Thomas Watson and the Populist Reconstruction of Jeffersonian Agrarianism

Thomas Watson and the Populist Reconstruction of Jeffersonian Agrarianism Thomas Jefferson was dead. And preceding him to the grave had been his political vision of an agrarian republic. With apologies to Mr. Charles Dickens, these facts “must be distinctly understood,” or nothing meaningful can come of this conference paper. Jefferson’s agrarian vision was designed during the heady days of the American Revolution as a plan to establish republican government in Virginia. He contemplated land ownership, and the corresponding ability to produce one’s own food, as the material cornerstone of economic independence and political liberty. Furthermore, the individual attachment to a particular plot of land would necessitate community involvement and thereby foster the civic virtue required of local self-government. In this manner, for Jefferson, economic self-interest would be reconciled with civic duty. Jefferson most clearly articulated this vision in his Notes on the State of Virginia, when he anointed “those who labour in the earth” as the “chosen people of God.” He proclaimed farmers blessed with a “substantial and genuine virtue” that inoculated them from the corrupting vices that inflicted merchants and tradesmen – those occupations whose very subsistence depended on the “caprice of customers” and encouraged the lamentable trait of personal “ambition.” Accordingly, he contended that merchants and manufacturers were particularly unsuited for the demands of self-government and believed it better for republican Virginia to dedicated itself to an agricultural economy than for merchants and craftsmen to bring their sordid “manners and principles” to the Commonwealth. Historical accounts tend to depict Jefferson’s agrarian republic as ultimately succumbing to the more-prophetic Hamiltonian vision of political economy. The truth be told, however, Jefferson’s design was already faltering in Virginia before he ever encountered Hamilton’s financial plan. The inability, or, in many cases, the undesirability of some Virginians to become 2 land owners allowed for a class of non-landed producers to persist and even grow during the postcolonial decades. These merchants and tradesmen, far from proving themselves “sores on the body politick” increasingly became vital economic actors in the state’s diversifying agricultural economy. Additionally, many of those who did become land owners found – either by circumstance or character – the responsibilities of ownership too difficult to maintain and lost their property to indebtedness or simply fled to greener pastures in the west. In response to these factors, by as early as 1785, Jefferson himself began considering new mechanisms by which to expand political rights and compel civic participation. By the end of the War of 1812, he had abandoned his aversion to merchants and manufactures as political actors. In a letter to Benjamin Austin he acknowledged that “we must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturalist.” Jefferson’s fellow Southerners learned this lesson as well. Nineteenth-century Southerners generally embraced the core values of a diversified political economy that considered agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, and internal improvement as fundamental components of economic development. Admittedly, fierce debates over the tariff and the national bank obscured any harmonious visage to the harmony of interest economic consensus. Nonetheless, Southern planters, in particular, consistently advocated for market-oriented policies of economic development to secure their continued prominence in the Atlantic economy. More significantly, perhaps, they also embraced the democratic political reforms that wrested the franchise from its traditional foundation in land tenure and, ultimately, reconstructed it as a right of personhood. The ownership of labor represented a key concept in this democratic negotiation in both the North and the South, although the concept meant something different in the South’s slave society allowing for a profound divergence in democratic development. Accordingly, by mid-century, the South remained agricultural in economic orientation but had abandoned the agrarian political ideology that mandated economic self-sufficiency as the litmus for republican citizenship. The stereotypical Jeffersonian 3 image of the sturdy, rustic farmer was portrayed in a pejorative fashion in Southern agricultural journals, which were themselves designed to communicate the practices of scientific agriculture to backwoods farmers. In antebellum literature too, the gentleman planter was depicted as an archaic and diminishing vestige on the southern landscape. And indeed, the concept of agrarianism itself now was considered by the likes of George Fitzhugh and William Gilmore Simms as a utopian enterprise and readily associated with the likes of Fourierism, Communism, Mormonism, and free-love. Nevertheless, the agrarian idea – or myth, as Richard Hofstadter would have it - has persisted with tremendous resonance across the landscape of American historical writing, particularly in the American South. David Potter contemplated the idea of agrarianism as the defining feature of the South and juxtaposed against the more familiar narrative of white supremacy. He attributed its modern origins to the early work of William Dodd and traced its historiographical descent into the writings of the Nashville Agrarians as well as their liberal critics. In the end, he found it lacking in viable evidence to assert itself as an interpretative concept but acknowledged its continuous appeal because it offered an alternative to Marxism as a critique of industrial capitalism. Potter ascribes to Dodd the primal motivation to combine all that he experienced as good in the South with his preference for democracy and found in Jeffersonian agrarianism a cradle that would hold both. Dodd’s own influences remain to be examined but Potter might have looked a little further back to discover a proliferation of writings conveying an agrarian sensibility during the Populist Revolt. This sensibility was especially evident in the writings of the Populists most ardent publicist, Thomas Watson. Watson appears as a pivotal actor in reconstructing an agrarian ideology for the South at the end of the nineteenth century. His political and historical writings infused the rural lifestyle of southern farmers with cultural meaning and, by extension, encouraged them to speak in a distinct political voice. The words of this voice were the words of revolution. Watson, 4 along with his fellow “middle of the road” Populists, sought nothing less than the overthrow of the capitalist class, whom he believed had usurped the governing authority of the country. His revolutionary rhetoric was grounded, however, in a nostalgic trope of traditional household social relations, which he contended served as the fount of democratic politics. In so doing, Watson emulated the revolutionary discourses of his hero, Thomas Jefferson, in seeking to justify revolution as a restorative act. It is important to note that, especially in Watson’s earliest writings during the Populist campaign, his rhetoric proved far from being exclusively agrarian. His political goals were espoused in the Ocala Demands and, subsequently, in the more inclusive People’s Party Platform, and he considered Populism a movement for all common folk; proletarian, small merchant, and farmer alike. When writing about the South, however, Watson emphasized preserving the rural quality of life and the primacy of agriculture. His agrarianism focused more on the cultural than the political aspects. Farmers were not necessarily more independent but they were more virtuous. Making this distinction between his Jeffersonian political theory and his cultural agrarianism affords insight into the persistent significance of his agrarian thought long after his political project had been defeated. Watson has probably not received the attention he has deserved from southern historians. Born on the eve of the Civil War, his life spanned the ferment of the South’s long reconstruction. He died in 1922. He is best remembered by his biographers for his successes and failures as a politician, but he advanced his political agenda and cultural view with equivalent aplomb through his prolific editorial work on numerous newspapers and periodicals. He also published several works of history and one autobiographical novel. Watson is most familiar to students today through his biography written by C. Vann Woodward in 1938. Woodward emphasized Watson’s political career and, because of his changing views on the franchise for African Americans, portrayed him as the personification of the failure of the New South. Woodward’s portrait of tragic ambivalence has dominated. Consequently, Tom Watson, agrarian rebel has eclipsed Watson the historian and journalists to the point where his 5 journalistic, historical, and even the full scope of his political writings, have been relatively ignored. It is in the very writings, however, the Watson fashioned the cultural agrarianism that would come to define the South for a half century. Despite Woodard’s nomination of Watson as an agrarian rebel, Woodward simply assumed Watson’s agrarianism and did not explore the development of his agrarian thought. It is certainly true, and significant, that Thomas Watson was the son of a farmer and that, early in his life, he worked as a dirt farmer himself. Watson knew first-hand about hitching mules and ploughing fields. Later in life, he maintained an intense interest in agriculture and carefully supervised the management of his Hickory Hill farm. Furthermore, as a politician, his constituency consisted overwhelmingly of farmers and he spoke intuitively to their daily concerns and experiences. All of these experiences contributed to Watson’s agrarian perspective, but they do not sufficiently explain the development of his agrarian thought. Examining the presentation of the People’s Party Campaign Book suggests that he arrived at his Jeffersonian political theory through the back door. The book was written and published by Watson during the 1892 campaign and represents one of the earliest expressions of his political thought. Indeed, it provided the skeletal framework for many of his subsequent political writings including his comprehensive Political and Economic Handbook published in 1916. The book summarized the foundational issues of the Populist appeal; the high tariff, the demonetization of silver, currency reform, subsidizing railroads, and so, but Watson began it with a historical discourse on political parties in the United States. He identified the “first political divisions” as originating during the revolution itself, and the divide between Whigs and Tory loyalists. Significantly, in Watson’s historical telling, the nature of party competition tended toward complete domination. Hence, the Whigs vanquished the Tories, the Federalist quashed the Anti-Federalists, the Federalist defeated by the Republicans, the Republicans were 6 overthrown from within by Democrats, and later day Republicans emerged from the scrap heap of the anti-Jackson Whigs. In a similar manner, he saw the People’s Party as arising from the dysfunction of the Republican and Democratic parties, whose interests had become so intertwined as to dissolve any difference. Watson concluded from his opening sequences that since the “Party names [were] ever changing” it become more important to inquire into “the Principles upon which the Parties themselves have been founded.” And he offered as a “broad proposition” the idea that there had never been “but two Schools of Political thought in the Country since the present Constitution was adopted;” the Hamiltonian school and the Jeffersonian. For Watson, the Jeffersonian persuasion consisted in the belief that “the General Government could only exercise powers expressly granted to it; that the individual citizen should have the freest possible scope without needless hindrance or direction by the Law; that rigid economy should be the rule in public expenditures; that equal and exact justice should be accorded to all and special privileges to none; that the Currency of the Nation should be in control of the people, and not of a special moneyed class of National Banks or of any other Corporation; that monopolies should be forbidden; that both Gold and Silver should be coined upon equal terms; that commerce should be free, should not be built up at the expense of Agriculture; and that a large Standing Army and Navy were dangerous to our liberties.” Hamiltonians, on the other hand, advocated for a “strong centralized Government” and s “strong National Banking System,” which would encourage the interest of rich men “in National affairs.” Hamiltonians also desired “a Bonded System perpetually Funding and Refunding the National Debt to the great advantage of the Capitalists; Protection of Manufactures at the expense of Agriculture; a Currency System in the control of the Banks; Internal Improvements upon a large scale, and a strong military establishment.” In sum, Watson explained, Hamiltonians “sought to create a moneyed aristocracy supported by special privilege.” Here was a Beardian interpretation of American history three decades before Charles Beard. It was also a history that Populists could rally around. It allowed them to adopt the 7 mantle of tradition despite their radical demands for the creation of a sub-treasury system, inflationary monetary policies, the abolition of commodities speculation and trading, a graduated income tax, and the government ownership of railroads. The threat posed by the modern-day Hamiltonian plutocrats was to the democratic ideas of equality and popular sovereignty. As Watson explained to his readers, “the man who closely studies our institutions at this time will be sure to observe how dangerously near to predominance the Hamilton Doctrine of Class Rule has come.” There are, of course, some apparent contradictions in this theory of government. For Watson, however, the historical tradition of Jeffersonian political thought facilitated the reconciliation of these contradictions. When he spoke of the Populist movement he consistently spoke of it not as a revolt but as a revolution (indeed that is the sub-title of the Campaign Book). The stakes of this revolution were the control of the government. Capitalist control of the government represented the central threat that the movement was attempting to thwart. The government itself was not the problem, but those who controlled it. Like his contemporary G.K. Chesterton, Watson recognized that the common folk particularly understood the need and ends of government. Accordingly, the government ownership of railroads served the needs of the public as long as the people controlled the government. Of course, Jefferson’s theory of decentralized (or federated) government remained preferable if only because the more consolidated that government became the easier it was for a particular class to assume control of it. Hence, Watson worked tirelessly campaigning for People’s Party candidates for state and local offices in Georgia. The Jeffersonian theory of government persisted as the central theme of political thought throughout Watson’s life. Ousted from the editorship of the New York-based Tom Watson Magazine in 1906, Watson began publishing the aptly-named Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine in January of the following year. Monticello and a picture of Jefferson – “the great commoner” as Watson referred to him – appropriately graced the cover. Watson’s companion 8 piece to the magazine, the Weekly Jeffersonian contained the statement as part of its head mast: “A Newspaper Devoted to the Advocacy of the Jeffersonian Theory of Government.” Yet in adopting Jeffersonian theory, Watson understood it only as it had developed as a policy of national government. He considered it as emerging from the context of the argument with Hamilton over the national bank as part of the early political debates over the powers allowed by the constitution. He apparently did not examine Jefferson’s political thoughts relative to the creation of republican government in Virginia and thus missed the theory of allodial property upon which Jefferson’s agrarian vision had been grounded. Accordingly, in Watson’s recounting, agrarianism follows Jeffersonian political theory because it is compatible with the interest of farmers, not because it served as the basis for the individual ownership of property. Watson embraced a labor theory of property that valued the rights of the producer over the abstract property rights of ownership as it had come to be defined. He articulated this belief in an essay titled the “Farmers’ Union” that he wrote for publication. He explained that “the Jeffersonian meant to do its utmost to help the agricultural classes in their fight for justice.” He asserted that “the wealth-producing millions who labor on the farms have been mercilessly pillaged ever since the Civil War, by our diabolical financial system, by the trustbreeding tariff, and by the public service corporations.” This assertion corresponded with the statement in the People’s Party platform professing that wealth belongs to creator of the product, be it agricultural or manufactured. Later, in his writings against Socialism, Watson also espoused the labor theory of value as the historical basis of all property rights. He called for the regulation of land monopolies by a progressive tax and policies encouraging every citizen to own his land and home individual in the similar manner as that which had been accomplished in 9 New Zealand. At this point in my research, this proposal seems to be the most significant piece of agrarian political reform that Watson advocated. Whither, then, is agrarianism in the thought of this agrarian rebel? Although his agrarian perspective was not at the core of his Jeffersonian political theory, it was ever-present in his writings about the Old South. Watson’s largely- autobiographical novel Bethany stands as the most obvious example. In it he depicted the region as characterized by its stability, order, and relatively harmonious social relations. Early in the novel, he describes a political debate between Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs, which draws the mass of the countryside into the town for the event. The debate concludes with a communal barbeque that had been arranged by an ad hoc committee procuring ample donations from the local planters. They also coordinated the building of a platform for the speeches and a shelter from the sun for the ladies. Much like the ballyhooed “barn-raising” parties of rural lore, Watson emphasized the inherent generosity and capacity of a community not dedicated to individual profit. And they would dine together. Watson explains that not too distant from the cooking pit ran, “the dinner table – two undressed pine planks resting side by side on brackets nailed to trees, and supported by plank legs – and this hasty table stretched out fifty feet long or more under the trees.” After the speeches, the community would congregate “on each side of this plank table” and “stand and eat – using fingers and pocket-knives in primitive fashion.” No silverware or fine china was to be provided for the local Vanderbilts and Morgans. Yet, for all the charm that Watson conveys to the scene, he does not want to suggest it as utopian. His scene of the political barbeque closes with two fights – one a drunken quarrel leading to a knife fight and the other which ends in an eye-gouging. Both relate to the political issues of the day. In including these events, Watson clearly attempts to show that the southern farmer will fearlessly go to great lengths to defend his political views and in so doing crassly foreshadows the coming civil war. He also, however, offers these brief considerations of individual honor and dignity in sharp contrast to the communal spirit and generosity portrayed 10 earlier in the chapter. Watson’s farmers perform their communal duties because they are gentlemen of honor, irrespective of social class. Watson extended these tropes of honor and duty to the relation between master and slave as well. Somewhat curiously, one of his clearest portrayals of slavery is found in his critical treatise on Socialism. He began his argument by responding to an essay written by New York Socialist Robert Hunter, who had indicted the white South for its history of racial exploitation. Watson’s refuted Hunter’s characterization by offering a rival view of the relation between master and slave as a patriarchal system, which was recognized by both parties. Before Watson turned to the faults of Socialism, he defended southern culture and its history of slavery. In so doing, he engaged most of the contemporary racial stereotypes used to buttress the argument for white supremacy. And his views on southern slavery certainly appeared more idyllic then even those of the most ardent proslavery writers before the war. But they necessarily appeared so because he sought to stress the relation of the master and slave as a human relation. Watson turned the argument about the economic inefficiency of the southern plantation on its head in order to emphasize this humanity. He acknowledged that the southern planters were not “good businessmen;” they lacked the constitution for the “daily grind of money making.” He explained that his grandfather, who was a superior farmer and owned over a hundred slaves, would only ever account for “a few bales of cotton” in annual profit. The rest of the income was consumed by the operation of the plantation. He contended that under the slave system the slaves received “a greater share of what they produced than the wage earners of the North and East are getting now.” And, perhaps most controversially, he suggested that the slaves recognized their apparent good fortune. He recounted on how when the master would necessarily be away from home, it was common practice for him “to select one of his slaves to sleep at the door [of the house] while he was away.” Watson described the scene: “every night that the white man was gone the negro would stretch his blanket on the piazza, and, with his axe in his arms, lie down to guard the master’s wife and his daughters.” 11 It is easy to dismiss Watson’s “moonlight and magnolias” perspective on slavery in the Old South as just another manifestation racist tommyrot. Considered within the larger project of fashioning a cultural history of agrarian ways and sensibilities, however, the apology for slavery represents something more. It served as a reference point for when things went awry for both races and Watson lamented the squalor of black tenant farmers in his own time. But it also allowed Watson to suggest that the human capacity for empathy was being eroded by industrial relations. For Watson to use a system of human bondage to illustrate this point was, to say the least, provocative. But, then again, he was Thomas Watson. Some consideration should be given as well to Watson’s editorial role in cultivating and transmitting agrarian ideas especially through the publication of the Jeffersonian Magazine and the Jeffersonian Weekly. These publications reached wide audiences in the early twentiethcentury South and served as a popular means to articulate and define the agrarian ways of the region. Further study, I suspect, will reveal the importance of these forms of media in crafting an image of an agrarian South for a generation that came of age with the automobile. It is not my intention today to suggest that the formation of cultural agrarianism in the twentieth-century South can be attributed to Thomas Watson alone. Other contemporary writers, Thomas Nelson Page, Philip Alexander Bruce, and Ellen Glasgow each emphasized the southern plantation and agrarian culture in juxtaposition to the commercial modernity imbued by capitalism. Yet Watson the editor, through his journals, may have disseminated the icons of agrarianism more widely. Of equal significance, it is important to consider that Southern agrarianism was not a parochial phenomenon. Simultaneous with Watson’s agrarian writings in the South, Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton were articulating the Distributist critique of capitalism in England. Chesterton famously, (and insightfully), characterized the capitalist revolution as anarchy while Belloc, in a more scholarly tone, rejected the charade of capitalist finance and called for the restoration of property to its more tangible, medieval forms. 12 Undoubtedly, Thomas Watson would chafe at being lumped with these Catholic bedfellows but within the historical context of the time, they shared far more intellectually then they parted. So too should he have sympathized with the popular revolt of the Cristeros in the midst of liberal revolution in Mexico. Agrarianism as a form of social thought experienced an international revival in the face of the triumph of capitalist social relations. In this manner, it offered an important contemporary critique of capitalism in a similar manner to Socialism, Fabianism, Communism, and, subsequently, Fascism. It was not merely an expression of a backward South struggling to maintain white supremacy. Watson’s cultural agrarianism stood at the core of his system of social relations that he believed necessary to counter-act the deleterious influences of capitalism and socialism, which both tended toward class rule. He posited agrarianism as a social system that could transcend class conflict (and at some points racial conflict as well) and, in so doing, provided a dynamic for Southerners to see their tradition as something distinctive from the American narrative of material progress. His intense political efforts to bring about a Jeffersonian revolution in government came to naught, or perhaps more generously, were simply co-opted by the subsequent Progressive reforms, but his reconstruction of agrarianism as the basis for Southern culture instilled a longer resonance. Southern writers and historians of the next generation would make Watson’s agrarian counter-culture the centerpiece of the public discourses on the South.