This book explores those who long for “bygone utopias,” times before rapid, culturally destructive social change stripped individuals of their perceived agency. The case of the wave of foreclosure protests that swept through the rural American Midwest during the 1930s illustrates these themes. These actions embodied a utopian understanding of agrarian society that had largely disappeared by the late 19th century: hundreds to thousands of people fixed public auctions of foreclosed farms, returning owners’ property and giving them a second chance to save their farm. Comparisons to later movements, including the National Farmers’ Organization and the protests surrounding the 1980s Farm Crisis highlight the importance of culturally catastrophic social change occurring at a breakneck pace in fomenting these types of bygone utopian actions. These activists and movements should cause scholars to re-think what it means to be conservative and how we view conservatism, helping us better understand why we’re seeing a contemporary resurgence in nationalist and reactionary movements across the globe.

When it comes to explaining the origins of electoral populism in the United States, we often look to the characteristics and conditions of voters, overlooking the reasons why populist candidates emerge in the first place. In The Making of the Populist Movement, Adam Slez argues that the rise of electoral populism in the American West was a strategic response to a political environment in which the configuration of positions was literally locked in place, precluding the success of new contenders or otherwise marginal competitors. Combining traditional forms of historical inquiry with innovations in network analysis and spatial statistics, he shows how the expansion of state and market drove the push for market regulation in southern Dakota, where an insurgent farmers' movement looked to third-party alternatives as a means of affecting change. In the context of western settlement, the struggle for political power was synonymous with the struggle for position in an emerging urban hierarchy. As inequities in the spatial distribution of resources became more pronounced, appeals to agrarian populism became a powerful political tool with which to wage partisan war. Offering a fresh take on the origins of electoral populism in the United States, The Making of the Populist Movement contributes to our understanding of political action by explicitly linking the evolution of the political field to the transformation of physical space through concerted action on the part of elites.

The grass-roots Populist movement that swept rural America a century ago drew millions of farm men and women and clusters of non-farmers into a powerful crusade to reshape the nation's political economy. Populists sought to usher in a "cooperative commonwealth" to reverse the growth of America's monopoly capitalism and harness the engine of private ownership for the common good. Thus, Populism became a bridge between the nineteenth-century traditions of republicanism and producerism and the regulatory state of this century. McMath crisply interprets the development of the Populist crusade from its early beginnings in the turbulent 1870s to the emergence of the Farmers' Alliances a decade later. He deals with the founding of the People's (Populist) Party in 1892, and its ultimate demise. He describes Populism's important regional components, and he places the crusade in a larger context as he compares it to parallel movements in the Great Plains and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. American Populism is an impressive book about a major social, cultural, and political movement.

Significant as a political, economic, and social organization, the southern Farmers' Alliance was the largest and most influential farmers' organization in the history of the United States until the rise of the American Farm Bureau Federation. McMath suggests that the ideas advanced by the People's party in the 1890s had been incubated within the alliance and that the shared experience of 1.5 million rural Americans helped give those ideas power in the Populist crusade. Originally published 1976. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Outlines the Department's organizational development and its response to changing conditions - national and international, scientific and economic. Appendix includes biographies of officials, a chronology of major events in USDA, etc.