Populism and Racism

We often think of the typical segregationist politician of yore as a genteel member of the white upper crust. But the more common mode was the fiery populist.

(The South’s Lesson for the Tea Party, Curtis Wilkie, New York Times, Aug. 12, 2014)

Is any of that true? To begin with, most liberals and Democrats think of the typical segregationist politician as rabble-rousing hillbilly trailer trash. And second, were populists more prominent in Southern racism than the genteel elite?

The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 and the Tulsa / Greenwood massacre of 1921, two of the bloodiest massacres in white supremacist history, were led respectively by Josephus Daniels (Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy and Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Mexico) and Tate Brady (one of Tulsa’s founders and a Democratic National Committeeman).

And while there were unquestionably populist-style bigots, there were also populist-style anti-bigots: Ralph Yarborough, Estes Kefauver, and Huey Long (who incidentally was Huey Newton’s namesake). Even LBJ was called a populist by elite liberals.

As far as I can tell, after 1896 everyone was racist, including the Republicans. (Another instigator of the Tulsa riot, which killed at least a hundred people and probably many more, was Richard Lloyd Jones, a progressive Republican). The Wilmington Insurrection overthrew the legally elected, mixed-race Republican government of Wilmington, N.C., and along with it the N.C. Populist Party. (Ben Tillman, another leader of the insurrection, was populist “in style”, but a loyal anti-Populist Democrat).

The 1896 Republican platform made no mention of voting rights in the South, so it wasn’t completely surprising when President McKinley did not respond to the insurrection. My guess is that for him the destruction of the actual Populist Party made the illegal, violent overthrow of a Republican mayor an unimportant consideration.

McDaniel and dozens of elected officials across the South are very much the descendants of not only Wallace and Faubus, but Tillman and Watson.

(Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns, and Money).

And Josephus Daniels, Tate Brady, Richard Lloyd Jones, and tacitly, William McKinley.

Avinash Tyagi Says:

May 28, 2021 at 10:22 am

You’re conflating terms such as populism and populism in style with racist rhetoric, without defining terms or understanding concepts.

Basically you’re using words you don’t understand.

Populism is attempting to unify the people against the elites along class based lines as illustrated by the People’s party of the late 29th century.

Populism was basically created by the People’s party, and for it’s time, it was the least racist of the parties, in fact it tried to unify the working class whites and blacks.

What racists in the South tried to promote was “white solidarity”, this was an attempt to use race as a wedge against populism.

What you have conflated is the idea that racist wedge issues are populist in style, no that is false, since they are wielded by elites to divide the people, they are not populist at all.

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