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A Narrowing of Vision: Hardy L. Brian and the Fate of Louisiana Populism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Joel Sipress
Joel Sipress
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin—Superior
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Abstract

In the 1890s, Hardy L. Brian was among Louisiana's leading Populists. He was a key founder of the Louisiana People's Party and served as state party secretary and editor of the organization's weekly newspaper. Son of a prominent agrarian dissident from the Louisiana piney woods, Brian believed deeply in the power of an aroused populace to bring fundamental changes to American political and economic life. Over time, however, he abandoned social movement organizing in favor of conventional party politics. The climax of this journey came in 1896, when Brian joined fellow delegates to the Populist national convention to give the People's Party presidential nomination to Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. The Bryan nomination cost the Populists their independent political identity and precipitated a collapse of their party organization. Hardy L. Brian's journey from agrarian rebel to conventional reform politician reflects a loss of faith in the power of the Populist vision. While he never abandoned the goal of fundamental change, Brian lost faith in the power of this goal to inspire and arouse. Instead, he embraced the logic of conventional party politics, and upon that logic the Populist vision foundered.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 43 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2008

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References

1 Hair, William Ivy, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 217Google Scholar; Colfax (LA) Chronicle, Oct. 10, 1891Google Scholar; Daily Picayune (New Orleans), Oct. 3, 1891Google Scholar; “Organization, Platform and Address of the People's Party,” Brian, Hardy L. Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Collections, Louisiana State UniversityGoogle Scholar.

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21 Times-Democrat (New Orleans), Feb. 18-19, 1892Google Scholar. , Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 196–97Google Scholar , 222-23. Many historians have interpreted Populist assertions of an identity of interests between black and white as a challenge to the South's racial orthodoxy. Conservative paternalists, however, also argued that the interests of black and white were identical. In both cases, the assertion of an identity of interests was used to argue that blacks should defer political power to whites.

22 , Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 225–26Google Scholar. For election results, see , Daniel, “The Louisiana People's Party,” 1126–29Google Scholar. Hair attributes Tannehill's poor showing in New Orleans, in part, to electoral fraud. The Populists received 9,792 votes in the 1892 gubernatorial election. In the fall of 1892, the Populists ran candidates in four of Louisiana's six congressional districts. The Populist congressional candidates received a total of 14,634 votes representing 18 percent of the vote cast in the four districts.

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32 Hunt, James L., Marion Butler and American Populism (Chapel Hill, 2003), 83–84Google Scholar. like Brian, Marion Buder was a veteran Populist with deep roots in the agrarian movement. Butler worked his way up through the ranks of agrarian politics, beginning as the lecturer and later the president of his local county Farmers' Alliance. For an analysis of national Populist leaders' use of free silver as a “wedge” issue, see , Durden, The Climax of Populism, 6–13Google Scholar.

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40 Louisiana Populist, July 31, Aug. 7, 1896Google Scholar. The sixteen-member Louisiana delegation was entitled to cast thirty-two votes at the St. Louis convention. The one delegate who failed to vote for Bryan abstained on the presidential ballot.

41 Louisiana Populist, Aug. 14, Aug. 21, Sept. 4, Oct. 16, Nov. 6, Nov. 13, 1896Google Scholar; , Daniel, “The Louisiana People's Party,” 1140Google Scholar.

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43 Winn Parish Enterprise, Sept. 29, 1949Google Scholar; Winnfield News-American, Sept. 30, 1949Google Scholar.

44 The members of the Louisiana delegation to St. Louis convention are listed in the Louisiana Populist, July 31, 1896Google Scholar. Of the sixteen members of the delegation, at least seven can be positively determined to have been active in the Louisiana Farmers' Union. One additional delegate, J. V. Lagman of New Orleans, though not a Farmers' Union activist, was a veteran Populist who had attended the founding convention of the Louisiana People's Party in 1891. The delegation did include at two relatively recent converts to Populism. According to Hardy Brian, one of these recent converts, Monroe newspaper editor A. A. Gunby, was the most ardent “middle-of-the-roader” in the delegation; Louisiana Populist, Aug. 7, 1896Google Scholar. The sources consulted in compiling this portrait of the delegation include the Louisiana Populist, the Chronicle, , Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian ProtestGoogle Scholar, and “Charter and By-Laws of the Winn Parish Cooperative Association.”

45 Cited in Korstand, Robert and Lichtenstein, Nelson, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” journal of American History 75 (Dec. 1988): 811.Google Scholar