Donna A. Barnes's The Louisiana Populist Movement, 1881–1900 and Michael Pierce's Striking With the Ballot: Ohio Labor and the Populist Party contribute to an expanding body of literature emphasizing the role the Populist movement played in late nineteenth-century American local and national politics and in broad-based reform efforts. The renewed interest in Populism is evident with the wave of recently published works, including Matthew Hild's Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists; Charles Postel's The Populist Vision; James M. Beeby's Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement, 1890–1901; Omar H. Ali's In the Lion's Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900; and Worth Robert Miller's Populist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the Third-Party Movement in the 1890s. Footnote ¹

Donna Barnes has written a thought-provoking, inquisitive book utilizing the investigative tools of social scientists and historians who analyze the origins and evolution of social movements in order to present the triumphs and failures of the Louisiana Populist movement at the close of the nineteenth century. The dearth of published material concerning that movement means Barnes's study is a welcome addition to the larger historical narrative. Her contribution is to explain the “eclectic” historical conditions enabling the emergence, growth, and ultimate decline of Louisiana Populism. In her estimation, historians such as Lawrence Goodwyn have focused too exclusively on the achievements of the cooperative movement and the failures associated with the Populist-Democratic Party free-silver fusion campaign (xi–xvi).

Drawing from her expansive research, Barnes contends that the short-lived Louisiana Populist movement gained strength during the relatively hospitable political climate of the post-Reconstruction era. It effectively countered the long-standing position held by elites that the agricultural depression was the fault of farmers’ overproduction. The Populists claimed instead that ordinary farmers who engaged in self-help cooperative tactics could combat economic and political disenfranchisement. The Populists’ “self-help strategic frame” quickly failed as a galvanizing force, in part because it offered little substantive aid to farmers trapped by the crop-lien system and racism (xvii, 247). In its place, Barnes concludes, Populists turned to electoral politics but ultimately could not transcend racial divisions and political partisanship.

The initial success of Louisiana Populists’ organizational efforts was primarily due to their adaptability. Organizers reached out to small, impoverished farmers and large, elite landowning groups alike to attract voters and policy support by adeptly and rather frequently reframing their arguments and political rhetoric. Not wedded to dogmatic ideology, Louisiana Populists, insists Barnes, took a pragmatic approach, frequently shifting their demands from subtreasury proposals, for example, to free silver. Barnes challenges previous contentions that the Populist movement “suffered because it became oligarchical” (15). Instead, she argues, the Populist base was heterogeneous, and its leaders were adaptable, although that adaptability had its limits. The Populist movement in Louisiana was simply unable to transcend longstanding racial animosity and Democratic Party and white voter political alignment. Most notably, Barnes maintains, Louisiana Populists who initially sought biracial cooperation turned to white supremacist language when the framing rhetoric better suited their political goals. Garnering the African American vote without alienating white voters “would prove to be the Achilles’ heel of the Louisiana Populist movement,” proclaims Barnes (172). Related weaknesses included the structural constraints of agricultural economic reform in a region hostile to interclass and biracial cooperation; the failed attempts to coalesce the Louisiana Farmers’ Alliance (LFU) and the Colored Farmers’ Alliance (CFA), particularly after Populists utilized white supremacist language to recruit white voters; and white farmers’ traditional attachment to the Democratic Party and the potent legacy of sectionalism. The Populist experiment in Louisiana was doomed to failure, in sum, because of the region's racism, racial violence, and the omnipresent legacy of slavery.

Barnes's work goes further, however, outlining additional factors that undermined the Populist coalition in Louisiana, including the lack of Farmers’ Alliance involvement and influence in the founding of the Louisiana Populist Party, the differing financial and political concerns of cotton and sugar agricultural interests throughout the state, election fraud and lack of federal election oversight, and an improving economy by 1898 that created “credibility problems for the diagnostic frame of the movement” (240).

Although Barnes's social science approach provides coherent structure to her analysis of Louisiana Populism, at times the discussion of social movement theory burdens the flow of the larger historical narrative. Barnes nonetheless offers a fresh and useful interpretation of the American Populist movement generally and provides a much-needed analysis of Populism in Louisiana in particular.

A complement to Barnes's focus on the fate of Populism in the American South is Michael Pierce's thoroughly researched, well-written, comprehensive examination of Populism in the American industrial heartland. In Striking with the Ballot: Ohio Labor and the Populist Party, Pierce explores the urban trade union movement's central role in the American reform tradition, particularly its contribution to the late nineteenth-century Populist movement in the industrializing Midwest. He traces the collaborative efforts of Ohio Populists and labor advocates, focusing on the pragmatic efforts of laborers and farmers to coalesce and achieve several overlapping political goals. Pierce argues that by embracing Populism in the mid 1890s, Ohio trade unionists directly shaped and participated in the last significant challenge to corporate capitalist hegemony. Pierce takes on historians who have previously concluded that trade unionists, especially those associated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), were indifferent to Populist reforms. Instead, Pierce reveals that trade unionists worked to unite urban and agrarian producers politically in order to challenge the domination of large business capitalism.

Pierce offers evidence that many labor advocates in Ohio cities such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus—including John McBride, a founder and leader of the AFL and president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)—were committed to a “producerist” ideology that claimed workers produced the only legitimate form of wealth. McBride apparently urged trade unionists to leave the major parties and join Ohio's People's Party, largely because the Populists’ 1892 Omaha Platform included a plank asserting that “wealth belongs to him who creates it” (7). Even as Ohio trade unionists maintained diverse goals, Pierce illustrates that they were united by broad political ideals relating to “labor republicanism,” whereby workers were principally responsible for maintaining and protecting the nation's republican system of government (7). Ohio trade unionists, according to Pierce, accepted industrialization and mass production but also called on government to protect workers from corporate exploitation as a way to ensure that “the people” benefited equally from the expanding capitalist system. Ohio trade unionists endorsed the Populists, believing the People's Party would best protect producers by expanding government's role in curbing corporate abuses, defending workers’ rights, and ensuring an equitable distribution of national wealth. By 1894, Pierce contends, the Ohio People's Party had clearly transformed into a labor party.

The Populists, Pierce argues, stood little electoral chance when either the Republicans or Democrats endorsed an agenda item that overlapped with the Populists’ platform. To combat the financial, media, and campaign might of the major parties, Populist leaders had to posit their agenda as entirely different and altogether better for labor and agriculture. As Pierce sees it, the failure of the labor-Populist alliance in Ohio was not the fault of trade unionists, but instead developed when national Populist Party leaders drove out labor, fearing any association with radicalism that stemmed from calls for the collective ownership of the means of production. The final collapse of the labor-Populist alliance came when the Populists fused with the Democrats in 1896, turning exclusively to the silver campaign. Here again Pierce faults the Populists for the failed alliance, though this conclusion might be further fleshed out as many agrarians opposed fusion while some labor advocates supported the silver crusade.

In one of the most enlightening sections of Striking With the Ballot, Pierce provides an analysis of John McBride's push to transform the AFL into a pro-Populist organization. McBride's efforts met resistance from Samuel Gompers's “pure and simple union” efforts that did not question the legitimacy of corporate capitalism but sought instead to move the AFL away from politics and toward the sole use of economic weapons to achieve bread-and-butter reforms for workers. Pierce shows that the collapse of Populism played a critical role in the triumph of Gompers within the AFL since the fragile labor-Populist coalition fragmented after 1896, revealing to many trade unionists the futility of political partisanship as a means to labor reform ends.

Pierce concludes with an assessment of the connections between the 1890s labor-Populist movement and the later progressives and New Dealers, positioning the Gilded Age labor movement within America's larger reform tradition. By 1912, Ohio Progressives essentially advocated the Populists’ Omaha Platform, though they largely focused on the initiative, referendum, and recall plank that appealed to trade unionists who viewed direct legislation as the best avenue to defeat corporations and political bosses alike. Pierce argues that with the glaring exception of government ownership of the means of production, transportation, and communication, most labor-Populist reforms were adopted in the Progressive and New Deal eras.

Striking With the Ballot and The Louisiana Populist Movement are reminders that although certain trends or themes might universally describe late nineteenth-century farmer and worker activism, a region's political landscape and local cultural dynamics profoundly shaped the conditions surrounding the emergence, growth, and decline of such movements. Although the Populists’ specific reforms would later be endorsed in the Progressive and New Deal eras, each narrative subtly weaves in an inevitability argument concerning Populism's collapse largely because cultural prejudice, broadly defined, impeded collaborative reform efforts. Both works convincingly demonstrate that class and race resentments as well as structural and organizational barriers, namely the entrenched power of the two-party political system combined with the hegemonic power of northern corporate and southern landowning elites, consistently encumbered third-party organizing and bottom-up activism in Gilded Age America. An analysis of how the Ohio and Louisiana Populist movements accessed gendered conventions to galvanize voters, denigrate opponents, or frame policy proposals would have enriched each work considerably.

Michael Pierce's Striking With the Ballot offers a well-conceived, labor-history analysis of the complex relationship between trade unionists and Populists in Gilded Age urban Ohio, while Donna Barnes's The Louisiana Populist Movement thoughtfully complicates the narrative of Populism in the American South, revealing how race and region play significant roles in shaping the evolution of social and political movements.