Populist Outline

4.      In fiction parading as fact, the booklet showed how the “Little Professor” — “Coin” Harvey — overwhelmed at the bankers and professors of economics with his brilliant arguments on behalf of free silver

5.      Another notorious spellbinder was redhaired Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, three times elected to Congress

6.      The Queen of the Populist “calamity howlers” was Mary Elizabeth (”Mary Yellin’”) Lease, a tall, athletic woman known as the “Kansas Pythoness.”

7.      She reportedly demanded that Kansas should raise “less corn and more hell”

8.      The big city New York Evening Post snarled, “we don’t want any more states until we can civilize Kansas”

9.      To many Easterners, complaint, not corn was rural America’s staple crop

E.      Populists were not to be laughed away

1.      yet the Populists, despite their artiste, were not to be left away

2.      They were leading a deadly earnest and impassioned campaign to relieve the farmers’ many miseries

3.      Smiles faded from Republican and Democratic faces alike as countless thousands of Populists began to sing “goodbye, my party, goodbye”

4.      In 1892 the Populists had jolted the traditional parties by winning several congressional seats and polling more than one million votes for their presidential candidate, James B. Weaver

5.      Racial divisions continued to hobble the Populists in the South, but in the west of their ranks were swelling

6.      Could the People’s party now reach beyond its regional bases in the agrarian America, join hands with urban workers, and mount a successful attack on the Northeast and so the bells of power?

VI.              Coxey’s Army and the Pullman Strike

A.     Background

1.      the panic of 1893 and the severe ensuing depression strengthened the Populists arguments that farmers and laborers alike were being victimized by an oppressive economic and political system

2.      Ragan armies of the unemployed began marching to protest of their plight