All the highways of global capitalism found their way into the trackless vastness of rural America during the last third of the nineteenth century. Farmers were in dire straits not because they suffered the privations of their own backwater isolation. On the contrary, they lived at ground zero, where the incendiary energies of industrial, financial, and commercial modernity detonated.
American agriculturalists were by no means unfamiliar with the market. At least part of their output had been bartered or traded for a long time, if only locally. That did not make them capitalists but rather petty producers of foodstuffs who did not trade in the market for labor, or if they did then only marginally or under extraordinary circumstances. The land they tilled might have been theirs by virtue of earlier acts of violent expropriation of indigenous pastoral or nomadic hunting societies. But even if so, those original means of primitive accumulation left behind family farms, not agribusinesses.
However, with the vast geographic expansion of the market, these ordinary farmers became both the beneficiaries and the victims of finance—of mortgage finance, in particular. On the one hand, the mortgage offered the chance of independent proprietorship; on the other hand, it undermined that freedom.
Mortgage-backed securities are no recent invention. Their capacity to wreak havoc long predated the subprime lending business. A global market in such securities was already well developed by the 1870s. It was centered on the East Coast, focused particularly on mortgages in the Plains states and out west (one-half of all Kansas farmers owed mortgages in 1886), and generated an intricate network of financial intermediaries. Homesteaders were often market-oriented farmers enmeshed with finance capital—that is, with investors concerned not with the agricultural value of the land but with its financial worth. And the railroads these settlers depended on were themselves so often submerged under a sea of bonded indebtedness, deposited there by rapacious Wall Street speculators, that they had the strongest incentive to seek out every way of squeezing their agrarian clients and customers.1
Farmers were notoriously cash poor anyway and regularly indebted to eastern banks for land, supplies, and machinery. Mortgage debt increased 71 percent in five years during the 1880s. Liquid capital (cash or assets readily converted into cash) consequently accumulated on Wall Street, piped there from the prairies. While railroads opened up new markets for agriculturalists here and abroad, they charged discriminatory rates for hauling farm goods long distances to urban markets. This accelerated the rate of capital accumulation for the roads by eating away at the spare resources sustaining the independent homesteader. Tariffs, levied mainly on industrial goods from abroad, exacerbated this cannibalizing of rural America; the west and South were compelled to buy their manufactured goods from high-priced domestic suppliers while selling their wares into low-priced global free markets. Growers were dependent on storage facilities—such as grain elevators for cereals—that were usually controlled by eastern business interests and exacerbated the precarious position of freeholders.2
To make matters worse, new commodity exchanges allowed for well-organized speculation in the value of agricultural goods. Paradoxically, those exchanges could regularize the flow of capital and credit into and out of wheat and corn and sorghum and cotton or pig and sheep raising… but they could also leave Nebraska wheat growers and Alabama cotton farmers at the mercy of wildly fluctuating prices that could turn all their careful husbandry to dust in a moment.
Any downturn in prices or any disaster (flood, insects, drought, plant disease) produced a new crop of foreclosures, tax sales, and evictions. So, for example, there was a great grasshopper plague in 1874; a blizzard out west in 1886 that devastated homesteaders, leaving behind absentee investor-owned ranches in the Dakotas and Montana; a drought in Kansas in 1893; a grasshopper infestation there and in eastern Colorado in 1894; flooding of the Mississippi three years in a row (1893–1895); a punishing blizzard on the prairies in 1895; and, in the South, a boll weevil invasion beginning in 1892, aggravated by a freeze in Florida in 1894 and a scorching heat wave enveloping the whole region in 1895. One might accept all these as acts of God and leave it at that. But these natural afflictions victimized farmers whose entanglement in the international web of finance and trade left them living on a razor’s edge, producing single cash crops only, at the mercy of the vagaries of the market, lacking either stockpiles of other edibles or cash to keep them afloat. They went under instead.3
Going under followed various routes. Those foreclosed upon might become tenant farmers, farm laborers, or migratory workers. The 1880 Census revealed that one-quarter of all farmers were tenants. As the factory came to the field, the number of migratory laborers, sometimes recruited seasonally among the unemployed in the cities (including children) soared. In the Midwest, 40 percent of those living off the land were wage workers. Bonanza farms owned by absentee investors extended the division of labor common in the factory to the fields, where specialized tasks like loading bound sheaves of wheat or running twine-binding machines were a premonition of the future. Three million people worked as farmhands, six hundred thousand of them women.4
In no way was this restricted to the Midwest: colonial dependency became the fate of the southland. The former Confederacy relied on the capital accumulation going on in the industrializing north. Not only did high tariffs compel the region (as they did the agrarian west) to absorb the higher cost and high-priced output of America’s “infant industries,” they relegated the region to a condition of permanent underdevelopment. Primitive accumulation as a regional relationship mimicked imperial economic dynamics generally. What development that did take place was skewed, so that, for example, railroads made forays into the outback to extract raw materials, but otherwise contributed next to nothing to all-around industrial, commercial, and urban growth.
Large portions of the South were frozen in time, left poor and growing poorer. Ex-slaves as well as much of the white yeomanry fell into penury. Landless whites in the up-country South were driven off by the enclosing of common lands by plantation monoculturalists, landing in company textile towns springing up in the piedmont.
In a sense, the farmer was the looniest speculator in a nation overrun with them. He was wagering he would master this fathomlessly intricate global game, pay off his many debts, and come out with enough extra to play another round. On top of that, he was betting on the kindness of Mother Nature, always supremely risky. But the farmer had no choice if he hoped to sustain himself and a way of life, the family farm. Instead, he was drawn into a kind of social suicide. The family farm and the whole network of small-town life that it patronized were being washed away into the rivers of capital and credit that flowed toward the railroads, banks, and commodity exchanges, toward the granaries, wholesalers, and numerous other intermediaries that stood between the farmer and the world market. Disappearing into all the reservoirs of capital accumulation, the family farm increasingly remained a privileged way of life only in sentimental memory.
Perversely the dynamic Lincoln had described as the pathway out of dependency—spending a few years earning wages, saving up, buying a competency, and finally hiring others—now operated in reverse. Starting out as independent farmers, families then slipped inexorably downward, first mortgaging the homestead, then failing under intense pressure to support that mortgage (they called themselves “mortgage slaves”) and falling into tenancy—or into sharecropping if in the South—and finally ending where Lincoln’s story began, as dispossessed farm and migrant laborers.
On the “sod house” frontier, poverty was a “badge of honor which decorated all.” In his Devil’s Dictionary the acid-tongued humorist Ambrose Bierce defined the dilemma this way: “Debt. n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver.”
“The Tramp’s Story,” an 1880 poem by Will Carleton, caught the bitter pathos of what today we might call the financialization of the land:
We worked through spring and winter—through summer and through fall—
But the mortgage worked the hardest and the steadiest of us all;
It worked on nights and Sundays—it worked each holiday—
It settled down among us, and never went away.
Whatever we kept from it seemed almost as bad as theft;
It watched us every minute and ruled us right and left.
The rust and blight were with us sometimes, and sometimes not;
The dark-browed, scowling mortgage was forever on the spot.
The weevil and the cut-worm, they went as well as came;
The mortgage staid forever, eating hearty all the same.
It nailed up every window—stood guard at every door—
And happiness and sunshine made their home with us no more.5
Malcontented farmers spread blame for their predicament far and wide. Mortgage holders, grain-elevator operators, absentee landlords, railroad monopolists, farm-machinery manufacturers, local provisioners, commodity and land speculators, and creditors were singly or all together targeted for censure. However, while none of these villains were ever let off the hook, agrarian anger tended to pool around the strangulating systems of currency and credit run out of the great banking centers of the east, especially Wall Street.
Rural hostility to the “money power” was an entrenched tradition, its roots extending as far back as Jackson’s war against the Bank of the United States. Actually the role of finance in determining the shape of the economy was a preoccupation of politics from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century. Nor was it confined to the countryside.
Smallholders, shopkeepers, handicraftsmen, local and regional merchants, aspiring entrepreneurs, cooperatives, and the whole universe of debtors were in a chronic uproar over the paucity of currency and credit and the price deflation that the government’s and Wall Street’s strict adherence to the gold standard imposed on the economy. For that reason, calls to print greenbacks or coin silver gripped the imagination of not only the farm population but also much of middling America. A whole range of protest movements concerned in one way or another with the drying up of entrepreneurial opportunity—including the National Labor Union and Knights of Labor in the cities, along with the Grange and rural-based cooperatives—fixated on the interest rate and the dearth of credit, uncovering linkages between “interest, bonds, and the whole speculating power that now owns and runs the government.”6
It also led to the creation of the Greenback and various labor-related parties during the 1870s and ’80s. Like these populist precursors, the People’s Party (commonly known as the Populist Party), which formed in 1890, tried to appeal to all those crucified on “the cross of gold,” not only to beleaguered farmers. Moreover, to nourish its roots in the South, the border states, and the far west, the Democratic Party too became a medium bearing the message of debt relief, although in this case it was always at war with its eastern wing of bankers and merchants. That stress would cause the party to fracture down the middle in the presidential election of 1896. So it was that calls for the free coinage of silver or for the use of both gold and silver as measures of value, by promising to open up the sluice gates of commercial credit, appealed way beyond the immediate zones of rural misery.
Arguably, primitive accumulation breeds a politics focused on finance. Debt, in a multitude of forms, has often been the mechanism through which the centers of international trade and finance have absorbed the wealth created by societies not themselves capitalist or even engaged in the regular production of commodities for the market. Finance and trade may grow prosperous in this way without actually invading the realm of production itself. During the long nineteenth century, this older form of debt-based primitive accumulation coexisted alongside the new realm of capital accumulation based on wage labor.
Eventually, financial capital internalized and dominated the processes of wealth production directly by investing in and managing new enterprises, especially the railroads and publicly traded industrial corporations that Wall Street helped midwife around the turn of the century. The convergence of these two systems of capital accumulation—finance and factory—and the resistances they gave rise to is one way of explaining why the long nineteenth century was so tumultuous.7
Combined and happening at the same moment, the immanent extinction of the family farm and the descent into the dependency of wage slavery in the city provided the critical mass for the unparalleled explosion of anticapitalist resistance that distinguished the long nineteenth century. America has experienced nothing like it since.
By the mid-1880s, the last of the great western trunk lines opened up millions of acres on the Great Plains and in the southwest to settlement and to a frenzy of speculation. Inflated farm prices, overextended loans, overbuilt towns, and mountains of insupportable commercial paper rested on these rickety foundations. It all came crashing to earth amid the biblical afflictions of grasshoppers, blizzards, and the devastating drought of 1889–90. Mass bankruptcies and evictions followed. Throughout the South everyone knew that a sign posted on an evacuated homestead reading G.T.T. meant “Gone to Texas,” which in fact 100,000 beleaguered farmers did every year of the 1870s, and in similar numbers thereafter.
Brooding over the debacle in the countryside, a farmer concluded in 1892 that “few Reading, thinking men in America, Deny the Slavery of the Masses, to the Money Power of our Country.” The axiom of agrarian rage was bracingly blunt: “the agricultural masses” were being “robbed by an infamous system of finance.” The language of rural revolt carried with it the same end-of-days foreboding and menace then running through the factories, mines, and mills of industrial America. Populist-inspired economic language was simultaneously a vocabulary and grammar of political and moral anathema. Words like “robbed,” “enslaved,” “plunder,” “virtue,” and “parasite”—the lingua franca of farm protest and of the whole family of antimonopoly movements—conveyed both analytic economic meaning as well as thunderous condemnations and benedictions. Populist cosmology consigned bankers and speculators to their own distinctive hellish ecological niche. They were, in a word, economic deadwood.8
Fused together were the moral, religious, and economic condemnations of the new system. One North Carolina insurgent denounced a financial system
concocted in Hades, and transplanted to earth, and it has made a pandemonium of a garden of Eden.… The father of lies, the incubator of all meanness, it has damned more souls, committed more perjury, it has made a hell of heaven, banished God from earth, and set up the devil’s kingdom, it has debauched our elections, established the reign of political thieves, it has brought the cause of Christ into disrepute and shut the minister’s mouth, and it is the quintessence of all that is mean.9
James H. Davis, a charismatic orator from Texas, condemned bondholders of railroads, state governments, and corporations. Led by “private greed alone,” they were guilty of taxing “the unborn generations” to pay their bonds. Another North Carolina activist asked: “Who are these bankers anyway? What do they produce? What do they distribute? What moral right do they have to cumber the earth?” The money power was not merely unproductive, it was counterproductive, like an incubus sucking away at the economic vitality of households and businesses.
When critics of the money power talked of “fictitious value,” they meant not only to judge but to explain. Economic practices originating in Wall Street were fictitious because they were deceptive and unreal, resting on deliberate falsifications—watered stock, for example. But they were fictitious in another impersonal, morally neutral sense as well. Fictitious value was the systemic outcome of the mechanisms of trustification. Without anyone’s conscious connivance, it produced a parallel universe of paper values increasingly at variance with and greater than the underlying wealth-generating capacity of the tangible properties that made up the foundation of that house of paper. Small-town editors, local preachers and politicians, itinerant writers and traveling lecturers—the whole populist, antimonopoly intelligentsia—busied themselves showing how this second, phantom economy exacted its heavy tribute.10
One acid-tongued observer did a postmortem on the heavily hyped and extravagantly financed new railroad ventures and found that at the end of the day “the road was unballasted, the ties are rotting, the station-houses are tumble-down shanties, the trestles and culverts and bridges are dangerous, the quarries and mines and forests have not been discovered.” The only real beneficiaries were Wall Street figures doing a heavy business in foreclosing on railroad mortgages, canceling old securities, organizing new companies, issuing new securities, and floating them out into the world on rafts of fraudulent reports—the cycle then primed to repeat itself without end. Rural critics of commodity speculation, regularly derided by orthodox economists as backward-gazing rustic yahoos, were often fully aware of the inner workings of international trade, but in their eyes “phantom cotton,” “spectral hogs,” and “wind wheat” subverted rather than sustained commerce.11
Whatever the merits or demerits of populist economics, it was in the political realm that the issue would be settled once and for all. In a refrain heard again and again, the movement demanded not merely an economy but a society that raised “man over money.” As the farmers’ plight grew more desperate and “man” remained mudsill, many looked ahead to a political Armageddon.
Entering the presidential race for the first time in 1892, the People’s Party whipped up enthusiasm with a campaign book authored by Georgia congressman and flamboyant orator Tom Watson. It bore the incendiary subtitle Not a Revolt; It Is a Revolution. Watson depicted what was happening in 1892 as a replay of the historic confrontation between Hamilton and Jefferson in 1792 over whether the country was to be governed by “a moneyed aristocracy supported by special privilege.” The division between the forces of privilege and those ready to take up arms on behalf of egalitarian democracy was a primordial one, and the Populists were hardly shy about tracing their lineage back to the Revolution’s early days. When the party assembled in Omaha, Nebraska, to formulate its platform, the delegates cheered a fire-and-brimstone preamble that reviewed the “thirty year war” against monopoly and vowed to carry on the ageless struggle against “the oppression of the usurers.”
However, the party’s populism was not a species of antimodernism. The Omaha platform itself showed none of the aversion to big government that had once been an axiom of the Jeffersonian persuasion. On the contrary, Populists proposed government control of the money supply and credit so as to benefit all the “producing classes.” A “sub-treasury” would function like a purchasing and marketing cooperative run by the government, making low-interest loans to farmers in legal-tender notes in return for their crops. The sub-treasury would then warehouse that agricultural output, releasing or holding back supplies from the market so as to maintain stable prices—prices that would ensure loan repayment as well as the farmers’ material well-being. Ultimately, the goal was to wrest control of the monetary system from the Wall Street banking elite and vest it in the hands of the U.S. Treasury.
Although the sub-treasury plan (and the free coinage of silver) constituted the heavy artillery for breaking Wall Street’s choke hold on credit, it was by no means the movement’s only foray into the economic future. The party advocated a graduated income tax. It demanded strict regulation or even public ownership of the means of transportation and communication (the railroads and telegraph and also public utilities). Along with notions of a government-run or heavily monitored banking system, these were radical departures from the ancestral suspicion of the state.12
Yet if Populist politics can’t be dismissed as an antediluvian rejection of the modern world, it is undeniable that the movement owed its fervor and sense of political and moral peril to the republican, smallholder mentality of the Revolution. Passionate attachments to immemorial traditions and ancient creeds—one might say to a useable or empowering past—were conjoined to creative methods of reconfiguring the future, all as a way of escaping the torments of an intolerable or even fatal present.
Government itself wasn’t inherently bad then, but democratic government was a fragile creature. For the Populists it depended on a broadly even distribution of wealth and property, as had been more or less the case before the new order of things. Upon that rough egalitarian competence rested civic independence and vigilance against the usurpations of a self-aggrandizing elite. But these would-be aristocrats qua moneycrats moved stealthily. They used their wealth to seduce and demoralize institutions of popular government until those instruments were weakened beyond repair—or even worse, until those instruments became the means of disinheriting and disempowering the people, stripping them of the economic self-reliance and political wherewithal to stand up to the forces of counterrevolution.
The great banking houses of the east now gathered in all these tributaries of counterrevolution, concentrating their force. Populists were aware of that shift in the political center of gravity, mindful that the nation was no longer put together as it had been. Nonetheless they grounded their condemnation of the new financial-industrial dispensation on the enduring insights of an ancestral faith. Stump orators on the prairie were fond of reminding their listeners that in Jefferson’s time moneyed corporations and financiers were often “tories,” that “a man was not considered a sound man to fill a government office if he was a banker or ‘stockbroker’ or corporate man.” An Alabama Populist congressman likened the arrogance and insolence of the Wall Street plutocracy to the French monarchy, the Stuart king Charles I, and of course England in 1776, all instances of aristocracies “intoxicated by power,” “surfeited with a redundancy of money,” and intent on making slaves of their subjects. In a speech to a gathering of Populists in Chicago, Henry Demarest Lloyd, the country’s most celebrated journalistic warrior against the trusts, echoed a widely shared conviction about the two major parties: they were done for, their best work behind them. “The Republican Party took the black man off the auction block of the Slave Power, but it has put the white man on the auction block of the Money Power.”13
Fear of enslavement—the recurring under-theme of so much of what made the long nineteenth century so apocalyptic in mood—sounds strange in our ears today. For Lloyd and so many others, however, it was a reference not only to economic exploitation, but to the theft of their political birthright. The money power cast its chilling shadow over the courts, the legislature, and all the branches of the state along with all the vital institutions of civic and educational life.
In 1892, Populist presidential candidate James Weaver (a brigadier general in the Union Army and the Greenback Party congressman from Iowa) captured the pervasiveness of baleful influence of the money power:
You meet it in every walk of life. It speaks through the press, gives zeal and eloquence to the bar, engrosses the attention of the bench, organizes the influences which surround our legislative bodies and courts of justice… determines who shall be our Senators, how our legislatures shall be organized, who shall preside over them.… It is imperial in political caucuses… is expert in political intrigue and pervades every community from the center to the circumference of the Republic.
For its part the People’s Party campaign book included a biopsy of a sickened two-party system. The chairman of the Democratic Party, Calvin Brice, accumulated his fortune as a railroad speculator, the book reported, then bought himself a Senate seat in Ohio and went on to become a “Wall Street operator; an ally of Jay Gould in corporate combines; a part owner of a convict camp in Tennessee.” Former president Grover Cleveland, running for another term, seemed to have “imbibed the financial views of Wall Street.” Nor were the Republicans any different. Both parties were predators: “Under the Banking and Bonding System all the Roads of Produce lead to the Rome of Imperial Plutocracy.”14
Populist insurgents meant to block those roads. Leading up to the final conflict in 1896, their political effectiveness and savvy steadily increased. When General Weaver had run for president on the Greenback Party ticket in 1876, he won only a handful of votes. In 1880, the handful was larger, but still a handful. By 1892, as the People’s Party candidate, he garnered over a million votes and carried the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota.
Enmity directed at the whole expanding universe of financial middlemen—financiers, railroad promoters, purveyors of watered stock, bankers and mortgage holders, organizers of trusts and “combines”—was raising the temperature of political life. The preamble to the People’s Party platform put things starkly:
We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin… our homes are covered with mortgages; labor impoverished; and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists.… The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for the few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, 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.15
Vitriol tossed Wall Street’s way grew more acidic each passing year. Defenders of the gold standard were prone to treat such talk as the ravings of lunatics and cranks—“border ruffians,” “Cossacks,” and “bandits” out of step with the march of Progress. But what is most striking is how widespread this verbal violence was.
Bewhiskered William A. Peffer, for example, looked like some eastern newspaper’s caricature of a hayseed radical. Actually, he was a sober-minded judge, newspaper editor, and successful Populist candidate for the U.S. Senate from Kansas in 1890. But Wall Street shenanigans made him irate. A year after his election, he published “The Farmers Side: His Troubles and Their Remedy.” Wall Street boasted—without warrant, according to Peffer—that it deserved credit for the country’s industrial and commercial development. What Wall Street apologists got right was that the power of the men assembled on the Street “to catch the driftwood of trade is greater than that of monarchies.” They were despicable hypocrites parading their “patriotism in lending a few millions of their ill-gotten gains to the government of their imperiled country at 12% interest, when thousands of farmers and wage workers… were voluntarily in the army at risk of life and home.”
Armageddon came finally and inevitably in 1896. The People’s Party split apart. Millions flooded back into the Democratic Party, drawn by William Jennings Bryan’s eloquence, his solemn vow that “mankind shall not be crucified on a cross of gold,” and to the alluring panacea of freely coined silver. They were prepared to give up all those other demands and desires that fired populism from the outset. Legions, however, remained faithful to populism’s daring and its programmatic independence. Together agrarian-minded Democrats and Populists joined battle with the “money kings of Wall Street.” In his electrifying peroration at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, Bryan quoted John Carlisle to challenge the delegates: “Upon which side will the Democratic party fight; upon the side of the ‘idle holders of idle capital’ or upon the side of the struggling masses?”16
Which side indeed. It was a war of the worlds. Populist politics took on the world of J. P. Morgan by looking backward and forward at the same time. It anticipated the modern regulatory-state way in advance of the urban upper-middle classes, which after all stayed wedded to the outmoded shibboleths of laissez-faire for some time to come.
But the money power’s offenses aroused enduring cultural anxieties and predilections about religion and sex, nature and the city, trust and infidelity. These were not, first of all, political emotions. The glare of Wall Street lit up an antique nightscape in the Populist imagination. It was populated by the oversexed and the emasculated, by urban tricksters and sybarites, by hook-nosed Shylocks and moral prostitutes, alien conspirators and apocalyptic demons. It was a despoiled landscape robbed of its natural vigor and hard-earned virtue. To redeem it called upon a reservoir of profound discontent, stoking a resistance of salvationist intensity. This was the cultural understructure of the politics of primitive accumulation as it unfolded in the countryside.
Whatever else one might think about this culture of opposition—expressed in utopian and dystopian fantasies, hellfire sermons, realist novels, and cartoon allegories, as well as in poetry—it was an undeniably luxuriant world, allusively dense and dramaturgically alive. It presumed a familiarity with biblical, Shakespearean, and pastoral themes and images. Together they composed a psychic armature with which to defend a sense of sacred honor and fend off the specter of social oblivion.
This was “culture war” avant la lettre. No terrain was spared. But there were hot zones of the most concentrated fire. The money power was an impiety and a pollutant that threatened above all the purity of the land, the family, and the nation.
Populism made serious if intermittent attempts to include the urban proletarian poor within its embrace, but it remained ambivalent about the city. It viewed the exfoliating financial network, no matter how far into the outback it extended its reach, as an irreducibly urban phenomenon. And it sometimes recoiled from the visage of proletarian squalor and demoralization.
Instead, proximity to the land was inherently salubrious, the natural soil nourishing manly independence and honest dealing upon which in turn a healthy society rested. The spirit of Wall Street was its antithesis. Wall Street ravaged the countryside by converting the land into a medium of commercial exchange and speculation, tearing it up by the roots, so to speak, from its preordained role as a giver of life.
This social drainage system headquartered in lower Manhattan could be displayed with graphic earthiness as in a cartoon sketch of a cow feeding in the west, then getting milked in New York. Or it might inspire sublime meditations. In this age full of looming premonitions of social cataclysm, the virgin land carried sacred meaning; its deflowering at the hands of alien financial interests amounted to a national calamity. Henry George’s Progress and Poverty fixated on ground rent in part because it expressed a more general cultural preoccupation with parasitism that set the stakes high indeed:
The general intelligence, the general comfort, active intervention, the power of adaptation and assimilation, the free, independent spirit, and energy and hopefulness that have marked our people are not causes, but results—they have sprung from the unfenced land. This public domain has been the transmuting force which turned the thriftless, unambitious European peasant into the self-reliant farmer; it has given a consciousness of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been the well-spring of hope even to those who have never thought of taking refuge upon it.17
Agrarian suspicion of and repugnance for city life had of course been a deeply rooted tradition in Western civilization for centuries before the settlement of the New World renewed its momentum. Wall Street was a city institution through and through, marked by all of urban life’s most dangerous proclivities, both old ones and new ones. Even its geography was suggestive, tucked away at the intestinal end of New York, conducting its business in the shadows of its serpentine alleyways.
Financial oligarchs wallowed in the immoralities of city life and threatened the moral fiber of the rest of the country. Sexual mores and family integrity were especially in jeopardy. The Sioux Falls Daily Argus, which concluded that J. P. Morgan had done more harm in the world than “any man who ever lived in it,” singled out for special censure his contribution to “the blighting of womanhood” and the “premature aging of children.” Angry farmers itemizing, often in capital letters, the most repugnant traits and abuses of the money power invariably raised the specter of “Debased Manhood.”
The populist brief against Wall Street’s sexual impropriety and subversion was part of a broader indictment of its sensual abandon and descent into a kind of overcivilized barbarism. Morgan’s world seemed morally pathological, the Street a boulevard of ravenous appetite. Millions were wasted there on outlandish feasts while “gaunt starvation walked the streets.” There men posed as “missionaries conquering deserts and building republics,” feigning piety and wisdom, soaking up the adulation and honorifics of the credulous, while “living in luxury and ease, renting costly pews in splendid churches and hiring their worshipping done; men petted and feasted by the rich everywhere.” Adversarial politicians and jaundiced-eyed journalists kept a scorecard of the Social Register’s monumental castles, their yachts “ready at the wharf,” their “private cars at the depot,” their private chapels and private priests,” and their fancy dress soirees, all the stigmata of a “libidinous plutocracy.”18
Wall Street wasted the soul. Populists likened the contemporary economic inequalities to the impassable scriptural divide between Dives and Lazarus: the rich Dives cast into hellfire, while the beggar Lazarus reposed in the bosom of Abraham. To stay loyal to republicanism and equality was to defend the battlements of a Christian way of life, its spiritually invigorating attachment to hard work and abstemious restraint in the face of iniquitous temptation. What the money power defiled was an essential innocence, a core conviction that “honorable labor in every walk of existence… will be counted Monarch among men.” Somehow there needed to be a return to the “principles and practices of primitive Christianity,” a restoration of that millennial community of human sympathy and fellowship. Unless this rather etherealized form of the labor theory of value prevailed against the corrosive logic of a leisure-infatuated commercial civilization, there would be hell to pay.
Hell was familiar territory: in the populist view of the world, the final conflict with the money power would inevitably take place on its borders. There the enemy would appear in all its ghastly viciousness, a fearsome, brutal figure of ancient lineage and apocalyptic import. A Populist congressman called trusts “institutional vampires.” Wall Street machinations were a “devil’s dance… an orgy of fiduciary harlotry.” Sometimes a primordial octopus, sometimes a “great Devil Fish” or vampire, the money power engaged not so much in acts of commerce as in acts of “necromancy.” Strip away Wall Street’s veneer of urbane sophistication and what stared you in the face was a demon—horrifically violent or unendurably seductive, but a demon nonetheless. The “trust” was “soulless”; beneath its avaricious, power-mad exterior beat a heart of pure nihilism, driving the whole human community down and backward into some dark age. Populist eschatology thought in terms of an “irrepressible conflict” joined generations earlier. Bred in the bone, it was a war over the soul of man with an uncertain outcome.19
Often enough, Populist insurgents on the western prairies and Southern cotton fields had arrived there only recently. Their homesteads might be just a generation old, two or three at the most. For these husbandmen, their fortunes had always been tied to the coming of the railroad and eastern banks—that is, to the infrastructure of modernity. Yet they cherished beliefs far older than that, a sacerdotal commitment to rural and small-town virtues that went back to Jefferson’s day. The money power and its voracious appetite for the wealth generated outside its immediate orbit of operation threatened a way of life as much as a way of making a living. For that reason, the populist uprising, whether it resisted in ways perspicacious or retrograde, lent the whole era a certain gravitas, an undercurrent of apocalyptic finality so foreign to our sense of things today.
With William McKinley’s triumph in 1896, heavily fortified by the biggest guns of industry and finance, one species of anticapitalism went extinct. Agrarian reform would remain an important feature of American politics through the Great Depression. But the revolution invoked by Tom Watson was over with. It died along with the frontier, as the eminent historian Frederick Jackson Turner intimated at just this time. Turner’s address to the American Historical Association at the Chicago world’s fair in 1893, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” has been thoroughly criticized, revised, and rejected in the generations since then. But his notions—that “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier,” that “so long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power,” and that each new frontier furnished, at least psychologically and sometimes in actuality, “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past”—were clearly alive and well within the ranks of agrarian unrest. The vanishing that Turner detected in the findings of the 1890 Census imparted a sense of imminent loss that inspired a paradoxical revolutionary nostalgia.
Moreover, this same vanishing was felt back east. By the time Turner composed his “frontier thesis,” the “dignity of labor” had become a hollowed out homily, a cruel joke in the face of the looming specter of a fixed and despised class of proletarians that, Turner noted, gave new urgency to the “social question.” Far from the cornfields and cotton farms of the heartland, root and branch challenges to the new order of things gathered steam.20