ANOTHER BAD TIME IN OUR HISTORY (WITH SOME PROLOGUE)

The 1890s were an awful time quite a lot like now.
The prologue to the 1890s can be said to begin in 1877. Three things happened in 1877 that cast a long shadow over the subsequent years, even unto this very day. First, an election commission declared Rutherford Hayes, the Republican, the presidential victor of the 1876 election--by a single electoral vote. And he was so declared with the understanding that the last Federal troops would be withdrawn from the remaining ex-Confederate states that allowed their votes to go for Hayes. And, indeed, shortly after Hayes's inauguration, those troops were withdrawn, leaving the freedmen to their own devices to fight their disenfranchisement, and the terror unleashed upon them by the white peckerwoods as best they could. In 1896, after nearly two decades of lynchings and other terroristic methods (and stout resistance from African-Americans and a few white allies), Plessy v. Ferguson allowed the states to make Jim Crow (and the disenfranchisement of people of color) law in all the old slave states, Union and Traitor (yes, including Delaware). I am ashamed to say such a noteworthy jurist as Oliver Wendell Holmes, a member of the G.A.R. himself, actually wrote, "If the majority of the population is determined to disenfranchise the Negroes among them, there is nothing this Court can do about it." There were three dissenters, led by John Harlan, himself a Southerner.
The third occurrence in 1877 was what became known as the Great Strikes, which began in Pittsburgh against the Pennsylvania Railroad when that company cut its workers' wages by 25 percent. When the Pittsburgh state militia refused to fire on the strikers, the bosses and their political slaves brought other militia in from Philadelphia to forcibly end that strike. The 1890s were to see both the 1892 Homestead steel strike against Carnegie Steel and another railroad strike, this time at Pullman, in 1894. That strike was the one which brought Eugene Debs, who was, according to contemporaries, as kind and generous a man as ever most of them had known, to the fore as a labor organizer. From 1877 through into the Thirties (with World War I as a sort-of interlude), much of the laboring population of the North was still trying to struggle out of semi-starvational conditions. And now a probable majority of working people are struggling not to return to that unhappy state.
An element present in the 1890s whose counterpart, if there is one, today, I cannot perceive, is the Farmers’ Alliance, Colored Farmers Alliance, and the Grange. These were small-farmer organizations which fought the railroads, banks and their boughten political slaves. Everywhere they struggled to make their voices heard against state-sponsored political terrorism and in the old slave states against state-sponsored racial terrorism as well. These organizations were the primary building block of the People’s, or Populist, party. By 1892, this party was strong enough to field a presidential ticket, which won 22 electoral votes. In 1896, they joined with the Democrats under William Jennings Bryan. Just how smart this was I’m still not sure, but the Midwestern Populists, who had made common cause with the out-of-power Midwestern Democrats, won out over the Southern Populists who had had to defend themselves against terrorism from in-power Southern Democrats.
Both the 1896 campaign and the Plessy decision fractured the biracial farmers’ coalition in the South.
This time we cannot afford to let anything fracture an all-races coalition of poor and working people, once such a coalition is fully built. And it neither can nor should be inextricably tied to any current political party! As for being the nucleus of a new progressive party….well, time will tell. In any case, we as a nation have been here before and it’s up to us to make as sure as we can that we never return to this!