Ronald P. Formisano, American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (2008), viii +315 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, $35.00).
This review was originally published in Social History 35, no. 4 (Nov. 2010), 486-488.
For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s
Ronald P. Formisano
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Of late, populism has become a dirty word. In the last decade or two, populism has most often been associated with extremism, especially extreme right-wing radicalism, particularly in Europe. Alternatively, populist styles and rhetoric have been increasingly employed and manipulated by charismatic leaders without a corresponding populist agenda. One need only think of the rise of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Yet in the United States, too, as one columnist has recently noted, ‘Almost every politician…pretends to be a populist’ (2). Populism as a style and posture in politics, as Alan Ware notes, ‘is everywhere and nowhere’ (3).
Thus it is Ronald Formisano's great achievement to rescue the history of authentically populist movements from these negative and/or less helpful or meaningful characterizations. Focusing on a diverse array of populist movements in the United States from the Revolution to the 1850s, Formisano carefully plots out important moments of mass mobilizations of ordinary people, arising at least initially from the grass roots and invoking the name of ‘the people’ against established or corrupt elites. Exploring the people and ideas behind disparate movements such as colonial protests, Anti-Federalism, Working Men's Parties, Anti-Masonry, Anti-Rentism and the Know-Nothing Party, Formisano charts new ground in making connections between these movements, demonstrating a progression of ideas and showing their influence on the course of American history.
As anyone who is aware of the details of these specific movements will know, Formisano is using a wide umbrella in making such connections. In making his argument, however, Formisano is careful to draw on a wide international literature on populism to highlight the important point that populist movements usually tend to be amalgams of contradictory tendencies. Indeed, while we often demonize or idealize populist movements as either entirely progressive or wholly reactionary, many movements, if not all, fuse elements of both a progressive and a reactionary agenda. Thus it is that the Know-Nothing Party could embrace anti-Catholicism while lavishing funds on public education, abolishing property qualifications and pushing for labour reform.
What does tie these movements together, Formisano argues, is that they share the common energizing sense, in Margaret Canovan's words, ‘that politics has escaped popular control. The message is, “this is our polity, in which we, the democratic sovereign, have a right to practice government by the people; but we have been shut out of power by corrupt politicians and an unrepresentative elite who betray our interests, ignore our opinions, and treat us with contempt”' (10–11). Thus Formisano's work, then, is really all about tracing the almost inevitable and ongoing conflicts that arise out of the gap between the rhetoric of popular sovereignty and the reality of representative government. Noting Edmund Morgan's powerful argument that the idea of the ‘people’ was a fiction created by elites to justify government by the few, Formisano suggests that the populist ideal of the people's sovereignty, in promising more than it could deliver, led to almost chronic instability and challenges to authority from the Levellers of the seventeenth century to the insurgents of 1776 and into the early years of the republic and antebellum era.
In the hands of a less skilful historian, this reading of such diverse events and movements might be too episodic, and unconvincing. But Formisano turns this diversity into a virtue, and does it so well because of the level and wealth of detail he has compiled on each movement. Drawing from an extensive array of secondary sources, and his own research, Formisano makes a convincing case that the main causes of seemingly one-issue rebellions were often much more deep-rooted than antagonistic contemporaries liked to admit, and that they were linked by a concern over who had the right to speak for ‘the people’. Most often, events such as the so-called ‘Whiskey Rebellion’ were about local communities defending themselves against what they saw as threats to their autonomy, political rights or economic security by an increasingly centralized and more powerful federal government. They simply demanded what had been demanded in 1776 – a greater say and accountability in their governance. Participants in these movements were much more numerous, too, than their political opponents charged. In reminding us of this, Formisano provides another timely reminder that it is the winners who get to write history – and that they preferred to monopolize the memory of the Revolution, and isolate and marginalize any dissent.
In the end, by making these kinds of connections, Formisano has also made a major contribution to our understanding of how populist movements changed over time. In the Revolutionary era, he argues, many Americans assumed the right of the people to ‘regulate’ their rulers – by watching, monitoring, petitioning, remonstrating and acting, sometimes extra-legally, sometimes violently – to restore the balance between themselves and their representatives. By the 1850s, such ideas had ‘weakened’ (196), as the rise of party politics changed the political context for such actions and ‘diminished the capacity and willingness’ of many Americans to act on a belief in popular sovereignty. New populist movements thus began to take different forms and employ different strategies, as most would now attempt to work through the political system and ballot box, although not necessarily through either of the two main political parties.
Finally, in tracing this process, Formisano has also succeeded in rescuing populist movements from the distortions of contemporary opponents as well as the misunderstandings of later historians. Indeed, many previous interpretations of the insurgencies and movements he covers have often incorporated ingredients of the self-serving constructions that their contemporary opponents imposed on them. One only has to think of Shays' Rebellion to agree with Formisano's argument that these imposed frameworks obviously benefited the populists' adversaries and gave them political and social advantage, as well as ‘the ideological upper hand in the short and the long run’ (214). In taking these movements seriously, examining them in meticulous detail with neither idealizing nor demonizing lenses, and tracing their influence on the politics of the new nation, Formisano has made it clear that the stories of these populist movements have to be moved from the margins of American history and put firmly at its core.