ABSTRACT
The British fascination with Richard III and the little Princes in the Tower is evidence that other countries suffered from similar distortions in their view of the past. But the very circumstances of their origin a people rendered Americans particularly susceptible to the pervasive Manichaeanism, which interpreted history as the battlefield between the forces of light and those of darkness-the good guys against the bad guys. Once upon a time, the good guys were the capitalists who built the nation and the bad were their socialist detractors. The inability to deal with the past other than as a conflict of good guys and bad totally distorted the understanding of American Populism in the scholarship of the years after 1945. Populism drew together many discontented elements in American society: farmers, laborers, social reformers, and intellectuals.
