Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America by Lawrence Goodwyn

Author:Lawrence Goodwyn [Goodwyn, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780195019964
Amazon: 0195019962
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1976-10-28T04:00:00+00:00

to his admonitions from the speaker's podium, Macune had become once again -- for a moment, at least -- the presiding captain of the reform movement. As the officials of the People's Party listened with what can be surmised were mixed emotions at best -- the provisional national committee included, among others, William Lamb -- Macune suggested that the convention reassemble immediately as a committee of the whole to establish its third party administrative apparatus. The delegates agreed and one of the fifteen named to this committee, in the nick of time, was Macune. His ambivalence on the third party issue forfeited any possible claims to popular leadership of the movement. The new party's presidential nomination would go to L. L. Polk, not to Macune. Nevertheless Macune was still editor of the movement's national journal, and his considerable organizing talents and diplomatic skills might enable him to become a successful and, perhaps, honored party chairman. But the convention's committee of fifteen soon found itself absorbed by the national committee and no one in either group rose to suggest that Macune, rather than the newly appointed Taubeneck, should head the crusade into its political phase. So much work loomed for everyone, in any case, that questions of leadership awaited future consideration. These ad hoc arrangements were to have large consequences for the future of Populism, for Taubeneck was to become a central character in the "free silver" controversy in 1895-96.

The chief anxiety among third-party strategists in the four months between the two inaugural Populist conventions concerned the progress of the campaign by Southern radicals to wean the Southern Alliances from the party of the fathers. Given the fate of all third party efforts since the Civil War, the concern about the South outweighed all other considerations.

As the Southern Alliances continued to employ their internal lecturing systems on the sub-treasury after St. Louis, L. L. Polk called a South-wide conference for Birmingham in May. But his purposes were not understood in the West, and Stephen McLallin, editor of the official Alliance newspaper in Kansas, wrote Polk a pleading letter that starkly revealed the continuing impact of sectional politics on radical hopes.

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