Chapter four

Reconstruction and Populism

The Civil War destroyed slavery in the South, but it did not immediately establish a new political and economic order in its place. The next three decades witnessed an intense, often violent, political struggle to determine the character of the South. In the end, white supremacy was reestablished, but this was not a foregone conclusion.

Today, it is widely accepted that all whites had an interest in disfranchising the newly freed Black population and that poor whites provided the main impetus for reaction. C. Vann Woodward argues “the escalation of lynching, disfranchisement and proscription reflected concessions to the white lower class” on the part of the upper class.1 Restricting Black rights was a precondition for lower-class whites winning rights for themselves, according to Woodward. “The barriers of racial discrimination mounted in direct ratio with the tide of political democracy among whites.”2 Various left-wing academics share the basic thrust of this analysis, and therefore draw the inevitable conclusion that racist ideology among the mass of whites was the cause of continued Black oppression.3 The political conclusion of such an approach is simple: the majority of whites, if not all whites, have a stake in maintaining racism. The prospects for Black and white unity are therefore slim, if not altogether excluded.

This analysis, however, never asks the central questions: Whose interests did white supremacy serve? Why did so many poor whites accept racism? And, if we understand that slavery gave rise to racism, why did racial oppression survive its abolition?

A careful look at the era of Reconstruction shows that there was a significant challenge to racism, and the reimposition of white supremacy was the result of a conscious and sustained campaign by the ruling class. Jack Bloom argues cogently that Reconstruction unfolded in a “revolutionary” period. The Civil War had destroyed the class system of the Old South, unleashing a fight over what type of society would replace it. Many different possibilities for a new racial order clashed. Therefore,

It was not a foregone conclusion that whites would join in concert against Blacks. White small farmers had long borne their own grudges against the wealthy slaveholders, and the economic squeeze they felt after the Civil War reinforced their anger against the upper class. The newly freed slaves had similar interests. Separately, each group constituted a problem for the planters; together, especially with the support of the federal government, they were a genuine threat to the existence of the landed aristocracy.4

The South was devastated by the Civil War. As Eric Foner writes in Reconstruction:

Even apart from the disorganization caused by the end of slavery, however, the widespread destruction of work animals, farm buildings, and machinery, and the deterioration of levees and canals, ensured that the revival of agriculture would be slow and painful. So too did the appalling loss of life.... Thirty-seven thousand Blacks, the great majority from the South, perished in the Union Army, as did tens of thousands more in contraband camps, on Confederate Army labor gangs, and in disease-ridden urban shanty-towns. Nearly 260,000 men died for the Confederacy—over one-fifth of the South’s adult white male population. Many more were wounded, some maimed for life. (Mississippi expended 20 percent of its revenue in 1865 on artificial limbs for Confederate veterans.) The region, moreover, was all but bankrupt, for the collapse of Confederate bonds and currency wiped out the savings of countless individuals and the resources and endowments of colleges, churches, and other institutions.5

This was the situation that confronted Andrew Johnson, who assumed the presidency after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. Johnson, a former slaveholder and the only senator from a seceding state to remain loyal to the Union, led a retreat from any notion of Black equality. Johnson was not interested in the plight of the newly emancipated slaves. He appointed provisional governors for the Southern states and conferred a blanket pardon to any former Confederate who took an oath of loyalty to the Union. Wealthy Confederate officials and owners of property valued at more than $20,000 were excluded, but they could apply for individual pardons, which Johnson granted generously.6 After establishing a new government and acknowledging the illegality of secession and the abolition of slavery, each state could resume its place in the Union. Johnson denied the franchise to Blacks and ordered that former slaves be evicted from plantations they had occupied at the end of the war.

Blacks resisted any policy designed to scale back the full freedom they had been fighting for. When they were forced to sign exploitative labor contracts with employers, Blacks resisted en masse. Writes Cedric Robinson, “the army frequently arrested Blacks striking against the near slavery of labor contracts and used force against Blacks unwilling to surrender land they were now cultivating.”7

By the summer of 1865, Johnson’s direction was clear. Johnson is quoted as saying to the California Senator, John Conness, “White men alone must manage the South,” and declaring “This is a country for white men, and by God, so long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”8

Slavery had been the source of wealth and power for the planter class in the antebellum South. After the war, the Southern ruling class had two choices to respond to the labor shortage. It could try to transform the plantation economy using capital-intensive methods of production—as in the case of Britain and the North—and thereby increase the productivity of labor. Or it could impose a sharp limitation on labor mobility—through formal laws and informal practices and terror—to keep workers tied to the land and limit their access to other employment.9

Given a free hand, the old Southern ruling class began to reestablish itself. For the planter class, obtaining and controlling cheap labor were crucial. “Black Codes” were enacted to regulate the lives of Blacks, which, insisted a Louisiana Republican, were aimed at “getting things back as near to slavery as possible.”10 The laws required Blacks to possess written evidence of employment. In Mississippi, any Black person who failed to sign a labor contract or left a job could be arrested for vagrancy and forced to work for a white person who would pay the fine. Several states passed laws limiting the right of Blacks to carry firearms. Blacks were also prohibited by law from hunting, fishing, and grazing livestock. Virginia and Georgia made theft of a horse or mule a capital crime. North Carolina even made “the intent to steal a punishable crime, decreeing that all attempted thefts, even if unsuccessful, should be treated as larceny.”11

A wave of violence was unleashed against Republicans, both Black and white. Among those assassinated in this campaign of terror were Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who had served in state constitutional conventions.12 Ex-Confederate Army officers in Pulaski, Tennessee, formed a secret organization called the Ku Klux Klan in 1865, aimed at reestablishing white supremacy. Initially formed as a social club for former Confederate Army officers, it made its true aims clear at its first convention, held in Nashville. The secret order pledged its members to “maintain[ing] the purity of white blood, if we would preserve for it that natural superiority with which God has ennobled it.”13 Summarizing their aims, Eric Foner writes that the Klan “aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican Party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the Black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.”14

Blacks and radical Republicans increasingly began to voice opposition to Johnson’s accommodation to the South. The split between moderates and radicals deepened. Many Republicans who supported Johnson’s program began to urge a different policy. These included Northern capitalists who believed that the end of the war would quickly lead to their control of the South. Expressing this view, General Philip Henry Sheridan wrote in 1865:

There are without doubt many malcontents in the State of Louisiana and much bitterness but this bitterness is all that is left for these people, there is no power of resistance left, the country is impoverished and the probability is that in two or three years there will be almost a total transfer of landed property, the North will own every Railroad, every steamboat, every large mercantile establishment and everything which requires capital to carry it on.... The slave is free and the whole world cannot again enslave him, and with these facts staring us in the face we can well afford to be lenient to this last annoyance, impotent ill feeling.15

Sharing Johnson’s leniency toward the leaders of the Old South, Sheridan continued, “The poor whites and Negroes of the South have not the intelligence to fill the offices of governors, clerks, judges, etc., and for some time the machinery of State Gov[ernmen]ts must be controlled by the same class of whites as went into the Rebellion against us.”16

But the plan backfired. Once the Civil War ended, the Republican coalition began to disintegrate. The Democratic Party began to make headway among Northern farmers and layers of workers who had grown disillusioned with the Republicans. The Democrats

identified the Republican [P]arty as an agent of economic privilege and political centralization, and a threat to individual liberty and the tradition of limited government.... And the party benefited from widespread resentment over the use of troops to suppress strikes, a dramatic illustration of what many workers perceived as the federal government’s partiality toward capital....

The potent cry of white supremacy provided the final ideological glue in the Democratic coalition. Sometimes the appeal to race was oblique. The Democratic slogan, “The Union as It Is, the Constitution as It Was,” had as its unstated corollary, Blacks as they were—that is, as slaves. Often, it was remarkably direct. “Slavery is dead,” the Cincinnati Enquirer announced at the end of the war, “the negro is not, there is the misfortune.”17

The growth in Democratic support in the North was paralleled by its strength in the South—especially as Blacks were not permitted to vote. In state elections in the North, the Democrats polled 45 percent in 1865, 45.4 percent in 1866, and 49.5 percent in 1867.18 Republicans, fearing a Democratic presidential victory in 1868, began to support granting Blacks the right to vote.

In 1867, the Radical wing of the Republican Party took control of Reconstruction policy. Legislation enfranchising Southern Blacks was enacted; at the same time, 100,000 whites who refused to sign a loyalty oath were disenfranchised and another 200,000 prohibited from holding public office.19 Radical Reconstruction was a blow to white supremacy and continued the process begun during the Civil War. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it in Black Reconstruction: “The inevitable result of the Civil War eventually had to be the enfranchisement of the laboring class, Black and white, in the South. It could not, as the South clamored to make it, result in the mere legalistic freeing of the slaves.”20

The principal base of support for the Republican Party in the South was among Blacks, but it also began to recruit whites on a class basis. An appeal from the Georgia Republican Party read:

Poor white man of Georgia, be a man! Let the slaveholding aristocracy no longer rule you. Vote for a constitution which educates your children free of charge; relieves the poor debtor from his rich creditor; allows a liberal homestead for your families; and more than all, places you on a level with those who used to boast that for every slave they were entitled to three-fifths of a vote in congressional representation.21

Across the South, the Reconstruction governments experimented with unprecedented social reforms that benefited both Blacks and poor whites. In South Carolina, white farmers armed themselves to prevent foreclosures on their properties.22 The military governor of the state halted foreclosures and closed debtors prisons. Free public education began to appear in the South for the first time.23 Thus,

The new Reconstruction governments established conditions that were more favorable to the lower classes, Black and white. They set aside some of the Black Codes, tried to enact a free labor market, established the conditions and to some degree regulated the contracts for labor, and tried to protect Black civil rights. In some cases racial discrimination was specifically forbidden.24

Now able to vote, Blacks began to participate in large numbers in local and national elections. Fourteen Blacks were elected to Congress from six Southern states, and two from Mississippi were elected to the Senate.25 (There was not a single Black representative from the North in Congress until the 1920s, and none in the Senate until the 1960s.) The demand for education also became central to Blacks, especially since 90 percent emerged from slavery illiterate.26 “By 1869, there were nine thousand teachers in the South instructing the children of ex-slaves. By 1870, there were four thousand three hundred schools with close to 250,000 Black children in attendance.”27

Despite these important reforms, Radical Reconstruction foundered because it was unable to solve the question of land reform in the South. While seizure and redistribution of plantation land was a chief demand of newly freed slaves and most Radical Republicans, the majority of Republicans would not countenance such an idea. “A division of rich men’s lands,” argued the Nation, “would give a shock to our whole social-political system from which it would hardly recover without the loss of liberty.”28

The Southern planters also mounted increasing resistance to Reconstruction. In some cases, planters entered the new Republican Party organizations in order to subvert them and render them ineffective. Simultaneously, they launched a campaign against “negro domination” and projected the Democratic Party as the party of whites in the South. Terror, intimidation, and fraud were used to prevent Blacks from voting. The Ku Klux Klan built its ranks on opposition to the Radicals’ political program. As Allen Trelease puts it, “The Klan became in effect a terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, whether the party leaders as a whole liked it or not.”29

The results of this violence and fraud can be seen in election results around the South. In Louisiana, many parishes with a Black majority went Democratic: In Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, which had a Black majority, the vote was 2,800 Democratic, 0 Republican in 1878. In another majorityBlack parish, not a single Republican vote was counted for 1878. More than fifty Blacks were killed and dozens driven from their homes during the campaign.30

The planters’ campaign for “redemption”—home rule without federal intervention—was successful because of the federal government’s acquiescence. Reconstruction fell in a dirty deal cut in Washington back rooms over the disputed 1876 presidential election. The Republican-led federal government agreed to withdraw troops from the South if the South agreed to cast its Electoral College votes for the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, rather than the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, who had won the popular vote.

The Republican Party’s abandonment of Reconstruction stemmed from two related developments. First, Northern capital had successfully extended its dominance into the South. Massive tracts of public land in the South had made their way into the hands of Northern railroads and speculators. More integrated into the rapidly expanding Northern economy, the Southern ruling class sought reconciliation with the North.

Second, Northern capitalists were eager to put an end to Reconstruction, especially in the wake of the depression of 1873 and a rising level of class struggle. Southern “redeemers” and Northern capitalists closed ranks in fear of a revolt from below. With the Paris Commune still fresh in his mind, a Northern Republican warned readers of the New York Tribune on June 21, 1871, that if the poor white population joined with the Black population, “so vast a mass of ignorance would be found that, if combined for any political purpose it would sweep away all opposition the intelligent class might make. Many thoughtful men are apprehensive that the ignorant voters will, in the future, form a party by themselves as dangerous to the interests of society as the communists of France.”31

The Southern ruling class successfully defeated Reconstruction by using racism, terror, and fraud. The Republican Party’s influence declined dramatically as the Democratic Party’s hegemony extended. The ruling class no longer owned slaves but the plantation economy was still the cornerstone of the South. Despite an increase in the number of farms in the Deep South between 1860 and 1880, there was also a sharp decrease in the average amount of acres per farming unit.32 By 1880, every Southern state showed an increase in its large plantations.33 Sharecroppers, tenants, and farmers now worked the land under a crop-lien system. Typically, sharecroppers would rent several acres of land and pay the planter with a portion of the crop, usually one-half. Under the crop-lien arrangement, farmers lacking cash would sign over part of the coming year’s crop in exchange for supplies from the local merchant or banker. Once in debt, few farmers ever escaped.

The South became even more dependent on one cash crop—cotton—than it had been before the Civil War. Farmers were not allowed to borrow seed to grow their own food, thus becoming even more dependent on the merchants, landowners, and bankers. This also led to increased cotton crops, which in turn helped drive prices down by flooding the market with too much product. These conditions not only affected Black sharecroppers. From 1870, white sharecroppers outnumbered Black sharecroppers. In 1860, Blacks produced 90 percent of the cotton crop; by 1876, the figure had dropped to 60 percent; by1900, they produced only 40 percent.34

The economic transformations that forced Black and white sharecroppers into similar positions also gave rise to efforts to organize them to fight side by side. Reverend J. L. Moore of the Florida Colored Farmers’ Alliance argued that “the laboring colored man’s interests and the laboring white man’s interests are one and the same. Especially is this true at the South.”35

In an effort to blunt the possibility of unity between Black and white farmers and sharecroppers, some Democrats adopted a different approach to Blacks. By the mid-1870s, the shrill cries of “Black domination” were replaced with attempts to tie Black votes to the Democratic Party. “The best friends of the colored men are the old slaveholders,” claimed Wade Hampton, a leader of the “redeemers” in South Carolina. The Democratic Party election platform in Louisiana in 1873 promised “to exercise our moral influence, both through personal advice and personal example, to bring about the rapid removal of all prejudices heretofore existing against the colored citizens of Louisiana.”36 Throughout the South, conservative Democrats appealed for Black votes promising to safeguard Black rights. In Mississippi, politicians created organizations of Black Democrats and set about terrorizing Black Republicans. “They developed the policy of ‘fusion,’” writes Jack Bloom, “in which they would divide up offices with the Black Republicans, each promising to support the other, thus leaving out the white farmers. Blacks were often conscious of what was happening, and many approved, feeling that with the defeat of Reconstruction their best hope lay not with the ‘poor white trash’ but with the ‘well-raised gentlemen.’”37 Disillusioned with the Republican Party, many Blacks concluded that supporting the Democratic Party was the only alternative. Some even argued that the interests of Blacks and ruling-class whites were the same. A Mississippi Black owner of several hundred acres of land and more than a hundred head of cattle, all acquired since the war, told a Senate committee in 1879 that he voted Democratic “because...I thought my interest was to stay with the majority of the country who I expected to prosper with.”38

The most important challenge to one-party rule emerged in 1890 in the form of the Populist movement. Uniting Black and white farmers and sharecroppers in several Southern states, the Populist movement grew out of a class rebellion that also threatened to recast race relations in the South. The movement grew in the North and South in response to ever-worsening conditions faced by farmers. By the 1890s, farmers were losing their farms at unprecedented rates. Tenancy—families working land that now belonged to merchants, bankers, and speculators—involved one-quarter of all farms in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. In the South, the figure was closer to half.39 Farmers needed, in the words of Mary Lease, a Populist leader of Kansas, to “raise less corn and more hell.”40

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East. Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us....

There are 30 men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars. There are half a million looking for work....

We want money, land and transportation.... We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the Government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us thus far beware!41

The Populists aimed much of their fire at the financial and corporate interests that were ruining the farmer. Their program included regulation of the trusts, public ownership of the railroad and communications systems, revision of the lien laws in favor of the farmers, lowered interest rates, and extension of public schools. The Southern Populists were the most radical element in the Populist movement. While the Populists of the Far West and Midwest spoke of reform, Southern Populists talked of revolution. “While this system lasts,” argued Georgia Populist Tom Watson, “there are no pure politics, no free men, in Georgia.... It is rotten to the core, and there is no remedy for it but destruction.” He later proclaimed: “Men of the country! Let the fires of...this revolution grow brighter and brighter! Pile on the fuel till the forked flames shall leap in wrath around the foul structure of government wrong, shall sweep it from basement to turret, and shall sweep it from the face of the earth!”42

Many Southern Populists began to understand how racism had divided poor whites and Blacks and strengthened the ruling class. For the first time in the South, a movement emerged that consciously sought to break down the divisions between Blacks and whites. Tom Watson summed up this sentiment:

The Negro Question in the South has been for nearly thirty years a source of danger, discord, and bloodshed. It is an ever present irritant and menace....

Never before did two distinct races dwell together under such conditions.

And the problem is, can these two races, distinct in color, distinct in social life, and distinct as political powers, dwell together in peace and prosperity?...

The white tenant lives adjoining the colored tenant. Their houses are almost equally destitute of comforts. Their living is confined to bare necessities. They are equally burdened with heavy taxes. They pay the same high rent for gullied and impoverished land.

They pay the same enormous prices for farm supplies. Christmas finds them both without any satisfactory return for a year’s toil. Dull and heavy and unhappy, they both start the ploughs again when “New Year’s” passes.

Now the People’s Party says to these two men, “You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism that enslaves you both.

“You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.”43

“The left [P]opulists,” argues Bloom, “formulated and won support for a program unique in Southern history before or since. They proposed to organize a political coalition around the growing similarity of the economic conditions facing both Black and white farmers.”44 For instance, poor whites quickly found that the laws set up to disenfranchise Blacks—like the poll tax—also took the vote away from them.

“Left Populists” made numerous attempts to overcome racial divisions. In Georgia—a state that led all others in the number of lynchings—the Populists announced their intention to “make lynch law odious to the people.”45 This commitment was not simply verbal. In 1892, for example, when the Black Populist Reverend R. S. Doyle was threatened with lynching, two thousand white farmers responded to Tom Watson’s appeal for help to defend Doyle. There were also many attempts to involve Blacks in the movement on an equal footing. In Kansas, the Populists ran a Black farmer for state auditor.46 In many states, Blacks were elected to high offices in the Populist Party. In Georgia, Watson nominated a Black man to serve on the state executive council, and in Texas, a Populist convention elected two Blacks to serve on their state executive.47

By 1890, the Southern Alliance (the Southern wing of the Populist movement) claimed three million members, and the Colored Farmers’ Alliance claimed more than 1.25 million Black members. The movement became a mass movement that threatened the stability of the Southern regimes. Thousands attended Populist meetings. In the early 1890s, the Populists defeated the Democratic Party in local and statewide elections.48 “This country,” reported the Weekly Progress of Charlottesville, Virginia, “is upon the edge of a great revolution...a test of strength is to be made in blood between labor and capital.”49

For the Southern ruling class, the Populists were a threat to their class rule. And they responded with the same tactics to the Populists as they had to the advocates of Reconstruction. Above all, they resurrected a campaign of violence, fraud, intimidation, and vitriolic race hatred. The cry of “Black domination” was raised once more in an attempt to convince poor whites that racial supremacy was in their interest. Summarizing the period, one historian concludes:

The agrarian struggles that gripped the South during the 1880s and 1890s were accompanied by widespread violence. As the Farmers Alliance and Populist movements fought to check corporate and banking domination of the South, racists employed terror as a means of retaining power for the privileged few. Whereas the agrarian radicals would argue that class was the crucial dividing line in society, the racists would make white supremacy the all-important issue.50

Despite the violence and intimidation, the Populists continued to gain support. In 1894, the Populist candidates garnered almost 1.5 million votes nationally, an increase of 42 percent over 1892.51 The recession of 1893 only fuelled the movement’s growth. The 1896 elections, however, resulted in an abrupt collapse of the Populist movement. Reform Democrats, faced with a crisis, adopted the language of Populism and took a stand for “free silver.” This “cheap money” policy was popular with indebted farmers.

The Populist rhetoric of Democratic Party presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan promised to lead “the masses against the classes.”52 But Bryan was by no means a Populist. “The People’s Party,” he said, was “plotting a social revolution and the subversion of the American Republic.” But before suppressing Populists, he wanted their votes.

In the end, many Populists supported Bryan, arguing that a victory for William McKinley, the Republican candidate, would be worse. After McKinley narrowly won the election, the Populist alliance collapsed into warring factions. “Our party, as a party,” Watson said, “does not exist any more. The sentiment is still there, the votes are still there, but confidence is gone, and the party organization is almost gone.... The work of many years is washed away and the hopes of many thousands of good people are gone with it.”53

With the defeat of the Populist challenge, the Southern ruling class used a variety of devices—the poll tax, property qualifications, literacy tests—to sharply reduce the right to vote. Within a decade, Black disfranchisement was almost total in every Southern state. In Louisiana, 130,344 Blacks registered to vote in the 1896 elections. By 1904, it dropped to 1,342. In Alabama, a Black electorate of 100,000 before 1900 was reduced to 3,700.54

Disfranchisement was not the only restriction of Black rights. Statutes and laws decreeing segregation—or “Jim Crow” laws—of which there had been few until the 1890s—formally separated Blacks and whites in residentional areas, public parks and hospitals, and on trains and streetcars. They soon became the public rule rather than the exception.55 Historian Harvey Wasserman writes, “[C]ourtrooms provided separate bibles and schools stored texts separately on the basis of which race used them. Some states passed laws forbidding Blacks and whites to fight, fish, boat, or play dominoes or checkers together.”56

“How is the white man going to control the government?” asked Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman in 1907. “The way we do it is to pass laws to fit the white man and make the other people [Blacks] come to them.... If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”57 Many former Populist leaders joined the call for white supremacy. Tom Watson, who had dropped out of politics after the defeat of 1896, reemerged as a virulent racist and anti-Semite in 1904. Watson now endorsed lynching, arguing that “Black domination” was a “hideous, ominous, national menace.” “Lynch law is a good sign,” he wrote. “It shows that a sense of justice yet lives among the people.”58 In 1910, Watson bragged that he would no more hesitate to lynch a “nigger” than to shoot a mad dog. Even Booker T. Washington, the archetype of Black accommodation, was rejected by Watson. He closed a diatribe against Washington by saying: “What does Civilization owe the Negro? Nothing! Nothing!! Nothing!!!”59

The defeat of Populism and the turn to white supremacy by former Populists is often used to show the limitations of any strategy that seeks to unite Blacks and whites. The racism of poor whites is most often given as the principal cause of the movement’s collapse. Robert Allen, for example, argues that “Like most other Southern Populists [Watson] was a white supremacist from the beginning and never really changed. He was willing to exploit the Black vote for the Populist cause.”60 Others argue that the Populist movement itself fuelled racism: “The net result of the Populist movement...seemed to be increased racial hatred and the embitterment of race relations.”61

These traditional explanations focus on the ideology of poor whites. Michael Reich’s objections are pertinent:

This traditional explanation has two main weaknesses. First, it understates the role of conservatives and other powerful upper-class whites in the evolution of the harshest elements of post-Reconstruction racism....

Second, the traditional explanation misstates the class basis of the disfranchisement movement, attributing a racist zeal to poor white Southerners who in fact were opposed to disfranchisement. Careful statistical analysis of Southern voting patterns by Morgan Kousser has shown that the extremism of the post-Populist era is attributable more to attempts from above by the upper class to prevent another Populist-like movement from arising than from a mass racist movement from below.62

The effect of these laws was to reduce both Black and white voting rights.63 But far from agreeing to disfranchisement, the Populists generally opposed any restrictions on suffrage.

Traditional assessments of Populism fail to understand both the limitations of the movement and its tremendous potential. Moreover, they miss the most important point: for the Southern ruling class, the Populist movement was a challenge to their class rule. Their aim was to defeat both Blacks and whites, and they consciously fostered racism to do so. For all the appeals to the perils of “Black domination,” the real danger was spelled out clearly by an editorial in the Charlotte Observer, June 27, 1900, hailing “the struggle of the white people of North Carolina to rid themselves of the dangers of the rule of Negroes and the lower class of whites.”64

Once its position was secure, the ruling class would later allow white participation in primaries as a means of cementing white loyalty to white supremacism. But this “concession” did not represent a threat to their rule. By 1924, the grip of the Southern Democratic Party machines was so complete that only 6 percent of the electorate voted in the presidential election.65 When Senator Cole Blease of South Carolina learned that Calvin Coolidge, the Republican candidate for president, had received just over 1,000 votes in South Carolina in 1924, he exclaimed, “I do not know where he got them. I was astonished to know that they were cast and shocked to know they were counted.”66

Some have argued that the system of job segregation adopted in several Southern states was a direct benefit to whites. But the creation of “whites only” jobs by employers was a means to win the loyalty of workers and was only maintained as long as white workers’ wages were kept at an absolute minimum. If white workers pressed for higher wages, the employers threatened to replace them with Black workers. As John Coffin, vice-President of the Southern Industrial Convention, explained in 1900, “If labor is reasonable, if labor will work for anything within reason, white labor will dominate the South forever; but they [management] will not submit to such outrages as have been frequently committed by organized labor.”67

The defeat of Populism marked the victory of white supremacy in the South. Racist ideas—and racist violence—flourished. In June 1894, for example, the Nation reported the Right Reverend Hugh Miller Thompson, bishop of Mississippi, as justifying lynching because “the laws are slow and the jails are full.”68 But racism did not only flourish in the South. America’s imperialist expansion in the 1890s was justified in terms that mirrored the ideology of Southern white supremacists. Various academics and pseudo-scientists produced studies showing the inferiority of non-whites. R. B. Bean of Johns Hopkins University published an article, “The Negro Brain,” in which he concluded, “The Caucasian and the Negro are fundamentally opposite extremes in evolution.... It is useless to try to elevate the Negro by education or otherwise, except in the direction of his natural endowments.... Let them win their reward by diligent service.”69 As the twentieth century dawned, racism once again reigned supreme, North and South.