Montgomery denies that the history of radical movements presents us with a "past moment of democratic promise that was irretrievably snuffed out by the consolidation of modern capitalism." Instead, the history of Populism leaves us with the useful lesson that "no successful socialist design for agriculture can be drawn up except by the people who work the land themselves", and that "popular initiatives," accordingly, "will be needed once again to create the agricultural component of a socialist America."

If the democratic movements of the Gilded Age ended in defeat, contrary to these heartwarming assurances from those who still believe against all evidence that history marches steadily onward and upward, it was a defeat not just for farmers but for workers as well. As Montgomery himself points out, workers took part in the Populist movement in considerable numbers, and Goodwyn's neglect of their participation conveys the misleading impression that Populism had no appeal outside the farm belt. Not only did workers in some areas support Populist candidates, but their own organizations, in the days before the AFL established its supremacy, had a strong flavor of populism. As we have seen, the nineteenth-century labor movement envisioned a union of the "producing classes," took a lively interest in the banking and currency questions, and advocated cooperation as the best hope of reasserting workers' control over production. In his history of the Knights of Labor, Leon Fink notes that the members of the Knights, "as independent artisans, small merchants, or skilled wage-earners," took "seriously the 'Lincoln ideal' of a republic of producers." It is precisely these features of working-class radicalism in the Gilded Age, in the eyes of progress-minded historians like Montgomery—its "fixation on currency reform," its capacious definition of "producers," its quixotic opposition to the wage system, its "fantasy" of "imposing moral order on the market economy"—that stigmatize it as sentimental, backward, nostalgic, and naive, the product of "flights of fancy," of the "illusion of a harmonious society," of an "imaginary arcadia of days gone by."

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in Brownson's, "historical optimism," as he called it, prevails. We love to side with the winning side.

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