I Was a Revolutionary (17 page)

Tonight there's a story about a massive Tea Party rally in Washington against the expansion of health care. He actually has heard about this, thanks to good ole Dad's middle-age flirtation with libertarianism, his father's love-hate relationship with the Republican mainstream. Sitting on the coffee table next to a half-empty Sunny D is the legal pad he took notes on today. He picks it up and begins to doodle absentmindedly as he listens to the TV. It's strange when the newscaster uses the term
populist movement
in reference to the Tea Party, these people whose rage seems both real and subsidized by billionaires. They are the complete opposite of the Populist Movement the Assistant has spent the day researching that wanted to use government to help the rural and urban working poor at the expense of the rich and corporations. These small-
p
populists seem to want to destroy government to protect Big Business at their own expense. Oh, and personal freedom, that's a big deal for them. From their cold dead hands or something. No, that's guns, which is also apparently about personal freedom, so maybe it is the same thing. He's heard all the Tea Party talking points from his dad, and the Assistant listens quietly, not bothering to voice suspicion of his freedom to be uninsured, that opportunity to accrue massive and insurmountable poverty-trapping debt in future visits to the ER if he so chooses—second only perhaps to the poor's sacred freedom to starve.

Actually, once he didn't listen quietly. Once this summer, in fact, when his mother had just come home from the hospital and his father was ranting at clips of the president on TV, the Assistant said, “What about Mom? What if she didn't have insurance? What if you all had to take on the debt of her surgeries and treatment and medication?”

“You leave Mom out of this,” his father had said. “Don't you dare make this personal.” And then Dad went ahead and made it very personal: “Say we actually had national health care. Do you know what would have happened if Mom didn't have surgery right away? If she had to wait weeks or months in line behind others?”

They'd caught the disease early, but it was an aggressive form, and his dad had taken her to Kansas City immediately, to the best treatment center in the region. While his father did not analogize the situation to those new barroom jukeboxes he'd seen in some of the bars near campus whereby one can pay more money to cut to the front of the song queue, the Assistant's mind went there immediately. No, there was no mention of line-cutting, let alone the fifty million people not even allowed to wait in line at present, and yet the terrible thought of Mom languishing there as the disease consumed her insides did penetrate the Assistant like a lance through the chest. Mom. The Assistant sets the legal pad aside and thinks of calling home, but the clock on top of the TV that he's never properly reset after last month's power outage says it's 3:17 p.m., which means it's 10:32 p.m., much too late to phone.

The next morning the Assistant makes his way back to the library. Still half-asleep, he notices clusters of purple-and-white-clad students staggering around campus. One young man is literally army-crawling across the quad in purple overalls. What is going on? There's something of a zombie apoca
lypse about the scene. Maybe this is a dream. But then it hits him: home football game! The Assistant has never been up early enough on a Saturday to actually witness this, but here he is in the midst of ritual. In Manhattan, Kansas, two things are sacrosanct: football and farming.

The library has just opened and the Assistant figures the Historian might already be in the war room, but when he arrives at the fifth-floor conference room he finds someone else there: a young female student sitting at the head of the table before her laptop, wearing headphones and giggling. She has on pink sweatpants tucked into furry winter boots as well as a men's undershirt, as if the bottom half of her were prepared for winter while the top was still summering. Oh
hell
no, he thinks. He stands in the doorway until she looks up from the computer screen to take notice of him. He switches his messenger bag from one shoulder to the other, meaning: Do you know who the fuck I am? She goes back to watching her dumb show or dumb movie or whatever the hell it is she's watching, but the Assistant just stands there glowering until finally, vanquished, she rises, unplugs her power cable from the wall and brushes past him, refusing to close the laptop, which she bumbles awkwardly as she relocates to a common area down the hall. The girl is rail thin, but the seat of her sweatpants says
Juicy
in cursive, which is strange, but also better than having
Fat Ass
written across your butt, whatever its actual size, he concedes.

When the Historian arrives, the Assistant wants to tell her how he defended her honor, or protected their turf, or drew a line in the sand, but can't find the right bromide and lets it go. They've got work to do anyway. She's dropped the sexy-fierce pantsuit of yesterday in favor of snug blue jeans and a well-worn Liz Phair concert tee from the early nineties, which
is sexy in its own way. Sexy-casual. He wants to ask how her walk home was yesterday evening, whether the idea came to her, but he can see she's agitated and there's little time to waste with pleasantries.

“You're on secondary sources today,” she says.

“Okay.”

“You can start here.” She motions toward The Bag, which somehow seems to have put on a few lbs. since yesterday.

“Okay.”

“But you might also run a search, check the databases, and see if anything interesting turns up.”

“Okay.”

Her directives still sound a little like “Go walk around for several hours and write down everything you see,” but he'll do his best. The Historian unloads books from The Bag and pushes the stack across the table slowly toward him. The books at the top skirt the edge, about to fall, but stop, leaning precariously, as if held there by some unseen wad of chewing gum. A biblio-Pisa. He decides he'll work in a carrel near the computers and takes the books low into his arms and clamps his chin on the top to steady them for the hazardous walk down the hall. “We'll meet up later and see where we stand,” the Historian calls after him, a command the Assistant can acknowledge only with the slightest turn of his head.

Kansas was probably the most radical state in the Union in the 1890s, and leftwing efforts continued there for decades.

—
WILLIAM C. PRATT
, “
HISTORIANS AND THE LOST WORLD OF KANSAS RADICALISM
,” 2008

The Populists in Kansas, however, were never successful in uniting the rural with the urban political elements. . . . The
agrarians, in their struggles against bankers, railroads, mercantile interests, and sound money men, held little appeal to the average urban workers who confronted quite different problems and adversaries. . . . The Populists, however, left a good legacy of labor legislation despite workers failing to reciprocate with political support for agrarians.

—
R
.
ALTON LEE
,
FARMERS VS
.
WAGE EARNERS
:
ORGANIZED LABOR IN KANSAS
, 1860–1960
, 2005

Parry, parry. Riposte:

Populism was never just a farmers' movement, even in its earliest stages, and agrarian radicalism always encompassed more than just farmers whether they be “subsistence yeomen” or “petty producers.” And I do not think farmers would have accomplished nearly as much as they did had the movement been limited to farmers from the beginning.

—
O
.
GENE CLANTON
,
A COMMON HUMANITY
:
KANSAS POPULISM AND THE BATTLE FOR JUSTICE AND EQUALITY
, 1854–1903
, 2004

The Assistant's carrel is overrun with small, variously colored sticky tabs that he uses to note passages the Historian might find helpful. He discovers a yellow tab affixed to his coffee cup. Mysteriously, too, one on a neighboring chair. Colored red.

In their struggle, Populists learned a great truth: cultures are hard to change. Their attempt to do so, however, provides a measure of the seriousness of their movement. Populism thus cannot be seen as a moment of triumph, but as a moment of democratic promise. It was a spirit of egalitarian hope, expressed in the actions of two million beings—not
in the prose of a platform, however creative, and not, ultimately, even in the third party, but in a self-generated culture of collective dignity and individual longing. As a movement of people, it was expansive, passionate, flawed, creative—above all, enhancing in its assertion of human striving. That was Populism in the nineteenth century.

—
LAWRENCE GOODWYN
,
THE POPULIST MOMENT
:
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE AGRARIAN REVOLT IN AMERICA
, 1978

The interpretative volleying of historians. The Assistant recalls his father's fondness for saying that opinions are like assholes: everyone's got one.

The interpretations of Populism have run a considerable gamut. John Hicks's
Populist Revolt
(1931) saw it as interest-group politics using popular control of the government and government action to regulate corporations and political conspiracy. Chester Destler in his 1946 account de-emphasized the regional aspects and saw the People's Party as part and parcel of long-held radical beliefs on natural rights. . . . Robert McMath, in
American Populism
:
A Social History
(1993), emphasized that Populism was especially strong in Kansas because the mainstream party response to farm problems was ridicule and intransigence. Had there been some bend in the Republican establishment, perhaps there need not have been such a fracture. Worth Robert Miller has found the picture still not orderly after one hundred years of analysis. . . . The movement does not fit neatly into a standard ideological category. Miller concluded, “It was a thoroughly American, nonsocialist, anticapitalist movement that called for enough change in
the institutions of land, transportation, and money to be considered moderately radical.”

—
CRAIG MINER
,
KANSAS:
THE HISTORY OF THE SUNFLOWER STATE
: 1854–2000
, 2002

He wonders what angle the Historian will take.

The Assistant, spitballing: Populists as some kind of anti-agribusiness/sustainable-farming avant-garde? Possible title:
Organic Revolution
.

A study of populist outrage: the People's Party and the Tea Party? Possible title:
Grassroots vs. Corporate Roots
.

Then the Assistant comes across this:

The grievances and solutions articulated by the People's Party have been the source of much historiographical conflict. In the 1950s Richard Hofstadter portrayed the Populists as an assortment of angry, reactionary rustics, dreaming of preindustrial times rather than facing the permanence of recent changes. Others found the Populists a far-sighted group of reformers concerned with America's industrial future.

—
THOMAS FRANK
, “
THE LEVIATHAN WITH TENTACLES OF STEEL: RAILROADS IN THE MINDS OF KANSAS POPULISTS
,” 1989

Which rings a bell from earlier research.
Hofstadter
, the name keeps coming up. The Assistant scans the H columns of the indexes in the books on his desk.

Hofstadter was no specialist on Populism, but his treatment in this book changed the direction of scholarship on the topic. No other account had such an impact on the study of
farm movements. He explored the darker side of populism, focusing on its illiberal tendencies. In his eyes, Populists indulged in conspiratorial thinking, nativism, and anti-Semitism.
The Age of Reform
won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1956 and, to this day, is acknowledged by many as one of the most influential works by a post–World War II historian.

—
WILLIAM C. PRATT
, “
HISTORIANS AND THE LOST WORLD OF KANSAS RADICALISM
,” 2008

The Assistant fancies himself old school, still favoring the book-as-object that one can touch and smell, and in which one can underline and spill coffee. But in 2010 the writing, so to speak, is on the wall, and he wonders how long before he will capitulate and buy a goddamn e-reader. A menacing gloom overtakes the Assistant as he searches the stacks to find a copy of Hofstadter's book, already missing these last precious days before everything is finally digitized.

The Populists looked backward with longing to the lost agrarian Eden, to the republican America of the early years of the nineteenth century in which there were few millionaires and, as they saw it, no beggars, when labor had excellent prospects and the farmer had abundance, when statesmen still responded to the will of the people and there was no such thing as the money power. What they meant—though they did not express themselves in such terms—was that they would like to restore the conditions prevailing before the development of industrialism and the commercialization of agriculture. . . . In Populist thought the farmer is not a speculating businessman, victimized by the risk economy of which he is a part, but rather a
wounded yeoman, preyed upon by those who are alien to the life of folkish virtue.

—
RICHARD HOFSTADTER
,
THE AGE OF REFORM
, 1955

The Library of Googlexandria.

In the books that have been written about the Populist movement, only passing mention has been made of its significant provincialism; little has been said of its relations with nativism and nationalism; nothing has been said of its tincture of anti-Semitism.

—
RICHARD HOFSTADTER
,
THE AGE OF REFORM
, 1955

The Age of Reform
serves up a pupu platter of vitriol and condescension that spurs the Assistant to write
cheese dick
in the margins of page 156. Hofstadter, the Assistant feels confident in asserting, is not only misguided in his analysis, but also kind of a jerk; however, he's aware of a certain strain of Stockholm syndrome particular to academe in which the researcher comes to overly sympathize with the researched. He's protective of his Populists as a mother hen now that they've kidnapped him from his own work, his responsibilities, his life.