Populism

American populism is an enduring and prominent intellectual and political tradition, as well as a specific political movement of the late nineteenth century. Populism lionizes the middle-class “producer” as a model of ideal manhood while blaming both the rich and the poor for the perceived decline of the white patriarchal family. This ideal, seen by its adherents as the foundation of the American republic, is based on a concept of masculinity grounded in breadwinning, protection of family, and citizenship.

Often infused with moral and evangelical fervor, populism has sought to restore an idealized past era of small-scale capitalism in which white male producers had the economic power to support their families, acted as independent citizens, [Page 366]and succeeded or failed on their own merits. Its promise to restore this lost status to a deserving “natural” elite of white working- and middle-class males has tended to attract men from these groups who feel dispossessed of economic privilege or political power, particularly during times of economic or social upheaval.

A populist ideology that advocated male superiority emerged in colonial America as an abundance of land and periodic shortages of labor fostered a perception that all enterprising white men could succeed by their own efforts. During the Revolutionary era, republicanism connected this economic ideology to a political narrative pitting a “producer” class (those who actually made things) against beneficiaries of inherited wealth and centralized power. According to the tenets of republican manhood (an important foundation of populism) only the male producer could maintain the vigilance, moral uprightness, and economic independence needed to sustain a democratic republic.

Populist masculinity took on added dimensions between the 1820s and 1850s, as industrialization and westward expansion began transforming the American economy. Jacksonian political ideology and an emerging working class emphasized an antielitist agenda that set “the people” (i.e., small-town businessmen, small western and southern farmers, and skilled urban workers) against both the rising power of northern industrialists and what they perceived as hypersexualized and degenerate immigrants, Catholics, blacks, and Native Americans competing with them for jobs and land. (Later in the nineteenth century, populism categorized Asian and Jewish immigrants similarly.) Building on real economic grievances, populist rhetoric featured images of the besieged patriarchal family man protecting his wife and children. Also emphasized were the importance of white-male suffrage, affordable land, and a family wage to the male provider. Populism thus asserted an inextricable connection between manhood, independence, and whiteness.

During the late nineteenth century, the Knights of Labor, a labor organization, and the populist movement attempted to combine populism's established antielitist political and economic agenda with a new and more progressive attitude toward women, racial minorities, and the poor. Hoping to unite various disempowered groups by loosening populism's moorings in masculinity and whiteness, the Knights hired women organizers, supported woman suffrage, and sought to establish “mixed” local organizations that would include blacks, the poor, the working class, and the middle class. But the Knights also drew on the ideology of manly producerism and envisioned a perfect society where a man would be able to earn enough to be the sole breadwinner of his family. The Knights' disintegration by the late 1890s ended this more broadly egalitarian populism.

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