populist Moment, 148ff. 48 Goodwyn, 131-32, 210, passim; Argersinger, Populism and Politics, 51-53, 62. 49 Woodward, Origins, 243ff; Hicks, 229ff, 439-44. 50 Shaw, Wool-Hat Boys, 69-72; Hair, Bourbonism, 228 (rhetoric), 262 (lynchings); Martin,

People's Party in Texas, 181-82, 236-37; Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton, 1969), 43. For the divisions in the Southern elite and references: John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South, (Cambridge, 1982), 161ff.

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

52 Woodward, Tom Watson, 223. 53 Hicks, Populist Revolt, 263, 337 (electoral maps).




government railway ownership, as well as sheer Alliance enthusiasm, but

Populists were unable to keep racism out of their own campaigns. In large part, this was an effort to disprove the Democrats' calculated, systematic race hatred, and their contentions that populism would "destroy white su-

premacy" and "bring about the death of our civilization."54 In part, Populist racism was genuine-or a play to voters' real sentiments. Watson, once considered a pioneer of racial amity, repeatedly denied that he favored social

equality for blacks; he spoke of biracial interests only when addressing black audiences.55 Despite an understandable appeal for black votes, Populists would not seat black delegates at their conventions in most states or recognize their demands in programs. In 1892, one Georgian black was lynched by a

group of Populists!56 By competing with the Democrats on the terrain of white supremacy,

Populists jeopardized their own electoral position among blacks and forced themselves into other electoral alliances (with urban reformers and businessmen) that compromised their principles without helping them at the

polls.57 At the national level, too, Populists let their stronger enemies set the terms of competition. In a process beautifully documented by Goodwyn, Democrats maneuvered Populists into narrowing their national platform to the free-silver plank, then split them into pro-Democrat "fusionist" and independent "midroader" factions and co-opted moderates. This tactic cost the Dem- ocrats the 1896 election, but successfully divided and destroyed populism.58

Southern Populists were defeated less by Democratic duplicity than by pervasive racism. Democrats had raised the cry of white betrayal against them, then defeated them at the polls by stuffing the ballot boxes in black counties. If their own racial ambivalence was not enough and elites had not

played to their supremacist fantasies, defeat only sharpened yeoman racism:

The bitter violence and blood-letting recrimination of the campaigns between white conservatives and white radicals in the 'nineties had opened wounds that could not be healed by ordinary political nostrums and free-silver slogans. The only formula power- ful enough to accomplish that was the magical formula of white supremacy, applied without stint and without any of the old conservative reservations of paternalism. . . .59

54 Shaw, Wool-Hat Boys, 69 (quote). 55 Woodward, Tom Watson, 220ff, 239-40; Woodward, Origins, 254ff. Woodward's favor-

able view has been attacked by Charles Crowe, "Tom Watson, Populists, and Blacks Recon- sidered," Journal of Negro History, 55:2 (1970), 99-116 and Shaw, Wool-Hat Boys, 83, 109, 114. Cf. Palmer, "Man over Money", ch. 5, 165-66; Woodward, Thinking Back, 36ff.

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

57 Ibid., 101f, 106ff; Palmer, "Man over Money", 154ff (on "Jeffersonian Democrats" and the new middle class in Alabama).

58 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, ch. 8; Woodward, Watson, ch. 16-17; Woodward, Origins; Hicks, Populist Revolt, ch. 11, 13-14.

59 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd. rev. ed. (New York, 1974),



356 DAVID PEAL

In a broader context, Barbara J. Fields has captured the dialectics of racial

politics in this episode even more acutely:

The most important obstacle thrown up by racialism is the fact that it formed a narrow one-way bridge, which allowed potential support to straggle over to the side of the Democrats while offering little scope for movement in the opposite direction. Patri- cians stood a better chance of attracting support among the common people than the common people did of attracting support from the patricians. The racialism of the black-belt elite, after all, carried with it the luster of victory. That of the white common people became ever more tightly bound up with the rancor of hard blows and final defeat, as they watched the basis of their proud independence eroded by economic and social forces with which they were finally unable to cope .. .60

The failure of Populism in the South meant black disfranchisement, Jim Crow

laws, white political apathy, and the submersion of divisive political issues, more than a chastened Democratic party and belated Progressive reforms, as some have argued.

B6ckel's political insurgency was bound up with fewer costs than that of the Southern Populists. One reason was the diversity that his political environment tolerated or could not control. Confessional differences, conflicting views of unification, the absence of elections to national office, and the lack of real parliamentary responsibility were conducive to local political fragmentation. In annexed Kurhessen, neither the Social Democrats, nor the bour-

geois parties (Conservatives, Catholic Centrists, National Liberals, left liber-

als), nor the tiny party of anti-Prussian, gross deutsch particularists could build a stable electorate. Fragmented competition, not the ravages of usury, made Bockel's victory possible in 1887. Four adjacent districts fell to his allies in 1890, followed by another two in 1893. Only in Saxony did the anti- Semites do so well, but there the success was fleeting.61

As in the South, conservative and liberal parties in Marburg were dominated by notables and were closed to popular participation. Politics was reserved for professors, rentiers, and retired officers as well as lawyers, businessmen, large farmers, and bureaucrats: the "interlocking networks of rural and urban notables" who "selected themselves for political leadership by virtue of property and education, a mixed cultural predominance experi-

82-83; Cell, Highest Stage, ch. 4; Joel Williamson, in Crucible of Race, challenges the "Jim Crow" thesis by leaving politics out of his account of the emergence of "radical racism."

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

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




enced by local inhabitants as a diversified moral authority, [and] some form of successful capitalist enterprise."62 Conservatives and National Liberals selected candidates, in caucus, from their own kind, a month before elections. Before 1887, they waged campaigns with few flyers and rallies. Social clubs like the Agricultural Society provided their organizational and financial resources, and the local press helped out largely through limited coverage and considered neglect of the usually insignificant opposition.63

In this context, it is not surprising that Bockel directed his principal fire against the social insiders who dominated local politics. As he wrote a sup- porter in 1886:

I'll tell you my views on the Conservatives, the only right views. . . . Don't believe that they will join our cause. Whoever has once been a proper Conservative can never leave the society of governors, judges, councillors, and courtiers. Among them we are only plebeians. . . . The Conservatives are hostile to us. . . . No pity with the whole Conservative society! I hate this pack more than all Jews and Social Democrats together.64

In the South, Populist politics threatened the racist assumptions of Democratic rule; Populists used racial slogans in large part to acquire legitimacy. In Germany, by contrast, racism defined the identity of popular politics for both voters and leaders. For voters, anti-Semitism gave focus to grievances and familiar meaning to new uncertainty. The ancient equation of Jews and usury was politicized, with race invoked to account for Jewish usury. For Bockel, anti-Semitism was both a creed and a way to establish political identity. It has been shown that he joined a program of cooperative action against usurers to his racism when he went to his voters. He used "practical anti-Semitism," too, in justifying his claim to speak for "the people."65

Unlike the Democrats in the American South, with their massive response to the Populist upsurge, the Conservative and National Liberal notables in Germany responded much more tentatively to the crumbling of their rural Protestant constituencies. The Kurhessian Conservative organization did write an anti-Semitic plank into its platform in 1887, five-and-a-half years before the national party took this step, but Prussian officials regretted in 1890, after watching anti-Semites win several new seats in the Reichstag election of that year, that the established conservative parties were idly watching the anti-Semites steal their districts.66 One reason for inactivity lay in the diagnosis of the causes of the movement. So pervasive was concern about

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

63 vom Brocke, "Marburg im Kaiserreich," 461. 64 Quoted in Peal, Rural Transformation, 185. 65 As Conservatives became more anti-Semitic, Bockel branded them "only anti-Semites".

As they set up cooperatives, he declared that only he cared about the people. Ibid., 187-91. 66 Ibid., 166, n.32.



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"usury in the countryside" that notables believed that anti-Semitism sprang from usurious exploitation of the peasantry, and that both could be combatted by a vigorous cooperative movement. This view guided the state's swift and effective sponsorship of Raiffeisen cooperatives after 1888 and the Conser- vatives' more hesitant creation of openly political "peasant unions."67 The deeper cause of inactivity was the inadequacy of notables' politics itself. Demagoguery bruised the sensibilities of elites, but they lacked the resources and personnel to respond in kind. More seriously, unlike the situation in the American South, the social cohesion of elites throughout Germany was not reflected in political unity. National divisions arising from conflicts over unification and social policy prevented a speedy, unified response to local episodes of populist politics.

This was the meaning of the February, 1893, founding of the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte [BdL]) in Berlin-a belated attempt to articulate elite agrarian interests with one voice and to counteract populist politics. In

Marburg, a chapter was set up in March, with the Agricultural Society as its core. The Marburg BdL controlled a local newspaper, adopted an anti-Semitic tone, and drew on the resources-speakers, flyers, probably money-of the national BdL.68 Like the SFA in the American South, the German BdL sought to influence the political process by supporting congenial candidates. Unlike the SFA, the BdL was situated on the far Right. Its local chapter set out to break the Bockel movement by co-opting it-by promising economic benefits and sponsoring local anti-Semites. Some "fusionists" promoted these efforts out of opportunism or the conviction the BdL would complete Bockel's work. In August 1894, B6ckel was excluded from his own party. In the next month, former allies Philipp Kohler and Otto Hirschel ousted Bockel from the MDBV

leadership. In October a new national anti-Semitic party renounced his political intransigence with respect to the BdL and Conservatives. In the next decade, Hirschel and Kohler cooperated with the BdL in the Hessian assem-

bly. Most striking was electoral fusion. In 1903, "reform" anti-Semites lost three seats to BdL-backed anti-Semites in the heartland of the Bockel movement. Marburg also was lost in 1907. Anti-Semitic politics fell into the orbit of the BdL and the Right. In the American South after Populism, paternalism yielded to radical social distancing in black-white relations. In Germany after Bockel, anti-Semitic politics lost its gritty anti-elitism and hoary fixation on usury, becoming domesticated among the groups Bockel had despised.69

67 Ibid., 187, 258-70; Peal, "Anti-Semitism by other Means?" 68 Hans-Jiirgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus, 2nd ed.

(Bonn, 1975). For a local study: James Hunt, "The 'Egalitarianism' of the Right: The Agrarian League in Southwest Germany, 1893-1914," Journal of Contemporary History, 10:3 (1975), 513-30.

69 Peal, Rural Transformation, 167-68, 311-12, 379-88; on BdL racism: Puhle, Agrarische




THE RACIST LEGACY

What can be learned about the B6ckel movement by this comparison? For reasons rooted in the circumstances of German unification and the American version of the same process-Civil War and Reconstruction-national political parties in both countries were defined along lines that left rural interests poorly represented.70 The penetration of commercial relations in the next two decades revealed this weakness. Courthouse and Rathaus stood, in the rural mind, for closed politics, mercantile interests, a kidglove style, and the vio- lation of customary norms. Populist movements did succeed in awakening established parties to the underrepresentation of smallholders. Because of political fragmentation and the impossibility of sectional containment, the upsurge was less amenable to control in Germany.

Without effective political opposition, Bockel was able to translate economic anxieties directly into political terms. Conversely, the SFA could acquire its great size and importance in 1886-90 precisely because of the obstacles to independent politics in the South. Cooperation and politics can thus be seen as parallel responses to vulnerability aggravated by political underrepresentation. Especially striking in the Bockel movement was the alignment of racism with the hostility to the merchant. In the American South, the feared storekeeper seemed to stand in the way of self-sufficiency; the debased black was an object of contempt. Germany's hapless rural Jews, whose legal emancipation was never seen as legitimate, played both roles. The protean, layered quality of historical anti-Semitism facilitated this alignment of modem racism with the older hostility to usury; anti-Semitic cooperatives institutionalized the hatred of Jews-as-usurers.

A comparative view of the Bockel movement also throws light on the limits of single-issue politics. While anti-Semitism gave a special virulence to the movement, it also made it vulnerable to political takeover bids. Goodwyn has made clear the extent to which the free-silver issue was imposed on Populism by its Democratic enemies. Bockel helped his enemies by going into politics on the plank of anti-Semitism. The increasing reformism of the movement and its cooperative crusade may be seen as efforts to undergird political independence by diversifying political appeal, yet a regional movement of smallholders could not hold out for long against national groups better organized and financed and better able to disseminate anti-Semitism. There was

Interessenpolitik, 113-40; Dieter Fricke, "Die Organisation der antisemitischen Deutschsozialen Reformpartei, 1894-1900," Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, 29:5 (1981), 432ff (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): Pierre van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York, 1967); Philip Mason, Patterns of Dominance (London, 1970), 60ff.

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



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more to the movement than anti-Semitism, but the process of political competition made this the movement's chief legacy-just as in the United States, at the national level, reformism entered mainstream politics largely through the process in which Democrats co-opted Populism; in the South, Populism's legacy was racism.

Ironically, by the standard view that sees only anti-Semitism in the movement, it was precisely anti-Semitism that defeated the B6ckel movement. Racism had established its political identity, but nothing prevented the BdL from using anti-Semitism to co-opt the movement. Southern Populists mobilized yeomen against elites. They failed, yet revealed the Democrats' electoral vulnerability. On the Democrats' initiative, both groups of whites vented their frustrations through a letting of black blood. As in Africa and India in the 1890s, at the opening of the imperial era, racism took an ugly turn in the American South that was marked by distancing, racial rivalry, and violence. Anti-Semitism after Bockel was devoid of populist style, program, organization, and leadership. "Conservative," racial anti-Semitism served, in Fields'

phrase, as a "narrow one-way bridge." 71

The bridge that brought small peasants into the agrarian camp in Germany, to pursue the metaphor, was built of materials of their choosing. While in the American South, racism was, in an important sense, imposed on Populism by Democrats, anti-Semitism in Germany was a popular effort to establish inde-

pendent politics. Implicitly, notables could no longer pursue politics in isolation, and, in certain circumstances, the bridge would permit travel in the reverse direction.72 Underlying conflicts-over property and inheritance taxes, Prussian suffrage reform, tariffs, and land reform-were no more dispelled by anti-Semitic slogans than white supremacy disguised all conflicts in the South. While one-party rule, sectional isolation, and disfranchisement of blacks and poor whites blunted opposition and produced apathy in the South, sharp political competition led to a rise in voter turnout in rural Germany after 1900.73 The agonies of the South were encapsulated in the nation at large, with Democratic rule reinforcing the isolation of the region's

71 Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction. A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York, 1949), 47 ("bridge"). 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; Peal, Rural Transfor- mation. On the "new" racism of the 1890s: Philip Mason, Prospero's Magic (Oxford, 1962); Cell, Highest Stage, 172f; Woodward, Strange Career, 72-74.

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

73 Key, Southern Politics, 504-8, 533-35. 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 Bockel movement, but climbed steadily in the Reichstag elections of 1903, 1907, and 1912. Peal, Rural Transformation, 413-81.




low-wage economy. The processes at work in central Germany were na- tionalized, with parties to the right of the National Liberals trying to pre-empt populist threats by appropriating their ideologies and programs. Conservative accommodation helped undermine the stability of the Kaiserreich.74

Lastly, what of anti-Semitism in American Populism? In the 1960s this topic produced much debate. The debate is of interest here because it mobilized historians who furiously denied the comparability of Populism with "reac-

tionary" ideologies in Europe. In response to Richard Hofstadter's remarks on the subject in The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR, Norman Pollack scoured the papers of Populism's leading anti-Semite (in Hofstadter's view) and concluded that "[Ignatius] Donnelly's anti-Semitism therefore bears little relation to twentieth-century manifestations; nowhere will one find here the extermination camps."75 Pollack rightly views the Third Reich as incommen- surable, though a really comparative view of his subject would have disabused him of his brand of exceptionalism. Yet, since the appearance of his work and that of like-minded Walter Nugent, historians have slighted rhetoric and actions that in Europe would have been unmistakably anti-Semitic: the use of "Shylock" and "Rothschild" to stand for plutocracy and the violence in- flicted exclusively on Jewish merchants in the 1880s, not to mention the trial and lynching of Leo Frank in 1914-15.76 These historians assume that Jews have to be attacked on religious grounds for anti-Semitism to be present (which would absolve Bockel if true) and that where there are few Jews there can be no anti-Semitism (which would make Marburg an unlikely locale for such agita-

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

75 Richard Hofstader, Age of Reform (New York, 1955), 67ff, 77ff. Norman Pollack, "Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism," American Historical Review, 68:1 (1962), 78; idem, The Populist Response to Industrial America (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 1-12; idem, "Fear of Man: Popu- lism, Authoritarianism, and the Historian," Agricultural History, 39:2 (1965), 59-67. In "The Populist and the Intellectual," American Scholar, 29:1 (Winter 1959-60), 55-72, Woodward doubts the importance of anti-Semitism relative to racism; cf. Thinking Back, 40. On Donnelly's anti-Semitism: Oscar Handlin, "American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the Twentieth Century," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 40 (June 1951), 338ff.

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 Baron Rothschild as the head of the 'money power' assailed him because he was an international banker, not because of his religion." William Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 160. Walter Nugent trivializes similar episodes in The Tolerant Populists. Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago and London, 1963), 108-115, 192; cf. Handlin's criticism in "Reconsidering," 68-9; Ransom and Sutch gloss over an anti-Semitic comment by an English traveler in Mississippi, One Kind of Freedom, 122, 342-43, n.35. Cf. Woodward, Origins, 188, n. 42. Woodward ascribes Watson's role in the Frank lynching to his post-Populist crankiness: Tom Watson, ch. 23; cf. Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York and London, 1968). For more on Southern anti- Semitism, see the essays by Edward S. Shapiro and Glen Jeansonne, in Anti-Semitism in Ameri- can History, David A. Gerber, ed. (Urbana and Chicago, 1986), and Gerber's introductory essay, p. 49, n. 71.



362 DAVID PEAL

tion). Jew-baiting, after all, was not universally approved in German politics. Among many conservative notables, anti-Semitic code words like "mobile capital" were used to keep politics decent, but not devoid of popular appeal. If the "anti-Semitic labels were missing," however, "everyone knew what the baggage contained."77 As a focus for protest and a response to lost independence, anti-Semitism deserves reconsideration by historians of American Pop- ulism, especially because inquiry into the subject was suspended before any solid research was carried out.

I am not arguing for a revival of the tendency to discredit populism as a whole by isolating its irrational aspect. This tendency characterized the work of postwar historians and-until recently-characterized studies of anti- Semitic politics that saw the Bockel movement as an early chapter in the history of Nazism. While earlier studies viewed racism exclusively as a psy- chological aberration, this article has tried to place it within the context of political conflict-without denying that (especially in politics) racism can make for enormous brutality. If it is recognized that popular struggles can only be created out of existing cultural materials, then it becomes clear that racism was too pervasive not to infuse populist movements in both countries. It lent identity to German insurgency, could not be kept out of Populism, and served as common ground with elites in both countries. The quality of racism changed with its uses: Bockel's anti-Semitism was not that of the BdL or the Nazis. I am, rather, arguing against simplistic historicist notions regarding the

rationality of peasants and their politics, as well as their diagnosis of their situations: "Often it is precisely those who think and behave the most ra-

tionally in their narrow economic lives who are receptive to irrational views and values in their non-economic lives."78

77 Blackbour, "Politics of Demagogy," 172. 78 Rudolf Heberle Landbevolkerung und Nationalsozialismus: Eine soziologische Unter-

suchung der politischen Willensbildung in Schleswig-Holstein 1918-1933 (Stuttgart, 1963), 170; Jiirgen Kocka, Alltagsgeschichte der NS-Zeit: Neue Perspektive oder Trivialisierung? (Munich, 1984), 53 (on unreliability of Hessian peasants' diagnosis of their own situation); Robert Moeller, "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.



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

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