Journalism of the Populist Movement
Authors: Klein Timothy Vest 
Published: December 2023

In the 1880s and 1890s working class Populists from the American South and Midwest started approximately 1,000 small newspapers in support of the Populist movement. Populist journalists, such as Henry Vincent, Mary Elizabeth Lease, Thomas E. Watson, Charles W. Macune, Ignatius Donnelly, and James “Cyclone” Davis, saw themselves as writing on behalf of the nation’s struggling farmers and working poor. They attempted to unite the economic suffering of sharecroppers and indebted farmers with the despair of wage laborers and the declining fortunes of independent craftsmen, who were being put out of business by massive corporations. Populist journalists focused on economic suffering along with the political and social isolation of life on the geographic periphery. They contrasted the wealth and power of industrialists and political elites in the boardrooms and exclusive social clubs of the Eastern seaboard with life in the slums of urban metropolises and in rural America. Out of the Populists’ isolation came a form of journalism that was full of intensity for their cause and a certainty in their moral superiority. For instance, Populists did not simply advocate for increasing the nation’s money supply through the free coinage of silver—they declared that “free silver will save us” and “God will raise up a Moses to lead us out” of the bondage of the gold standard. Although free silver may be the most widely remembered Populist plank, its emphasis in 1896 was seen at the time, and by later historians, as a strategic miscalculation that split the Populist movement and played a major role in the movement’s downfall. Nonetheless, the fervor and moral certitude that Populists expressed around free silver was also evident in their advocacy for the sub-treasury agricultural loan program, farming cooperatives, the graduated income tax, postal savings banks, regulation (or public ownership) of the nation’s monopolies, and numerous other Populist policies. The boldness of Populist communication gave farmers and political outsiders the confidence to enter the political arena and fight for their ideas, but it also created intense hostility against the movement. Many Populist journalists preached the superiority of rural areas over urban areas, of the South and Midwest over the East Coast, of manual labor over office work, and of the “plain people” over political and economic elites, and in the process they made many powerful enemies who were committed to defeating the Populist movement.

Populist journalism was sandwiched between two broader journalistic trends. With the rise of the yellow press in the 1890s, journalism was moving toward a hypercommercialization, where newspapers were attracting a mass audience and news was becoming a big business. At the same time, journalism was also moving toward greater professionalism, with the rise of journalism education and the flourishing of Progressive journalism in the decades following the Populist movement. Populist journalism did not fit into either of these conflicting trends, and it was instead a vestige of the partisan press era of personal attack journalism that was common in the United States in the early 19th century.