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Making War Their Business: The Short History of Populist Anti-Militarism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2014

Catherine McNicol Stock
Catherine McNicol Stock*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College
*
[email protected]
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Extract

Several historians have recently demonstrated that ideas generated initially by the Populists found their way into Progressive Era reform, New Deal/Great Society liberalism, and even today's Democratic Party politics. The only trouble is that the vast majority of the Populists themselves did not make the journey. Once a bastion of anti-corporatism, support for labor, “women's improvement,” the graduated income tax, and government regulation of the economy, the rural states of the Great Plains and American South became fortresses of what Bethany Moreton has called “Christian Free Enterprise,” with strong anti-statist and socially conservative agendas. A decade ago Thomas Frank noticed this remarkable shift on the Great Plains and wondered “What's the Matter with Kansas?” Despite many new works on the economic impact of the Cold War in rural America, we still do not have a comprehensive answer to his question. In this essay, I examine a contrast that other historians of rural politics have overlooked in large part because it goes beyond economic policy, strictly defined: what Kansans (and residents of other rural, Great Plains states that supported the People's Party) once thought about the role of the United States military and what many believe now. Understanding this striking contrast will lead to understanding more fully the origins of today's “red” state politics. Furthermore, it can highlight more subtle signs that some aspects of Populist anti-militarism may have survived this otherwise fervent shift to the right.

Type
Forum: Populists and Progressives, Capitalism and Democracy
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 387 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014 

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References

1 From the left, see Postel, Charles, The Populist Vision (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; from the right, William Anderson, “The Progressive Era, Part I: Myth and Reality,” at www.fff.org/freedom/fd0602d.asp. (accessed July 25, 2012).

2 Moreton, Bethany, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, (Cambridge, MA, 2009)Google Scholar.

3 Frank, Thomas, What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York, 2005)Google Scholar. See also an updated discussion of conservative politics in Frank, “Letter from Brownbackistan,” Harpers, July 2012, 4–7. Charles Postel recently asked Frank's question in a more abstract way, writing, “In short, where is the populism in [the Tea Party movement] that seeks to repeal everything that the original Populists stood for?” See Postel, Charles, “The Tea Party in Historical Perspective: A Conservative Response to a Crisis of Political Economy” in Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party, eds. Rosenthal, Lawrence and Trost, Christine (Berkeley, 2012), 28Google Scholar. Other recent works on the postwar history of the Great Plains include Wuthnow, Robert, Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s (Princeton, 2011)Google Scholar; and Hurt, R. Douglas, The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century (Tucson, 2011)Google Scholar.

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5 Postel, The Populist Vision.

6 In Operation Iraqi Freedom, military deaths per capita ran highest in the rural states of the Great Plains and South and also in Vermont. See “US Casualties: State-by-State Troop Deaths,” PBS News Hour, www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/middle_east/iraq/honorroll/map_flash.html (accessed July 20, 2012).

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9 Postel, Populist Vision, 99–100, 122–23, 239–41.

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22 Ibid., 265.

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26 Horowitz, Insurgency and the Establishment, 179.

27 William C. Pratt, “Another South Dakota or The Road Not Taken: The Left and the Shaping of South Dakota Political Culture” in The Plains Political Tradition, 105–32.

28 Stock, Catherine McNicol, “Nuclear Country: The Militarization of the US Northern Plains, 1945–1975” in Local Consequences of the Global Cold War, ed. Engel, Jeffrey (Palo Alto, CA, 2008), 238–74Google Scholar.

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30 Stock, “Nuclear Country.”

31 Heefner, Gretchen, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the term “zone of sacrifice,” see Stock, “‘Nuclear Country,’” and Kuletz, Valerie, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

32 Ahmad, “War and Peace in South Dakota,” 186–210.

33 Ibid., 204.

34 Heefner, The Missile Next Door; Stock, “Nuclear Country”; Mojtabai, A. G., Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas (Boston, 1986)Google Scholar; Although the South had a different history with militarism, many communities struggled with the consequences of the Cold War. See Frederickson, Kari, The Unexpected Exodus: How the Cold War Displaced One Southern Town (Columbia, SC, 2007)Google Scholar; Frederickson, , Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South (Athens, GA, 2013)Google Scholar.

35 Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, 37–40.

36 Stock, “Nuclear Country.”

37 South Dakota Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, “Report on Rapid City” (Mar. 1963), http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12r18.PDF. (accessed Mar. 21, 2012).

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41 Heefner, The Missile Next Door, ch. 1.

42 Stock, “Nuclear Country”; Gretchen Heefner and Catherine McNicol Stock, “Missiles and Militarization: How the Cold War Shaped South Dakota Political Culture” in The Plains Political Tradition, 211–38; Heefner, , “Missiles and Memory: Dismantling South Dakota's Cold War,” Western Historical Quarterly 38 (Summer 2007): 181–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 For an example of the publications that helped organize local protests, see Day, Herbert, ed., Nuclear Heartland: A Guide to the One Thousand Missile Silos of the United States (Madison, WI, 1988)Google Scholar.

44 Conn Carroll, “What Makes Paul Nation Tick?” http://theelectoralmap.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/what-makes-ron-paul-nation-tick/ (accessed Aug. 15, 2013).