Several historians have recently demonstrated that ideas generated initially by the Populists found their way into Progressive Era reform, New Deal/Great Society liberalism, and even today's Democratic Party politics.Footnote ¹ The only trouble is that the vast majority of the Populists themselves did not make the journey. Once a bastion of anti-corporatism, support for labor, “women's improvement,” the graduated income tax, and government regulation of the economy, the rural states of the Great Plains and American South became fortresses of what Bethany Moreton has called “Christian Free Enterprise,” with strong anti-statist and socially conservative agendas.Footnote ² A decade ago Thomas Frank noticed this remarkable shift on the Great Plains and wondered “What's the Matter with Kansas?” Despite many new works on the economic impact of the Cold War in rural America, we still do not have a comprehensive answer to his question.Footnote ³ In this essay, I examine a contrast that other historians of rural politics have overlooked in large part because it goes beyond economic policy, strictly defined: what Kansans (and residents of other rural, Great Plains states that supported the People's Party) once thought about the role of the United States military and what many believe now. Understanding this striking contrast will lead to understanding more fully the origins of today's “red” state politics. Furthermore, it can highlight more subtle signs that some aspects of Populist anti-militarism may have survived this otherwise fervent shift to the right.

Like the advisors behind the scenes of the Mitt Romney and Barack Obama campaigns in 2012, historians of Populism from John D. Hicks and Richard Hofstadter to Lawrence Goodwyn, Elizabeth Sanders, and Jeffrey Ostler have evinced little curiosity about anything beyond the People's Party's important proposals to reform the American economy and political process.Footnote ⁴ Even Charles Postel, whose innovative approach takes on populist religious and intellectual life and who thus considers the widest array of populist concerns, seems to care little about populist views of America's role in the world.Footnote ⁵ It is difficult to find a sustained discussion of what populist foreign policy was, much less any long-term analysis of it—any exploration, for example, of whether there were similarities between and among populist isolationism, Progressive Era imperialism, and Cold War global interventionism. No historians appear to have wondered whether the voters in today's dark red states of the Great Plains have inherited the “Populist persuasion” on international affairs—or if they have not, why not. None have perhaps even noticed how many rural men and women die in faraway wars today, when not so long ago their forefathers believed that no such wars should be fought at all.Footnote ⁶

To be fair, it is difficult to write about something that was, at least initially, a secondary concern. Reforming American foreign policy was not on the top of the People's Party's to-do list in the 1880s and early 1890s, and even after fusion with the Bryanite Democrats, rural people cared most about domestic issues and policies. Thus nothing like the fluid connections between populist, Progressive Era, and current liberal/left economic thought can be found in the arena of foreign affairs. Instead, conflict developed between the foreign policy ideas of the anti-militarist populists and progressives and those of other progressives, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who supported the new imperialistic adventures of the late nineteenth century. These conflicts were amplified in the debates regarding the United States' entry into both world wars when, as David Horowitz notes, familiar categories of “left” and “right” blurred significantly.Footnote ⁷ In the years just after World War II, potent political, economic, cultural, and demographic forces in rural America combined to shift most of the remaining anti-militarist activists on the Great Plains toward anti-communism and pro-interventionism, which themselves became strongly affiliated with the New Right. Today, despite continued misgivings about the power of the federal government in general, and surging interest in the neo-isolationist views of Ron and Rand Paul, few voters in these rural red states have anything but high regard for and close physical ties to the military. They volunteer, serve, and fall in war at much higher numbers per capita than do residents of states on either coast.Footnote ⁸ Apparently, no other citizens have changed their views on militarism in the past century as completely as have rural people in America's “red” heartland.

A cursory glance at the Omaha platform of 1892 might suggest that any discussion of the People's Party's foreign policy could be quick reading. Only one plank—indeed it was merely called a “sentiment”—mentions the military: “RESOLVED, that we pledge our support to fair and liberal pensions to ex-Union soldiers and sailors.” But even that one short statement reveals an important perspective on what was important to the Populists about the military and what they believed the relationship between the military, the state, and the American people should be. For Populists, many of whom had fought in the Civil War themselves, the federal government had an obligation to provide pensions to veterans (at least those from the Union side). Far from a statement about overseas affairs, this statement reflected an understanding of veterans as patriotic laborers deserving of government aid and intervention—not unlike farmers who needed the subtreasury plan or miners who needed unions. In ways that foreshadowed the demands of both Coxey's Army and the Bonus Marchers of 1932, the Populist support for veterans' pension was a demand for justice and respect as well as a call for new, expanded roles for the state.

But the silence about traditional matters of foreign policy in the Omaha Platform—and subsequently in the Democratic Party platform of 1896—also spoke volumes. We know now that many Populists, far from being unsophisticated rubes, had a global perspective on both trade and race relations. A group of Kansas Populists even began its own colony on the west coast of Mexico.Footnote ⁹ Likewise Populists in the late 1880s and 1890s knew full well of the Republican proposal to strengthen the Navy and increase the United States military presence around the world, whether it was in Hawaii, Japan, China, or South America. Even so, as Postel says, “most Populists paid little heed to foreign affairs.”Footnote ¹⁰ In other words, they did not mention such concerns in the Omaha Platform or even in the Democratic Party platform of 1896 because they did not want them to detract from what they felt was even more imperative. They believed ardently that the economic transformations of the industrial era had to be ameliorated at home before anything could be done abroad and were deeply suspicious of anyone who believed otherwise. Some Populists even called for a declaration of “political independence” from other nations, whose financial markets and policies seemed to dictate so much American economic strategy.Footnote ¹¹

The sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898 brought about one of the very few occasions over three generations when Populists and their progeny joined in a frenzy of war-making abroad. As such a bright exception, however, the War in Cuba ultimately fleshes out the otherwise bare bones of Populist foreign policy—demonstrating in concrete terms the party's conviction that local, controlled uses of volunteer troops in defense of the nation or (even better) for a larger moral purpose would sometimes be inevitable—even honorable—but a standing imperial army around the world was not. While never a member of the People's Party, William Jennings Bryan's actions and views provide a strong exemplar here, since many original Populists supported him in later decades. Throughout his life, Bryan believed that war-making was wrong and a violation of Christian principles. Moreover, his views of economic injustice overlapped with his concern that upper classes profited from war, while clerks and factory workers paid with their lives.Footnote ¹² Nevertheless reports of Spanish atrocities in Cuba and the loss of American life aboard the Maine convinced Bryan that the United States needed to intervene (as later he would suggest that the country intervene in Armenia). He accepted the offer of a commission in the Nebraska National Guard and picked 2,000 troops from the scores of local Nebraska residents, young and old, who had volunteered to fight with him. In the end, Bryan and his troops never saw battle in Cuba, stationed (he thought imprisoned) in Camp Cuba Libre in north Florida for the duration. This lack of activity did not represent any lack of commitment to the cause. Instead it reeked of political gamesmanship. Why, after all, would William McKinley have given his rival an opportunity for glory during midterm elections if he did not have to?Footnote ¹³ When Bryan finally resigned his commission and left to campaign again, he joked, “I had five months of peace in the Army and resigned to take part in a fight.”Footnote ¹⁴

Next up, of course, was the question of the Philippines. Bryan's vehement opposition to this pending conflict (despite his support for the Cuban War) provides more insight into exactly what he and his rural (formerly Populist) followers feared about aggressive international interventionism. While many rural people believed the war in Cuba had been necessary to turn back a European imperial force in their hemisphere, Bryan and his supporters saw the treaty with the Philippines as nothing more than a European-style imperialist land-grab. And they feared imperialism would have terrible repercussions for the United States in the long run. Speaking to the Democratic National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, in July 1900, Bryan argued that in light of the United States' history of upholding self-government, colonization of the Philippines made hypocrites of all who called themselves lovers of freedom. Moreover, he paraphrased Abraham Lincoln's belief that our freedom does not depend on militarization: “The safety of this nation was not in its fleets, its armies, its forts, but in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere, and he warned his countrymen that they could not destroy this spirit without planting the seeds of despotism at their own doors.”Footnote ¹⁵

In ways that echo Thomas Jefferson's concerns with “entangling alliances,” Bryan was most concerned about the impact that the creation of a standing army would, by definition, have on the politics and culture of the United States. Not only would a vastly expanded professional military require immense amounts of money, he believed, it would also change the culture of the peaceful land and people he knew and loved. “The army is the personification of force, and militarism will inevitably change the ideals of the people and turn the thoughts of our young men from the arts of peace to the science of war.”Footnote ¹⁶ For Bryan and his many followers, then, imperialism begat militarism, and it was militarism they feared most.

This view of a military culture as a destructive influence on the United States put traditional Populists and many Bryanite Democrats in stark contrast with both Republicans like McKinley and emerging progressives like Theodore Roosevelt. Kristin Hoganson and others have explained that anxieties about changing gender roles at the turn of the century influenced much of the debate around the use of the military.Footnote ¹⁷ The quest for “the Strenuous Life” and for manly pursuits led many men in urban areas to fascination with football, boxing, all things related to the diminishing western frontier, and a romantic view of war.Footnote ¹⁸ It also made Populists and others who sought peace and backed moral reforms like prohibition seem more and more out of the mainstream—not only of culture but also of gender. Hoganson argues that Populists were increasingly accused of being “old women.” Even the act of joining a third party (see as an act of unmanly disloyalty) gave Populists the moniker of “she-men” “eunuch” and “man milliners.”Footnote ¹⁹ In the presidential campaign of 1900, McKinley's heroic Civil War record was held high, when questions raged about why Bryan had not stepped foot on the sands of Cuba when he theoretically had the chance. Later, even the Democrat Woodrow Wilson praised “the young men who prefer dying in the ditches of the Philippines to spending their lives behind the counters of a dry-goods store in our eastern cities. I think I should prefer that myself.”Footnote ²⁰ It is hard to imagine, however, that even the most enthusiastic imperialist could have anticipated the house of horrors that the Philippines became or the atrocities that Americans committed there—from caging prisoners and bragging about the death rate to organizing mass executions of combatants and noncombatants alike.Footnote ²¹ Rebecca Edwards recounts that the day that Roosevelt declared “mission accomplished” in the Philippines was the tenth anniversary of the day when “the People's Party had met in Omaha to propose a radically different government agenda.”Footnote ²² Bryan's followers feared the moral degradation of militarism far more than they feared any kind of less “strenuous” future and the campaign in the Philippines did nothing to dissuade them of this view, however much in the minority it had become.

Despite these attacks and the dissolution of the Populist movement as an organized political force, Bryan and many of his followers held fast to their principled anti-militarism until the coming of the First World War. Their line of anti-militarism reemerged in the interwar period. Bryan's reluctance to give aid to the Allies even after the sinking of the Lusitania, isolated him in Wilson's cabinet, and ultimately cost him his post. But it cost him few of his “commoner” supporters. After tendering his resignation, Bryan received hundreds of letters of support from farmers, workers, and small town people throughout the country, equally fearful of the advent of a world war. Bryan's biographer, Michael Kazin, quotes several of the most devoted. One traveling salesman in Minnesota wrote, “‘For 20 years when asked what I thot of anything you have done, my reply has always been, The King can do no wrong, you are my King.’”Footnote ²³

Although the anti-militarist message in the 1910s had less internal coherence than in previous decades, new organizations carried on the plea to keep American boys out of foreign wars: associations of German Americans; socialist groups in Montana, Oklahoma, and Washington; and the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota and Minnesota. While a strong militarist tradition survived in the American South, Jeanette Keith nonetheless reports that as many as half a million rural southerners may have avoided or refused conscription.Footnote ²⁴ After the war, the cause reemerged as strongly as ever with the Minnesotan Charles Lindbergh (hard to imagine this hero being called a “she-man”) chairing the national America First Committee and North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye investigating the role of munitions manufacturers in the onset of the war. Many historians believe that the strength and passion of these groups kept the United States out of the Second World War at the cost of millions of lives—Soviet lives in particular. Others, however, including David Horowitz and Sylvie Murray, demonstrate that isolationists, far from being disengaged from important political realities, connected their critiques of the growth of federal and corporate power in the New Deal with the power of elites in both the United States and abroad to foment war. As late as 1940, politicians from previously Populist areas—Nye, Henrik Shipstead, Robert La Follette Jr., Burton Wheeler, and others, believed that “military mobilization [especially through the first ever peacetime draft] would bring increased statism at home.”Footnote ²⁵ In a direct reference to the New Deal agricultural program of 1933, when farmers had been encouraged to “plow under” their crops to reduce production, Montana Senator Burton Wheeler declared that Roosevelt's “triple-A foreign policy” would “plow under every fourth American boy.”Footnote ²⁶

As in so many areas of American political life, the end of World War II proved a watershed in the history of rural anti-militarism—not to mention the historiography of rural politics as a whole. Although few historians have written comprehensive studies of this period, the tragedies of World War II together with the perceived threats of Soviet imperialism and demographic changes on the Great Plains clearly combined to silence nearly all antiwar activism on the Great Plains in the postwar era. Red-baiters purged university faculties, liberal politicians, and previously progressive farm organizations.Footnote ²⁷ Whenever possible, national politicians reminded rural people that they had been the “wrong side” of the debate before the war.Footnote ²⁸ Perhaps the most understudied of the trends that lead to more conservative political culture was the simplest. Farmers and their families—the backbones of populist and later leftist movements—facing economic hard times in the early 1920s, 1930s, and immediate postwar era, left the Great Plains and rural South in the hundreds of thousands, emptying out the counties where Populist ideas had first taken hold. And they may well have taken their ideas with them. Many migrants from the upper plains traveled to the states of the Northwest Coast, where perhaps their brand of leftist politics influenced the important progressive movements in that region. White tenant farmers from the southern plains chose areas of California instead where, as James Gregory argues, their cultural practices and political ideas influenced the emerging New Right in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ²⁹

Powerful as they were, local expressions of McCarthyism and three decades of agrarian outmigration cannot explain completely the transformation of the states of the Great Plains from populist anti-militarism to ardent Cold War interventionism, which was in itself just a part of the overall shift in rural America from left- to right-wing politics. Cold War militarization also reshaped the political, economic, and cultural landscapes of the countryside in very concrete ways. Between 1941 and 1990 the Department of Defense invested trillions of dollars in the infrastructure of the military across the United States—more in the West and South, of course, than in the East Coast or Rustbelt areas. In places like Seattle or Los Angeles, this meant tremendous increases in population and industry. In more rural places it meant increased spending and a change in the landscapes themselves. In Grand Forks and Mandan, North Dakota; Rapid City, South Dakota, Missoula, Montana, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, new Air Force bases became major employers in town beginning in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ³⁰ These were followed in the 1960s and 1970s by the installation of Titan, Atlas, and ultimately a thousand Minuteman missiles, the latter buried in the land itself. With them, the states of the Great Plains became targets of the Cold War, and all people had invested their lives in its outcome. Rural western states received a far greater portion of federal dollars per capita than did urban eastern states, but they also took on a larger portion of immediate risk. They were quite literally in the bullseye of the Cold War, their region part of a “national zone of sacrifice” should nuclear war ever come.Footnote ³¹

No surprise then that people on the plains made the aggressive support of the military—indeed even war itself—their business. The creation of a military economy in the heartland not only made obvious the association between local politicians and the military, but it took away their most potent anti-militarist view: that rich easterners and financiers on Wall Street were profiting from war while poor farm boys did the fighting and dying. The military state was no longer something remote or suspicious—it was the guys next door in the jeep running out to take a shift in the silo or the kid in the next seat at the local college.Footnote ³² For most rural people in our time, supporting the military is supporting one's neighbors and business partners. Indeed at a time when many pundits observe that military service is far removed from the lives of most Americans and the vast majority of the country's leaders, historian Ahrar Amhad says of South Dakotans, “Most people know somebody in the military …many people feel a sense of personal involvement in military operations [and] wear their association with the services as a badge of honor.”Footnote ³³ Likewise volunteering for the military is a reasoned choice in areas where choices for careers have diminished. Today the states with the highest per capital casualty rate in the Iraq War is almost identical to the states with the strongest support for Republican candidates in the last four election cycles. An Iraq War casualty map also strongly correlates with a map of the strongest support for Populist candidates and their anti-militarist views a century ago.

But the story of this transformation in ideas is not one of a simple macro-level bribe or buyout, the creation of a kind of Pentagon imperialism or colonialism to augment agribusiness, coal, oil, and gas corporations. Such a simplistic explanation would not only be insulting to the thoughtful rural people who have lived through the postwar era, but it would also miss other more subtle cultural changes that accompanied the military state and help to explain why so many people on the Great Plains came to embrace it. At the moment research on the social and cultural shifts that accompanied militarization are limited to local studies and individual issues and conflicts.Footnote ³⁴ But a few accounts suggest that communities on the Great Plains grew more culturally and politically conservative at the same time that they became more economically reliant on the military. Bethany Moreton, for example, provides a very specific link between the rise of the “Christian corporation” and the militarization of the Great Plains. Among the most important factors, she reveals, that Sam Walton and his executives considered when deciding where, outside of the rural South, Wal-Mart should expand, was the presence of a large active or retired military population or, even better, an active military base.Footnote ³⁵ He believed that anywhere there was a military base there would be employees and consumers willing to buy into Wal-Mart's idea of active evangelical Christian conservatism.

With the military also came a more diverse population than many communities of the Great Plains had experienced and sometimes put conflicts over American identity in the political spotlight. Residents of Grand Forks, North Dakota, fought the installation of a USO club downtown as they feared the behaviors of unmarried and mobile servicemen on their community.Footnote ³⁶ In Rapid City, South Dakota, African American servicemen protested the denial of services in local restaurants, bars, barbershops, and neighborhoods and eventually brought the issue to the South Dakota Commission on Civil Rights. Local people complained that “outsiders” were bringing conflict into their communities, which had previously handled problems “their own way.”Footnote ³⁷

Whether they were black or white, servicemen and other federal workers and migrants brought their own beliefs and cultural practices with them, always influencing local folkways, sometimes influencing local politics. Tom Brokaw's memoir of his childhood in South Dakota includes his memories of getting to know many southern families who had moved to his hometown to work on the Garrison Dam. His family was influenced by neighbors who ate different foods, listened to different music, and worshiped in different ways.Footnote ³⁸ In Fargo, the increase in evangelical religious communities, including Pentecostalism, also influenced the nascent anti-abortion movement.Footnote ³⁹ Along with arguing that Okie migration transformed California politics, James Gregory has suggested that white and black migration from the South to all parts of the nation changed the politics and cultures of all those regions for the rest of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁰

But any story of this transformation to the political right through exposure to and acceptance of militarization would also miss the subtle signs that some aspects of Great Plains anti-militarism have also survived. As Gretchen Heefner has recently recounted, even in the middle of the Cold War and the throes of the defense industry's “money dump” on the plains, local farmers and others resisted the imposition of the military state.Footnote ⁴¹ For example, they fought against the Defense Department's choice of locations for military “reservations” and demanded that the federal authorities keep their part of the bargain, building new roads and schools and other infrastructures.Footnote ⁴² Beginning in the late 1970s, throughout the plains states, anti-nuclear groups gathered at missile silo sites, shining a spotlight on the neglected fact of local nuclearization.Footnote ⁴³ In the end, when many missiles were imploded and destroyed in the late 1990s, not all rural people were sorry to see them go.

Remaining ideas about anti-militarism, the overreaching power of the federal government, and the need to once again put “America first,” have drawn a number of rural people in militarized regions to support candidates, like Ron and Rand Paul, who promise to roll back America's military commitment in the world. Blogger Conn Carroll remarks on the close correlation between states with the largest per capita donations to Ron Paul's 2008 campaign and states where the federal government owns more than 25 percent of the land.Footnote ⁴⁴ Many of these—Nevada, Montana, Colorado—are also states with large military presences. Rural people in Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, and North Dakota may not have contributed as much money, but their votes garnered first or second place finishes for Paul in the 2012 primaries. Whether they call it non-interventionism or neo-isolationism, Ron Paul's supporters make no bones about the fact that they want a smaller military and less money spent on weapon systems and wars. These commitments echo back to the anti-militarism of the Populist Party, even if either Ron or Rand Paul are careful never to invoke in any detail such a left-leaning heritage in the heartland.