Having learned from Goodwyn that Populism has to be carefully distinguished from the free-silver movement and from a merely rhetorical championship of the redneck, so often confused with populism in American politics, we must nevertheless recognize that nineteenth-century populism found other outlets besides the People's party. We can agree with Goodwyn that neither Bryan nor Pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina nor James K. Vardaman of Mississippi was a populist, although they posed as sons of the soil, and we can agree that William V. Allen, the Nebraska senator who engineered the Populists' fusion with the Democrats in 1896, was a "Populist in name only." But what about Terence V. Powderley, grand master of the Knights of Labor, who favored cooperatives and took a dim view of strikes? What about William B. Sylvis, who condemned the "whole system of wages for labor"? What about the Boston Voice, a labor paper that urged the National Labor Union in 1867 to broaden its program so as to attract the "intelligent 'middle classes'— speaking, to be understood, after the fashion of the day—who are not capitalists or otherwise selfishly involved in the present order of things"? What about the Pennsylvania greenbacker who declared in the I870s that "every producer and laborer who works in a factory, mine, or on a farm, or in any branch of business that creates wealth [is] in the same boat"? Unless we are prepared to write these people off as "sentimental labor reformers" or petty-bourgeois proto-fascists, we should probably agree to call them populists too, along with leaders of the People's party like Ignatius Donnelly, Leonidas Polk, and Tom Watson.

We can extend the term in this way without diluting its meaning or endorsing the current confusion in which a populist is anyone who cultivates a folksy style. Nineteenth-century populism meant something quite specific: producerism; a defense of endangered crafts (including the craft of farming); opposition to the new class of public creditors and to the whole machinery of modern finance; opposition to wage labor. Populists inherited from earlier political traditions, liberal as well as republican, the principle that property ownership and the personal independence it confers are absolutely essential preconditions of citizenship. In the nineteenth century, the validity of this principle was still widely acknowledged, both in England and in the United States. What was not widely acknowledged was that it no longer corresponded to social practice. Most people—including, regrettably, most members of the "producing

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