On Corruption in America by Sarah Chayes

Author:Sarah Chayes [Chayes, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

And so, the Populists declared, “we seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people,’ with which class it originated.”

Despite several victories in local, state, and congressional elections, the ultimate fate of this big-chested effort was the same as that of the earlier cooperative purchase and sales idea—only more punishing. Apart from the sectional divide, a challenge the new party faced was the gap between organized, experienced rural Populists and urban workers, who were repeatedly shattered by the savage crackdowns and whose languages and cosmopolitan cultures were foreign to farmers. But the most important factor was elite backlash. Such a threat did this groundswell represent to northern industrialists and southern planters alike, to Democrats and Republicans, that the often rival networks joined forces to defeat it—by any means necessary.

Those means included “wholesale ballot-box stuffing, open bribery, various forms of intimidation, and massive voting by dead or fictitious Negroes.” Lynchings soared. Workers who campaigned for Populist tickets were blacklisted and could not find jobs. Barriers to voting, such as the poll tax or education requirements, were stiffened. Press aligned with one party or the other “systematically played on racial, sectional, and class fears to alert readers to the Populist menace.” And, especially in 1896, when the Populists reluctantly opted to combine with the Democratic Party and back William Jennings Bryan, unprecedented political spending funded a public relations blitz equating Republicanism with patriotism.

William McKinley—later assassinated by an anarchist—won.

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