On Wed, November 18, 1998 at 14:31:28 I wrote:
>...
>Another interesting book is Marion K. Barthelme (ed.), *Women in the
>Texas Populist Movement: Letters to the Southern Mercury* (Texas A&M
>University Press, 1997).
The *Southern Mercury*, a Dallas-based Texas Populist weekly, was
published (under different names), between 1884 and 1907. Costing one
dollar per year, it had a peak circulation in 1892 of between 26 and
30 thousand.
Women's letters to the *Mercury* were largely (though not entirely)
segregated from men's to one page (usually the second), under various
headings ("The Ladies Department", "The Family", "The Woman's Column",
"Our Household").
One letter in particular speaks to Ellen's concern of "learn[ing] how
to live in a democracy", though I think the most important task ---
the one the Populists were undertaking --- is to learn to build
democracy that does not yet exist as we struggle for it.
September 11, 1888. Weimar. P.
"The Farmer In Politics"
Whenever a farmer utters one protest against his wrongs or
attempts in any way to clear his garments from the mud with which
the privileged class have so ruthlessly bespattered him, you hear
something like the following: "The farmers are running into
politics; there never was an association of farmers that was not
broken up by political aspirants. The average farmer is easily
fooled, and is so unsuspecting that he is drawn into the
political net before he knows it. The Grange and the Alliance all
die of the same thing."
Now, what is the same thing? ... It is to be hoped that no
reasonable being, no thinking mind belonging to the laboring
class which desires to be a competent judge in its own behalf ...
can be so hoodwinked. Trust companies, cotton monopolies and
other varied monopolistic tyrannies might tell us, if they would,
who forges the chains that so manacle these bodies that they die
of inertia. Are not these combinations fostered by our
government? We may be fools and unsuspecting, but we are not such
fools as not to see the rottenness of a government that is
scorching us to death by the sirocco breath of class legislation.
Pray, who is to grapple with and strangle to death these thieving
combinations of power? If farmers and other laboring classes do
not?
Yes, of course the farmer is running into politics.... Who has a
better right to find out what is the matter with this political
net than they who are being strangled to death in its intricate
meshes? Have we not a right to know why they who toil not, are
clothed in purple and fine linen, whilst the toilers scarcely
know sometimes whether they will be clothed at all....
Every organization that has for its object the good of the
laboring class may die, crushed beneath the mighty monopolies,
which say, you shall not live: for it depends upon the laborer to
show the monster tyrant that he will live, or to his funeral pyre
light a torch....
General Lee is said to have given as the cause of the failure of
the confederacy, "That the southern people were not half in
earnest." If the Alliance fails, it will be from the same cause;
not sufficiently in earnest to walk boldly into the strife of the
politician and strike left and right until the last armed foe
expires....
---Marion K. Barthelme (ed.), *Women in the Texas Populist
Movement: Letters to the _Southern Mercury_* (Texas A&M University
Press: 1997, pp. 174-5).
One final note: If I remember correctly, when the economic upturn(s)
came about, many Populist newspapers dropped out of the struggle, as
those running them were typically the upper-crust of the Populists,
and they were the first to ride the crest upward. Having a greatly
diminished need for agitation, they left the Populist movement without
a strong voice.
Bill
