The American Populists
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what, in C19th America’s Gilded Age, was one of the most significant protest movements since the Civil War with repercussions well into C20th. Farmers in the South and Midwest felt ignored by the urban and industrial elites who were thriving as the farmers suffered droughts and low prices. The farmers were politically and physically isolated. As one man wrote on his abandoned farm, ‘two hundred and fifty miles to the nearest post office, one hundred miles to wood, twenty miles to water, six inches to Hell’. They formed the Populist or People’s Party to fight their cause, put up candidates for President, won several states and influenced policies. In the South, though, their appeal to black farmers stimulated their political rivals to suppress the black vote for decades and set black and poor white farmers against each other, tightening segregation. Aspects of the Populists ideas re-emerged effectively in Roosevelt’s New Deal, even if they are mainly remembered now, if at all, thanks to allegorical references in The Wizard of Oz. The caricature above is of William Jennings Bryan, Populist-backed Presidential candidate.
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Guests
- Lawrence Goldman
11 episodes
Professor of History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London -
Mara Keire No other episodes
Lecturer in US History at the University of Oxford - Christopher Phelps
2 episodes
Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham
Reading list
-
In the Lion's Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900
Omar H. Ali (University Press of Mississippi, 2010) Google Books → -
The Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum (first published 1900; Puffin Classics, 2008) Google Books → -
Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America
Lawrence Goodwyn (Oxford University Press, 1978) Google Books → -
The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America
Lawrence Goodwyn (Oxford University Press, 1978) Google Books → -
The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers' Alliance and the Populist Party
John D. Hicks (first published 1931; University of Nebraska Press, 1967) Google Books → -
The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR
Richard Hofstadter (first published 1955; Random House, 1988) Google Books → -
American Populism
William F. Holmes (ed.) (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) Google Books → -
The Populist Persuasion: An American History
Michael Kazin (Basic Books, 1995) Google Books → -
American Populism: A Social History 1877-1898
Robert C. McMath (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990) -
The Populist Vision
Charles Postel (Oxford University Press, 2007) Google Books → -
Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel
C. Vann Woodward (first published 1938; Martino Fine Books, 2014) Google Books →
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Programme ID: b08tbf4g
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tbf4g
Auto-category: 973.8 (History of the United States, 1865-1901)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. In the late 19th century, in late 19th century America, farmers in the South and Midwest suffered with droughts and low prices while the new urban and industrial centres were thriving.