The Tolerant Populists, Second Edition: Kansas Populism and Nativism

WALTER NUGENT is Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History emeritus at Notre Dame. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Into the West: The Story of Its People, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion, and Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1963, 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. First edition 1963.

Second edition 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05408-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05411-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/9780226054117

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nugent, Walter T. K.

The tolerant Populists : Kansas populism and nativism / Walter Nugent.—Second edition.

pages. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-05408-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-05411-7 (e-book)

1. Populist Party (U.S.)   2. Kansas—Politics and government—1865–1950.   I. Title.

JK2374.K2N84 2013

324.27812'7—dc23

2013005901

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

THE TOLERANT POPULISTS

Kansas Populism and Nativism

Second Edition

WALTER NUGENT

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

TO MY PARENTS

CONTENTS

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

List of Abbreviations

Part One: Populism Bastinadoed, and Some Caveats

1. The Populist as Monster

2. Revising the Revisionists

Part Two: The Salad Days

3. Kansas in the Eighties

I. The Ethnic Pattern

II. Prohibition and Political Futility

III. Economic Boom and Bust

4. Agitate, Educate, Organize!

I. The Birth of the Alliance

II. Goodbye, My Party, Goodbye

5. The People’s Party and Other People

I. Fruits of Victory

II. A Populist Profile

III. Money Question or Money Power?

IV. Englishmen and Jews

V. Alien Land

Part Three: The Political Years

6. Fusion and Victory

I. An Arm-in-Arm Campaign

II. Storms in the State House

7. Populism against Itself

I. Fusion and Faction

II. Women’s Suffrage, Prohibition, and the APA

III. A Three-Ticket Race

IV. Bleak Results

8. Free Silver and Undesirable Classes

I. A Single-Issue Campaign

II. The Literacy Test for Immigrants

III. After Seven Lean Years

9. Denouement

I. Jingoes and Humanitarians

II. The 1898 Campaign

III. And Afterward

10. Concluding Remarks

Notes

Bibliographical Note and Acknowledgments

Index

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Exactly fifty years ago, the fall 1963 list of new books from the University of Chicago Press included The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism. I never intended the book to be an overall history of the People’s Party, even in Kansas. It addressed a much narrower point: the accusation that the original, 1890s Populists were nativists and anti-Semites and also the root of the anti-Semitism and nativism of twentieth-century America.¹ Richard Hofstadter’s 1955 book, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR, was not the only place where these accusations surfaced, and it was more nuanced than most others. But it was the most influential, coming from his position at Columbia and then receiving the Pulitzer Prize. Yet the accusations did not match the farm people I knew from Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska (and I suspected that Hofstadter had never met any people like them). Admittedly, my experience began in the 1950s, whereas Populism flourished sixty years earlier. But small farms and farmers still existed abundantly in the 1950s, wheat and corn markets and the weather still dominated rural and small-town life, and a sense persisted that those markets—and thus farmers’ incomes—were not in the control of friends. Memories of the New Deal of the 1930s, which owed a lot to Populism, were still fresh; government, in the right hands, would be that welcome friend.

Prior to the 1950s, the prevailing interpretation of the Populism of the 1890s was benevolent and approving. The leading authorities were John D. Hicks’s The Populist Revolt (1931), supplemented for the South by C. Vann Woodward’s Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938) and his Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951).² Both saw the Populists as major sources for twentieth-century liberalism, manifested in the Progressive movement and the New Deal. Then along came Hofstadter and lesser lights to revise, even reverse, that interpretation. For a time, the revisionists prevailed. So that’s how it really was, thought many; the 1890s Populists were the forerunners not of liberal movements but of nativism, anti-Semitism, the rants of the radio priest Charles Coughlin in the 1930s and of Joseph R. McCarthy and McCarthyism in the 1950s. Until then, populism—with a small p—was not a dirty word. But it became one, and it has continued to carry the connotation of demagogic, unreasoning, narrow-minded, conspiratorial, fearful attitudes toward society and politics. More on that later.

The Tolerant Populists was not an effort to prove Hofstadter wrong, though my experience suggested he was. Instead, I went to Topeka and elsewhere in Kansas with, I hoped, an open mind, to study the primary sources and see if Hofstadter was right. He wasn’t. My book was not the first critique of the revisionists—Woodward in a 1959 article³ gently and deftly took issue with them—but mine was the first book-length, sourcebased analysis of one key Populist state. The basic problem with The Age of Reform was, and is, that its source base was far too narrow to sustain the charges it made. As the historian Richard White remarked recently, Hofstadter was never much for sources; and Alan Brinkley of Columbia, Hofstadter’s university, wrote that Age of Reform has a strikingly thin acquaintance with the sources, very much in contrast with Woodward’s Origins.⁴ In private correspondence Hofstadter admitted as much.⁵ He was a brilliant essayist and consider[ed] himself ‘as much, maybe more, of an essayist than an historian.’⁶ But insofar as primary sources are essential to historical accuracy, he was not a good historian; and insofar as his book was almost predictably so influential yet so flimsily based, he was irresponsible. Later critics agreed that he had an almost visceral prejudice against smalltown, rural America, to him a hotbed of bigotry, political reaction and anti-intellectualism.⁷

In the years after The Tolerant Populists appeared, revising the revisionists happened over and over again. Among the books that appeared were Sheldon Hackney’s on Alabama (1969); Stanley Parsons’s on Nebraska (1973); Robert W. Larson’s on New Mexico (1974, 1987); Peter Argersinger’s on Kansas (1974); Bruce Palmer’s on the South (1980); Robert Cherny’s on Nebraska (1981); Worth Robert Miller’s on Oklahoma (1987); Norman Pollack’s on Populist thought (1987, 1990); O. Gene Clanton’s on Kansas (1991, 1998); and Jeffrey Ostler’s on Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa (1993). In nearly all of these books, there are no index entries for anti-Semitism, immigrants, Jews, or nativism. Nor are these topics mentioned, except to note their absence, in important journal articles by Ostler, Robert Johnston, and Miller, as well as in those by Brinkley, Collins, and Singal, already cited.⁸ No one found any anti-Semitic or nativist statements except for a few scattered ones, as I did myself, and so state in this book. I was once asked if I found utterly no such references, and I replied that I found some dozens—all but a couple (see Paul Vandervoort in this book) of the Shylock-Rothschild rhetorical kind—in contrast with the thousands of neutral or favorable statements I had seen. Though it took a while to sink in, the verdict was clear that the nativism and anti-Semitism accusations were not sustained. The revisionists lost. We won.

The controversy has been called, at a distance of twenty or thirty years, one of the bloodiest episodes in American historiography (fortunately not in a literal sense) and an unusually bitter historiographical controversy.⁹ I had no idea how much praise—and outspoken resentment—my book would produce. It received a good deal of both. In the end, The Age of Reform, which Brinkley called the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America,¹⁰ had a black eye. Capped in 1976 by Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment, the first book since Hicks’s and Woodward’s to look at the entire Populist movement, the revisionists had been revised. What showed up there and in the monographs of those days was not nativism and anti-Semitism, or conspiracy-mindedness and small-town ignorance, but a concern with economic, social, and distributive justice and a willingness, even eagerness, to use government to redress grievances, end corruption, and rein in the unregulated power of banks and corporations, especially railroads. As statists, the real Populists were polar opposites of today’s faux populists, the Tea Party people.

If our antirevisionist side won, do we need this fiftieth-anniversary edition of my book? I think so (and I thank the University of Chicago Press for agreeing). The purpose here is not to dance on the grave of 1950s revisionism, but to do some unfinished business: to underline the misuses and perversions of the term populism, with a small p, and how they obscure the message of the real Populists, which is needed again today, in this second Gilded Age we live in. It seems timely to bring out a fiftieth-anniversary edition of this book, in the hope it may educate, and yes, inspire people to agitate and organize, as the Populists tried to do in the 1890s. The one percent of that day defeated the Populists in the 1890s. In the next twenty years, however, many of the Populists’ specific proposals, and the overall thrust of using government to benefit all the people, were achieved.¹¹ The New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s owed a great debt to the Populist message. It can be true again. The current right-wing efforts to return America to the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age, the most radical reactionary movement in American history—except the antebellum attempts to extend slavery—can be stopped.

The use of the term populism to mean something other than the Populism of the People’s Party of the 1890s was nothing new at the time I wrote this book. To the contrary, it was a central theme of the revisionists; it was the term they applied to the right-wing demagoguery they were attempting to explain in the 1950s. It was an easy assertion that the small-p populism traced back directly to the large-P Populism of the 1890s. I was aware of the large P/small p conflation at that time—see chapter 1—and I was not alone. I corresponded with C. Vann Woodward about it, and he replied that combating the misuse of the term was almost certainly a battle already lost. And it was. The terms Populist and Populism, coined to provide an adjective and a short noun out of People’s Party by Midwestern editors who had taken a little Latin, became generalized in the print media to mean rattlebrained, irresponsible, ignorant—the eructations of the common herd against their betters. It continues to be applied to a vast array of individuals and movements, past and present, foreign and domestic, almost always with an unsavory connotation. At best it is used to characterize a politician with a common touch. At worst it means demagogic, hypernationalistic, or irrational.

Populism has become a useful word in dodging informed thinking. In American media, it has become an all-purpose put-down. It has been applied across the spectrum to libertarians, reformers on the left, and fringe candidates. Historians (like myself) become irritated at this, because to us it has a specific reference: the People’s Party of the 1890s. I was once on a panel of academics interviewing the Washington Post’s longtime columnist David Broder, and I asked him if he would consider a moratorium on the word, since it had been used to describe such a wide range of people as to be meaningless. He said no; for him the term had general application. I protested that it has great specificity. But I got nowhere.

What then does Populism really mean, as a historical movement and political party? Its best-known statement of principles was its founding document, the Omaha Platform of 1892. Starting with an impassioned preamble condemning excessive wealth concentration, it demanded specific reforms including government ownership of all railroads, telephone, and telegraph; a safe, sound, and flexible national currency; free and unlimited coinage of gold and silver; increase of circulating currency to $50 per capita; a graduated income tax; land to be held and farmed by actual settlers and not railroads or foreign landlords; the initiative and referendum; and direct election of senators. The common element in all these measures was to use government as an instrument on the people’s behalf, rather than on behalf of special interests, monopolies, unregulated banks and other corporations, and (to use today’s term) the one percent. Historic Populism had nothing in common with Ross Perot or the Tea Party. Historic Populism wanted to augment the use of governments, not diminish or circumvent them, because, as the Populist congressman Jerry Simpson put it, "the government is the people and we are the people."¹² When Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed in 1981 that government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem,¹³ he may have said something popular, but it was hardly Populist. There is an ocean of difference between large-P Populism and small-p populism, as I pointed out in the first edition of this book.

Is it valid to use the word to refer to anything other than the political party of the 1890s? For years I was a purist, bridling whenever the word referred to anything other than the real Populists. But I have finally accepted Woodward’s wisdom (of which he had much): populism with a small p may refer to other things, in other contexts and countries. The danger in such usage is that it can read back from present or recent unsavory people or movements to obscure the real Populists and what they stood for. Michael Kazin seeks to avoid this problem in his book The Populist Persuasion: An American History.¹⁴ For him, populism is not a program or a set of issues, but a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter. The People’s Party of the 1890s, to which Kazin devotes a knowledgeable chapter, were the original Populists. Kazin disposes of the anti-Semitism charge in a couple of sentences and a footnote. It was once a hotly disputed topic . . . [but] a minor element of the movement’s language that stemmed more from a nationalist hatred of international bankers than from a specific antagonism toward Jews.¹⁵ (Further proof, by the way, that the revisionists’ accusations are dead.)

Another definition—actually two definitions—that go well beyond the 1890s come from historian Singal. He sees two main currents in the populist heritage: an economic populism of the left, directed against business and financial elites and relatively tolerant of ethnic and racial differences; and a cultural populism of the right, directed against liberal elites and cultural minorities, and relatively tolerant of big business. The 1890s Populists, at their best, exemplified the first current; the long succession of American nativist and racist movements, dating back to the 1830s, has exemplified the second.¹⁶ The Tea Party movement, for all its internal variety and diverse sources, is clearly of the second kind.¹⁷

The Oxford English Dictionary has entries for populism and populist. It defines the former as the policies or principles of any of various political parties which seek to represent the interests of ordinary people . . . Also: support for or representation of ordinary people or their view; speech, action, writing, etc., intended to have general appeal. A populist was an adherent of a political party formed in the United States in 1892 to represent the interests of the entire population. The words could also refer to a Russian political party or a group of French novelists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but those do not concern us here. The OED, besides defining words, cites the earliest usages it can find, and these usages were in newspapers in 1891 and 1892. A much later (and unfortunate) usage was by Walter Z. Laqueur in 1958, who saw parallels between American and Russian Populism—anti-Semitism for instance. Thus even a respected scholar could be taken in by the baseless accusation then making the rounds, and the most authoritative dictionary of our language could pass it on—further testimony to the harm that can result from irresponsible writing.

What would I change if I were writing the book today? A few emphases and a little phraseology, perhaps, in the existing text; but likely I would consider some new matters that have arisen. Since the 1970s, historians in and of the United States have been particularly attentive to race, class, and gender. This book, however, appeared just a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial and nearly two years before the Selma march, and perhaps a decade before second-wave feminism hit its stride and women’s history really got under way as a field. The book does mention a few African Americans among the Kansas Populists. But I could have been more attentive to the voting patterns of the black precincts in Topeka and the Exoduster settlement at Nicodemus in western Kansas. And I certainly could have done more with women, who were major contributors to the Farmers’ Alliance and often supportive of the People’s Party, though existing laws or customs restricted their voting and office holding to school superintendencies. I admit to having been unsympathetic to the Populists’ support of women’s suffrage in 1894, because it was divisive and prevented the fusion with Democrats that might have won the election, as fusion did in 1892. Support for women’s suffrage was understood in Kansas as support for prohibition, as I explain. Many Populists, including state chairman John W. Breidenthal, favored suffrage in principle but opposed it pragmatically. I could have said more about the reformer Annie Diggs of Lawrence, and I would have benefited from Rebecca Edwards’s new work on Mary Elizabeth Lease.¹⁸

Where are Populist studies today? The revisionist accusations of anti-Semitism and nativism are dead; they are no longer discussed. Many monographs and several general works have appeared since 1963 by responsible and careful historians. Especially enlightening and recent are Elizabeth Sanders’s Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917,¹⁹ which places the People’s Party centrally in the historical development of agrarian politics and accurately describes what she calls the agrarian statist agenda; and Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision,²⁰ which establishes the Populists as innovators and modernizers, just the opposite of the backward-looking provincials that the revisionists accused them of being.²¹ In our Second Gilded Age of underregulated banking, widening gaps in income and wealth, unlimited campaign financing, and gridlocked governments, true Populism deserves a rehearing and reawakening.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This book is an investigation of the attitudes of the Populists of Kansas to foreign-born people and to foreign groups and institutions and of the participation of the foreign-born in the People’s, or Populist, party in Kansas from about 1888 to about 1900. During the 1950s a body of writing appeared that accuses the Populists of a number of faults, especially nativism, and the following pages constitute a look into Populism in a key state of its western phase in order to discover how seriously these accusations—nativism, anti-Semitism, protofascism, and others—ought to be taken. I find that they need considerable revision and restatement.

It is not my desire to denigrate the stimulating and valuable work of other historians. I hope it is permissible, however, to revise without rancor some of their apparent overgeneralizations. It seems to me that Populism, or for that matter many movements in American history, ought to be looked at from the standpoint of its operation in a state and local context as well as in comparison to its manifestations elsewhere or to other incidents that may seem to bear to it a superficial similarity. This is especially true in the case of a movement like Populism, which chose the route of party politics to accomplish its objectives. In making that partisan commitment it found itself committed also, willy-nilly, to the ways of compromise, the tactics of group support, and the process, sometimes a painful one, of transmuting logical ideology into manipulable, attainable policies. The commitment further demanded more than passing attention to the particular economic, political, ethnic, and traditional configurations of a given state, which like all others, had a politics that was unique. In short, it is of the essence of Populism that it was the People’s party.

In order to deal with the criticisms to which Populism was subjected as well as to examine more fruitfully the thing itself, some remarks seemed to be necessary concerning the relation of behavioral science concepts to historical writing. This book, then, deals with this problem too, although far less thoroughly than it treats of nativism in Populism.

Perhaps this book will have another use, and that is to provide some reflections on American democracy. The Populists represent an instance of minority conflict, and their experience may reflect upon the question of the place of elites in a democratic society. But this, too, is much less central than the discussion of Populism and nativism.

Dozens of persons helped me in many different ways in the preparation of this manuscript, and I am deeply grateful to them. Several deserve mention by name for suggestions, criticisms, or other assistance while work was in progress or for careful, helpful readings of the completed version. Some of their suggestions I have incorporated, but others met with too stubborn resistance on my part, and so I am entirely responsible for utilizing or interpreting whatever assistance they gave me. Specifically, I must thank James P. Murphy, whose clear perception into Populism and nativism helped me to formulate their relation as a problem for historical investigation; the staff of the Kansas State Historical Society, especially Nyle Miller, Edgar Langsdorf, and Robert W. Richmond; Walter Johnson, Bernard A. Weisberger, C. Vann Woodward, and Martin Ridge for their much-appreciated comments, criticisms, and thoughtful suggestions; Mrs. Elinor Barber for a critical reading; Rt. Rev. George W. King for his constant support; and my colleagues William T. Doherty, Jr., George Hilton Jones, Philip M. Rice, and Homer E. Socolofsky for criticisms of the manuscript or for allowing me to pester them on various annoying matters. Finally, I thank my wife for many things.

Walter Nugent

Kansas State University

ABBREVIATIONS

Advocate

The Advocate (Meriden, August 10, 1889 through December 20, 1889; Topeka, January 9, 1890 through November 17, 1897); The Advocate and News (Topeka, November 24, 1897 through April 12, 1889); The Farmer’s Advocate (Topeka, from April 19, 1899).

CKSHS

Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society (Topeka).

KSHS

Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka.

Nonconformist

The American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator (Winfield).

TKSHS

Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society (Topeka).

PART I

Populism Bastinadoed and Some Caveats

OSWALD: What dost thou know me for?

KENT: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

—King Lear, Act II, scene 2

CHAPTER ONE

The Populist As Monster

In the National Gallery of Art in Washington hangs Raphael’s famous painting of St. George and the Dragon. One of its happiest qualities is its utter lack of ambiguity: good and evil are unmistakable; moral judgment is simple. For almost half a century, the Populist was one of the St. Georges of American historical writing. Yet suddenly in the 1950s it appeared that he was not that at all but in fact a dragon and a fierce one. The awful truth emerged that in fixing good and evil upon their canvases, historians had got the combatants reversed. The erstwhile hero stood stripped of his shining armor in the harsh glare of behavioral science and realism. But better to have the truth, however belated, it was said, if truth it was.

The reasons for Populism’s long-time favor were several. It was a colorful episode with more than its share of picturesque characters and quotable quotes, such as Mrs. Mary E. Lease’s undocumentable but typical advice to farmers to raise less corn and more hell. Historians whose outlook had been shaped by liberal reformism in the twenties and thirties regarded it benignly as a vigorous, friendly ancestor. Furthermore, in the days when Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was riding high as an interpretive device for all American history, Populism seemed felicitously to bear it out.

In the 1950s, however, some historians and other writers concerned with the threats to American traditions they saw posed by the Cold War and by McCarthyism took another look at Populism. To them it appeared to be a late nineteenth-century eruption of the same pathological condition that produced the Wisconsin Senator and his growling cohorts. It had been thoroughly egalitarian and had despised aristocratic views and elitism, which some of these writers believed the United States needed more of, not less. A virulent strain of anti-intellectualism seemed to impregnate it. It had been notably unsubdued, unreconstructed, and unorthodox, and thus it was rudely disturbing and ultimately dangerous to any reading of American history that stressed tranquillity and harmonious order as opposed to bumptious reform and raucous protest. Treatments of Populism by earlier writers had been innocent, moreover, of the behavioral science approaches then beginning to become fashionable among historians. It was a richly endowed whipping boy indeed.

Populism simply identifies a movement of political and economic protest that rose out of the Farmers’ Alliances in about 1890, made its vehicle the Populist, or People’s, party in several southern and western states in the nineties, reached a high point nationally in the Bryan-McKinley campaign of 1896, and then went rapidly downhill. The interpretation of Populism that scholars as well as college students have come to accept over the past thirty years is nearly as unadorned as that. Until about 1960, standard college texts followed John D. Hicks’s study, The Populist Revolt (1931), which was cited widely in American history bibliographies as the most comprehensive book on the subject.¹ It presented Populism as a frontier phenomenon, a political answer to agrarian economic difficulties in a newly settled area. In his widely used text on post-Civil War American history, The American Nation, Hicks again viewed Populism as a political revolt against hard times, a program of positive action that tried to relieve specific economic distresses. Much the same presentation appeared in H. U. Faulkner’s extremely popular textbook for survey courses, American Economic History, with an added emphasis on class tensions in that Populism was seen as an attempt to tie farmer and labor interests together under a radical program. A slightly more elegant but basically similar view was taken by Morison and Commager in The Growth of the American Republic, wherein Populism was described as having been rooted in, and in fact created by, a government and society increasingly hostile to agrarian interests, insufficiently democratic, and unresponsive to a very severe agrarian economic distress. As for Kansas Populism specifically, the most thorough study of it, by Raymond Miller, also interpreted it as a political outgrowth of economic trouble in a frontier situation and the simple demand of an independent and aggressive people, demanding that the government perform its legitimate functions.²

It must have been with some dismay that a student in the 1950s who had been nurtured on this view of the Populists as an injured, honest, alert citizenry striving only for economic fair play and democratic treatment arrived in graduate school only to find that such an approach had suddenly become hopelessly out of date. As irresponsible disturbers of the peace, the Populists were in disgrace. The employment of certain behavioral science concepts was revealing that they had been neurotic, anxious, ethnocentric, anti-Semitic, and fear-ridden and that their kind of democracy was noxious since it later produced McCarthy. They had not been torchbearers of democracy but incipient fascists.

Some adjustments were in order, too, if the well-read graduate student approached the problem from the opposite side, from the place of Populism among the roots of American nativism and anti-Semitism, especially in the late nineteenth century. Up until 1950 or so, nativism and anti-Semitism were not often written about—certainly far less than Populism—but a few books discussed these attitudes, which were, moreover, embedded in some of the classic works of American historiography. Yet the student might recall that Rabbi Lee J. Levinger placed none of the onus for anti-Semitism on the Populists in his book of 1925; he might also remember that Carey McWilliams in 1947 saw anti-Semitism not as a farmer-labor fantasy but as a device employed by late nineteenth-century tycoons to gull a free and democratic-minded public into swallowing the subjugation of industrialism; and he might search in vain through Humphrey Desmond’s book on the American Protective Association for a mention of the Populists as supporters of the most widespread nativist movement of the time. Furthermore, if he had read his Henry Adams, Parkman, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, his Schouler, von Holst, Rhodes, McMaster, and Oberholtzer, he would have found that these very un-Populistic historians shared in greater or lesser degree a distaste for immigrants and Jews. And if