Economic Overkill

The Old Populism, with its accent on fiat money and its threats to “raise less corn and more hell,” had its lunatic side, but, as historian Louis Hacker pointed out long ago, it shaped most of the social programs of the Rooseveltian and Wilsonian decades. Free Sliver never took hold, and such characters of the movement as “Bloody Bridles” Waite and “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman have been pretty well forgotten. Nevertheless, we owe to the Old Populism practically all the institutions that have made us a regulated and controlled people, from the progressive income tax to the eight-hour law, and from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the various New Deal devices for protecting the farmer.

Is it going to be the same course for the New Populism, which sounds vague enough when it deals in “soak the rich” vituperation and in grousing about the corporations and big foundations? When Hubert Humphrey is carrying on about tax loopholes, or when George Wallace is ridiculing the pointy-heads, the New Populism sounds like the Old Rhetoric or the Old Humor. But when Senator George McGovern bends to his populist subject we are in a whole new period of specificity. The Prairie Prophet from South Dakota has added a computerized patina to the simple soak-the-rich Bryanism of his colleagues. His program is short on rhetorical flourishes and long on stuff that sounds like a detailed readout from the calculating machine’s most sophisticated electronic innards. And so one wonders. Maybe George McGovern is setting things up for some Louis Hacker of the future to say that the New Populism, while it began as campaign oratory, ended as the shaper of an entirely new order.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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The Old Populism, with its accent on fiat money and its threats to “raise less corn and more hell,” had its lunatic side, but, as historian Louis Hacker pointed out long ago, it shaped most of the social programs of the Rooseveltian and Wilsonian decades. Free Sliver never took hold, and such characters of the movement as “Bloody Bridles” Waite and “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman have been pretty well forgotten. Nevertheless, we owe to the Old Populism practically all the institutions that have made us a regulated and controlled people, from the progressive income tax to the eight-hour law, and from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the various New Deal devices for protecting the farmer.

Is it going to be the same course for the New Populism, which sounds vague enough when it deals in “soak the rich” vituperation and in grousing about the corporations and big foundations? When Hubert Humphrey is carrying on about tax loopholes, or when George Wallace is ridiculing the pointy-heads, the New Populism sounds like the Old Rhetoric or the Old Humor. But when Senator George McGovern bends to his populist subject we are in a whole new period of specificity. The Prairie Prophet from South Dakota has added a computerized patina to the simple soak-the-rich Bryanism of his colleagues. His program is short on rhetorical flourishes and long on stuff that sounds like a detailed readout from the calculating machine’s most sophisticated electronic innards. And so one wonders. Maybe George McGovern is setting things up for some Louis Hacker of the future to say that the New Populism, while it began as campaign oratory, ended as the shaper of an entirely new order.