Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-14T23:50:19.327Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Making War Their Business: The Short History of Populist Anti-Militarism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2014

Catherine McNicol Stock
Catherine McNicol Stock*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College
*
cmsto@conncoll.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Several historians have recently demonstrated that ideas generated initially by the Populists found their way into Progressive Era reform, New Deal/Great Society liberalism, and even today's Democratic Party politics. The only trouble is that the vast majority of the Populists themselves did not make the journey. Once a bastion of anti-corporatism, support for labor, “women's improvement,” the graduated income tax, and government regulation of the economy, the rural states of the Great Plains and American South became fortresses of what Bethany Moreton has called “Christian Free Enterprise,” with strong anti-statist and socially conservative agendas. A decade ago Thomas Frank noticed this remarkable shift on the Great Plains and wondered “What's the Matter with Kansas?” Despite many new works on the economic impact of the Cold War in rural America, we still do not have a comprehensive answer to his question. In this essay, I examine a contrast that other historians of rural politics have overlooked in large part because it goes beyond economic policy, strictly defined: what Kansans (and residents of other rural, Great Plains states that supported the People's Party) once thought about the role of the United States military and what many believe now. Understanding this striking contrast will lead to understanding more fully the origins of today's “red” state politics. Furthermore, it can highlight more subtle signs that some aspects of Populist anti-militarism may have survived this otherwise fervent shift to the right.

Type
Forum: Populists and Progressives, Capitalism and Democracy
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 387 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 From the left, see Postel, Charles, The Populist Vision (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; from the right, William Anderson, “The Progressive Era, Part I: Myth and Reality,” at www.fff.org/freedom/fd0602d.asp. (accessed July 25, 2012).

2 Moreton, Bethany, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, (Cambridge, MA, 2009)Google Scholar.

3 Frank, Thomas, What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York, 2005)Google Scholar. See also an updated discussion of conservative politics in Frank, “Letter from Brownbackistan,” Harpers, July 2012, 4–7. Charles Postel recently asked Frank's question in a more abstract way, writing, “In short, where is the populism in [the Tea Party movement] that seeks to repeal everything that the original Populists stood for?” See Postel, Charles, “The Tea Party in Historical Perspective: A Conservative Response to a Crisis of Political Economy” in Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party, eds. Rosenthal, Lawrence and Trost, Christine (Berkeley, 2012), 28Google Scholar. Other recent works on the postwar history of the Great Plains include Wuthnow, Robert, Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s (Princeton, 2011)Google Scholar; and Hurt, R. Douglas, The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century (Tucson, 2011)Google Scholar.

4 Hicks, John D., The Populist Revolt: A History of the Famers' Alliance and the People's Party (Minneapolis, 1931)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Goodwyn, Lawrence, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar; Ostler, Jeffrey, Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, 1880–1892 (Lawrence, 1993)Google Scholar.

5 Postel, The Populist Vision.

6 In Operation Iraqi Freedom, military deaths per capita ran highest in the rural states of the Great Plains and South and also in Vermont. See “US Casualties: State-by-State Troop Deaths,” PBS News Hour, www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/middle_east/iraq/honorroll/map_flash.html (accessed July 20, 2012).

7 Horowitz, David, Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment (Urbana, 1997)Google Scholar.

8 Ahmad, Ahrar, “War and Peace in South Dakota” in The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, eds. Lauck, Jon K., Miller, John E., and Simmons, Donald C. Jr. (Pierre, SD, 2011), 186–210Google Scholar; “US Casualties: State-by-State Troop Deaths.”

9 Postel, Populist Vision, 99–100, 122–23, 239–41.

10 Ibid., 240.

11 Kazin, Michael, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York, 2006), 61Google Scholar.

12 Kazin, Godly Hero, 85, 240–41. See also Curti, Merle, Bryan and World Peace (Northampton, MA, 1931)Google Scholar.

13 Kazin, Godly Hero, 87–90.

14 Quoted in ibid. 89.

15 William Jennings Bryan, “The Paralyzing Influence of Imperialism,” Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Held in Kansas City, Mo., July 4, 5 and 6, 1900, 205–27, www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bryan.htm. (accessed Mar. 30, 2012).

16 Bryan, “The Paralyzing Influence of Imperialism.”

17 Hoganson, Kristin, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar.

18 White, G. Edward, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (Austin, 1986)Google Scholar.

19 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 22–23.

20 Quoted in Maddow, Rachel, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, (New York, 2012), 45Google Scholar.

21 Edwards, Rebecca, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York, 2006), 264–65Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., 265.

23 Kazin, Godly Hero, 240–41.

24 Keith, Jeanette, Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War (Chapel Hill, 2004)Google Scholar.

25 David Horowitz, Insurgency and the Establishment, 180. See also Murray, Sylvie and Johnston, Robert D., Writing World War II: A Student's Guide (New York, 2011)Google Scholar, pt. 1.

26 Horowitz, Insurgency and the Establishment, 179.

27 William C. Pratt, “Another South Dakota or The Road Not Taken: The Left and the Shaping of South Dakota Political Culture” in The Plains Political Tradition, 105–32.

28 Stock, Catherine McNicol, “Nuclear Country: The Militarization of the US Northern Plains, 1945–1975” in Local Consequences of the Global Cold War, ed. Engel, Jeffrey (Palo Alto, CA, 2008), 238–74Google Scholar.

29 Gregory, James S., American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar.

30 Stock, “Nuclear Country.”

31 Heefner, Gretchen, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the term “zone of sacrifice,” see Stock, “‘Nuclear Country,’” and Kuletz, Valerie, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

32 Ahmad, “War and Peace in South Dakota,” 186–210.

33 Ibid., 204.

34 Heefner, The Missile Next Door; Stock, “Nuclear Country”; Mojtabai, A. G., Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas (Boston, 1986)Google Scholar; Although the South had a different history with militarism, many communities struggled with the consequences of the Cold War. See Frederickson, Kari, The Unexpected Exodus: How the Cold War Displaced One Southern Town (Columbia, SC, 2007)Google Scholar; Frederickson, , Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South (Athens, GA, 2013)Google Scholar.

35 Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, 37–40.

36 Stock, “Nuclear Country.”

37 South Dakota Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, “Report on Rapid City” (Mar. 1963), http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12r18.PDF. (accessed Mar. 21, 2012).

38 Brokaw, Tom, A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland in the Forties and Fifties (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

39 Ginsburg, Faye D., Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley, 1998), 192–93Google Scholar.

40 Gregory, James N., The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill, 2005)Google Scholar.

41 Heefner, The Missile Next Door, ch. 1.

42 Stock, “Nuclear Country”; Gretchen Heefner and Catherine McNicol Stock, “Missiles and Militarization: How the Cold War Shaped South Dakota Political Culture” in The Plains Political Tradition, 211–38; Heefner, , “Missiles and Memory: Dismantling South Dakota's Cold War,” Western Historical Quarterly 38 (Summer 2007): 181–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 For an example of the publications that helped organize local protests, see Day, Herbert, ed., Nuclear Heartland: A Guide to the One Thousand Missile Silos of the United States (Madison, WI, 1988)Google Scholar.

44 Conn Carroll, “What Makes Paul Nation Tick?” http://theelectoralmap.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/what-makes-ron-paul-nation-tick/ (accessed Aug. 15, 2013).