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Marion Butler and American Populism

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By James L. Hunt

The University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2003 University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-2770-3

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Introduction

This is a biography of Marion Butler, a North Carolina native who made his greatest mark in the 1890s as a leader in the Southern Farmers' Alliance and the Populist Party and as the only southern Populist ever to serve in the United States Senate. Butler's life is worth the historian's interest not simply because he held high office in the Alliance, the Populist Party, and in Congress. More broadly, his story illustrates crucial issues in the movement to expand the regulatory role of American government between 1880 and the 1930s. While a member of the Alliance in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Butler underwent a transformative education that convinced him the federal government should own or abolish monopolies, especially those which concerned transportation and money. At the same time, he understood this action as necessary to create equal economic opportunity for individuals, but not equal economic results. Like most other reformers of his generation, he had faith in the market, private property, and the idea that representative democracy was the best way to protect the interests of the masses. Butler learned this reform doctrine before he was thirty years old and retained it until his death at seventy-five in 1938. He was the most prominent Populist to apply it to the issues of the 1890s, the Progressive Era, the 1920s, and the New Deal.

For the historian and biographer the most important dimension to Butler's life was his endurance in trying to convert his economic ideas into law through politics. Butler's, and Populism's, greatest struggle was not to create a pro-producer ideology that would promote some forms of government regulation and ownership while at the same time sustaining the competitive market. The real challenge, one that Butler spent the fifty years between 1888 and 1938 trying to meet, was the political success of that ideology. That task involved the enormously complex project of building local, state, and national organizations that would attract followers, conduct elections, send believers to state and national legislatures, and enact and carry out Populist laws. This political project turned out to be Populism's greatest failure, and Butler's life, perhaps more than that of any other person, illustrates this part of the Populist story.

These two themes-Butler's education as a reformer and his long and losing efforts for political success-are the experiences around which this biography is built. In addition, my argument that Butler absorbed Alliance doctrine and promoted it at all levels of political competition as well as in the Senate and in the Republican Party after 1900 is intended to cause some rethinking about Butler, about Alliance and Populist ideas, about Populist politics, and about the relationship between Populism and what followed.

When I started this project almost twenty years ago, there was relatively little detailed information about Butler. With some notable exceptions, practically all that had been written about him was negative, sketchy, or merely descriptive. No one had published a full biography. More specifically, no one had considered all the key evidence: the newspapers he edited between 1888 and 1913; his votes, committee actions, and speeches as a North Carolina and United States legislator; or his personal papers through 1938. Most of what was written about Butler focused on the few months in the summer and fall of 1896 when he led the Populist Party in that year's presidential election.

Moreover, in the early 1980s there was a pervasive interpretation of Populist ideology and politics, and Butler's relation to it, that had first arisen with C. Vann Woodward's 1938 biography of the Georgia Populist Tom Watson. Because of Populism's demand for more federal government regulation, the Alliance's use of agricultural cooperatives, and Populism's occasional rejection of the harsher attributes of political white supremacy, Populism had come to stand for a number of causes, including southern liberalism, democracy, or even opposition to industrial capitalism. This made Populism useful as an object of study, especially to historians trained in the 1960s. Practically all the published histories of the Alliance and Populism in the 1960-80 period sympathized with Populism. Moreover, historians gave greatest attention to Populism's ideological and social characteristics. Less emphasized were its legal aims and political qualities.

One aspect of this interpretation was that those historians who seemed to have the most influence severely criticized Marion Butler. The prevailing view was fully articulated by Lawrence Goodwyn, who wrote in 1976 that "Marion Butler believed in free silver, tariff protection, white supremacy, and good government. Fundamental Alliance-greenback concepts of permanent national party realignment were ... foreign to his thinking." Thus, Goodwyn surmised that Butler's thoughts were "unrelated" to the broad program of reform embodied in the 1892 Omaha Platform of the People's Party and that as a result Butler was not a "real" Populist. Goodwyn also concluded that the whole of North Carolina Populism was not "genuine."

Years earlier, C. Vann Woodward offered a similar thesis. Woodward stigmatized Butler as a "practical politician" and condemned him as someone allegedly "mistrusted" by elements of the Populist Party because of his endorsement of a political strategy that involved cooperation, or "fusion," between the People's Party and other parties. Woodward also emphasized Butler's support for free silver, implying that Butler was unaware of, ignorant of, or opposed to other proposals of the People's Party. These thoughts appeared in Woodward's biography of Tom Watson and were repeated in his study of the South after Reconstruction.

Several works published before the early 1980s, particularly Robert F. Durden's analysis of the Populist Party in the 1896 election, portrayed Butler differently. Yet, when I began my research, it seemed that the task had already been framed by the preceding generation of Populist historians, who either agreed with Woodward or Goodwyn or relied on the same kinds of sources those men used. In particular, there was a deep-rooted assumption that Populist ideology and politics were largely defined by a clear distinction between Populists who allegedly supported the whole of Alliance-Populist reform and opposed cooperation with the older political parties and those who allegedly did not believe in all Populist reforms and supported cooperation. The former were approvingly described as genuine Populists, while the latter, including Butler, were dismissed as shallow opportunists.

This biography presents evidence against this position, using Butler's life. When I began doing research, it seemed odd, if Goodwyn and Woodward were right about Butler's lack of "genuine" Populism, that Butler became a lecturer and president in his local Alliance as soon as it appeared in his county, state president of the Alliance at age twenty-eight, and then national Alliance president. The widespread lack of information among Populist historians about Butler's Alliance experience was demonstrated by Robert McMath, who in 1993 described him in the early 1890s as a "youthful lawyer." McMath, the leading expert on the Southern Alliance, knew that the Alliance barred attorneys from membership, yet he followed the Woodward-Goodwyn paradigm and described Butler as an attorney. He was not. Ironically, in the early 1890s Butler made his living as a professional Allianceman, first as president of the North Carolina Alliance and later as vice president and president of the national Alliance. Similarly, Bruce Palmer, an outstanding historian of Populism, recently published a sketch of Harry Tracy that referred to the "Democrat Marion Butler" running for the U.S. Senate in 1900. Actually, in 1900 Butler had not been a Democrat for eight years and was chairman of the national Populist Party.

Further, according to Goodwyn, Butler was not really a Populist. Yet not only did Butler lead the Alliance, including its cooperative dimension, in his home county, but he also served in the United States Senate as a Populist for six years, attended practically every major Populist convention, wrote every North Carolina party platform, contributed to national party platforms, published a Populist newspaper, knew every major Populist leader throughout the United States, and regularly read Populist newspapers from across the nation. It seemed incredible that a man who had held more and higher offices that any other Populist in the history of the movement could have missed what a 1970s historian described as the purpose and meaning of his political party.

Yet, as with McMath and Palmer, an underlying difficulty is at the factual level. One telling example was Goodwyn's claim that although Butler did not have real Populist beliefs in the 1890s, he experienced some kind of conversion in 1901, but only after having been exposed to a "genuine" Texas Populist, Harry Tracy, during the 1900 election. The conclusion is based on legislation and speeches Butler made in the Senate supporting the creation of federally controlled irredeemable currency, which Goodwyn claims took place in early 1901, when Butler's Senate term was nearing its end and he was a lame duck. Actually, Goodwyn placed these events in the wrong year, as Butler promoted irredeemable currency at the beginning of 1900, not 1901. He was up for reelection and would endorse Populist cooperation with other political parties during the 1900 election, including with the Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan. Goodwyn also wrongly assumed that Tracy taught Butler real Populism. Actually, Butler convinced Tracy to support political cooperation and William Jennings Bryan in 1900. Other factual problems involve omissions. In his seven-hundred-page study of American Populism, in which he excoriates cooperation with other parties and argues Texas was the center of real Populism, Goodwyn does not mention that Texas Populists agreed in 1896 to vote for William McKinley, the nation's foremost conservative politician, in exchange for having Texas Republicans support Populist state candidates.

The writings of the late C. Vann Woodward contain similar errors. Woodward was a sympathetic biographer of Tom Watson, the Georgia Populist. He portrayed Watson as a true Populist, a man who believed in all Populist reforms and who sought purity in Populist politics by avoiding cooperation agreements with other parties. Unfortunately, Woodward did not describe how Watson favored a watering down of the Populist platform in 1895, in anticipation of the 1896 elections. Watson was anxious to attract persons who "are not coming to us as long as they can be made to suspect that we aim at revolution, or radical interference with vested rights." He advocated a retreat to the Alliance's Ocala Platform, which favored regulation, not ownership, of railroads as a means of achieving a "strong yet conservative" political position. He also suggested that the party "drop the subtreasury.... [L]et us [also] deliver our land plank from the suspicion of socialism." Woodward also neglected to mention that Watson supported Butler for chairman of the national Populist Party in 1896 and that late in the 1896 election he considered trading his Populist vice presidential electors with the Democratic candidate Arthur Seawell for a seat in the House of Representatives. Woodward persuaded readers that Watson opposed cooperation, when in fact Watson was a key member of and an enthusiastic supporter of the cooperation ticket of 1896 that included Watson and William Jennings Bryan. After his nomination he gave as his reasons for supporting the ticket the same reasons Butler and other Bryan supporters did. He became angry only after the implementation of cooperation did not turn out as he had hoped.

As for Butler, with whom Watson feuded after July 1896, Woodward tried to diminish his standing as a Populist by emphasizing his support for free silver, particularly through a statement Butler made at an 1895 silver meeting in which he said he "loved the cause better than his party." Although this was supposed to mean that Butler did not support all Populist reforms, Woodward neglected to mention that in the speech Butler also said he was "a thorough Populist and believe[d] in every plank in the Omaha platform. I believe in government ownership of railroads and the telegraph." He urged the delegates to support all Populist reforms, including "complete government issue and control" of the money supply. This was the "cause" of which Butler spoke; the Populist Party was a means to that larger end.

The point of these remarks is not to lay unreasonable blame on historians' mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable; a healthy exposure to Samuel Johnson's writing about scholarship makes that clear enough. Instead, I suggest that the dominant approach to important aspects of Populist politics and Butler has been shaped by fundamental factual errors. Most important, the older view posits a direct and even logical correlation between belief in certain reform principles and a particular kind of political strategy, when there was neither such logic nor such a correlation in practice. As just one example, why would the Populists' aversion to extreme party partisanship not suggest that cooperation with other parties was a political strategy more consistent with the policies of Populism than some other strategy? This biography of Butler is one among many possible means of asking such questions and replacing one view of Populism with another view that recognizes the much greater complexity of the Populist effort to win control of government at the local, state, and national levels. It is a view that emphasizes broad agreement on core Populist principles while describing enormous disagreement about political strategy and attempting to explain that disagreement without suggesting that one side was "better" or more "genuine" than the other. Indeed, it is an error to assume there were only two Populist political strategies or that Populists acted consistently among the various choices. Similarly, it is an error to assume that any particular strategy, whether Butler's or someone else's, was without both advantages and costs.

Marion Butler is particularly useful to these questions because he supported both Populist principles and, over a fifty-year period, a variety of vehicles to advance them politically: the Democratic Party, the Populist Party, the Populist Party and the Democratic Party, the Populist Party and the Republican Party, the Republican Party, and the Republican Party and the Progressive Party of 1912. Moreover, he supported cooperation among parties and solitary action by a party. What emerges from his life is a picture of Populist politics much richer than the simplistic view of silver versus irredeemable currency or fusionist versus midroader. In fact, I have tried to avoid the word "fusion" in the biography, because in the 1890s "fusion" was most often a pejorative term used by its opponents, whether Populists, Democrats, or Republicans. "Fusion" also wrongly suggested a merger of parties, when merger was the opposite of what cooperation meant for Butler and others. I have also tried to present a balanced version of Butler's life. The few previous published biographies of Populists, including Woodward's Tom Watson, Martin Ridge's Ignatius Donnelly, Stuart Noblin's Leonidas La Fayette Polk, Peter Argersinger's Populism and Politics on William Peffer, and Michael Brodhead's Persevering Populist about Frank Doster, while excellent examples of scholarship, are all friendly to their subjects. This seems natural given the scholarly investment required.

My own feelings toward Butler, however, have become increasingly ambivalent, despite the effort to correct previous inaccurate criticisms of him. He was a thoughtful politician, certainly as much so as any of his southern contemporaries. He was courageous and persistent, suffering ostracism, death threats, economic pressure, and retirement from political office at the age of thirty-seven because of his support for Populism and black suffrage. On the other hand, it is difficult at the current stage of American history to become too excited about his Populist ideas; most now seem irrelevant or wrong. Having the government own the national transportation network, set the volume of money in circulation, and operate as a huge bank in order to make beneficial loans to farmers seem alternately naìve and ordinary as a way of transforming the economy. Such changes could not have produced the Promised Land for middling farmers or others. Moreover, an argument can be made that Populist political goals, measured in terms of self-interest, differed only in degree from the favors sought by the industrial and transportation monopolists they detested. Farmers' desire to cartelize agriculture suggests Populism's political and economic rhetoric was often hollow. Then there is Butler and other southern Populists' commitment to white supremacy, the ugly bedrock of southern politics.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Marion Butler and American Populism by James L. Hunt Copyright © 2003 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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