A tiresome rite of the presidential campaign is the release by candidates of tomes intended to enlighten voters about their lives, their views, and their qualifications to hold the highest office in the land. Most such literary efforts quickly find a well-deserved place on the remainder shelf at the local Costco – and none of them begin quite like this:
The author’s object in publishing this book is to call attention to some of the more serious evils which disturb the repose of American society and threaten the overthrow of free institutions.
These are the opening lines of the book written by James B. Weaver and published in the early months of 1892 as the People’s Party began to look toward the upcoming presidential campaign and consider who to nominate. Like many of its modern-day cousins, A Call to Action has languished in obscurity since its publication. As an important document of the Populist movement, it deserves a better fate.
James B. Weaver, from A Call to Action.
A Call to Action is not light reading, but Weaver and his fellow Populists were not in a cheerful mood. “We are nearing a serious crisis,” Weaver warns in his introduction. “If the present strained relations between wealth owners and wealth producers continue much longer they will ripen into frightful disaster. This universal discontent must be quickly interpreted and its causes removed.”
The Agrarian revolt that had simmered on the nation’s farms and ranches in the decades after the Civil War reached its zenith in the early 1890s as the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union – or more informally, the Farmers Alliance – spread from the plains of Texas across the South and north into the Great Plains.
Their grievances were many. Farmers were being crushed by the tight money policies favored by Eastern financial interests. They wanted access to capital but found it hard to come by in rural banks far removed from the money centers of New York or Chicago. They sympathized with the demands of organized labor for better working conditions and higher pay. They feared and loathed banks. And they regarded Congress — and particularly the Senate — as hopelessly beholden to special interests.
Weaver touches on all of these themes — and more — in language that is indignant but not radical. A lifelong Methodist, the Iowan was a reformer by nature, not a revolutionary.
His formative political experiences came in the 1850s as a stump speaker and organizer for the new Republican Party. The political world in those years, the Iowan would write decades later, seemed to be “searching out a new orbit.” Weaver himself would spend much of this adult life seeking a new orbit of his own.
When war broke out, he enlisted in an Iowa infantry regiment after the fall of Fort Sumter in 1861 and fought down the Mississippi at Fort Donelson, Shiloh and Corinth. He rose through the ranks and ended his service in 1864 with the rank of colonel. He was breveted after the war as a brigadier general and remained a Republican into the 1870s.
But Weaver, an ardent temperance advocate, found that the party of Lincoln no longer shared his reformer’s zeal. Iowa Republicans rejected his bid for a congressional nomination in 1874 and one year later turned back his bid for the party’s gubernatorial nomination when party bosses engineered a convention floor stampede for Samuel L. Kirkwood.
By 1878 Weaver was a leading figure in the Greenback-Labor Party. Two years later he ran for president at the head of the Greenback-Labor ticket. He remained a temperance man, but the evils of strong drink were no longer his primary concern. Weaver became a leading supporter of the party’s namesake cause — the continued use of paper “greenback” currency to fight the deflationary pressures caused by the tight-money policies favored by financial conservatives who were represented in both parties.
A newspaper illustration of Weaver and J.G. Fields, his running mate on the 1892 Populist ticket.
By 1892, the emphasis on greenbacks gave way to the call for the unlimited coinage of silver, but the desired end was the same. An “abundant circulating medium” is essential to a healthy economy, Weaver wrote. “We do not mean plenty of idle money, nor money which is so scare and hence so valuable that it can bring greater returns to its owner by being hoarded than by being invested. We mean money that is abroad in the channels of trade performing its legitimate office; money that works, and not money that shirks.”
Modern economists can take issue with the monetary proposals of 19th-century Agrarian radicals like Weaver. They may well have a point, but so did Weaver and his allies. Tight money exacerbated the deflationary tendencies that were impoverishing farmers and ranchers around the country.
In his discussion of monetary issues, Weaver makes a telling reference, drawing on a passage from the Apostle Paul to make his case: “that if any would not work neither shall he eat.” It was not a throwaway line — the devout Methodist filled “A Call to Action” with biblical allusions and references. When discussing abuses by railroads, Weaver paraphrases a passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans when he argues that only way to bring the railroads to heel was to have the government take them over:
It is idle to talk of any other remedy. We have experimented through the lifetime of a whole generation and have demonstrated that avarice is an untrustworthy public servant, and that greed cannot be regulated or made to work in harmony with the public welfare. Like the carnal mind, it is an enmity to the laws of God and man and is not subject to the will of either, neither indeed can be.
Weaver in his uniform. From James B. Weaver, Fred Emory Haynes.
Weaver titles a section of the book focusing on the yawning gap between rich and poor in a section titled “Dives and Lazarus” – reference to the Biblical story of the rich man who goes to Hell while the poor man who languished at his gate goes to Heaven.
Throughout A Call to Action, Weaver urges action to stem monopolies, purge Congress of corruption (he was an early advocate of the direct election of senators) and close the gap between rich and poor to forestall violent revolution. But Weaver did not want to overthrow the American economic system – he simply wanted it work for everyone.
Several months after publication of A Call to Action, Populists gathered in Omaha to nominate a presidential candidate. Weaver won the nod – but by then his tome had been overshadowed by the party’s platform. Today, students of populism are well-acquainted with the Omaha Platform and its assertion that “the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.”
A Call to Action has been largely forgotten. It demands renewed attention from students of the period.
You can find my biography of James B. Weaver, Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver, at amazon.com
Amazon also carries my account of the Credit Mobilier scandal:
