American populism
Subtitle: a social history, 1877-1898
By: Robert C. McMath, Jr. ; Eric Foner, consulting editor.
Contributors: Foner, Eric.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Published: 1993
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 245
Subjects: Populism -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1933.
Description: The grass-roots Populist movement that swept rural America a century ago drew millions of farm men and women and clusters of non-farmers into a powerful crusade to reshape the nation's political economy. Populists sought to usher in a "cooperative commonwealth" to reverse the growth of America's monopoly capitalism and harness the engine of private ownership for the common good. Thus, Populism became a bridge between the nineteenth-century traditions of republicanism and producerism and the regulatory state of this century. McMath crisply interprets the development of the Populist crusade from its early beginnings in the turbulent 1870s to the emergence of the Farmers' Alliances a decade later. He deals with the founding of the People's (Populist) Party in 1892, and its ultimate demise. He describes Populism's important regional components, and he places the crusade in a larger context as he compares it to parallel movements in the Great Plains and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. American Populism is an impressive book about a major social, cultural, and political movement.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [213]-231) and index.