| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Populist Vision. By Charles Postel. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiv, 397 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-19-517650-6.)

It is rare that a book comes along with the power to redefine the parameters of a major historiographical debate. In the case of the Populist movement of the 1890s, it has been a generation since Lawrence Goodwyn did that with his majesterial Democratic Promise (1976). Goodwyn argued that the agrarian revolt constituted a profoundly democratic "movement culture" that sought to replace the emerging corporate capitalism of the late nineteenth century with a "cooperative commonwealth" that drew on the producerist, antimonopoly ideology of the Farmers Alliance and labor movement. More recent syntheses, such as those by Robert McMath (American Populism, 1993) and O. Gene Clanton (Populism, 1991), though differing in many respects from Goodwyn's perspective, have concurred with his basic contention that Populists stood in opposition to mainstream American notions of "progress." The People's party failed, according to these views, because its countercultural vision of a just society could not stand against the overpowering forces of capitalist modernity.

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