lent of European fascism and national socialism." Isolationist, racist, and anti-Semitic, populism was at odds with "democratic socialism in the humanist tradition." It contained no "broad ideas about human freedom or the fuller human life" and hence "aroused no interest in serious American intellectual circles." It did not criticize "private property or the wage system." Instead it attacked symbolic and largely imaginary evils, usually conceived as the product of conspiracies led by Jewish financiers, agents of the Roman Catholic church, or communists. Populists shared a belief in "plebiscitary democracy" and a "despair of liberal democratic institutions." They wanted to "sweep away intervening institutions"— legislatures, courts, parties—and to set up a tyranny of the majority. They hated labor unions as much as they hated big business. Their program appealed to a "middle class composed largely of farmers and small merchants," which feared that it would be "crushed between big business ... and an industrial working class which tends to question the necessity of the wage system and even of private property itself."

Ignoring evidence that criticism of the wage system was far more closely identified with the populist tradition than with the twentieth‐ century labor movement, Ferkiss rested his case on inflammatory quotations from Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, Ezra Pound, Lawrence Dennis, and Charles Lindbergh. Their pronouncements exposed a "common core of doctrine" and thus relieved the historian of populism of the need to trace their ideas to a specific tradition of thought or to a particular history of political agitation. Torn out of its historical context—the struggle to preserve the moral virtues conferred by property ownership against the combined threat of wage labor and the collectivization of property—"populism" became a makeshift category that included everything that fell outside a liberal or social democratic consensus. Ferkiss made no attempt to prove that his "populists" referred to themselves as such or claimed to stand in the populist succession. The passive subject of his central contention—"the claim is openly made that the fascists are the inheritors of the Populist mantle"—remained unspecified. Since "no figure in this article ever applied the label 'fascist' to himself," as Ferkiss admitted in a footnote to this same sentence, it is hard to see how any of them could have made such a claim. Perhaps this singularly uninformative summary of his thesis referred to the thesis itself— the "claim" that Ferkiss was "openly" making in his own essay!

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