Page 4 RAIN February/March 1981 n ' f ·-- ~-__/ ·- - . ~ --· ~ ~ ., . - ,/: · - , ·~- ~ ·+;,- . "-·'... ;t,: • • '-',,.._s.,. , ) • :~- ----~ Fatmers in a Functioning Democracy The Populist Moment, by Lawrence Goodwyn, 1978, 349 pp., $5.50, from: Oxford University Press 200 Madison Ave. New York, NY10016 The Populist Movement occurred in the last quarter of the 19th century. Its roots were in farmers' efforts to break their economic subservience to banking interests. It bega:n in Texas with the Farmer's Alliance, spread through the South, West and Midwest, held 'national conferences eventually involving over 2 million people in 43 states in an independent political'party, and was broken up and defeated in 1896 by a combination of co-optation and chicanery from the corporate, political and financial sectors .• There are generally two sorts of book reviews: the ones which suggest you should or should not read a given book because it either does or does not measure up, and the reviews that essentially gut a book for you so that, read it or not, you get the good parts in your lap. Well, The Populist Moment is such a good, solid, important book that I feel compelled to both excerpt it extensively and still urge you to read it. But first, I want to comment on Mr. Goodwyn, because I like his style: I think he'd have made a good populist lecturer. His book is loaded with history. It's even academic. Yet he's written it with his arms waving and his voice raised (or lowered to a whisper of respect). He is clearly in awe of the populists, and riled with righteous anger that nowadays, no one seems to be quite so· courageous, quite so passionate, as to attempt to live "an authentic political life ... in a functioning democracy." So prepare yourself for a little come-uppance. Goodwyn uses history to crit1.que the present. He defines the context into which populism fit in the period from the 1870s to its denouement in 1896 and demonstrates that, from an agrarian perspective, the scenario has worsened. Given that grim indictment, he is determined to clearly describe both the processes of mass organizing as recognized and carried out by the populists, and the shortcomings which led to the movement's collapse. The sequential process of democratic movement building will be seen to involv'e four stages: (1) the creation of an autonomous institution, where new interpretations can materialize tht:it run ... -·· - -~-,~ counter to those of prevailing authority-"the movement forming;" (2) the creation of a tactical means to attract masses of people-"the movement recruiting"; (3) the achiev·ement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis~ "the movement educating";'and (4) the creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas, shared now by the rank and file of the mass movement, can be expressed in an autonomous political way-"the movement politicized." Towering over all other tasks is the rieed to find a way to overcome deeply ingrained patterns of deference permeating the entire social order. For this to happen, individual self-respect obviously must take life on a mass scale. "Individual self-respect" and "collective self-confidence" become for Goodwyn the hallmarks of the Populist Movement. It was first and most centrally a movement that imparted a sense of self-worth to individuals and provided them with the instruments of self-education about the world they lived in. The movement taught them to believe that they could perform specific political acts of self-determination. The Alliance demands seemed bold to many other Americans who had been intimidated as to their proper status in the society, and the same demands sounded downright presumptious to the cultural elite engaged in the process of intimidation. But to the men and women of the Agrarian movement ... it was all possible because America was a democratic society and people in a democracy had a right to do whatever they . had the ethical courage and self-respect to do. Such undisguised idealism, even romanticism, is rampant in this book, and not without Goodwyn's full endorsement. Older aspirations---adreams of achieving a civic culture grounded in generous social relations and in a c~lebration of the vitality of human cooperation and the diversity of human aspiration itselfhave come to seem so out of place in the twentieth-century societies of progress that the mere reritation of such longings, however authentic they have always been, now constituted a social embarrassment. The problem that will doubtless interest future historians is not • so much the presence in the twentieth-century, of mass political alienation, but the passivity with which the citizenry accepted that condition. It may well become known as the century of sophisticated deference. More than any other group in our history the populists were sue-
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