populist party
- Dreamed of creating a broad political coalition that included many groups
- Populism always appealed principally to farmers and particularly to small farmers with little long-range economic security
- Populists tended to be not only economically but also culturally marginal that the farmers who felt cut off form the mainstream of national life and resented their isolation
- On the whole, however Populism never attracted significant labor support in part because the economic interests of labor and the interests of farmers were often at odds
- Did have some significant success in attracting miners to their cause partly because local populist leaders supported a broader platform that the national party embraced and largely because they endorsed a demand that the national party only later accepted "free silver" the idea of permitting silver to become, along with gold, the basis of the currency so as to expand the money supply
- In the South, whites Populists struggled with the question of accepting African Americans into the party
- Was a movement to create "colored alliances"
- Many of the Populist leaders were members of the lower class
- Their plan was to have a system of "subtreasuries" which would strengthen the cooperatives with which both the Grangers and Alliances had been experimenting with of years
- The government would establish a network of warehouses, where farmers could deposit their crops
- Using those crops, as collateral, growers could then borrow money from the government at low rates of interest and wait for the price of their good ts to go up before selling them
- Populists also called for the abolition of national banks which they believed were dangerous institutions of concentrated power, the end of absence ownership of land
- They demanded a system of government operated postal savings banks, a graduated income tax, and the inflation of the currency
- Often tried to find solutions to real problems as they emphatically rejected the laissez-faire orthodoxies of their time, the idea that the rights of ownership are absolute
- They raised one of the most overt and powerful challenges of the era to the direction in which American industrial capitalism was moving
- Populism was not a challenge to industrialization or to capitalism itself, but a response to what he Populists considered the brutal and chaotic way in which the economy was developing