ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century Populists sought to build a multiracial alliance of the producing classes to combat the power of plutocrats in Gilded Age America. They advocated radical economic reforms and political reforms to expand and fortify democracy. In addition, they were critics of an imperialistic foreign policy at a time of American empire building. Finally, they promoted a vision of community embodied in their vision of the cooperative commonwealth. That they failed was as much a measure of the campaign of electoral fraud and terror employed against them and the pervasiveness of the values of the dominant culture as their failure to live up to their ideals. This is illustrated by the armed coup that overthrew the fusionist Republican-Populist government in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 as well as by the efforts of Kansas Populists to build an inclusive movement. That some prominent Populists went on to embrace a politics of racist demagoguery, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and nativism, while others continued to advocate that the multiracial coalition politics championed by the Populist movement is not well understood. This legacy to some extent explains the appropriation of variants of Populist discourses by the left and right over the subsequent course of history.
