Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism (1980). On class oppression conceived as invasion from outside, see Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest : Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982). On the "transitional" character of producerist ideology, see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation ofAmerica (1982).

The works of Richard Hofstadter—in particular, The Age of Reform (1955) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), which contains his essay on Coin Harvey—helped to identify nineteenth-century agrarian populism with nostalgia and the sentimental "yeoman myth." Hofstadter's interpretation continues to find favor, at least with the general public, because it is superior to those that treat Populism merely as an early version of the New Deal—for example, John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (1931), or John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform (1932)—or, even more improbably, as a rudimentary form of socialism, as in Norman Pollock, The Populist Response to Industrial America (1962). For Marxist historians, on the other hand, the untenability of this latter interpretation leads to an interpretation that is almost as unfair to the Populists as Hofstadter's more openly satirical and dismissive treatment. It is because Populism fell so far short of a socialist program that it is found wanting by James Green, "Populism, Socialism, and the Promise of Democracy," Radical History Review 24 (fall 1980): 7-40; by David Montgomery, "On Goodwin's Populists," Marxist Perspectives I (spring 1978): 166-73; and by Bruce Palmer, "Man over Money ": The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (1980). Palmer tries harder than most Marxists to judge Populism in its own terms, but he too finds it hard to resist a superior tone. "Being landowners or aspiring landowners and having little experience of industrial America, the Southern Populists overlooked the growth of huge manufacturing complexes like Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel as well as the new classes created by them." Palmer reminds us that "no single worker could hope to own a steel mill," as Populists allegedly believed. He gives the Populists credit for opposing "this maddening rush for money," as Tom Watson called it, but he finds it regrettable that they "stopped short of an attack on the market system" and failed to "follow through on the implications of their demand that American society replace economic competition with... the 'cooperative commonwealth.' " Because Populists failed to condemn the institution of private property, Palmer assumes that they "accepted" industrial capitalism and a "profit-oriented market economy." He can then accuse them of inconsistency: they wanted the benefits of capitalism without recognizing their source. In particular, they had "little notion of the role credit played in ... building the very economic system they accepted."

Steven Hahn's valuable study The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (1983) makes it clear that the Populists and their immediate predecessors, the agrarian radicals of the seventies and eighties, did not "accept" a market economy at all. On the contrary, their defense of customary grazing rights, their opposition to the new fencing laws that nullified these rights, and their refusal to regard land simply as a commodity indicate that their political ideas had a "decidedly nonmarket character," accord

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