The Populists and their allies spoke of themselves as participants in a revolution. It was a revolution against party dominance and against the power of money. Like their ancestors in the American Revolution, the rebels of the 1890s were not radical firebrands but conservatives seeking to restore the democratic promise of American life. Their greatest enemy was not Wall Street's financial elites, but the prejudices that divided them one from another – divisions of North against South, white against black, farmer against laborer, Democrat against Republican, Protestant against Catholic. That history has recorded Populism as a Southern, white, Protestant movement is testimony to the effectiveness of those divisions. But the effort was larger than this. It was an effort to unite producers of all persuasions in pursuit of an antimonopolist alternative. The failure of that effort contributed to the rise of a corporate capitalist economy and a narrowed democracy.

The subject of this chapter is the political geography and historical contingency of the regime shift of the 1890s. The three state cases first explored in Chapter 4 are returned to here.