The Dissenters’ Last Crusade: Populism in Humboldt County
After the poor showing of the Knights of Labor in the 1886 county and state elections, dissenting third-party political activity lapsed for several years in Humboldt County. The Western Watchman beseeched voters to support the Union Labor party in 1888 but, as the Watchman noted, the party was poorly organized in California, and in Humboldt County fielded only a few candidates. Notwithstanding their tactical errors and ideological contradictions, the Workingmen’s and Greenback Labor parties, and the Knights had popularized a set of ideas and platforms that would support the local Populist movement in the 1890s. Not surprisingly, then, Humboldt became one of the banner counties of a vigorous California Populist movement in the 1890s.1
The Alliance Takes Hold
Prior to the emergence of the Populists, the founding of a Bellamy Nationalist Club in Eureka in January 1890 evidenced the profound disquiet that some Humboldters felt about the destiny of the republic.2 The Arcata Union referred disparagingly to a “Bellamy craze” in Eureka, while the Watchman and the Coast Seamen’s Journal welcomed the development.3 “Social evolution, the investigation of socialistic problems, are just now taking a very interesting phase,” reported the Watchman.4 The Eureka correspondent of the Coast Seamen’s Journal noted approvingly the considerable interest and involvement of the local trade union movement in the Nationalist Club.5 The Nationalist movement, however, proved to be as much a fad in Eureka as it was nationwide. For several months, regular meetings earnestly discussed the works of writers such as Edward Bellamy, Henry George, and Laurence Gronlund, but by the summer of 1890 the movement evaporated. Nevertheless, the Nationalist movement was testimony to the continuing vitality of a dissenting tradition in Humboldt County and contributed several prominent figures to the local Populist movement. Expressions of disquiet echoed throughout Eureka as the 1890s opened. The address of graduate Paul Follenius at the Eureka Academy Commencement Exercises, for instance, began by decrying the pursuit of wealth for its own sake, then added:
It has been clearly demonstrated by eminent writers that in no country in the world is the concentration of wealth going on as rapidly as in ours; in no other country is there a class that can compare with the wealthiest class of Americans. It may not be a pleasant truth, but it is truth nevertheless, that in our country the middle class is fast disappearing; that the masses of people are becoming more dependent on the few. Independent tradesman are becoming servants in gigantic monopolies and are ruled over by the lords of trade.6
At the very time that the Nationalist movement was waning in California, the Farmers’ Alliance was taking root in Santa Barbara in the spring of 1890. By November, 173 suballiances had been founded and the Alliance held its first state convention. The Watchman carried a full report of the proceedings and admonished the farmers of Humboldt County for not jumping on the Alliance bandwagon.7 In early January 1891, the Watchman issued another clarion call for the formation of suballiances in the county.8 Goaded by the Watchman and encouraged by a visit from a state Alliance organizer, J. W. Hines (a former Humboldt County resident), the farmers of Humboldt responded. By February 1891, ten suballiances and a county Alliance had been founded.9 William Ayres was elected secretary of both the Eureka and Humboldt County Farmers’ Alliance. Charles Devlin, a former Knight, became president of the Eureka suballiance, while a sheep farmer, H. C. Hanson, presided over the county Alliance. Fourteen suballiances, embracing almost 1,000 members, were in existence by the spring of 1892.10
The Humboldt County Alliance’s strong following cannot be explained in terms of the economic hardship of the county’s farmers. While the embattled wheat farmers of Tulare and San Luis Obispo counties may have joined the California Alliance in the hope of improving their condition, the Alliance flourished in Humboldt County where the agricultural economy was not depressed. In the period from 1880–1889, the average amount of mortgage debt on each acre of Humboldt County farmland was $5.40. This was nearly half the average for all California counties ($9.84), and of the state’s 53 counties, only 8 had a lower level of mortgage indebtedness on their farms than Humboldt during the decade.11 In 1890, the average annual mortgage on Humboldt County farms was $2,404, significantly below the statewide average of $3,406, and 30 California counties had higher average levels of mortgage indebtedness on their farms.12 In 1891 and 1894, William Ayres embarked on extensive travels through the county, but the lengthy accounts of his travels, which he dutifully sent to the Western Watchman, made no reference to farmer poverty.13 Letters from perennial Watchman correspondents Charles Spears and Sam Patch conveyed a picture of a prosperous farming community, even if the sheep farmers had seen better times.14
During the 1880s, an important shift of resources from cereal and livestock farming to dairying had occurred in Humboldt County; by the 1890s Humboldt had become the leading county in a budding California dairy industry. A U.S. Department of Agriculture report, published in 1896, cited estimates from “well informed persons” that over half of the population was employed in the dairy industry.15 This was almost certainly an overestimate, but the dairy industry was central to the county’s economy by the 1890s. Even during the depression, California’s dairy farmers continued to prosper. The State Board of Agriculture dwelt on the plight of the California wheat farmers while reporting on the flourishing condition of the state’s dairy industry: “No adjunct of farm life offers more inducement for further development and extension than does the dairy business,” the 1896 report asserted.16 Reviewing the county’s production and export statistics for 1894, the Humboldt Times noted the precipitous decline in lumber production but stated that the dairy industry was “thriving” and that dairy exports had made a “big difference to the county’s economy.”17 A short history of the county, written in 1904, spoke of the farmers’ dire circumstances in the early 1880s, but stated that, after 1890 and the switch to dairying, there had been “a complete transformation of the financial outlook for the valley farmers” and that “ruination and foreclosures had in great measure been lifted.”18
To Regenerate a Republic
Most Humboldt County Alliance members saw the Populist movement as a crusade to purify and reform the American body politic and not as a sectarian struggle to restore the supposedly exalted social and economic standing of the American farmer. Humboldt County Populism conforms in many respects with Lawrence Goodwyn’s depiction of the national movement as a “movement culture” embodying a “people’s movement of mass democratic aspiration.”19 Goodwyn argues that a Populist movement culture derived from years of economic and social cooperation between farmers and that this preceded and was a necessary condition for the emergence of a strong political movement.20 The case of Humboldt County, however, suggests that the direction of causation was the other way round. Shared political assumptions and discontents generated a movement with broader social ramifications. Moreover, there was nothing unique or distinctive about the social and fraternal manifestations of Humboldt Populism. Impressive as they were, they represented the Populist’s ability to utilize and adapt many of the community’s existing social customs and rituals to the service of the movement.
For the first half of the 1890s, the Alliance played an important social and political role in the community. The county suballiances organized numerous social events—dances, literary renditions, plays, musical performances, and picnics. On many such occasions, a neighboring suballiance joined the festivities. William Ayres vividly described a visit to a meeting of the Table Bluff Alliance. Following political addresses by several leading members of the county Alliance, there were songs, recitations, and plays that went on until after midnight: “The whole assemblage soon became a regular picnic of friendly greetings, introductions of visiting Alliance brothers and sisters, social intercourse, in fact a veritable lovefeast of good fellowship.”21 Many suballiances organized Fourth of July celebrations. The festivities organized by the Eel River suballiance in 1892 attracted 1,500 people. The customary picnic took place, accompanied by singing, dancing, and foot races, and the day closed with a grand ball in Ferndale Hall.22 The Island suballiance not only built its own meeting hall but started its own newspaper, the Alliance Voice.23 The paper was edited by a different person each issue and read to the membership every month. The Ferndale suballiance established its own auction market and a warehouse where farmers could store produce.24 The Table Bluff suballiance founded a cooperative store,25 and 25 Eel River dairymen bought out the Excelsior Creamery and began operating it as a joint stock concern.26
Women played a particularly important role in the suballiances, and male members apparently recognized their contributions. Women staged many social events, and, more important, were elected to official positions. Women contributed as many, if not more, pieces to the Watchman than their male counterparts, publicizing the social and political activities of the alliance. After his visit to the Table Bluff Alliance, Ayres reported: “The flourishing condition is acknowledged by all the male members to be due in very large degree to the sisters.”27
The fraternal spirit and the cooperative ventures of the Humboldt County Alliance did not preclude a serious political orientation. On the contrary, a shared transcendent political vision was the foundation upon which the Alliance was built. All meetings of the Alliance opened with lengthy political addresses and readings. The communications, essays, and articles of Alliance members revealed the explicit nature of their political orientation. The following letter to the Watchman from an Alliance member is representative of many such communications:
Be not led by the politicians nor seduced by ambition, but vote to secure the greatest need to the greatest number, without class legislation for any. This is true democracy and pure republicanism. . . . The situation demands reform, and it must come through the ballot box or through a revolution. Then claim your right at the polls and then vote for the heaven born principle of equal rights to all and special privileges to none. No class politics for us.28
In February 1892, the Island suballiance offered prizes for the best essays on the Farmers’ Alliance. All four prizes went to women, who displayed a thorough knowledge of the history of the Alliance in America. They attacked the national banking system with particular vehemence and expressed the conviction that the country was falling into the hands of the monopolists. Lucie Gallway thought the Alliance would provide for “the protection of the people against the ever increasing monopolies and trusts.” She called for the abolition of the National Bank, currency expansion, and the direct election of senators. Delia Dunlap began her essay with a forthright statement of the premises on which the Alliance was founded: “Our forefathers held that all men are created equal. This is the fundamental principle upon which the government of our country was founded.” Besides listing most of the reforms called for by Lucie Gallway, she called for government ownership of the railroads and telegraph, the Australian ballot, and greater support for public education, “the only salvation of the poor people.”29
Like an earlier generation of Humboldt County dissenters, the Alliance members’ political consciousness reflected an acute awareness of and sensitivity to national social, political, and economic developments. And, while references to the plight of the farmers appeared, they were usually incidental and brought up in the context of the general discussion of the national malaise. The Humboldt County Alliance, the suballiances, and the county and state Alliance lecturers devoted little time to the Humboldt farmer and surprisingly little to the travails of farmers nationwide. In fact, the Humboldt County Alliance displayed as much concern for the working classes as for the American farmer. In the spring of 1892, the county Alliance passed a resolution in sympathy with the Mendocino lumber workers locked in the bitter struggle over the ten-hour day.30 In 1894, the Alton suballiance passed a resolution blaming the depression on the “unwise and corrupt legislation of the Democrats and Republicans” and “heartily” endorsed “the commonwealth march of J. S. Coxey and his followers.”31 Two months later, the county Alliance denounced President Grover Cleveland’s use of troops in the railroad strike and expressed great sympathy with members of the American Railway Union and kindred labor organizations “in their recent efforts to obtain justice at the hands of an organized monopoly.”32
With the 1892 presidential election approaching, the Humboldt County Alliance hardly needed to be prodded in the direction of political action. Two factors hastened this development. First, at the national level, the Farmers’ Alliance founded the People’s party in February 1891 and in July held its first convention in Omaha. Second, at the state level, the California legislative session of 1891 proved to be one of the most corrupt in the state’s history, and soon became known as the “Legislature of a Thousand Scandals.”33 Humboldt County Alliance members were outraged at the record of their state legislature. In a letter to the Pacific Rural Press in October 1891, Charles Devlin reported unanimous sentiment within the Humboldt Alliance in favor of establishing a People’s party.34 The Alliance proceeded to elect delegates to the founding convention of the California People’s party to be held later in the month. On July 18, 1892, 400 supporters of the Humboldt County People’s party met to nominate and draw up a platform for the fall elections. They endorsed the Omaha platform and that of the California People’s party in their entirety. The local platform represented a distillation of the main points in these platforms: a graduated income tax, the direct election of senators, support for the initiative and referendum, expressions of sympathy with the workingman in his battle for a shorter workday, and a resolution condemning the use of Pinkertons and troops in the recent Homestead strike.35
The Humboldt County People’s party ticket was comprised predominantly of men of relatively humble standing or origin. Fred McCann, the candidate for the California assembly, 2nd District, was born in New Brunswick, Canada, and emigrated to the county in 1873. He left school at an early age and worked for many years in a logging camp. He managed, however, to continue his education, and in 1884 he became a teacher. The People’s party nominee for the 3rd District was B. H. Willsie, a native of the county and the son of a die-hard Greenbacker.36 At thirty-three years of age, he was a successful farmer thoroughly versed in the principles of the Farmers’ Alliance. Nominees for county offices included a ranch worker, a woodsman, a bookkeeper, a mason, and a carpenter. Only the candidates for county surveyor and district attorney were professional men and the latter began life as a farmworker.37
The Humboldt County People’s party had to contend with two complicating elements in the 1892 campaign. The first was the presence of A. J. Bledsoe on the Republican ticket for the state legislature. Bledsoe had distinguished himself as a maverick Republican in the 1891 legislature determined to expose the corrupt practices of his fellow assemblymen, regardless of party affiliation. On several occasions, the Humboldt County Alliance passed resolutions commending him for his honesty and courage. Thus the Populists found themselves pitting their candidate against a man with a considerable progressive following in the county. The Populists also suffered a setback a few days after their convention in July 1892 when the news arrived that the $1.7 million harbor appropriation bill for Humboldt County had received the presidential signature. The bill had been sponsored by California Democratic Congressman Thomas Geary, whose district included Humboldt County. The community’s jubilation following this news was described in the previous chapter, and there can be no doubt that Geary gained some political capital. The Watchman praised him, and Nerve published a list of people who allegedly would break with their party allegiance and reelect Geary. Several well-known Populists were on the list.38
Bledsoe and Geary racked up handsome majorities in the 1892 elections, but the result showed that the People’s party had strong roots in the county. The Populist presidential candidate, James Weaver, attracted a respectable 19 percent of the vote, more than double the percentage he received nationally (8.5 percent) or in California (9.4 percent). In only three California counties did Weaver obtain a higher percentage of the vote. On the state ticket, the Humboldt Populist also performed well. Alfred Stimson, Populist candidate for the state senate, garnered 43 percent of the vote; B. H. Willsie got 40 percent of the vote in his fight for a seat in the California legislature; and in the other assembly contest, Fred McCann obtained a creditable 21 percent of the vote against Bledsoe. At the county level, no Populist candidate was disgraced, and even in most three-cornered fights, the Populist got 20 percent of the vote.39
Populism, Depression, and the Workingman
The Populist movement in Humboldt County was not simply a rural one. In the 1892 election, Weaver obtained 23.5 percent of the vote in Eureka, a showing that dwarfed his performance in San Francisco, where he received a paltry 4.3 percent of the vote. In almost all state and county contests, Populist candidates performed better or as well as they did in the rural precincts. The strength of Populist support in Eureka indicates the broad-based character of Humboldt Populism and the extent to which earlier dissenting movements had bequeathed a legacy of ideas that the Populists were able to draw on in all areas of the county. The vitality of Populism in Eureka is especially striking in view of the weakness of the county’s labor movement in the 1890s, following the collapse of the Knights. It is important to note, though, that in unions that managed to survive the 1890s, such as the Carpenters’ Union, the Coast Seamen’s Union, and the Typographical Union, a strong current of ideas derived from the radical democratic–republican tradition, and congruent with the Populist program, flourished. Thus, the first paragraph of the Carpenters’ Union’s formal statement of purpose in 1889 spoke of “wealthy capitalists” who “combine their wealth to monopolize and control the wealth of the world” and “menace . . . our free institutions.”40 A few weeks later, Frank Keyley, the union’s recording secretary, stressed the need for political action in rhetoric that anticipated the Humboldt County Alliance almost word for word: “Capital has the army and the navy, the legislature, the judicial and executive departments. Why should the capital control? Why should not the laborer combine for the purpose of controlling the executive, the legislative and judicial departments? They will never find out how powerful they are unless they combine, and use their political power.”41 The carpenters held regular monthly meetings to discuss the principles of trade unionism. But, frequently, political topics were discussed, and an invitation was extended to all crafts and the general public.
In August 1892, “Typo,” a self-confessed member of the Printers’ Union, expressed his disgust with the Republican party, which he had supported for years. He lambasted the Republican press for its treatment of the Homestead and Coeur D’Alene strikes and alleged that “the money lenders are defiling the temple of pure principles once occupied by the Republican party of Lincoln, Sumner and Steward.” The Republican party, he said, had become “too much the party of moneyed aristocracy for the laboring men to follow.”42 In December 1893, the Eureka Typographical Union and the Carpenters’ Union forwarded a petition to Congressman Geary calling for the public ownership of all means of transportation and communication.43
The onset of the depression of the mid-1890s exacerbated the discontents of many workingmen. By July 1892, the first shock waves of the depression had hit the county. It was reported that times were “very hard” in Eureka, and “the laborers do not attend every picnic . . . [while] all the stores are piled full of goods.”44 The Eel River Lumber Company announced wage cuts of from 5 to 30 percent in April 1892,45 but the full force of the depression did not hit the industry until midsummer 1893. In early August of that year, the Watchman reported large wage cuts and layoffs at many mills.46 There were isolated instances of resistance. At Scotia, a group of lumber workers walked off the job when informed that their wages had been cut by $5 a month.47 At the Flanigan and Brosnan mill, too, a walkout occurred after wage reductions were announced.48 In early May 1894, 60 woodsmen employed by the Pacific Lumber Company struck unsuccessfully to retain the wage rate of the previous summer.49 More wage cuts and layoffs took place between the summer of 1893 and 1896. In several instances, wages were reduced by more than 30 percent, and unskilled lumber workers were forced to subsist on as little as $15 a month.50 As early as May 1894, one source estimated that the total number of people employed in the county had shrunk by 2,500 since the outbreak of the depression.51
The county’s charitable institutions were stretched to the limit. A few weeks after the massive layoffs of August 1893, the Watchman reported bands of homeless men gathering every night around the mill slab fires.52 The Humboldt Standard, aware that local charitable institutions were overwhelmed, urged Eureka to follow the example of Stockton and provide work for the needy.53 In December 1894, the editor of the Humboldt Standard overheard a well-respected Eureka “mechanic” saying that if it were not for his little children, he would have committed a crime so that he could obtain a regular meal in the jail. “Will it come to the famine cry ‘Bread or Blood,’” asked the editor.54 “Sockless Simon” complained that “the almost inexhaustible natural resources that are being turned into commercial values by the energy of her people” were “being rapidly concentrated in the hands of a few men.” He called for immediate government ownership of railroads, the telegraph, and other “public necessities,” and urged people to vote for the People’s party.55
Both the Humboldt Times and the Humboldt Standard reported with some consternation that the majority of Humboldt County laborers and citizens were sympathetic to the Pullman railway strikers.56 Sam Patch noted with sadness a growing “anarchist” sentiment in the community, but, he said, “so long as the rich can dress their pet dogs in silk and satin and have them sleep on eiderdown pillows, while the little rosebuds, the sweet, dimpled babies of the poor are dying in the gutter from hunger and cold, there will be anarchists.”57 When the entire 138-man crew at the Jacoby Creek quarry struck for an increase in wages in July 1894, Sam Patch claimed they had the sympathy of almost every workingman in the county.58
After the 1892 election, the Humboldt County Farmers’ Alliance continued to thrive, although the total number of suballiances dropped from a peak of 14 to 10 by the time of the 1894 election.59 Regular quarterly meetings of the county Alliance invariably reaffirmed the main planks of the 1892 platform. The Alliance also passed resolutions calling for stricter enforcement of county liquor ordinances. Several resolutions expressed sympathy for the workingman and welcomed the growing involvement of labor in the California Populist movement. When a county grand jury failed to indict George Hall, a notorious antiunion vigilante on the Humboldt Bay waterfront, for the murder of a union sailor, the Alliance formally expressed its outrage.60 The Alliance was treated to visits by several prominent western Populist leaders, including Thomas Cator, the leading figure in the California People’s party.
The platform of the Humboldt County People’s party in 1894 adhered closely to the Omaha platform. It charged the Democratic and Republican parties with “conspiring with foreign bankers to place this nation on a gold basis, thereby reducing our circulating medium, resulting in a depreciated market for the products of all labor.” Other demands included the prohibition of immigration “until such time as the home market is relieved,” a more economical administration at all levels of government, immediate construction of the Nicaraguan canal under government ownership, and opposition to a bill extending by fifty years the time the railroads had to pay off their mortgages to the federal government.61 Again, the Populist ticket nominated primarily men of relatively humble standing or origin. Nominees included a mason, a bookkeeper, a shoemaker, a filer in a shingle mill, two other men who had spent most of their lives as lumber workers, a clerk, and two farmers of modest means.62
Bledsoe was once more a factor in the campaign. Between 1892 and 1894, he buttressed his reputation as an honest and progressive legislator by supporting legislation to make the Southern Pacific Railroad pay its fair share of taxes and sponsoring a bill to remove three railroad commissioners suspected of dereliction of duty. He also supported bills that would have established initiative and referendum procedures in California and he authored and secured passage of a bill making ten hours the legal working day in California woods and mills,63 only to see it vetoed by the Republican governor, Henry Markham. Populists knew they had little chance of unseating Bledsoe and put up their weakest performance in the assembly race in the 2nd District.
The 1894 election demonstrated that the Populists had consolidated their position in Humboldt County. J. V. Webster, the Populist candidate for governor, got 36 percent of the vote—one more vote than his Republican opponent and several hundred more than the Democratic nominee. Webster got a higher percentage of the vote in Humboldt than in any other California county. His showing in Eureka was especially impressive; he secured 42 percent of the vote, trouncing his Republican and Democratic party rivals. The Populists elected a district attorney, and although this was their only triumph, Populist candidates at the state and county levels generally obtained 25 percent of the vote when both Republican and Democratic nominees were in contention and over 40 percent when the Democrats did not offer a candidate.
Populism in Retreat
The 1894 elections marked the zenith of both Humboldt County and California Populism. Statewide, Webster got just over 51,000 votes, or 18 percent of the total. This was almost double the number of votes he received in 1892. The 1894 Populist vote translated into fewer seats in the state legislature than in 1892, but in every state and congressional race, Populists constituted the balance of power.64
After the 1894 elections, Humboldt and California Populism entered a decline. The Farmers’ Alliance in the Golden State was in such poor shape by spring 1895 that it did not have enough money to print the minutes of its state convention.65 The decline of the Humboldt County Alliance was equally precipitous. The Table Bluff suballiance met in March 1895, and the county Alliance a month later, but these are among the few references of any kind to the continuation of the Alliance after 1894. As early as January 1895, the Watchman asked plaintively: “What is the matter with the People’s party of Humboldt County? Have they imitated the bears—gone into winter quarters to sleep?”66
Undoubtedly, postelectoral apathy contributed to the decline of the Humboldt County Alliance and People’s party. This phenomenon also occurred after the 1892 election when the number of suballiances dwindled. The Alliance was sustained by a transcendent political vision of almost millennial proportions. This meant that, in a movement with a pronounced national political orientation, there was a close linkage between the fortunes of the local, state, and national Populist movements. At the state and national levels, the results indicated that the Populist millennium was far from just round the corner. Humboldt Populists had been in the field for almost four years and fought two major election campaigns. The movement could not sustain itself at a euphoric pitch indefinitely, especially in the absence of dramatic, or at least commensurate, gains at the state and national levels. Significantly, in the aftermath of the 1894 elections, even the Watchman displayed a distinctly apolitical tendency. A rash of articles and editorials stressing that “cooperation” would be the major vehicle through which the oppressed might find salvation. Finally, after 1894, a full-scale regeneration of the Humboldt People’s party was precluded by the increasing drift of the Populist movement at the state and national levels toward fusion and an emphasis on free silver.
As the 1896 election drew nearer, the Humboldt People’s party began to show signs of life. In February 1896, the Watchman called on Populists to prepare for the upcoming campaign.67 When William Jennings Bryan was nominated by the Democrats, the Watchman expressed reservations about his candidacy; two weeks later, with the Populists’ nomination of Bryan, they withdrew their opposition. In August 1896, Humboldt Populists and Democrats cooperated in drawing up a common platform and ticket. All this was somewhat ironic in view of the stridency with which the Watchman had denounced the California Populist Congressman Marion Cannon’s collaboration with the Democrats in 1893,68 and it clearly signified that much of the fire that had driven Humboldt Populism between 1891 and 1894 had been extinguished.
From the outset, the tariff and free silver were the main issues of the 1896 campaign. Populists, while opposed to high tariffs in general, had not taken a strong stand on the issue in 1892 and 1894. By contrast, the Humboldt County Republican and Democratic parties had locked horns on the tariff question ever since the 1884 presidential election. The degree to which the Republican party exploited the tariff as an issue cannot be exaggerated. In the two months before the 1892 presidential election, for example, the Republican Humboldt Times published 15 editorials or articles on the benefits of the tariff. A recurring theme was the way in which protectionism was linked with nationalistic and Manifest Destiny tenets of the democratic–republican tradition to equate protectionism with prosperity. The Humboldt Times traced the tariff back to the genius of Hamilton and insisted that even Jefferson and Jackson had recognized “the value of the American system.”69 In one editorial, the Times asserted: “Republicanism means civilization. It means progress. . . . Republicanism protects—it protects the home, the family, the workshop. It is progressive. And protection is the mystic wand that smoothes the path to progress.”70 It was argued repeatedly that the tariff protected the wages of the American workingman by shielding him from the competition of cheap foreign labor. At the same time a battery of statistics was produced to try to prove that the tariff did not raise price levels. The Times argued repeatedly that tariff reductions would devastate the local, regional, and national economies.
In Humboldt County, especially in the midst of a severe depression, the Republican arguments had more than symbolic appeal. Since the Civil War, the American lumber industry had enjoyed considerable protection. During the late nineteenth century, with the increasing development of the Canadian lumber industry, American lumbermen insisted that it was essential to retain the tariff on foreign lumber. In 1888, when lumber appeared to be in some danger of being placed on the free list, Humboldt County lumbermen and the Chamber of Commerce petitioned Congress to resist any such move,71 and Eureka formed a Protective League with more than 150 members.72 The Humboldt Times, meanwhile, tried to rally the community to the cause by evoking memories of the depressed lumber market of the late 1870s.73 Similarly, in 1893 and 1894, the Times repeatedly warned its readers of the dangers of competition from foreign lumber.74
The Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act became law in August 1894 and put lumber and wool, among other items, on the free list. Although its passage occurred after the onset of the depression, this action of a Democratic administration lent plausibility to the Republican charge of a close link between protection and prosperity. In the 1896 campaign, the Republicans argued constantly that the Wilson-Gorman Act had seriously hurt the county’s wool and lumber interests.75 An address by William Carson blamed the depression in the lumber industry and the country at large on tariff reductions.76 At a major Republican rally, E. C. Cooper compared wages paid in Humboldt County mills “under the McKinley law with those under the present free trade system.”77 The argument was just credible enough to put Democrats and Populists on the defensive.
Important as the tariff issue was in 1896, it was secondary to the free silver issue. Here again, Populists and Democrats were to have the worst of the argument. The fusionist campaign got off to an inauspicious start when the Humboldt Standard repudiated its longstanding support for the Democratic party, largely over the free silver issue.78 Populists were faced with the awkward task of rationalizing their shotgun marriage with the Democrats and almost totally subordinating their former platforms to the issue of free silver. The Watchman insisted that the Democratic party had returned from its “strange wanderings with Cleveland and Carlisle” and that it was once again the party of Jefferson and Jackson.79 The Watchman denied that the emphasis on free silver entailed jettisoning key elements of the Populist program and argued that the issue had sweeping social ramifications. In a strongly worded election-eve editorial entitled “Bimetallism Means the Brotherhood of Man,” the Watchman stated:
If the morality of bimetallism be not in keeping with the Sermon on the Mount Jesus Christ never taught the brotherhood of man. The men whose interest lie with the Gold standard belong to the same class which Christ drove from the Temple because they had made his house a den of thieves. They have desecrated our Temple of Liberty, gambled on Tables of Law, and are now trying to force a mortgage on our Holy of Holies—the Declaration of Independence.80
Notwithstanding such rhetorical flourishes from the Watchman, the Democratic party played the main role in the campaign and in the advocacy of free silver. The fusion ticket had to make free silver a credible alternative basis for managing the nation’s money supply and allay fears that the system would have the dire consequences predicted by the Republicans. At this task, Humboldt Populists and free silver Democrats failed as badly as their counterparts at the state and national levels.
In Humboldt County, Populists and Democrats had difficulty in stemming the tide of alarmist anti–free silver publicity. The Republicans argued that free silver would put up prices faster than wages, and they cited statistics on the money supply, wages, and inflation during the Civil War and the immediate postbellum period purporting to prove their point.81 They also argued that any measure to facilitate the monetization of silver would lead to the establishment of a dual currency. Lumber owners would be paid in gold for their lumber and would pay their workers in depreciated silver money. The Humboldt Standard reprinted a letter from a laborer alleging that this had happened in neighboring Mendocino County in 1875.82 The liberal monetization of silver, it alleged, also would destroy the confidence of businessmen in the credit system and thereby lead to economic chaos that would inevitably bring wage cuts.83 William Carson linked the destitution of the Mexican laborer to the fact that silver was a major component of the Mexican currency.84
The Republicans successfully highlighted some of the contradictions and ambiguities in the free silver argument. In an important campaign speech, J. E. Jansen of the Eureka McKinley Club pointed to the absurdity of telling farmers that free silver would raise prices, and at the same time telling laborers that there would be no increase in prices or decrease in real wages.85 The Humboldt Times asked laboring men to consider whether the interests of labor and capital really were totally exclusive. If they were not, and if free silver would hurt the interests of the employers, how would the workingman stand to gain? In the same passage, the Times noted that most lumber capitalists attributed the ongoing depression in the lumber industry to “the currency agitation and the lack of proper protective duties.”86
In another editorial, the Humboldt Standard reiterated this argument, but provided it with an interesting twist. It conceded that it was “common talk on our streets, by the advocates of cheap money, that this is a campaign of the poor against the rich, a fight between labor and capital.” The Standard ridiculed this notion and said that it was the trusts and millionaires who “oppress the people and absorb their earnings.” It also pointed tellingly to the contradictions and inadequacies of the free silver argument:
How would free silver prevent continued exploitation? One will tell you that free silver will not depreciate the value of the silver dollar but make it as good as gold; another will tell you that it will be the best thing in the world to have a cheaper money, so that people who owe debts can pay them in fifty or sixty cent dollars, but none of them will point out just how it will curtail the rich and make lighter the burdens of the poor.87
At the 1896 elections, the Humboldt County Republicans recorded a comfortable, though not overwhelming, victory. If the Democrats and Populists had been able to muster anything like the support they had received in 1894, they would have swamped the Republicans. Instead, the Republicans beat their opponents by close but secure margins in most contests. Republican presidential electors received a solid 55 percent of the vote. The Republican congressional candidate got a slender, 170-vote margin and a fusionist candidate won a seat on the County Board of Supervisors, but in all other state and county contests, the Republicans won easily.
The Meaning of the Movement
The Watchman described the result of the election as a “bitter disappointment” but was philosophical about the outcome. It remained confident that, ultimately, an “earnest, studious population will prove the death knell to the present, usurious monetary system” and called on “each producer” to “continue with might and main at his work with a mightly thinking, and let his thoughts be in the direction of how to make cheap and equitable exchange of his products for his neighbor’s products.”88 At a “mass meeting” in February 1897, delegates from the Humboldt People’s party passed resolutions declaring the necessity for the continuance of the People’s party at the local, state, and national levels.89 The Watchman soldiered on until August 1898, occasionally admonishing the electorate for its stupidity, and reporting sporadically on a Populist party that was little more than a rump after the 1896 elections. In 1898, the Humboldt County Populist party dissolved itself when the dozen or so remaining die-hards voted to cooperate with the Democrats in the upcoming elections. The Republicans triumphed by an even wider margin in the 1898 elections, and no more was heard of the Humboldt County People’s party.
The saga of Humboldt County Populism provides insights into important questions about the Populist movement that historians are still debating. It suggests the pitfalls of making sweeping generalizations about the causes of Populism and, in particular, challenges the notion that Populism represented a short-lived political response to the agricultural depression of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Certainly, in many regions, the depression was the midwife of Populism, but in other areas, such as Humboldt, a strong movement developed in the absence of a serious agricultural depression. Conversely, the strength of Populism in Eureka suggests that historians should look further at the appeal Populism had to many workers in urban, and especially small-town, America. The depression of the 1890s hit many workers as hard as it did farmers, and while the union movement was in disarray, the depression may have been a radicalizing experience for them.
Most important, the history of Humboldt County Populism indicates the need to study Populism from a long historical perspective, and to examine not only the social and cultural antecedents of Populism, as such historians as Goodwyn and Hahn have done, but also its political ones. The political history of a county or region, especially the presence or absence of dissenting movements earlier in the Gilded Age, may have been as important a determinant of the strength of Populism as sociocultural antecedents and the severity of the depression.
Unquestionably, the Humboldt County Populist movement was the heir to a rich ideological legacy dating back to the 1870s. The movement represented the denouement of a strong dissenting tradition founded in the radical tenets of the democratic–republican tradition that offered a penetrating critique of Gilded Age capitalism. The Populists offered a program of economic and political reform that was as trenchant as any other reform movement in the mainstream of American history.
Dissenters voiced their political ideas in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian rhetoric partly because this was the language of politics in nineteenth-century America, and partly because they believed the post–Civil War era had produced a serious erosion of economic opportunities and, with it, a grave threat to their cherished political institutions. But they were not starry-eyed idealists who wanted to return America to its early nineteenth-century condition. Although the eras of Jefferson and Jackson provided a reference point, the dissenters did not object to industrialism per se, but rather to the impact of unfettered industrial development on the nation. To them, the restoration of true democracy entailed a degree of government management of the economy that would have been abhorrent to their Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ancestors.
To be sure, the radical democratic–republican tradition contained contradictory and ambiguous elements. To some extent, the persistence of ideas and rhetoric from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries imprisoned Gilded Age dissenters ideologically; that is, although the ideological bequest provided the basis for a class analysis of American society, all but the most radical dissenters in the vanguard of the trade union movement failed to confront the implications of this analysis. They were unwilling to recognize an inherently antagonistic relationship between capital and labor and stressed the primacy of politics as a panacea. By default, they deemphasized the importance of working-class organization, notwithstanding their awareness of the workers’ plight. Nevertheless, the radicals and union leaders of the early twentieth century borrowed significantly from the radical democratic–republican ideology, while still departing from it in several important respects.