The story of Georgia’s political flamethrower Tom Watson will never become a defining national myth. Despite its extraordinary influence on American democracy, Watson’s life is too saturated with tragedy to merit the righteous optimism that national norms demand. When Watson’s statue was removed from the steps of the Georgia State Capitol in 2013, the event received little attention outside of Atlanta. Without historian C. Vann Woodward’s transcendent 1938 biography, Watson, like most politicians of his time, would have surely disappeared from academic research.
But there remains an unsettling force in Watson’s life that, once encountered, inevitably influences interpretations of America’s past and present. Watson was the most charismatic leader of the late 19th century political upheaval that became known as American populism, and his story resonates with the full promise and danger of the American project. He can be understood without exaggeration as America’s heroic scion. The Boston Tea Party and the frenetic progenitor of Donald Trump’s violent fantasies.
Born to slave-owning Confederate military parents, Watson witnessed his family’s descent into poverty after the Civil War and rose to prominence in Georgia politics as a lawyer and newspaperman attacking the dominant economic order. Ta. Watson accurately portrayed the political domination of the Gilded Age as a predatory alliance between Southern political bosses and Northern capitalists. As the 1880s moved into the 1890s, Watson came to understand that racial divisions were an essential tool of this bipartisan system. This bipartisan system was instigated by elites from both parties to undermine their political power by pitting black and white workers against each other. He ran for Congress as a member of the Independent People’s Party, pledging to erase America’s “color line” in order to liberate farmland, and won support from prominent black intellectuals, including W.E.B. DuBois. The People’s Party’s radicalism is easily overshadowed by the fact that many of its early demands, from an eight-hour workday to free mail delivery to a progressive income tax, were eventually passed. But the most unusual thing about the populist party was its coalition government. When Georgia State Police arrested black voting rights activist H.S. Doyle on the streets of Augusta ahead of the 1892 election, one of Watson’s henchmen pulled Doyle from prison and took him under protection at Watson’s mansion. There, more than 2,000 People’s Party members took up arms and successfully defended it. Doyle, a state-sponsored lynch mob.
However, Watson was ultimately defeated in the 1892 election campaign, and the populist movement that had captivated the nation collapsed within a few years. By the early 20th century, the party had disappeared and Watson had transformed from a prophet of racial cooperation to a fountain of white racial resentment. He supported the complete disenfranchisement of black voters, ranted against Catholics and socialists, and eventually used newspapers to incite lynch mobs to kill Jewish factory manager Leo Frank. I had him killed.
Watson’s embrace of the dark side led to his greatest electoral success. At the time of his death in 1922, Watson was a senator from Georgia and a representative of the Democratic Party he had once denounced.
Watson was an effective agitator because he practiced the politics of anger in a time when anger was called for. Even at his most exciting—and his losing campaign in 1892 was a euphoric cultural phenomenon—Watson was less committed to helping than to fighting. He had a policy platform, but he also ran an economic cooperative, almost an armed rebellion. Throughout the Gilded Age, workers and peasants were actually exploited by predatory oligarchy. The political system was indeed deeply corrupt, and the economy was a system of mass deprivation characterized by financial crises, endless deflation, agricultural mismanagement, mechanized industrial brutality, and child labor. People had a right to be angry.
Although today’s global economy is largely calmer, the same politics of anger are returning. The 2008 financial crisis heightened the sense that the game was rigged against the public. As unemployment rose to 10% and more than 9 million homes were lost to foreclosure, the federal government saved bankers’ bonuses and avoided financial fraud. The richest 1 percent of American households captured half of the economic gains during President Barack Obama’s term, but by the end of 2015 the bottom 99 percent had only recovered about two-thirds of the income they lost in the crash. There wasn’t.
It is not difficult to see how the politics of anger can be mobilized when political institutions fail ordinary people’s expectations while taking extraordinary measures to protect the wealthy. Even more difficult to process is how that anger has sustained itself over the past eight years.
The unemployment rate has been below 5 percent in all but the last nine months of President Donald Trump’s term and the first six months of President Joe Biden’s term. For context, from January 1974 to April 1997, the unemployment rate never fell below 5 percent. And while no one benefited from the inflation that began in 2021-2022, wage increases for workers have outpaced price increases since the coronavirus pandemic began. . Inflation peaked at 7.2% in June 2022, but in fact, absent a populist uprising, the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (and then nine straight months of double-digit unemployment) Inflation was high throughout the period (continued). The U.S. labor market has never been as strong as it is today in the last 50 years, and even when accounting for inflation, the past two years have been the best overall economic performance since at least the end of President Bill Clinton’s term. The US economy is not without its problems. For example, housing is too expensive and everything related to parenthood has become very difficult. However, this does not mean that the country’s political system ignores the plight of ordinary workers. We have responded vigorously to their needs with repeated trillions of dollars of investment in domestic industry and direct support to households.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have waged a vicious election fraud campaign that would make Senator Watson proud, and will almost certainly win the votes of nearly half of American voters this November. Dew. This is not a populist campaign in the economic sense. For example, President Trump’s pledge to repeal Joe Biden’s anti-inflation law would renege on more than $1 trillion in promises to U.S. manufacturing. However, it is still a campaign based on anger. During the recent vice presidential debate, Vance repeatedly parlayed anti-immigrant vitriol into his economic commentary, claiming that illegal immigration is “one of the most important drivers of housing prices in this country.” is an obviously absurd explanation for post-COVID-19 house price increases (housing prices were created not by a mass influx of foreigners, but by the disruption caused by the pandemic). One week, Trump and Vance caused a stir in Springfield, Ohio, with their outrageous lies about immigrants eating pets. He then concocts a fable about the government diverting disaster relief aid to undocumented workers and rants about immigrants bringing “bad genes” into the country. Sometimes Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance pay lip service to policy proposals for a few hours, show no signs of paying attention to even their most ardent supporters, and then return to their campaign’s business of bashing immigrants.
jim newell
I’ve been covering Washington for a long time. I have never heard anyone in Congress say this much.
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Why on earth does such madness garner political attention? For many liberals, the answer is simply that this country is full of racism, and that’s both true and boring. Racism has plagued this continent for centuries, but demagogues seeking power through raw resentment always fail. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been trying to blame immigrants for the city’s problems for years, and everyone hates him. Pat Buchanan and David Duke tried to do the same in the 1990s, but were unable to gain the support of their own parties. Watson’s story shows that, for a time, the right leaders can inspire even former Confederates to literally fight for black voting rights.
As President Trump’s term ended and President Joe Biden’s term began, something important happened. No one wants to talk about it. Even conservatives no longer bring up masks or school closures, and much of the discussion around inflation carefully avoids any reference to the massive economic disruption caused by COVID-19. But one of the most important cultural achievements of this era was the sudden spread of vaccine skepticism into mainstream culture. The delusion of anti-vaxxers that vaccines cause autism persists in large part on the fringes of the autism community. Because it gives narrative meaning to difficult, random experiences. There is great joy in the life of a special needs parent, but there is also great fear and pain. Fear comes from not knowing how the world will react to your child, and pain from having to watch your child struggle through no fault of their own. For many people, it is more comforting to believe that their child’s difficulties are the product of deliberate wrongdoing rather than an accident of fate. The idea that bad things happen for bad reasons is more pleasant than the belief that they happen for no reason at all.
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Anti-vaxxers aren’t the only ones seeking such comfort. Americans on the right and left are turning away from Tom Watson’s story not only because it’s ugly and violent, but also because it claims we can control our own destiny. . From Huck Finn to Indiana Jones, American mythology tends to portray heroes as variations on the David and Goliath story, the story of the underdog achieving an unlikely victory over overbearing orders. The heroic acts of individuals reassure audiences with the promise that the world’s wrongs can be righted with enough courage, even if that order is part of America itself. Horatio Alger’s novels about children born into poverty can be read as indictments of the social order of the Gilded Age, but the romance of these stories is always about the boy grasping fate by the horns. We are disturbed not only because Watson turns evil, but because this extraordinary leader’s earnest and courageous attempts to right the world’s wrongs end in failure. In order to win, he consents to the domination of dark forces beyond his control.
By the time the peak of the pandemic had passed, Joe Biden was too old to provide the country with the leadership that could help it handle the tragedies experienced in 2020 and 2021. One of Biden’s unique talents as a public communicator has always been. his ability to transform his experience of personal tragedy into public consolation; At his best, he is an amazingly empathetic orator, able to connect with people from vastly different walks of life through a shared experience of pain. But in his 80s, he didn’t or couldn’t do that. By the end of his presidential term, Biden holed up in the White House with his family, fervently denying both political reality and his own destiny.
We all lost something to the pandemic, but the nation has never collectively mourned that loss in any meaningful way. The politics of anger aren’t particularly suited to times of fear and pain, but for millions of Americans, it’s a more comforting alternative. Hope.
