embodied the baffled response of farmers and small businessmen to the modern world, the complexity of which their simpleminded "yeoman myth" could not explain. Jacksonian democracy, the Grange and greenback movements, and Bryanism all drew on a "popular impulse that is endemic in American political culture," one that Hofstadter also associated with a long tradition of "anti-intellectualism." The People's party was "merely a heightened expression" of this backward-looking, "nostalgic" view of the world, which had consistently thwarted the growth of political realism in America.

Goodwyn's Populists, on the other hand—the genuine as opposed to the shadow Populists—achieved a clear understanding of their situation, an understanding based not on slogans but on practical experience. Finding themselves driven more and more deeply into debt by falling prices, rising railroad rates, and a shortage of credit, they began to see that their only hope lay in the organization of cooperatives. The Farmers' Alliance sent lecturers far and wide to urge farmers to solve the credit problem by pooling their resources and thereby destroying the bankers' monopoly. But the "implacable hostility" of bankers and furnishing merchants soon taught farmers that cooperation could not succeed without federal support. "Those who controlled the moneyed institutions," Macune said, "... did not choose to do business with us." In order to enlist the help of the federal government, the Alliance organized the People's party, with Macune's subtreasury at the heart of a comprehensive program of reforms—only to see the subtreasury plan and the party itself swallowed up by the agitation on behalf of free silver.

The essence of Populism, Goodwyn argues, was the political education provided by economic cooperation and their enemies' efforts to crush it. Lecture bureaus and newspapers gave them a "democratic communications network," by means of which the Populists began to break through the "conforming modes of thought" and the "intimidating rules of conduct" that usually discourage popular initiative. The "Populist moment," as Goodwyn sees it, was defined by the promise of a political culture based on popular self-education (the kind of political culture earlier envisioned by Orestes Brownson). When the "the moment passed," it was more than agrarian radicalism that went down to defeat. The decline of Populism was followed by a "corresponding decline in the vitality of public life."

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