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The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

David Peal
Affiliation:
The Institute for Historical Study

Extract

A Populist newspaper in North Carolina commented in 1890 that agrarian unrest was common just about everywhere, in “high tariff and low tariff” countries as well as in “monarchies, empires, and republics.” Historians of this discontent have neglected the international dimension of protest that was so striking at the time. The countries that produced the most vigorous agrarian movements, Germany and the United States, have been especially well protected from the scrutiny of comparison. One reason for this neglect is that scholars in both countries emphasize their nations' peculiarities and capacity to make their own histories. The most influential study of American Populism, for instance, is still John D. Hicks' The Populist Revolt (1931). Hicks ascribed the movement to the closure of the frontier, the “safety valve” once thought to be the special feature of American history. Most scholars today reject the “Turner thesis,” but continue to see populism as uniquely democratic. Just as American Populists have been celebrated as “good guys,” German agrarian leaders have been demonized. The marked anti-Semitic aspect of agrarian movements in the 1890s has led historians to link them more or less directly to national socialism, the arguably unique “outcome” of German history. Whatever the sources of this exceptionalism, the constrained view has distorted the understanding of a crucial historical conjuncture.

Type
The Traditions of Populist Politics
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1989

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References

I would like to thank the following people for their help and suggestions in the development of this article: Ruth Bleasdale, Jack Crowley, Geoff Eley, J. Morgan Kousser, John O'Brien, Jane Parpart, Norman Pereira, Lawrence Stokes, and Graham Taylor. I would especially like to thank the Killam Trust of Canada and the Dalhousie University History Department for giving me the chance to prepare, present, and refine this paper.

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41 Ibid., 308ff.

42 Ibid., ch. 6.

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