silver movement of the I890s, which culminated in William Jennings Bryan's "cross of gold" speech and the memorable campaign of 1896, from the more radical movement that grew out of farmers' experiments with cooperative finance and marketing. For Richard Hofstadter, Coin Harvey, theorist of free silver, was the quintessential populist, with his harebrained fixation on currency panaceas, his suspicion of foreigners, and his "paranoid" fears of a secret conspiracy to defraud the people of their birthright. For Lawrence Goodwyn, on the other hand, the quintessential populist was C. W. Macune, organizer of the Farmers' Alliance and author of the subtreasury plan, which would have made federal credit available to farmers and thus freed them from dependence on private bankers and supply merchants. The People's party of the early nineties was the product of a specific series of experiences, according to Goodwyn, and those who came late to the movement, without the benefit of that experience, never mastered its lessons.

These "shadow Populists," as Goodwyn calls them, diverted the movement from reforms designed to encourage cooperatives into the free-silver crusade. Seduced by the expectation of overnight electoral success, they maneuvered the party into an ill-considered endorsement of Bryan. Fusion with the Democrats diluted the Populist program, put an end to the Populists' efforts to break the Democratic monopoly in the South, where Populists had achieved considerable success, and destroyed the possibility of a new party that would unite black and white farmers behind a program of far-reaching reforms. In opposition to the conventional view that reforms first advocated by the Populists eventually found their way into the political mainstream, to be enacted during the progressive era by the major parties, Goodwyn argues that the agrarian cause— and the cause of harmonious race relations as well—suffered a crushing and conclusive defeat from which they never recovered.

In The Age of Reform, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and other writings, Hofstadter took the position that the populist "spirit" continued "to play an important part in the politics of the progressive era," went "sour" in the twenties and thirties, when cultural conflicts between city and country nourished "provincial resentments, popular and 'democratic' rebelliousness and suspiciousness, and nativism," and found a more and more reactionary voice in the movements led by Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, and Joseph McCarthy. Even in its prime, populism

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