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Of course, language is mutable. Merely figuring out the intentions of the people who coined a given word doesn’t tell us a whole lot. But while the People’s Party is no more, the political philosophy that the Populists embodied did not die. The idea of working people coming together against economic privilege lives on; you might say it constitutes one of the main streams of our democratic tradition.

The populist impulse has been a presence in American life since the country’s beginning. Populism triumphed in the 1930s and 1940s, when the people overwhelmingly endorsed a regulatory welfare state. Populist uprisings occur all the time in the United States, always against the same enemies—monopolies, banks, elites, and corruption—and always with the same type of salt-of-the-earth heroes. The most obvious embodiment of the populist tradition today is certainly the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, whose principal likes to describe it as a “grassroots movement” rising up against the nation’s grotesque economic inequality.

That is the word’s historical meaning, and when we use it as a handy term for demagogues and would-be dictators, we are inverting that definition. Populism in its original formulation was profoundly, achingly democratic; it was also, by the standards of the time, anti-demagogic, pro-enlightenment, and pro-equality. In its heyday, and alone among American political parties of the time, the Populists stood strong for human rights. Populism had prominent female leaders. Populists despised tyrants and imperialism. Although not entirely immune to the racialism of its era, Populism defied the poisonous idea of Southern white solidarity.

In these days of feverish anti-populism, my mind often goes back to a 1900 speech by one of the very last Populists in Congress, a Nebraska lawyer named William Neville. His subject was America’s imperial rule over the Philippines, and his party’s opposition to it. But first he denounced both Southern Democrats, for trying to “exclude the black man from the right of suffrage,” and Republicans, for “shooting salvation and submission into the brown man because he wants to be free.” Then Neville said this:

Nations should have the same right among nations that men have among men. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is as dear to the black and brown man as to the white; as precious to the poor as to the rich; as just to the ignorant as to the educated; as sacred to the weak as to the strong; and as applicable to nations as to individuals. And the nation which subverts such right by force is no better governed than the man who takes the law in his own hands.

Of course, scholars and pundits have a right to ignore such statements and to divorce any word they choose from its original meaning. It’s legitimate for them to take the term “populist” back to its Latin root and start all over again from there, to pretend that the train from Kansas City never arrived and the farmers’ revolt never happened.

But why do that? Why use such a fine, democratic word to mean “racist,” to mean “dictator,” to mean “anti-intellectual”?

The answer is that denunciations of populism like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays are part of a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation. And it is that tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn, rather than populism itself, that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly in our time.

Perhaps we should not be surprised to discover that modern-day thinkers who attack what they call populism only rarely bother to consider the movement that invented the word. Far more frequently they attach the term to the deeds of European politicians like the Le Pen family or the rhetoric of certain South American demagogues. Some of these experts seem unaware that the People’s Party of the 1890s existed. Others mention it only in passing.

What these present-day thinkers cannot escape are the roots of their own anti-populist tradition. Whether or not they have ever heard of Kansas Populists like “Sockless” Jerry Simpson, they are embracing a political philosophy that was pieced together long ago to stop radicals like him.

The anti-populist tradition came into its horrific own during the 1896 Democratic National Convention, when working-class unrest appeared to triumph in the person of William Jennings Bryan, then a young former congressman from Nebraska, who won the presidential nomination on the strength of his oratory against the gold standard. Bryan talked a lot like a Populist, and a short while after the Democratic convention, the Populists nominated him as well. To the Establishment, there could be no doubt about what this signified: one of the nation’s main political parties had been captured by radicalism, and the shock was as great as that of a stock-market crash. Before 1896, the differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic questions had been small; the two parties orbited each other within a tight system of limited government, gold-backed money, and friendliness toward big business. Bryan’s nomination signaled this arrangement’s collapse.

The country was in a recession that year, which was the inescapable theme of the campaign, but the candidates addressed it via the proxy issue of the U.S. dollar. Democrats and their Populist allies blamed the deflationary gold standard for the unhappy fate of farmers. William McKinley and the Republicans believed the gold standard to be the central pillar of civilization itself, and regarded the threat to dismantle it as a deadly peril. The Republicans were wrong on this issue, but nevertheless they prevailed. They contrived to crush Bryan’s challenge and, in so doing, to build a lasting stereotype of reform as folly. The word with which they expressed that stereotype: “populism.”

Let us open the Judge magazine of August 8, 1896, to get a glimpse of how respectable Americans regarded the radical threat. Judge was one of the country’s premier humor magazines, with several large, beautifully drawn political cartoons in each issue. The rest of its pages typically featured grotesque caricatures of blacks, Irish, Jews, immigrants, and farmers. Between the jokes at the expense of these subordinate people, one could also catch glimpses of the demographic for whose amusement the chuckles were collected: refined, upper-class whites—people of manners and education and bank accounts—saying witty things about the burdens of good taste.

With this particular number of Judge, however, it is clear that something terrible has happened: the usual tone of genial mockery has given way to panic. At the magazine’s center is a foldout illustration of stark American disaster, brought on by a gigantic figure labeled populism. This colossus is rustic and tattered, but we are not meant to laugh at him: he glares with predatory eyes, he is armed with a brace of pistols and knives, he wears a Phrygian cap—the liberty cap of the French Revolution—marked anarchy, he wields the torch of ruin, and he towers terrifyingly over his fellow Americans. From this monster flee the sort of tidy white people who made up Judge magazine’s readership: banker, capitalist, honest citizen, respectable democrat. One of them cowers on the ground beneath Populism’s onslaught; another clutches his head in disbelief. “Has It Come to This!” blubbers the caption.

This was the Democracy Scare, 1896 version: our system was unraveling, with society’s worst elements rising up against its best. Similarly frightful images appeared that year wherever people were dignified and accomplished together, always expressed in the vocabulary of hysteria and hyperbole. Populism wasn’t merely menacing “norms”; it was bringing the country face-to-face with anarchy and repudiation.

On July 10, the New York Sun declared that the Democratic Party had been given over to “Jefferson’s diametric opposite, the Socialist, or Communist, or, as he is now known here, the Populist.” A lead editorial that ran in the Sun a few days later declared that there was no real Democratic candidate that year. Instead, “there are Populist-Anarchist candidates nominated on a Populistic-Anarchist platform.” Similarly, in a pamphlet distributed by the Republican Party that fall, the novelist and statesman John Hay claimed that the Democrats no longer existed: “The enemy which confronts us is the Populist party,” which had swallowed the Democrats “as a python might swallow an ox.”

Then as now, consensus among elites was the primary weapon of the anti-populist resistance. Thanks to William Jennings Bryan and “his new Red Circus,” something miraculous had happened, the Sun proclaimed: “the business interests of the country are all arrayed on one side.” E. L. Godkin, then the conscience of American journalism, clucked in The Nation that “no man has ever yet been elected President whom the business interests of the country . . . distrusted and opposed as unsafe; these interests in the controlling states are substantially unanimous against Bryan.” Godkin was pleased even better by the harmony with which the nation’s press came together against the Democratic challenger. Similar unanimity reigned in fashionable churches and in prestige academia.

From the heights of this consensus the men of quality denounced the rabble. Bryan’s campaign aroused “the basest passions of the least worthy members of the community,” announced an editorial in the New–York Tribune that ran on the day after the election. “It has been defeated and destroyed because right is right and God is God.”

Populism represented the world turned upside down. It came from a dark place where democracy’s guardrails were gone, where wealth and learning and status counted for nothing. “Populism” was a word used to express the horror of seeing hierarchies collapse and the lowly clamber to places where they did not belong. Populists, John Hay wrote, valued nothing, throwing “their frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization.” They longed to bind the hands of government “where it is inclined to protect order and property.” They appealed “to the openly lawless.” They waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” Their plans for funding the government were “the merest babble of the loafers around a rural livery stable.” For the plumèd knights of the Republican Party, it was, he wrote, “as if a champion at a tourney, awaiting the onset of a chivalrous antagonist, should suddenly find himself attacked by a lunatic in rags.”

The familiar identification of populism with demagoguery, a core doctrine of modern-day punditry, is also descended directly from this original Democracy Scare. It began on the very day of Bryan’s surprise nomination. An editorial in the Evening Post declared the Nebraskan to be the Democrats’ “chief demagogue,” a man “who took the mob of repudiators off their feet by a speech of forty-blatherskite power.” It wasn’t so much Bryan’s arguments that won the Democrats over, the editor continued, as it was “his wind power, which is immense.”

A favorite trope of the anti-populists of the 1890s was the masquerade or the put-on. Bryan and his followers were not real Democrats, the men of quality agreed; they were “masquerading in the Democratic garb,” as Cornell’s president, Andrew D. White, put it. In a more gothic vein, Leslie’s Weekly depicted Bryan’s face as a mask, behind which lurked a hideous howling anarchy in a boar’s hide and bat wings. This was, as the caption put it, “The New (Not the True) Democracy Unmasked.” One of the monster’s hands held its name tag, a second gripped the throat of a working man, a third used a knife to cut the dollar in half.

Who was really in control of the uprising? Was Bryan some kind of mastermind, or was he merely the tool of sinister others? According to the New–York Tribune, Bryan was “not the real leader of that league of hell,” a verdict the paper handed down after the Democrat lost the election. “He was only a puppet in the blood-imbrued hands of Altgeld the Anarchist and Debs the revolutionist and other desperadoes of that stripe.”

And if he wasn’t a puppet or a demagogue—if Bryan wasn’t fooling when he denounced plutocracy—oh my God, don’t even ask. “He is a dangerous man,” editorialized the New York Sun: “If he is sincere, dangerous even as a fool is dangerous when he raises a false alarm of fire in a crowded theatre; and if a demagogue, as he seems to be, doubly dangerous.”

Then as now, faith in the people’s wisdom was thought to be populism’s original sin. Bryan was mocked in The Nation for supposedly starting his speeches with empty salutes to the genius of the common people: “Your wisdom is inexhaustible and infallible,” he was parodied as saying. “I tell you that you are so great that you can ignore the rest of the world.” A cartoon in Puck imagined Bryan on his whistle-stop tour, blowing the same sort of bunkum out of a bellows at a crowd of happy farmers, snaggletoothed idiots wearing long agrarian whiskers. Bryan was driving them to ecstasy by saluting the wisdom of the hayseed:

Our people are capable of ruling!

They do not need the lessons of history!

They have nothing to learn!

They do not care for the experience of other nations!

They know it all! . . . Study and science are of no account,

the popular intuition is better than reasoning and what the people say goes!

That populism is at war with intellect, that it is an offense to meritocracy—these lasting axioms are also rooted in the original Democracy Scare, when Populism threatened to level both the hierarchy of money and that of credentialed technique. The institution where these two came together was the gold standard, the bedrock of both classical economics and the nineteenth-century banking system. For the Populists, the elites’ faith in gold was a favorite target for mockery. But for establishment figures like John Hay, the only legitimate way to settle the currency question was “by the investigations of the leading economists of the world,” gathered in solemn contemplation. The conclusion of such a gathering was certain: one couldn’t adopt a silver standard in just one country and hope to succeed. America’s economy was locked in an international system regulated by responsible expertise, Hay insisted, and upon this reasoning everyone who was anyone agreed. “All the intelligent bi-metallists of America . . . ; all those of England . . . ; all the German scholars . . . agree in this.”

Many years later, the consensus-minded historian Richard Hofstadter would assert in these pages that Populism reflected status anxiety and even a “paranoid style.” His larger insight, which revolutionized social science in the 1950s and which persists in the anti-populism of our own day, was that mass protest movements in general could be understood as a reaction of maladjusted minds to the advance of modernity.

In truth, Hofstadter’s discovery had already been made back in 1896, when Populism was repeatedly diagnosed as a mental aberration. In September of that year, as the contentious presidential campaign unfolded, the New York Times announced the alarming discovery: William Jennings Bryan appeared to be clinically insane. It began with a letter to the paper from an anonymous “alienist,” or psychologist, who examined Bryan’s heredity, his heretofore mediocre career, and his behavior on the campaign trail, and concluded “without any bias” that “Mr. Bryan presents in his speech and action striking and alarming evidence of a mind not entirely sound.” Proof: the candidate was “an apostle of an economic theory without ever having a training in economics.”

It was a scary situation, the alienist continued. After all, having “a madman in the White House” would not only be dangerous, but would also damage democracy itself, since it “would forever weaken the trust in the soundness of republics and the sanity of the voting masses.”