When I was a college student in the late 1960s, the most popular US history courses were the ones that covered the Gilded Age. They promised to illuminate the origins of urgent contemporary problems. Their canvas was broad and filled with...
Blaming Wall Street for the nation’s economic woes is not a new...
Grover Cleveland was elected the twenty-fourth president of the United States thanks in part to a third party movement—the Populists—that siphoned off some of the strength of the Republican Party, and by a vigorous campaign against the extravagance of the Republican “Billion Dollar Congress.” But his second term would be ruined by the economic depression of the mid-1890s, the worst economic crisis that the country had ever seen. Insisting on sound money, in his second term Cleveland would seek to keep the country on the gold standard and...
William Allen White’s anti-Populist editorial, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” appeared.
In the presidential election of 1896, Republican William McKinley defeated populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan to win the executive office.
William Peffer of Kansas became the first Populist to be elected to the United States Senate.
The Populist Party (or People’s Party of America) held its first convention in Omaha, Nebraska, and ratified the Omaha Platform documenting the tenets of the party.
Ohio Populist Jacob S. Coxey led unemployed workers in a march to Washington, DC, to call on Congress to create public-works jobs.
At the Democratic National Convention, Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan delivered his “Cross of Gold” speech and was nominated for president. Populism had helped transform the Democratic Party and lift Bryan to become the first major candidate from west of the Mississippi, though he did not win the election.
L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published. Many read the book as an allegory of the populist movement, though Baum denied that the subtext was intentional.