When populism went wrong
Its darkest impulses became for many its defining characteristics.
On July 4, 1892, a collection of disgruntled farmers, labor leaders, and politicians gathered on the banks of the Missouri River to chart a new way forward in American politics.
Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, delegates to the first convention of the People’s Party, soon to become widely known as the Populist Party, nominated a presidential candidate — James B. Weaver of Iowa — and issued an ambitious platform. The Populists called for drastic reforms to ease debt burdens and make money more easily available to hard-pressed farmers. They demanded government control of the railroads and the nation’s telegraph system. They endorsed a graduated income tax.
The Omaha platform stood on a foundation of deep grievance with the way the American economy of the day favored the interests of the wealthy over the needs of everyday citizens. The party platform laid out its indictment in an eloquent preamble that eerily anticipates the politics and economic conditions of 2025.
“The conditions which surround us best justify our co-operation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin,” the preamble began. Corruption permeated all branches of government at the state and federal level. The press was muzzled and “public opinion silenced.” A demoralized public struggled with massive debt, and workers were “denied the right to organize for self protection.” Above all else, the American economy operated in the interests of the wealthy rather than in the interests of the many.
“The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”
Weaver, a veteran politician who had at various times identified as a Democrat, a Republican, and a leader of the Greenback-Labor Party, carried four states to become the first third-party presidential candidate to win votes in the Electoral College since 1860.
The People’s Party appeared on the cusp of becoming a major partisan force in American politics, but it collapsed into the irrelevant status that has befallen all third-party movements in this country before the decade ended. Weaver hastened the decline when he convinced reluctant Populists in 1896 to put William Jennings Bryan, already nominated by Democrats as their presidential candidate, at the head of their ticket.
Although not a Populist, Bryan shared many of the party’s objectives — particularly with regard to the free coinage of silver, which would have inflated the currency and lowered the debt burdens crushing farmers. Just as importantly, Bryan spoke in the Biblical cadences that resonated with Weaver and other Populists in Protestant rural America. The Democratic Party became a champion of modern liberalism with Bryan at its head.1 Weaver and many others abandoned the Populist Party to join him.
No longer a factor as an independent political movement, The Populist Party limped along as a shell of its former self. With many of its positions co-opted by Democrats (and later by Progressive Republicans), the character of populism changed dramatically in the early 20th century. Instead of targeting economic injustice, populists turned their wrath on ethnic and religious minorities.
Populism has always had a dark side. Anti-Semitism, voiced by the paranoid charge that the Rothschild banking house orchestrated an international cabal of Jewish bankers to manipulate global gold prices, lurked behind calls for economic fairness. Populists courted Black voters in the South with a “Colored Farmers Alliance,” but the organization was led by a white man. The leading Populist newspaper in North Carolina, The Caucasian, touted white supremacy.2
No one embodied populism’s shift from its emphasis on political and economic equity to scurrilous bigotry quite like the dyspeptic Georgian the party nominated for vice president in 1896. In the early 1890s, Tom Watson denounced explicit appeals to racism by Georgia Democrats. He dispatched armed Populists to safeguard Black supporters. Although he refused to endorse racial equality, he bemoaned “lynch law” and appeared on the same platforms with Black speakers.3
By the next century, however, Watson had abandoned his relatively far-sighted views for the very racial demagoguery he once denounced. He supported the disenfranchisement of Black voters. In his magazine, he laced statements of support for white supremacy among denunciations of Wall Street and revolutionary opponents of the czar.
Watson’s vitriol reached its zenith in the case of Leo Frank, a Jewish garment factory manager convicted on weak evidence of murdering a young white woman employee. When Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison, Watson campaigned relentlessly through his weekly newspaper for Frank’s lynching using the all-caps writing style with which modern Americans have become familiar. “THE NEXT JEW WHO DOES WHAT FRANK DID, IS GOING TO GET EXACTLY THE SAME THING THAT WE GIVE TO NEGRO RAPISTS,” he warned in one issue.4
Watson got his wish — and more. A Georgia mob dragged Frank from the state penitentiary and hanged him on a tree near Marietta. Watson’s campaign for lynch law justice breathed new life into the long-dormant Ku Klux Klan, which reorganized in Georgia and emerged as a powerful force into the 1920s.
“If Watson had any hand in launching the new organization, no record has been found which reveals it,” Watson biographer C. Vann Woodward wrote. “Yet if any mortal man may be credited (as no one man may rightly be) with releasing the forces of human malice and ignorance and prejudice, which the Klan merely mobilized, that man was Thomas E. Watson.”5
The dark populism unleashed by Watson flourished through the rest of the 20th century and into the present day. Louisiana’s Huey Long combined an ambitious populist program of public works aimed at making “every man a king” with a corrupt and autocratic governing style that foreshadowed the anti-democratic “illiberal” regimes of 21st-century Eastern Europe. Alabama Gov. George Wallace laced his presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972 with populist vows to stand up for the “little man,” but the rhetoric was less important than Wallace’s reputation as an outspoken foe of integration and school busing.
Today, President Donald Trump has seized control of right-wing populism. He demonizes undocumented immigrants and many of his political foes with language that echoes the vitriol employed by Watson. His blunt and inflammatory rhetoric has won the hearts and minds of Americans who feel they have been left behind, much as rural Americans in the 19th century believed they were being crushed by the railroads and Wall Street.
But Trump is no populist. The signature economic initiative of his current term — a tax and spending bill expected to add $4 trillion to the national debt — includes a populist nod to working-class voters by eliminating federal taxes on tips. But it also keeps tax rates low for the wealthiest Americans and slashes funding for health programs such as Medicaid, a program on which working-class Trump supporters depend. “Taken together,” the measure means “low-income households stand to lose more in benefits than they gain in tax breaks,” the Washington Post concludes.6
For many, populism has come to mean little more than angry appeals to cultural conservatism and nativism. A more hopeful version emphasizing economic equity flourishes among progressive Democrats, but they have struggled to gain ascendancy within the party. Centrist Democrats who view Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez with disdain should remember the backhanded tribute paid to Bryan and his populist allies by none other than Herbert Hoover.
Complaining about his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hoover dismissed FDR’s New Deal as simply a variant of what he called “Bryanism.” Hoover’s assessment, Bryan biographer Michael Kazin noted, “proves that bitterness need not impair one’s historical judgment.”7
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. xix. Hereafter referred to as Kazin.
Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 172.
C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York, Oxford, London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 220-2212.
Ibid., pp. 370-371, 380, 443.
Ibid., p. 450.
Julie Zauzmer Weil, Yasmeen Abutaleb, and Jacob Bogage, Washington Post, Julyk 3, 2025 [www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/03/big-beautiful-bill-impacts-medicaid-taxes]
Kazin, p. xix.