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5 THE SHAPE OF
US POPULISM, Part 2 Long-term effects of the Civil
War By Henry C K
Liu
Republican strategist Karl
Rove who engineered the two-term victories of
George Bush.
McKinley, backed by an elite
group of rich men in close alliance with
government, beat Democratic candidate William
Jennings Bryan of Nebraska who was nominated by a
party convention dominated by Western and Southern
populists. The Democratic platform, drafted by
populist Governor Altgeld of Illinois, called for
free and unlimited coinage of silver.
Bryan stampeded the Democratic Convention
with one of the
most famous speeches in US political
history:
There are two ideas of
government. There are those who believe that if
you just legislate to make the well-to-do
prosperous, their prosperity will leak through
on those below. The Democratic idea has been
that if you legislate to make the masses
prosperous, their prosperity will find its way
up and through every class that rests on it ...
Having behind us the producing masses of this
nation, and the world, supported by the
commercial interests, the labor interests, and
the toilers everywhere, we will answer their
demand for a gold standard by saying to them:
You shall not press down upon the brow of labor
this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify
mankind upon a cross of
gold.
The
nomination of Bryan, a populist in all but party
affiliation, meant the end of populism as a
separate political force independent of the
two-party system. Thereafter, populism is
repeatedly co-opted by the two major parties. For
the first time in US political history, a
clear-cut issue of major importance emerged
between the two major political parties. The
question of free silver became symbolic of the
conflict between capitalism and agrarianism. On
the one side is the Hamiltonian notion of a
society dominated by big business controlled by
the financial elite; on the other side, the
Jeffersonian ideal of small, independent and rich
agrarian land owners as the core of a democratic
society. It was not a class struggle between the
rich and poor.
Bryan conducted a
superhuman campaign, traveling over 17,000 miles
and delivering more than 600 speeches. But it was
no match for Hanna, who raised a war chest of over
$16 million to flood the country with pro-business
propaganda to spread the message that, among other
things, Bryan, an old-time Christian
fundamentalist, was no better than an anarchist.
Defeat of populism by
federalism The McKinley presidency
(1897-1901) was widely interpreted as the
definitive victory of the Hamiltonian Federalist
ideal of using the Federal government to build a
strong economy and a powerful military toward
great power status for the young nation. As Henry
Adam, scion of an aristocratic family in US
politics, observed: "The majority at last declared
itself, once and for all, in favor of a
capitalistic system with all its necessary
machinery."
The integration of business
and politics began in earnest with the onset of
the 20th century. Thereafter, an increasing number
of rich personages became leading politicians and
most politicians left politics rich or to become
rich through connections developed while in
office. Under McKinley, big business got all it
wanted from government and then some.
On
top of government subsidy and protection, big
business gained legitimacy and respectability. The
Dingley Tariff of 1897 assured US industry of
complete protection from foreign competition.
After a half-hearted attempt to negotiate
international agreement for the coinage of silver
as promised in the 1896 Republican platform, the
currency question was settled for the time being
by the Gold Standard Act of 1900, and made
operative by the happy coincident of discovery of
new gold mines in South Africa, which brought a
rapid increase of gold supply to produce the
currency-led inflation desired by the silver
interests.
The future belonged to
populism Yet while big business appeared
to have achieved both political and economic
dominance, the future belonged to the populists,
who inherited a movement for the revitalization of
popular democracy to express the real interests of
the people and the founding ideals of the nation.
Under more effective leaders, populism became
politically influential whenever the capitalistic
system ran itself to the ground from its
structural internal contradictions.
Both
the progressive period before World War I and the
New Deal era before World War II were reactions to
economic depressions. Eventually, most of the
reforms advocated in the Populist Platform of 1892
were put into effect by mid 20th century. This
will prove to be a recurring fate for populism.
The financial crisis of 2007 will lay the
groundwork for a new wave of populist reform
starting in 2008 that may well extend into the
early decades of the 21st century.
The
central attribute of US history during the latter
part of the 19th century was rapid economic
expansion. Between 1860 and 1900, railroad mileage
increased almost sevenfold from 300,000 to
1,930,000 miles. Capital investment in
manufacturing multiplied 10-fold from $1 billion
to $10 billion. The population grew from 31
million to 76 million. The portion of urban
population rose from 20% to 40%. The number of
workers rose from 1.3 million to 5.3 million,
yielding a two and a half times increase of
capital investment per worker, from $800 to almost
$2,000. The annual value of production multiplied
sevenfold from less than $2 billion to more than
$130 billion. Worker productivity rose 15 times,
from $1,540 per worker to $25,000 per worker. Yet
annual wages rose only from $297 in 1860 to $384
in 1870, dropped to $345 in 1980 and rose to $427
in 1890.
Overall, corporate profit rose
more than three times faster than wages. In
constant dollar term, wages were mostly unchanged
after inflation.
The economic growth of
the US was propelled by a range of material
factors, such as abundant flight capital from a
Europe beset with social instability from the
democratic revolutions of 1848, a flood of labor
from immigration to keep wages down, large and
seemingly inexhaustible supply of arable land,
absence of external threat that would require
costly defense expenditure and limitless
opportunities for internal development.
Americans arrived in the new land with a
deeply imbedded spirit of Calvinism of personal
integrity, honesty, thrift and hard work. More
importantly, a religious sanction on business,
coupled with the optimism of the Enlightenment and
an inculcated belief in personal liberty and
individual rights, created a national belief that
a harmony can be achieved between private
individual interest and common welfare and the
inevitability of progress.
The national
character expresses itself in the belief that an
individual can best contribute to society by
devoting himself first to the accumulation of
personal wealth and then repaying society
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