From: nyxfer%panix.com@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (N.Y. Transfer)
Subject: HIST:How Capitalists Rule/Pt.12
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Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 20:10:10 GMT



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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