Carleton Beals and Populism

Carleton Beals

There are several ways of meeting people quite apart from shaking hands.  You can develop a sense of knowing a speaker, a musician, an actor whom you have never met and probably never will meet in the flesh.  One of my favorite ways of meeting people is through books.  That is how I just got to know Carleton Beals (1893-1979) better.  Beals was a journalist, popular historian, and radical political activist with a special expertise in Latin America, and we first “met” around 2008 when I was working on some political writers of the later twentieth century.  Our intermediary was Leon Trotsky.  By the end of the 1930s Trotsky, who had been exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, was unequivocally at the top of Stalin’s hit list.  The master fiction of the Moscow Show Trials of 1936 and 1938 was that Trotsky had been at the center of a vast conspiracy to overthrow Communism in Russia.  The trials, which provided the background for Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, were Stalin’s means of destroying all real or potential rivals.  Though the charges against the Old Bolsheviks were fantastic, Stalin was sure that western radical intellectuals “would swallow the whole thing,” as he put it. 

 

            In this view he was largely but by no means entirely correct.  I will say parenthetically that while Trotsky had of course been a  mass murderer too, his penny-ante efforts in this field were so far outstripped by Stalin that he could seem a semi-saint to that comparatively small group of internationalist Marxist true believers who broke with the Red Tsar.  Thus “Trotskyism” was much more than a mere annoyance to Stalin.  It was a potential challenge to his hegemonic ambitions.  By now the exiled Trotsky was living in Mexico, where he was in due course assassinated by an NKVD agent, in August of 1940.  But before that happened, while the Spanish Civil War was still raging, a group of anti-Stalinist leftists had put the Moscow Trials themselves on trial in a propaganda coup.  A “People’s Tribunal” went to Mexico to investigate Trotsky’s alleged treason against Socialism.  The tribunal interrogated Trotsky at length and, after a good deal of mock legal deliberation, declared him not guilty.  The head of this blue-ribbon tribunal was the eminent, widely respected American intellectual and educational guru John Dewey.  Other members had been chosen for their expert knowledge of international progressive and revolutionary movements.  One of them was Carleton Beals, a journalist-adventurer who was neither a Stalinist nor a Trotskyite or indeed any kind of Marxist at all.  He was a Populist who had established himself as an expert on the Mexican Revolution and on radical movements in Latin America generally.  But he had felt moved to resign from the tribunal after only a few meetings.  His colleagues had been offended by the “antagonistic” questions he had been putting to Trotsky.  He had asked him, specifically, whether there had been any attempted Bolshevik meddling in Mexican politics in the 1920s.  That seemed a fair question to put to the Apostle of World Revolution, but it was not appreciated  by Trotskyites.

 

            What an interesting guy, I thought.  But I forgot all about him until, in my hopeless quest to understand what has been going on in our own American politics in the previous and current presidential administrations, I stumbled upon one of Beals’s many books roughly forty years after its author’s death.  It is called The Great Revolt and Its Leaders: The history of popular American uprisings in the 1890’s.*  Few book titles are more precise in their identification of an author’s subject matter.

 

            The book, though breezily written and journalistic in its temper, is based in extensive research.  Its broad subject is Populism.  The terms Populism and populist are common enough in current journalism, but used today with such imprecision as to render them functionally useless except as vague markers of elitist disapproval.  But around 1900 Populism was a thing, a real political party, the animating force behind important thinkers and writers, the vital spirit of influential newspapers, a vibrant expression of a genuine though now nearly vanished interpretation of the American democratic ideal.  History is replete with sad admonitions, but it also presents us with the clear evidence, if only we will accept it, of the dramatic amelioration of national and world problems which in the past rendered our ancestors virtually helpless.  During the last few months serious authors have claimed that the political divisiveness of Americans is at an all-time high, that the gap between rich and poor has never been greater, that racial injustice and antagonism could hardly be worse, and that juggernaut corporations exercise upon us a uniquely novel and malign tyranny we are incapable of resisting.  If you believe any of these things, as I myself have been wont to do, I suggest you read The Great Revolt.

 

            Beals was born in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, in 1893.  His father was the editor of a leading Populist newspaper.  His grandmother was the celebrated feminist warrior against alcohol, Carrie Nation.  He summarizes his book thus: “The middle western and southern revolt that came to a head out on the plains in the grim gay 1890’s was the last gasp of the dying frontier.  Two great systems—frontier America with its free lands and egalitarian democracy, and the new industrialization with its private property and the exploitation of the individual—met and clashed.”  It is “the story of that paradoxical grass-roots revolt of a dying agricultural system.”

 

            Beals is a great story-teller, and his stories center in the remarkable personalities of those he identifies as the “leaders” of the varied attempts to defend or restore the ideals of individual agency and egalitarianism they believed to be the essence of the early republic.  Their efforts ranged from the formation of farmers’ unions, to warfare against the gold standard, to quixotic political action such as that of Coxey’s Army, an early paradigm of the “march on Washington”.  Beals’s subjects include important thinkers like Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty, powerful if now neglected writers like Hamlin Garlin, but also a wide range of politicians, including some whose bombast often exceeded their effectiveness, such as William Jennings Bryan.  Mostly they were themselves men and women inured by years of brutal physical labor.  They were fighting against the mighty power of the trusts and the combinations, the railroads, unscrupulous land speculators, the industrial extractors of oil and mineral wealth, an increasingly rapacious “financial industry,” and the capricious cruelties of natural agricultural disasters.  Giants in the earth, indeed!  It is the special gift of certain writers to be able to honor the comedy that resides within the tragicomedy of history without devaluing the tragedy.  Carleton Beals was of their number.

 

 

*Carleton Beals, The Great Revolt and Its Leaders: The history of popular American uprisings in the 1890’s (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1968), pp. 367.