Discussion of American Populism (personal recollections from relatives etc)

From an RBB discussion on old-time American Populism and some related matters.

Very interesting discussion.  I do feel obliged to say a few things.

The Populist (Peoples Party) movement, and its forerunners and its descendants. are something that I know something about -- via a few surviving close relatives on my mother's side who were quite active in it in Kansas and Indian Territory (later, of course, to become Oklahoma.) And some of their descendants, cousins of mine, have done extensive research on the period.  As far as I know, the relatives in Dakota Territory/North Dakota were definitely not so inclined -- large landholdings were common with them.  (Even so, as I noted some time back, they found IWW workers to be "good and dependable.")

I've always seen the Populist movement, short lived as it was in the political party sense, very favorably -- a most significant step in American social protest. While there were racist connotations in the South, I don't think racism was pervasive in it in Dixie (and not much racism can be found anywhere else in its bailiwick) .  Not long before its formal organization in 1890 or so, and there had certainly been many comparable populist strains immediately preceding it, Blacks and low income whites had formed coalitions in the Deep South -- which were ultimately destroyed by the economic royalists via racism and the passage of Jim Crow laws.  A good reference for this is W.J. Cash's excellent The Mind of the South (1940 and many subsequent editions.)  Cash's work has the great merit of being extremely, almost beautifully, written.  It's too easy to focus on demagogic Tom Watson and his successors in the Democratic Party, e.g., James K Vardaman and later Theodore Bilbo.  Populism and its continuing influences were much more healthily complex than that.  The Non-Partisan League in North Dakota had Populism as a major lineal ancestor -- and the NPL's influence in that state is still more than simply extant.

Populists and their successors didn't like big Eastern banks and railroads and elites.  Good for them.

My maternal great grandfather, Michael Senn, who emigrated from Switzerland as a young man into Kansas Territory, was an Abolitionist, a Union soldier,  a founder of the Knights of Labor in Kansas, repeatedly and publicly denounced atrocities against the Indian people, was a key leader of Kansas Populism, served terms in the legislature where he introduced bills on behalf of women's suffrage, and -- depending on which relative I was talking with -- was in the latter days of his life close to, or a member of, the Socialist Party.  He died a decade before I was born but his wife, Josephine, from Missouri, lived deep into her '90s and was always very friendly to my Native father. (One of Michael Senn's daughters, a great aunt of mine, wrote a bio sketch of him when she was quite old and very erroneously called him a Christian Scientist. She was of that inclination.  But I heard the story, and so did Eldri, of his standing up in a Kansas Methodist church and denouncing the preacher and all organized religion.)  

His social activist daughter, Marie Barbara Senn Heath,  my grandmother, was an active fighter for women's rights -- among her many other good causes.  It was she who, in her 90s, would tell me how important it was that we all support "Mr Bryan."

I've always thought very well of Mr William Jennings Bryan.  A good, short and inclusive biography of my maternal grandmother can be found in Who's Who of American Women.  http://books.google.com/books?id=COsLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA377&lpg=PA377&dq=marie+barbara+senn+heath+/+women+of+america&source=bl&ots=qwDUpJNTH7&sig=N8ud9Nzj6xrcB4JTKL1Q_4nQMUU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oaRfUu73GqzFiwLBsIDQDg&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=marie%20barbara%20senn%20heath%20%2F%20women%20of%20america&f=false

All of this, and certainly the equally positive Native influences on my father's side,  have shaped me much.

All best,

Hunter Gray (Hunter Bear)

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq / 
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO

Check out our massive social justice website
www.hunterbear.org  The site is dedicated to our
one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray, and to Sky Gray:
http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm

See our very full and substantial COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
page -- with a great deal of practical material:
http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm

See my  new expanded/updated "Organizer's Book," 
JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- with a new substantial 
introduction by me. This page lists many reviews and endorsements.
And this book is also an activist's how-to manual: 
 http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm   

See the Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm:
(Many photos.)

Check out our Personal Background Narrative (with much info):
http://hunterbear.org/narrative.htm