Harvesting Hope
The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism
by Gregg Cantrell,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
592 pp. $40 hardcover.
Reviewed by
John Mckiernan-González
In August 1891, Melvin Wade made his way to Dallas City Hall to attend a gathering to establish the Populist Party in Texas. As he told a local reporter, “he was in sympathy with the objects of the meeting. [But] I want to see a thing before I go into it.” Appointed to the Dallas board of registrars by the United States Army in 1868, Melvin Wade helped establish the Texas Federation of Labor and became a key part of the Reconstruction Republican Party. Given the close, high stake and violent elections that kept happening in Texas after the end of U.S. military oversight, his curiosity and attendance at the establishment of a new state-wide party indicated the promise and threat of a populist party to the political order in Texas.
As a historian, I sympathize with the growing attention historians and journalists have given the Gilded Age and the dawn of Jim Crow as harbingers of our current moment, as well as with any monograph that places Texas at the center of these unsettling political and industrial transformations in this era. At the same time, when a book promises a detailed journey into the possibilities of a political transformation in one of the more multi-ethnic, geographically diverse states, like Melvin Wade, I “want to see a thing before I go into it.” What Gregg Cantrell’s The People’s Revolt provides is a layered, deeply detailed narrative analysis of the economic, religious, racial, politically inclusive, and electorally exclusive social movement that sought to rewire the political order in Texas. The populist arrival catalyzed a violent white counter insurgency and the establishment of a populist economic agenda as a consistent stream in Texas politics. These twinned legacies should remind us all that a movement’s legacy does not simply rest on county vote tallies, but on broader shifts in politics.
What is the thing that is The People’s Revolt? Making the Populist Party real to the story of Texas. Ever since Richard Hofstadter picked key leaders in the Populist Party to argue that the movement revolved around status anxiety and established the “paranoid style” in American politics, subsequent scholars have been trying to rescue this semi-rural national coalition of farmers, businesspeople, preachers, artisans, women and industrial workers from the opprobrium of this charge. Two key works—Lawrence Goodwyn’s Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America and Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision—argue that the participants were democratic and business oriented and, by extension, representative of their time. What Greg Cantrell adds to the already deeply layered conversation is a focus on the edges of the movement – the skeptical and yet involved Tejanos and African Americans, the preachers, and the disaffected members of the Party establishments. He uses the broad discussion across the ethnic and the establishment press as well as private papers regarding the possibility and promise of the Populists across Texas politics. By adopting this model, Cantrell highlights how growing numbers of people who did not join the party continued to be interested in the economic reform dimensions, electoral reforms, and were wary regarding the “lost cause” waving by many populists. All this highlighted the vast unrest and churn in Republican Party circles, in Democratic circles and in non-voting circles. The complexities of Texas highlight the many Populist Parties across the state, structured, of course, by the need for a statewide reach.
There are too many telling details, each one worth their own extended case study. The extended discussion of an anti-Mexican disenfranchisement proposal in San Antonio brings out a substantial portion of an electorate committed to the appearance of broad enfranchisement for Mexicans in Texas. His use of Spanish-language papers points to a broad discussion of what would be necessary for the San Antonio-based Democratic Party to keep ethnic Mexicans voting democratic, and the Populist candidate’s push to exclude suspected Mexicans made that task easier. Like with Melvin Wade’s long participation in trade-union organizations in Dallas, the appearance of Vicente Carvajal, Ricardo Rodriguez and Pablo Cruz in a moment of electoral exclusion is treated in a deeply textured fashion and deeply welcome to this account of the origins of American liberalism. Similarly, Cantrell’s decision to base a gender analysis in the contrast between the Populist debate and tent-revival conventions and the saloon and hotel based Democratic Party conventions seemed a weak discussion of gender and of politics. However, after repeated exposure to mask-less and defiant presidential rallies charging the other party with unmanliness because they followed medical guidelines and expressed empathy, Cantrell’s discussion of a more rules-based, open and respectful convention as part of a more accessible culture of politics in Texas is another important historically-grounded reminder that gender hierarchies also include men.
The People’s Revolt is a deeply satisfying read. First, the book traces out the open secret of politics in Texas—that state legislative and administrative action continually shape economic and political outcomes. Second, the book highlights the active role of state agencies and the then-Democratic party in actions to violently disenfranchise African Americans, ethnic Mexicans, and non-Democratic Party members, most of which came in response to the Populist Party. Third, the Populist challenge led to a fracturing of intraracial participation in Texas political parties, both ethnic Mexicans in the Democratic Party, African Americans in the Republican. The conclusion does raise a question: Are LBJ and Barack Obama the only heirs of the populist tradition in Texas? One thinks of the railroad commission, public housing projects in the New Deal, the persistence of city owned utilities in San Antonio and Austin, the extended battle in Crystal City between Valero Gas and La Raza Unida Party, the election of Jim Hightower to agricultural commissioner to realize one does not need an immediate familial or presidential connection to lay claim to a broad liberal legacy.
John Mckiernan-González is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Southwest, the Jerome and Catherine Supple Professor of Southwestern Studies, and an Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. His first book, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942 (Duke 2012), treats the multi-ethnic making of the U.S. medical border in the Mexico-Texas borderlands.
John Mckiernan-González is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Southwest, the Jerome and Catherine Supple Professor of Southwestern Studies, and an Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. His first book, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942 (Duke 2012), treats the multi-ethnic making of the U.S. medical border in the Mexico-Texas borderlands.