The Second Gilded Age
It is almost impossible to over-state the similarities between the First Gilded Age (the 1880s through 1920s) and the current one, so-named by US historian Thomas Sugrue (1991-present). By the 1920s, the wealth gap between rich and poor was the largest in human history. More women were in work outside the home than ever before. The continued growth of the economy was predicated ballooning consumer debt and stock market speculation.
Cross-dressing was really trendy and progressives were very excited about voluntary, incentive-based eugenics, whereby governments and civil society organizations encouraged homosexuals, the mentally ill and indigenous people to get themselves sterilized. And there was a massive public controversy over whether women should have their own sex-segregated competitive sports.
Authoritarian movements of both the left and right were on the rise while the sheen seemed to have come off good old fashioned democracy. And working people were paying for nearly everything on instalment plans that never seemed to end. But they appeared unable to bridge racial, sectional and rural-urban divisions to form a viable political coalition to reverse their immiseration.
Of course, that was the terminal phase of the First Gilded Age. And, of course, history does not repeat. It only rhymes. But you must admit, this seems a pretty catchy rhyme, as history rhymes go.
Free Soilers, the First Producerists and the Wizard of Oz
And yet, there is one area of comparison, one set of obvious parallels that commentators comparing First Gilded Age to the second seem to avoid: the Producerist movements. It is strange how the producerists have been excised from our social memory and political history, despite them having had a huge political impact which left many traces, chief among which is the Wizard of Oz, originally written not as a children’s pulp novel (this genre was just in the process of being born) but as a political satire of the 1896 US presidential election.
Dorothy, the novel’s main character, begins her story in Kansas, the crucible of American producerism. Kansas, a state founded on a prior movement with similar grievances and a similar constituency, the Free Soil movement, was a natural seedbed. Free Soilers were yeoman farmers of staple goods, especially maize. Despite working hard on their family farms every year and churning out a lot of food for the rest of America, it seemed that they could never get ahead. The costs of getting their food to market, via sternwheelers, canals and railways often left little money in their pockets.
Meanwhile, Down South, it seemed that the rich slave-holding land-owners, despite being soft-palmed and idle, were making money hand over fist. So, Free Soilers, like Abraham Lincoln, argued that the economy was being skewed by railway companies, milling concerns and other corporations, in cahoots with Washington’s political elites. This force they called “slave power” and they primary interest in bringing down slavery was not humanitarian concern for the slaves but the desire to alleviate the poverty in their own communities.
And yet, following the abolition of slavery, matters only seemed to get worse. None of the money Ulysses Grant’s administration handed the railway companies ever seemed to trickle down to the farmers and reduce the costs of shipping their products to market. Indeed, the railway boom drove canal and river boat companies out of business in many cases and consolidated railways into an increasingly small group of ever-larger corporations.
So, some of the farmers who remained unhappy with their lot began to embark on new political analyses and new political projects. They broadened their optic and began to see that it had not been the planter class but rather the whole national business elite: rail, finance, shipping, manufacturing that were against them. As in the Second Gilded Age, the First Gilded Age was characterized by rapid horizontal (i.e. firms doing the same kind of business merging) and vertical (i.e. firms that fed into each other’s supply chains e.g. iron, coal and auto manufacturing) integration. Business in the US was rapidly consolidating, merging into things called “rings,” “trusts” and “combinations.”
The little guy was being squeezed out, a feeling that intensified as new agricultural industries, like the sugar beet sector, began snapping up the land of economically marginal independent farmers and consolidating land into plantation-like operations, worked, in the southwest, by Hispanic debt peons and in the southeast by black sharecroppers. The banks clearly colluded in this process and then rail companies built special spur lines to these new latifundia.
The first political response was the Greenback Party, which ran candidates in the three presidential elections of the 1880s on a platform of breaking the power of the banks through something we today call “cryptocurrency.” The thinking was that the power of the vast conglomerates and the growing financial sector could be broken through the issuance of a new currency that was not pegged to gold.
The Greenbackers soon began electing members to the US House of Representatives and local town councilors, not just in farming communities but in the new single-industry mining towns that were popping up all over the West. The incipient industrial union movement in organizations like the Knights of Labour began drawing close to this coalition in the mill and mining towns of the West opened by massive rail development, and fueled by commodity rushes and booms like the Dakota gold rushes.
Like the farmers, the miners, loggers and mill workers of the West saw themselves as the true creators of America’s wealth, those whose hands transformed the country’s natural capital into the things that materially sustained its people. And they too lived at the whim of instalment plans, catalogue store monopolies, banks and railways, eking out a meagre existence while the wealth generated by their toil somehow vanished.
The Greenbackers and their successor party, the Populists, were not anti-capitalist. Rather, they believed that capitalism was being sabotaged by powerful business and government elites that colluded to rig the system against hard-working producers. In the 1892 presidential election, the Populists won Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota and Colorado but their biggest haul of electoral votes came from Kansas, pulling in 9% of the popular vote. The party also elected eleven members to the House of Representatives.
Major civic organizations backed the party, the Grange, a federation of farmers’ cooperatives and the Knights of Labour, a Christian proto-trade union that, like the Grange, was more interested in restoring the spirit of Adam Smith’s capitalism than upending it.
Yet for all the deregulation of the financial sector and trust busting producerists called for, the movement, from its inception, also pushed for socialization of the railways, the electrical grid and the education system, not out of an incipient or nascent socialism but because populists saw these things as necessary foundations for a level playing field in the marketplace.
The Road to the Emerald City
What the Populists could not do, it seemed, was break out of their core geographic region. After four elections, their party had been unable to make a dent in the political duopoly that dominated the East Coast and Midwest. Despite the Populists having moderated their policy from pure crypto currency to a position called “bimetallism,” which proposed to peg the dollar to both gold and silver, and despite there being widespread support in all regions of the country and within both major parties for bimetallism, the leaders of both major parties resolutely backed the gold standard, a position that had become synonymous with the elite policy consensus of the duopoly on a host of issues.
Naturally, then, as Dorothy arrives in Oz, concurrently afflicted by the wicked witches variously representing natural disasters and economic downturns, she realizes that her only hope is to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, Baum’s allegory of the gold-paved path to Washington.
En route, Dorothy gains the support of the Scarecrow, the personification of the Populist Party’s base, the maize farmers of the Great Plains, big-hearted but lacking in political savvy. While she personally wins over the Tin Man, who represents the industrial working class of the Northeast, he is never convinced of the project of the Scarecrow, or the Cowardly Lion, the representation of William Jennings Bryan’s insurgent entryist politics, about whose ultimate failure the Wizard of Oz was written.
Entryism Then and Now
Disappointed by inability of the Populist Party to crack 10% or break out of its core region, some producerists had begun to favour political entryism as a strategy after the disappointment of 1892.
Entryism is a political strategy we tend to associate with twentieth- and twenty-first century Marxists. The idea is that a radical group slowly, stealthily joins a more mainstream organization and gradually accumulates influence therein before fully uncloaking as a group conducting a take-over for the purpose of radically realigning the organization. Most recently, Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in the British Labour Party were accused of being a coalition of far-left anti-Semitic extremists organized by the group Momentum, who had stealthily joined the party to radically change its trajectory. Similar accusations were leveled at the Dogwood Initiative and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in their effort to realign the BC New Democratic Party’s fossil fuel policies through the insurgent leadership campaign of Anjali Appadurai.
Irrespective of the veracity of the specific accusations in the present, entryism is something we today associate with educated, urban environmentalists and socialists but, arguably, the most successful act of political entryism in the Anglosphere was Bryan’s seizure of the Democratic Party.
Bryan and the populists traveled to Chicago without his candidacy having been declared, riding a wave of general dissatisfaction with the pro-establishment, conservative policies of their incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, a strong supporter of the gold standard. With Cleveland’s potential successors trying to sort out just how much of their party’s legacy to wear and how much to repudiate, the entryists staged a floor vote on bimetallism which they won handily and which gave Bryan the opportunity to deliver one of the most famous pieces of American political oratory, the “Cross of Gold” speech, which he compared America’s farmers and labourers to Christ himself, arguing that they were being crucified by the banks and big business on a “Cross of Gold.”
And he won the presidential nomination on its strength, only having declared his candidacy moments before.
Bryan began the transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of the working man and the small holder with his presidential runs in 1896 and 1900 but his campaigns received a fraction of the financial support Cleveland’s did, as the banks and major industries had no use for a candidate that repeatedly denounced them, often by name. At one point, Bryan even named JP Morgan in a Democratic Party convention resolution, proposing the expulsion of any Democratic who took money from him or any of the nation’s other influential plutocrats.
Bryan did not just campaign to break the power of the banks and major industries; he also opposed American imperialism, Baum’s decision to represent him as the Cowardly Lion coming from the media attacks he sustained for joining Mark Twain and other early peace movement figures in opposing America’s invasion of the Philippines.
Bryan’s movement, which continued to hold significant sway in the Democratic Party, ultimately helped to shape the New Deal of the 1930s, was not informed by Marxism or any other explicitly socialist ideology. Rather it comprised rural labourers and farmers who believed the only way to get a square deal under capitalism was to bridle the power of big business.
Producerism in Canada
While Canada’s more conservative political culture enabled producerists to enjoy a comfortable home in the Liberal Party, the perpetual opposition in nineteenth-century Canada, this began to change with the election of the Wilfrid Laurier government, which began the party’s century-long project of alienating its original rural Western base. Following Laurier’s fall and the upheavals caused by the First World War and botched demobilization programs, there was a rapid radicalization of the Canadian producerists, which yielded dramatic post-war political changes.
Out of nowhere, it seemed, the United Farmers of Alberta swept the province’s farming communities and formed a majority government in 1921. Meanwhile, the province’s slow-growing Labour Party had split into pro- and anti-Marxist factions. The anti-Marxist faction won seats in Edmonton and entered the legislature as allies of the United Farmers, based on a shared producerist ethos, one that sought to bridle the greed of the banks, the railways and the subsidized manufacturing interests of Central Canada. The Farmer-Labour alliance remained in power for the next fourteen years.
The same year, at the national level, a producerist party, calling itself the Progressives, swept the West, from Vancouver Island to James Bay in the 1921 federal election, consigning the Conservative Party to third place and holding the Liberal Party to a minority. Allied with this mix of labourers and farmers was a more radical group, the Independent Labour Party, led by a key figure in the Winnipeg General Strike, JS Woodsworth.
Without strong leadership or a coherent program, Canada’s producerist parties gradually declined, primarily because they had thought little about reasonable policy prescriptions that could actually restructure the economy along the lines of the supporters’ class interests. And so, after forming a single provincial government in Ontario, the party was slowly reabsorbed into the Liberals and Conservatives.
Western Producerism and the Rise of the CCF
In the West, however, the decline of the producerists was more complex. The more urban, secular and socialistic labour factions of the parties and the more religious, rural and free market factions increasingly drifted apart, giving birth, in the 1930s, to the two regional political parties that dominated Canada’s three Western provinces: the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and Social Credit.
It must be understood, then, that while socialists like JS Woodsworth, Tommy Douglas and Major Coldwell were highly effective in recruiting not just labourers but farmers to the CCF, the party’s rank and file members and most of its elected representatives were not bespectacled readers of Marx and Engels but farmers and workers animated by the producerist ethos, the idea that industries like banking, electricity and rail should be socialized so that individual workers and farmer could get a fair shake financing their family businesses, keeping the lights on and getting the products of their hard labour to market.
That is why, when Canada elected its first CCF government in Saskatchewan, this was only possible because Saskatchewan was the least urban province in Canada, allowing Douglas and his producerist coalition to be swept into office, despite losing the province’s two main cities.
It is also useful to remember that during his seventeen years as premier, Douglas never introduced Medicare. The universal social programs his government delivered were a universally accessible electrical grid and highway system. It would be his successor, Woodrow Lloyd, who would fall on his sword over Medicare in 1961.
Today’s Producerists
Well, folks, it’s 2024 and the producerists are back. Farmers, truckers and rural industrial workers, the core of the original producerist coalitions of the US and Canada have returned, not just in Canada but throughout Europe. Big rigs and tractors are blocking highways from Berlin to Nanaimo, raising a host of grievances shared by the classes that raise our food, drill our oil, mine our coal, deliver our goods, etc. I do not agree with all of the demands of today’s producerists, nor is their coalition any more coherent or cohesive than the first producerist coalitions were.
But it is they, not the laptop class of soft-palmed urbanites looking down on them who are organizing the big anti-government rallies and anti-war demonstrations. They are the ones denouncing the big banks, the legacy media, the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industry.
Just like the producerists who won the 1944 Saskatchewan election, the 1919 Ontario election and the 1921 Alberta election, they are being demonized, smeared and belittled as hicks and hayseeds, sources of ignorance, pestilence and disorder, in many cases by the successors to the very party they founded in Calgary in 1931, the CCF. They’re even being smeared with an accusation that was already tired in 1944, that they are dupes and stooges of a foreign strongman in Moscow and not just ordinary, decent people who want a fair shake out of this economy, however unrealistic that dream might be.
But maybe that message is starting to get through now that we see their demonization grow ever more extravagant, as terrorists, Klansmen and Nazis. Anything, I guess, to distract us from the man behind the curtain.
