 I'm Jay Fiedel and I love being here, here on History Lens with John Daviden. We need to do a show on the history of dogs, yeah. The history of dogs, too. A little dog jumping. Yeah. By the way. But, too, please give generously, Jay, and keep interrupting it, Jay. It's okay. You can finish your statement. I want to hear more about that one. Yes, give generously to the dogs. No, to Think Tech, Hawaii. Yes. Thank you, thank you. And John Daviden is a history professor at HBU. Some people feel he is a most distinguished history professor. Yes. Don't ever call me that again, Jay. So this is what happens when you get to be of a certain age. People stop saying, geez, handsome. No, they say he's distinguished, which means you're really old. Don't call me that. Yeah, you look so distinguished. So John, we're talking about populism in American history today. And we have a bit of that going on right now. We do, indeed. And we have to study this and how it evolved and where we've seen it before in American history. But what is populism? Yeah, so populism is basically a power of the people. When we refer to populist movements, these are movements where the common man, the common woman, common humans, the working classes, farmers, lower class people. I mean, there are a lot of different ways to carve it out. But when these folks stand up and vote and start protesting and maybe have more of a say in politics, what we find is a lot of these folks over the course of history, not just American history, but really world history, have not been very engaged over the long haul. But there have been these moments, moments where the lower classes have emerged and voted what we would call a populist ticket or voted for a populist movement. And in those moments, then, there's been the possibility of dramatic change. That's one of the things we're going to look at today is the question of change and transformation. I'm interested, though, in the notion that these are the lower classes. This country was not founded on a populist notion. No, it was not. In fact, well, there are some, mostly not history, there are some historians, too, conservative historians would argue. But yeah, it was founded by the Americans, founded by the colonists who served in the army and did the boycotts and these lower class people. Honestly, the colonies broke away because they had very important aristocratic leadership that decided that it was no longer in their interest to be a part of the empire. They didn't have enough power in the empire. They didn't trust the disenfranchised, disadvantaged lower classes to make the decision. It wasn't in the revolution. You couldn't vote, for example, unless you owned property, right? No, that's true. After the revolution and the establishment of the country was on an elitist basis. Absolutely. It was not a democracy at that point. Very few people voted, could vote, had voting rights. So, yeah, that was definitely not popular. Although there are some aspects of the revolution that are populist, the truth is that the founding fathers were mostly aristocratic, a few merchants in there, and they were not at all interested in populism. They saw populism as quite dangerous, actually, ruled by the mob. Okay, ruled by the mob is a problem because you can have the post-French Revolution kind of mob chopping everybody's heads off, and that isn't necessarily constructive. We don't want that. I want to keep my head. I know that you would keep your head in any such circumstance, but what troubles me is that when you have populism, people coming up from the bottom of the social and economic ladder, somebody has got to get them to come up. Somebody has got to be the leader of this deal, and whenever you have populism bubbling up to the surface like that, my right, you have to look at who the leaders are, whether the leaders are themselves from the bottom, or maybe the leaders are the aristocrats from the top trying to make it look like it's from the bottom. Okay, so when you talk about this kind of populism from the top, this is what happened in the 2016 election. First, Donald Trump was elected, and he ran on this platform which was isolationist, which was anti-immigrant. It was the people in small towns and rural areas are not getting a good deal anymore, and Trump promised to give them a better deal. So in a way, he ran on a populist ticket, although when you begin to look at his policies, even his, you know, the things that he ran on, his policies were definitely not populist overall. I mean, the tax cut, that's not populism. That gave most of the tax cut, 85% of the tax, the money from the tax cut goes to the ultra-rich, so we know that's not populist. You mean the tax reform bill in 2017 was a scam on the public? I didn't call it a scam. Oh, a deception. Yes, yeah, it was, yeah, I mean, the thing is, yeah. So you have a president, a guy who ran as a kind of a, let's call him a pseudo-populist, or maybe this is a little crude or a fake populist. Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of things that are fake about this president, but so he runs as a kind of pseudo-populist, and then his policies, I mean, the most prominent is the tax cut, really, have really not benefited the common man much at all. So this is not really populism. And I think that must happen. Trump's idea of populism is Trump. That must happen. I mean, I'm thinking of Huey Long in Louisiana, where he makes people feel like he's working for them and they're bubbling up from the lower classes, but in fact, he's manipulating them. Well, yeah, so Trump, I think, is in his own category as a fake populist. I don't think we've ever seen a populist who was so wealthy, so embedded in the ruling classes, the wealth of the country, a product of the ruling classes, who claimed to be a populist. And I think that's quite frankly why his popularity hasn't turned into a majority at any point because it's not authentic populism. But if you want to go back in time, okay, let's go back in time. Let's talk about Huey Long. We'll go back further in a minute and talk about populists from the 1870s to about 1900. But Huey Long is very interesting. Louisiana politician became governor of Louisiana, essentially ruled the entire state from the governor's office, was actually now, this is interesting about Long. Long got the power by fighting the entrenched oil interest in Louisiana because at that time, there were oil companies in Louisiana who were drilling in the bayous and controlled a lot of the politics of Louisiana. And Long said, those guys are bad, they're not serving the common man. And so, and Long did in fact extend the social safety net in Louisiana when he became governor. Now, Long is actually a populist. He's a guy who cares about the common man. The problem is he was a demagogue, lying to the common man. Remember the line, you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can fool all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time, which is, that was his demise. No, that's right. So he's not, oh, this is a tricky one, Jay. I don't think he, once again, I don't think he's in the same category as Donald Trump in terms of demagoguery. Okay, although, Huey... We won't ask one, which is the bigger demagogue. Which is the bigger demagogue? Well, Donald Trump is important. We've never had a politician in this country who lied so systematically to Donald Trump. According to one study that was done of the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton lied about 25% of the time and Donald Trump lied about 75% of the time. So, big difference there. But Huey Long is a fascinating guy. Yes, he does say things that are not true. That's absolutely true. And he attacks the great powers, right? Long has a very interesting plan. It's called the Share the Wealth Plan, in which anybody who makes over a million dollars would be taxed at 100% for that time. Okay, the wealthy people... It's a lot of tax. That's a lot of tax. But a million dollars, you know... The first million, what? No tax. The first million, no tax, and then after that 100% tax. But then the proceeds from that would be used to make a payment each family of, I think it was $2,000 a year. Guaranteed annual income. Guaranteed annual income, which is actually re-emerged among the real populists. The leftists in the Democratic Party. Those are the real populists, right now, by the way. They want to fight income inequality. They want to put forward healthcare. I mean, they want to attack climate change because they know it's affecting, you know, middle income and poor people. So, there are some ideas, actually, that come through from Huey Long's time into the present time. But so long as a very interesting guy, he actually runs for president. Pardon me, he's going to run for president. He creates a national organization in 1934. Abandoned Roosevelt. And people look up to him and, you know, he gets letters from constituents saying, oh, you are right next to Jesus Christ as my hero. It was astonishing. Yeah, I mean, he really developed a following. But then he also had a lot of enemies. He was senator from Louisiana by this time. Running Louisiana from his Senate office, by the way. That's how much power he had. He was a populist, but he didn't really care that much about democracy and doing things in a fair way. He liked power. He goes back to Louisiana and an angry constituent shoots him. Although he would have survived except the doctor botched the operation and he died from this. So the longs and interesting, you know, short lived and could have he challenged Roosevelt in the 1936 election? Oh, I think if he had lived, he would have challenged Roosevelt. I don't think he would have won because what Roosevelt did was begin to move more leftward in response to people like Huey Long and Father Coughlin. Because they were pushing Roosevelt. They were saying, hey, the poor people are suffering. Everyone's doing worse now. The economy's terrible. Look at all the rich people. So that's kind of the main kind of outline of populism. And Trump has a big problem with that because he is one of those rich people. Yes. Right? Attacking the rich, it just doesn't work very well. It sounds like populism is often confused with demagoguery. Well, there's a... No, no, Jay. Now you're exposing the dark side, the dark underbelly of populism. What about nationalism? Is populism related in some way? It can be, yes, of course, yeah. I mean, many populists have used very kind of nationalist slogans. Unfortunately, populism... Yeah, populism is associated with... can be associated with right-wing nationalism, associated with racism, associated with anti-Semitism, and associated with anti-immigrant. What a great package, John. Well, look, there are good populists, too. There are good and bad populists. They're fake and real populists. So Huey Long is a mixture, okay? He's definitely anti-Semitic. He doesn't like immigration. He doesn't like immigrants. So he would fit in with the America firsters. He's a racist, definitely. So, well... What a guy. He favored the common man just as the common man was an African-American. So I guess the populists make us laugh. One thing, I mean, going in, it sounds like a good idea. When you start examining what happened, and I'd like to cover that with you in this country, over populism, it isn't necessarily a good idea at all. Well, so... I mean, there's this open question, right? This is a question that's debated between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann in the late 1920s. Dewey's a famous philosopher, of course, philosopher of education. Walter Lippmann is actually... he becomes the most famous journalist of the first half of the 20th century, and he majors in philosophy. So he understands Dewey and the two of them publish books arguing back and forth about democracy. Dewey says that we don't have enough democracy in the United States. Lippmann says we have way too much democracy that things like populism, rule by the people, are quite dangerous, and we should accept the fact that there are elites, that people in the middle class that educated people could be in charge of government. Therefore, we won't have problems with people who don't know how to govern, who don't know much of anything. Governing, and quite frankly, you know, a guy like Donald Trump who has a college education but clearly never studied the Constitution is... you've said this before, he's outside of the political norms and now he's doing things that are way outside of the political norms and are really unconstitutional and I think will be ruled as unconstitutional in the courts. This is the wall, the national emergency for the wall and the stuff about free speech and universities and the rest of it. The statements or the declarations themselves are so poorly constructed that they're not going to have constitutional mustard but they do provide him a platform for attacking others and for trying to re-energize his populist base. Yeah, go ahead. I just like to say that I don't know if his grades in college were very good. There was some revelation of that. He tried to stop the... he tried to stop the disclosure of his grades. Oh, is that right? Although there was somebody who had part of it and his grades were really poor. Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing is... Take this break, John. The break is just coming up. Why don't I make a call and see if he'll agree to reveal his grades? Where's Jay's phone? We're going to keep the phone away from Jay. We'll be right back. Aloha. I'm Lauren Pair, a host here at Think Tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to ThinkTechHawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at 3, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation, and world, and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. We're back and I want to tell you, John, that he said he would not reveal his grades in college nor would he voluntarily give up his tax returns then or any other period since then. So when we look at populism historically, it's a very interesting species. I wouldn't say it's a dominant pattern. I would not say it's a dominant pattern in American life, in American history, but when it crops up, it has some very interesting characters. They're energized. They want to speak to those who are disenfranchised those who are down and out, who are struggling. So in the 1870s, this is when populism first crops up after the Civil War. In the 1870s, what you have is a new economic world in the United States, the rise of manufacturing at a very big scale, the rise of steel manufacturing. The price of a ton of steel drops from like $100 a ton to $12 a ton by the late 1870s because of new technology involved. Bessemer. The Bessemer process. Pennsylvania. That's right. You know, Henry Bessemer. So you have the development of these large enterprises. You know, you have Carnegie Steel, you have Standard Oil of John D. Rockefeller, you have all kinds of mining interests. I mean these very big companies, the railroad interest, all of it. So what it means is that they control a much larger share of the economy than they did before the war. The robber barons. That's right. That's correct. So and on the other hand, farmers are kind of suffering, not just because of industrialism. But yeah, I mean what's happening is the economy is rebalancing away from farming and in favor of industrialism. The number of farmers drops dramatically after the Civil War. Incomes of farmers drop. The price of corn drops from like 66 cents, a bushel to about 35 cents, a bushel by 1890. So it's a lot of things. It's the new industrialism. It's droughts, you know, crop failures and the rest of it. And so the farmers are really suffering actually in the 1870s. And farmers rely on two things in this time period for their, really for their livelihood. And that's local banks who provide them with funding because farmers always have to have access to credit, right? And then the other is local elevators that they take their crop to, which then, you know, they buy the crop and then the crop is shipped out. Somebody had to put the capital in to build the elevator. In the railroad operators and the bankers, they are a part of these small towns and a part of farming communities. But the economic situation is that interest rates are high, somewhere between 6 and 8% in this time period. And the banks, therefore, can charge farmers, you know, up to 8% on their land and on their equipment and everything. And the elevator operators are dubious in some cases. So elevator operators, they grade the grain that farmers bring in. So for instance, farmers will bring in winter wheat in places like North Dakota that bring it in in the spring. And the elevator operator will grade this wheat and they'll grade it on a scale and they'll grade the wheat that they buy from the farmer as a C or a lower grade scale and then they'll sell it as an A. Ooh, that's tricky. Yeah, it's a very unsavory business. It's illegal today to do that. But they have these farmers who are suffering because of this, these are the main evils of the banker and the elevator operator. And then they get to organize. And there's a woman, her name is Mary Lees, and we've got a picture, we can bring it up. There's Mary Lees right there. Mary apparently said at one point, let's raise less corn and more hell. Ah, nice. Yeah, she was quite the populist. She became an organizer for what was called the Farmer's Alliance. Back in that time period. And she was, so she traveled the country giving speeches and trying to bring farmers into the Farmer's Alliance. And so this becomes a very big organization. Now there are actually two organizations. There's the Grange, which I'm, you might have heard of the Grange, maybe not. The Grange. The agricultural organization. The Grange is the earliest populist in the 1870s and interestingly the Grange still exists today. It's a very small organization today, but it's, there it is, it still exists today. In rural America. In rural America, that's right. And then after that, the Grange, at their height in the mid-1870s, they have about 500,000 members. Wow. Yeah, it's decent-sized. And then after that in the 1880s, then there's another organization that appears called the Farmer's Alliance. This is the one that Mary Lees works for. And this organization develops a membership of over a million people in the 1880s and the early 1890s. So these are going organizations. They're successful organizations. And they're successful because the farmers are really struggling. It's an economic effort by the farmers. And I guess what I'm hearing from you is that, to the extent it was populist, the base, so to speak, was the farmers. That's correct. It wasn't bankers, it wasn't railroad guys, and it wasn't Eastern money. That's correct. The farmers outside of the Eastern money. So it's really an alliance of Midwestern farmers and then Southern farmers. And the Southern farmers have a little different story than the Midwestern farmers with the elevator and the bankers. Southern farmers are primarily tenant farmers. They work on plantations and they share their crop. They share crops. And that's how they pay for things. So Southern farmers really don't have to worry about credit. They should worry about credit. Because when they have to borrow money, they borrow it from the plantation owner. You mean liberated slaves? Yes. Well, that's what? Okay, so this is sharecroppers. The sharecroppers in the South were the slaves who had to do that to stay alive after the war. That's correct. It was not a pretty picture. That's right. So they become a part of the underclass, the farming underclass. And it's not just slave, former slaves. It's actually whites and former slaves and some Native Americans. They become tenant farmers. And they're perpetually in debt. The plantation owner holds that debt. And therefore they can never leave the plantation. It's like a form of slavery. And so the tenant farmers are arguing for more freedom from this debt and for a fairer share that they would pay to the plantation owner. So that's where populism emerges. Quite powerfully in the South and then powerfully in the Midwest. Mary Lisa's in the Midwest. Another famous populist, Tom Watson, becomes leader of populists in the South. We have a picture of Tom Watson here. There's Tom Watson. Yes, handsome young man. Tom's a very interesting guy. He's from Georgia. Family of slaveholders. He stayed on the farm. And they still own the same land without the slaves after the Civil War. But Watson was from a family of doolers. When he was growing up, he was actually offended by a friend of his once. He challenged him to a duel. Because Georgia had a law against dueling. And they went to Alabama in order to do their duel. And I think Watson killed the man, actually. So dueling was really dying out by the 1890s. No pun intended. Sorry. Yes, right. So, Watson's an interesting character. He writes poetry. He's a duelist. He's a very smart young man. And he becomes interested in the populist. But he's also an ambitious politician. And this is perhaps where the populists get into trouble or where they have to be more careful. I don't think it's trouble necessary. It sounds like the aristocrat becoming the leader of a populist movement, which is composed of underclass. Yeah, I mean, the farm is a going concern. He's certainly not a tenant farmer. His family has money, has means. But he cares about the little guy. He suffers from some of the same problems as the tenant farmers. In that the local politicians are always making laws that are against the smaller farming interests and in favor of the plantation owners themselves. This is an agricultural rebellion of sorts. Absolutely is, yeah. At the height of it, how big was it? And how much political power did it have, either in the states or in federal government? Right, so Watson becomes the major force in the South. And by the early 1890s, then in the election of 1890, and then again in the election of 1892, the populists, especially in the South, do very well In 1892, they take over eight legislates. They elect their candidates to five governorship. Sounds like reconstruction of sorts. Well, it certainly is a going movement. The difference between this and reconstruction is reconstruction supported rights for African-Americans. Now, the early years of the populist movement in the South, there are black and white tenant farmers who are working together within the populist movement. Although the populists never allow African-Americans to join. The farmer's alliance has a separate colored farmer's alliance for African-Americans. Those were the days when that sort of thing happened. Yeah, the only way they could make it work. But significantly, Tom Watson actually campaigned alongside African-American organizers in the election of 1892. So Watson, it seemed as though was not opposed to organizing African-American tenant farms. The problem is this changes later on. So you have this success in 1892. In 1896, the populist movement tries to take another step, and they fuse with the Democratic Party. William Jennings Bryan runs for the presidency under the fuse populist and Democratic banner. We actually have a picture of William Jennings Bryan as well. There's the young William Jennings Bryan. One of the greatest orators of the 19th and early 20s could speak for hours without notes. Wasn't he involved in the monkey trial? Yes, as a very old. He was quite old. That's a different way of Jennings Bryan. Bryan was also an evangelical Christian. And in the Sculpt trial, of course, he was arguing against evolution. It was a great embarrassment to him. The trial was, and two weeks later, he died. Maybe of embarrassment. He didn't have embarrassment. We're out of time. Oh, my gosh. Sorry. But this is so interesting. This is really great stuff. Well, no, I don't, but it's a great narrative and we're right in the middle of it. It's all about populism. So let's schedule another show on populism. Just a little sneak peek at the next one. Watson is not quite the man we think he is. I'm Watson. Curiosity run us over. Watson is not the man we think he is. Thank you, John. John David and distinguished professor from HP. We'll be back soon. You'll see.