Populism

THE ECONOMY OF POPULISM

To emphasize the sins of populism—its nativism, its temptation to anti-Semitism in deploring the power of the "money interests" and intellectuals—displaces to the point of denying the economic conditions that gave rise to the Populist Party. After the Civil War, increased production of grains and silver drove commodity prices down and made it increasingly difficult for tenant farmers to make loan payments. In response, self-help farmers' cooperatives advocated (among other things) government control of railroads and a graduated income tax.

Two Hollywood genres depict economic issues relevant to Populism, both associated chiefly with the American 1930s. One is the western, in which banks and railroads and land disputes—many of them historically contemporary with the rise of Populism—come under repeated scrutiny. Though scholarship of the early twenty-first century on 1930s B-westerns points to the conflation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century time cues (cow ponies, motor cars) as confirming the link between the economics of Populism and those of the "Popular Front" New Deal, the best known Populist western is John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), wherein a well-fed frontier banker absconds with a recently received payroll and spouts Hooverite slogans ("The government must not interfere with business") while complaining about bank examiners to his fellow passengers.

Another western often associated with Populism is Jesse James (Henry King, 1939); what sets Jesse on the path to outlawry is the railroad's strong-arm attempt to take over the family farm, resulting in his mother's death, which Jesse repays by sticking up the railroad, and a bank or two for good measure. Later westerns evoking the rural crises that led to the farmers' revolt of the 1880s and 1890s include Shane (George Stevens, 1953) and Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). A resonant instance of this tradition is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), in which William Devane's politically ambitious lawyer invokes William Jennings Bryan, the Populist (and Democratic) Party's 1896 presidential candidate, by way of encouraging McCabe (Warren Beatty) to stand fast against Wild-West corporate thuggery ("McCabe strikes a blow for the little man").

A second strain of movie Populism linked to the 1930s involves films that treat Depression-era agricultural dilemmas directly. Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, 1934) literally depicts an agricultural cooperative, as a city couple organizes other down-and-outs to help work the land they are (effectively) tenanting. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town features a whole army of dispossessed farmers, who see Longfellow's homestead giveaway scheme as their last chance. The "Kansas" portions of The Wizard of Oz evoke Depression-era agricultural anxieties. Ford's Tobacco Road (1941) depicts an almost surreal clan of Georgia farmers who are saved from eviction when the cash-strapped landlord himself pays the banker to let them stay for one more crop. The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945) similarly delineates the plight of field hands who turn to tenant farming to improve their lot.

Pride of place in this tradition obviously goes to Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), one of Hollywood's most radical examinations of the kind of agricultural tragedy—narratively the result of "dust bowl" weather but visually the fault of a bank and its Eisensteinian bulldozer—that drove farmers in the 1880s and 1890s to organize. The tradition continues in later films— Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974)—where Depression-era outlawry is sympathetically linked to economic hardship and dispossession. And the agricultural iconography on view in Our Daily Bread is repeated in "Farm Crisis" movies of the 1980s, Country (Richard Pearce, 1984), The River (Mark Rydell, 1984), and Places in the Heart (Robert Benton, 1984), the last of which is also set in the 1930s.