¹ Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism, 2nd. ed. (Chicago, 1963, 2013)Google Scholar, 25. All references are from the second edition, which has a different pagination from the first edition. The second edition is mostly a reprint of the first edition but with a new preface. This essay does not present a complete historiography of Populism; neither does it offer a comprehensive treatment of the works cited. Works are cited as exemplary or representative of certain tendencies or arguments. Perhaps the most complete historiographical essay circa 1993 is Worth Miller, Robert, “A Centennial Historiography of American Populism,” Kansas History 16 (Spring 1993): 54–69Google Scholar. There are excellent bibliographical essays at the end of a number of works on Populism, including McMath, Robert C. Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; and Clanton, O. Gene, Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890–1900 (Boston, 1991)Google Scholar. Recent historiography is covered well in Worth Miller, Robert, ed., “The Populist Vision: A Roundtable Discussion,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 32 (Spring 2009): 18–45Google Scholar, and “Agricultural History Roundtable on Populism' with Robert C. McMath, Jr., Peter H. Argersinger, Connie L. Lester, Michael F. Magliari, and Walter Nugent,” Agricultural History 82 (Winter 2008): 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also of note is Henry Clay Dethloff and Worth Miller, Robert, eds., A List of References for the History of the Farmers' Alliance and Populist Party (Davis, CA, 1989)Google Scholar. I would like to thank Robert McMath and Thomas Alter for their generous comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

² Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis, 1931)Google Scholar; Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York, 1938)Google Scholar; Woodward, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1951)Google Scholar. See also Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955)Google Scholar. On Hicks's importance in the Populist historiography, see Ridge, Martin, “Populism Redux: John D. Hicks and The Populist Revolt,” Reviews in American History 13 (Mar. 1985): 142–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Ferkiss, Victor C., “Ezra Pound and American Fascism,” The Journal of Politics 17 (May, 1955): 173–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; essays by Bell, Viereck, Parsons, and Lipset in The New American Right, ed. Bell, Daniel (New York, 1955)Google Scholar and The Radical Right (Garden City, NY, 1963).Google Scholar

⁴ Vann Woodward, C., “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual” in Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, 3rd. ed. (Baton Rouge, 1993), 141–66Google Scholar; Pollack, Norman, The Populist Response to Industrial America (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; and Pollack, Norman, “Fear of Man: Populism, Authoritarianism, and the Historian,” Agricultural History 39 (Apr. 1965): 59–67.Google Scholar

⁵ Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Brinkley, “Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform: A Reconsideration,” Reviews in American History 13 (Sept. 1985): 462–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ostler, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism,” Agricultural History 69 (Winter 1995): 1–27Google Scholar; Johnston, “The Age of Reform: A Defense of Richard Hofstadter Fifty Years On,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 6 (Apr. 2007): 125–38Google Scholar; Postel, The Populist Vision (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Clanton, Populism: The Humane Preference in America, and McMath, American Populism. I would not want to suggest that Nugent's was the only work during the period between Hofstadter and Goodwyn that kept the Hicks/Woodward themes alive. Theodore Saloutos, for example, maintained these emphases in a number of works including Farmer Movements in the South, 1865–1933 (Berkeley, CA, 1960)Google Scholar, as did a number of early state-based studies.

⁶ Tolerant Populists, xvii. See also ix–x. Works focusing on Kansas Populism that followed The Tolerant Populists include Clanton, O. Gene, Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (Lawrence, KS, 1969)Google Scholar; Argersinger, Peter, Populism and Politics: William Alfred Peffer and the People's Party (Lexington, KY, 1974)Google Scholar; and Ostler, Jeffrey, Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, 1880–1892 (Lawrence, KS, 1993)Google Scholar. These works confirm most of Nugent's emphases in The Tolerant Populists, including the economic sources of Populist action, the rational nature of Populist reforms, Populist political savvy, and Populist toleration.

⁷ Tolerant Populists, x; see also xvii.

⁸ See responses by Irwin Unger and Oscar Handlin in “Roundtable on Populism” in Agricultural History 39 (Mar. 1965): 59–85. Unger and Handlin focused on Pollack, though Handlin also accused Nugent of overstating his case against Hofstadter in his zeal to defend the Populists. Sheldon Hackney also criticized Woodward and Nugent for ignoring Populism's dark side in Populism: The Critical Issues (Boston, 1971), viii–xxiiGoogle Scholar, 79. On Nugent's motives for writing, see Tolerant Populists, x, Nugent, “‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone…When Will They Ever Learn?’” Reviews in American History 39 (Mar. 2011), 206Google Scholar; and Nugent, Making Our Way: A Family History of Nugents, Kings, and Others (Notre Dame, IN, 2003), 202–3.Google Scholar

⁹ Tolerant Populists, 14–15. Nugent was careful in The Tolerant Populists and elsewhere to distinguish the work of Handlin and Hofstadter from Ferkiss, Viereck, and Parsons, regarding the former as typically careful historians (Tolerant Populists, 11–15). In the new edition, however, he has somewhat stronger words for Hofstadter, calling his work “irresponsible,” see Tolerant Populists, x. For recent assessments of the impact of Age of Reform, see Collins, Robert M., “The Originality Trap: Richard Hofstadter on Populism,” Journal of American History 76 (June 1989): 150–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brinkley, “Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform: A Reconsideration,” and Johnston, “The Age of Reform.” Collins (154) notes the degree to which Nugent is fair in his assessment of Hofstadter.

¹⁰ Tolerant Populists, 14, 71–73.

¹¹ Pollack, The Humane Economy: Populism, Capitalism, and Democracy (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), xii–ixGoogle Scholar. Early in his career, Pollack (Populist Response to Industrial America and “Fear of Man”) argued that Populists mounted a radical critique of capitalism that resembled Marxism.

¹² Postel, Populist Vision. Populists' views on education were likewise often progressive, especially in North Carolina and the Midwest, where they fought for land-grant institutions, industrial and agricultural education, and access to higher education. See Scott M. Gelber, The University and the People: Envisioning American Higher Education (Madison, WI, 2011).Google Scholar

¹³ McMath, “Agrarian Protest at the Forks of the Creek: Three Subordinate Farmers' Alliances in North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 51 (1974): 41–63Google Scholar; McMath, Populist Vanguard (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; McMath, “Populist Base Communities: The Evangelical Roots of Farm Protest In Texas,” Locus 1 (1988): 56–60Google Scholar, and McMath, American Populism. Nugent and McMath's use of antecedents like the “agrarian myth” was far more nuanced than Hofstadter's.

¹⁴ Tolerant Populists, 14–15. Hicks was a student of Turner.

¹⁵ Ostler, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism.”

¹⁶ Unger and Handlin in “Roundtable on Populism” in Agricultural History (1965). See, for example, Turner, James, “Understanding the Populists,” Journal of American History 67 (Sept. 1980): 354–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Dibbern, John, “Who Were the Populists? A Study of Grass-Roots Alliancemen in Dakota,” Agricultural History 56 (Oct. 1982): 677–91Google Scholar, who take up this issue of motivation. On this point, see also Peter Argersinger, “Agricultural History Roundtable on Populism,” 8.

¹⁷ Goodwyn, Democratic Promise. Goodwyn was the most hesitant to draw on cultural antecedents, stressing instead the immediate impact of Alliance movement culture. Hackney, Sheldon, in Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton, 1969)Google Scholar and Populism: The Critical Issues, cut a middle path between Nugent (Tolerant Populists) and Hofstadter (Age of Reform), suggesting that something like “status anxiety” was at work among North Alabama Populists who insisted on getting their fair share of the market.

¹⁸ Nugent, “Some Parameters of Populism,” Agricultural History 40 (Oct. 1966): 255–70.

¹⁹ Brinkley (“Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform,” 463) and Collins (“The Originality Trap,” 162) have noted that Hofstadter did not do adequate archival work for The Age of Reform.

²⁰ Tolerant Populists, especially 57, 62–63, 82–94, 119–36, 144–45, 155–83. While Nugent's characterization of Populist tolerance in Kansas and similar western states was no doubt true, tolerance took on a more complex timbre in the South and Southwest, especially in terms of racial complications and more frequent use of anti-Catholic rhetoric. As I sought to demonstrate, such anti-Catholic rhetoric, like anti-Shylock rhetoric, was neither racist nor nativist but drew on traditional Protestant patriotic tropes comparing the Catholic hierarchy to monarchical tyranny. See Creech, Righteous Indignation (Urbana, IL, 2006)Google Scholar, 33, 36, 99, 127–28, 147–50. On Texas, see also, and especially Cantrell, Gregg, “‘Our Very Pronounced Theory of Equal Rights to All’: Race, Citizenship, and Populism in the South Texas Borderlands,” Journal of American History 100, No. 3 (Dec. 2013): 663–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ Nugent, “Some Parameters of Populism.” Nugent pointed out that allegiance to either form of metallic specie was bad economics; see Money and American Society, 1865–1880 (New York, 1968), especially 263–75.Google Scholar

²² Tolerant Populists, x.

²³ Tolerant Populists, xi–xiii, xvii–xviii; Nugent, “Agricultural History Roundtable on Populism,” 22; Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York, 1995)Google Scholar, 1, 5. Another explanation might be the use of the term “populist” to describe European right-wing and even fascist movements.

²⁴ For example, Tolerant Populists, 63–66 and 104–7.

²⁵ Tolerant Populists, see especially 29–59. On the Alliance Yardstick, see 47–49.

²⁶ On this point see Ostler, Prairie Populism, 5, as well as comments by Robert McMath in the “The Populist Vision: A Roundtable Discussion,” 29–33.

²⁷ Beeby, Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement, 1890–1901 (Jackson, MS, 2008)Google Scholar; Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar; Miller, Oklahoma Populism: A History of the People's Party in the Oklahoma Territory (Norman, OK, 1987).Google Scholar

²⁸ On the West see Postel, Populist Mind. Books on race and southern Populism are legion, starting with the seminal works by Woodward (Tom Watson, Origins of the New South, Strange Career of Jim Crow). Perhaps most important have been Kousser, J Morgan, The Shaping of Southern Politics (New Haven, 1974)Google Scholar, Ayers, Edward L., The Promise of the New South (New York, 1992)Google Scholar, Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race (New York, 1984)Google Scholar, and Perman, Michael, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill, 2001)Google Scholar. The recent article by Cantrell (“‘Our Very Pronounced Theory of Equal Rights to All’”) on black and Mexican American voters in Texas is also important.

²⁹ On Alabama, see Sheldon Hackney, Populism and Progressivism in Alabama; on Georgia, see Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of Georgia's Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar, and Shaw, Barton, The Wool-Hat Boys: Georgia's Populist Party (Baton Rouge, 1984).Google Scholar

³⁰ Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar; Hart, Redeemers, Bourbons & Populists: Tennessee, 1870–1896 (Baton Rouge, 1975)Google Scholar; Lester, Up From the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers' Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee, 1970–1915 (Athens, GA, 2006)Google Scholar; Barnes, The Louisiana Populist Movement (Baton Rouge, 2011)Google Scholar; and Ostler, Prairie Populism.

³¹ McMath makes this a key emphasis in Populist Vanguard and American Populism.

³² McMath was one of the first to take evangelical antecedents, in particular, seriously; see “Agrarian Protest at the Forks of the Creek,” Populist Vanguard, “Populist Base Communities,” and American Populism; Creech, Righteous Indignation, Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside (Norman, OK, 1999)Google Scholar; Argersinger, “Pentecostal Politics in Kansas: Religion, The Farmers' Alliance, and the Gospel of Populism,” Kansas Quarterly 1 (1969): 24–35Google Scholar; Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York, 2006)Google Scholar, and Postel, Populist Vision. Postel tended to downplay antecedents and saw western Populists' tendency to embrace nontraditional religion as a symptom, not an antecedent, of their Populism.

³³ Clanton, Populism: The Humane Preference in America; Miller, Oklahoma Populism, esp. 3–27; Ostler, Prairie Populism, and Ali, In the Lion's Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900 (Jackson, MS: 2010), esp. xiii–xvGoogle Scholar, 5, 7–9.

³⁴ Tolerant Populists, 41–43, 69, 174. The tension between tactical and ideological political independence was especially acute in Texas.

³⁵ Turner, “Understanding the Populists”; Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama. Neither Turner nor Hackney denied the Populists' material destitution, but both downplayed it in favor of the anxiety produced by rural isolation or town/country tension.

³⁶ McMath, American Populism, 14. See also Ostler, Prairie Populism, 6. In some states, such as North Carolina, scholars have not been able to demonstrate that Populists suffered economic deprivation distinguishable from Democrats or Republicans. See, for example, Creech, Righteous Indignation, 187 n11. John Dibbern, on the other hand, found a positive correlation between economic disadvantage and Populist voting in Marshall County, South Dakota; see “Who Were the Populists?”

³⁷ Goodwyn (Democratic Promise, especially xi, xiv, xvii, 110–53) saw Populism mounting a radical critique through its cooperative assault on capitalist individualism. Steven Hahn argued similarly in Roots of Southern Populism, especially 3–10, 276–85, that this critique was rooted in antebellum labor producerism and republicanism that informed local tensions in the Georgia upcountry between farmers and merchants. On Palmer, see “Man Over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill, 1980)Google Scholar, passim, but especially xvii. Though neither Goodwyn nor Hahn saw the Populist critique to be as radical as Debs's Socialism, it nevertheless fundamentally challenged the industrial capitalist assumptions of the late nineteenth century. Pollack (Humane Economy, xii–ix) and most other works cited in this essay have concurred with Nugent that the Populists were solidly petit bourgeois and accepted as normative the basics of liberal, free-market capitalism. It is important to note that many Populists in Texas and Oklahoma transitioned to Socialism after the People's Party collapsed.

³⁸ Goodwyn and Palmer argued that Free Silver was a “shadow movement” that undercut the radical communitarian edge of Populism; see Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, especially xiv; Palmer, “Man over Money,” passim. Hahn (Roots of Southern Populism) tended to agree with the shadow movement narrative, but in his emphasis on Populism as an economic movement, he also stressed how elite economic actors, more than political ones, stifled the movement (with racism also contributing substantially). Goodwyn, Palmer, and Hahn were certainly correct to point out that Free Silver was not a radical policy. Critics have argued that Goodwyn, in particular, placed too much emphasis on the role of cooperation in Texas, setting up Texas Populism as a model for judging other Populist strategies. It is important to note, however, that Free Silver did, indeed, play a significant role in fracturing the People's Party in Texas. See Goodwyn, especially xi, xviii, and xix; Palmer, especially xiii–xviii; McMath, American Populism, 15; and Parsons, Stanley B., Parsons, Karen Toombs, Killilae, Walter, and Borgers, Beverly, “The Role of the Cooperatives in the Development of the Movement Culture of Populism,” Journal of American History 69 ( Mar. 1983): 868–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁹ Durden, The Climax of Populism: The Election of 1896 (Lexington, KY, 1965), especially 1–22Google Scholar. Hunt, James L. presented a very strong case for Marion Butler's political savvy in Marion Butler and American Populism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003)Google Scholar. Butler was the chief architect of fusion with the Bryan ticket over Free Silver. Durden, like Nugent (Tolerant Populists), would agree with Goodwyn (Democratic Promise), Palmer (“Man over Money”) and Hahn (Roots of Southern Populism) that Free Silver was not a radical strategy. But Nugent understood the axis of disagreement between mid-roaders and fusionists over Free Silver to be local versus national policy strategies rather than a radical versus conservative outlook.

⁴⁰ Tolerant Populists, xvii.

⁴¹ Durden, especially 1–22. Others who view Populism primarily as a political movement have been Ayers (Promise of the New South); Hart (Redeemers, Bourbons & Populists); McMath, American Populism, Ostler, Prairie Populism; and Anderson, Eric, “The Populists in Capitalist America” in Race, Class, and Politics in Southern History, eds. Crow, Jeffrey, Escott, Paul, and Flynn, Charles Jr. (Baton Rouge, LA, 1989).Google Scholar

⁴² Pollack, Humane Economy.

⁴³ Goodwyn, in Democratic Promise, wrote, “The agrarian revolt cannot be understood outside the framework of the economic crusade that not only was its source but also created the culture of the movement itself,” xviii. See also, Goodwyn, especially xi, xiv, xvii–xviii, and Hahn (Roots of Southern Populism), especially 1–3. Palmer (“Man over Money”) mostly concurred with Goodwyn, and Hahn drew on both Goodwyn and Palmer.

⁴⁴ Tolerant Populists, 112–40, 164–72. Goodwyn (Democratic Promise); Hahn (Roots of Southern Populism); Palmer (“Man over Money”); Miller, (Oklahoma Populism), 156; and Postel (Populist Vision), 270–75, also argued this point, though they did not follow Goodwyn, Hahn, and Palmer in casting Populism primarily as an economic movement. Hahn also stressed racism as a cause of Populist demise.

⁴⁵ Tolerant Populists, especially chs. 7 and 9.

⁴⁶ Woodward, especially Strange Career of Jim Crow; Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics. See also Ali, In the Lion's Mouth.

⁴⁷ Tolerant Populists, xviii, xiii.

⁴⁸ Palmer wrote, for example, that Populism was the “last major mainstream attack on capitalism and its business culture in America,” xviii. Also, see especially Clanton, Populism: The Humane Preference in America, xi–xviii. Clanton stressed the degree to which Vernon Parrington, a Kansas Populist himself, captured this narrative in in his multivolume Main Currents in American Thought. See Ostler, Prairie Populism, Miller, Oklahoma Populism; Creech, Righteous Indignation, especially 177–83. See also Goodwyn, Democratic Promise; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism; and Palmer, “Man over Money,” especially, along with McMath, Populist Vanguard and American Populism, Johnston, The Radical Middle Class; Miller, Oklahoma Populism; and Pollack, Humane Economy.

⁴⁹ For an excellent forum on Postel's Populist Vision, see Miller, “The Populist Vision: A Roundtable Discussion.”

⁵⁰ Tolerant Populists, ix, xi–xv, ch. 9, on connection to progressivism. See also, Nugent, Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2010)Google Scholar, ch. 2. For a powerful statement of the connection between agrarian statism and progressive policies, see Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago, 1999).Google Scholar

⁵¹ Walter Nugent, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,'” 208–9. As with my review of the Populist literature, this overview of Nugent's work is not intended to be exhaustive; Nugent has especially written articles too numerous and varied in content to cover in full here; also, he has written a number of textbooks and edited volumes that I mention only in passing.

⁵² Money and American Society, 4, and The Money Question During Reconstruction (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. Nugent also published the textbook, Creative History: An Introduction to Historical Study (Philadelphia, 1967)Google Scholar. Nugent's other textbook is From Centennial to World War: American Society, 1876–1917 (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

⁵³ Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865–1896 (Cambridge, UK, 1997)Google Scholar. See also Nugent's “Comments on Wyatt Wells, ‘Rhetoric of the Standards: The Debate over Gold and Silver,’” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (Jan. 2015): 69–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁴ Nugent, Structures of American History (Bloomington, IN, 1981), xi–xii.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ On the “New Western History,” see Nugent, “Western History, New and Not So New,” OAH Magazine of History (Fall, 1994): 5–9. Nugent's introductory materials and editorial choices in The American West: The Reader, eds. Nugent and Ridge, Martin (Bloomington, IN, 1999)Google Scholar, marked his appreciation of the “New Western History,” as did his emphases in Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York, 1999)Google Scholar. For Nugent's thoughts on Turner, see, Nugent, “Happy Birthday, Western History,” Journal of the West 32 (July, 1993): 3–4Google Scholar; Into the West, 97–98; Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington, IN, 1992), 161Google Scholar; and especially Structures of American Social History (Bloomington, IN, 1981)Google Scholar, xii; 12–17, 32–33, and 163 n34.

⁵⁶ Nugent, “Frontiers and Empires in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Western Historical Quarterly 20 (Nov. 1989): 393–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Into the West, ch. 3.

⁵⁷ Nugent, Structures in American Social History, xi. See also 25, 32.

⁵⁸ Nugent, Structures in American Social History, 25.

⁵⁹ On modernization theory, see Structures in American Social History, 4–12. Nugent reflected further on many of the themes in Structures in “Tocqueville, Marx, and American Class Structure,” Social Science History 12 (Winter 1988): 327–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁰ Crossings, xv, 5–10, and passim.

⁶¹ Nugent, Into the West, passim. For further reflections by Nugent on the West as place and myth, see “Where is the American West?,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 42 (Summer 1992): 2–23.Google Scholar

⁶² Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (New York, 2008)Google Scholar. Nugent addressed many of these themes in his presidential address to the Western Historical Association, “The American Habit of Empire,” Western Historical Quarterly 38 (Spring 2007): 5–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar