Word: populists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BEEN a long time since anyone has used the word "populist" in a contemporary political context. With the death of Tom Watson at the turn of the century and Louisiana's charismatic Hucy Long after the depression, "populist" unity between poor whites and blacks faded. Southern politicians turned instead to bland personality-filled appeals designed to appease, if not energize, the white ruling class...
Social Engineering. More than anything else, Phillips' book is a master plan of how the G.O.P. can corral voters troubled by what he calls "the Negro problem." The Democrats, says Phillips, have shifted from the economic populist stand of the New Deal to "social engineering." As a result, writes Phillips, "in practically every state and region, ethnic and cultural animosities and divisions exceed all other factors in explaining party choice and identification...
...Vonnegut holds no grudges. He is, in general, a man more rueful than wrathful. Black-humorist contemporaries often vibrate with a febrile, apocalyptic rage, seeming to feel that America has the market cornered on greed and hypocrisy. Vonnegut takes a longer view. Though he has an old-fashioned Populist's distrust of the rich and powerful manipulators of society, Vonnegut's is closer kin to Twain than Kafka. Deeply pessimistic about the world, he is rarely depressed by it. Part of him, at least, would contemplate even the story of the apocalypse as some sort of cautionary tall...
Although Womack holds very tight reins on his subjects matter, for me his book is suggestive of certain principles concerning the nature of any agrarian revolt. He offers an understanding of the nature of a populist leader and what the goals and limits of a populist uprising...
...than the story of a man and how he changed the world, Womack tells the story of a little world and a man who epitomized it. The tale ends, not with Zapata's murder, but with the final dissolution of the movement he started. In the history of a populist movement the people are the real heroes and the story ends with their surviving our not surviving...