Global populism and its 1890s Southern United States antecedent: the vexing case of Thomas E. Watson and William Faulkner’s literary intervention

ABSTRACT

Contemporary global populism combines systemic critique of power inequities with a politics of resentment. This conjunction under conditions of modernity gives rise to populisms whose twenty-first-century manifestations markedly exhibit features of Southern variants of the 1890s populism that briefly convulsed United States politics. Volatile mixtures of systemic critique and resentment politics, of progressive and proto-fascist tendencies, are vividly illustrated in the career of Thomas E. Watson (1856–1922), a prominent Georgia lawyer and politician whose populist rhetoric moved from advocating racially inclusive class solidarity to embracing virulent racist nativism. This trajectory, revelatory of susceptibilities to nativist authoritarianism also prominent in many currents of contemporary global populist politics, raises the question of whether and how literary art and humanities scholarship might work to disentangle justified revolt from reactionary resentments. William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) and The Hamlet (1940) offer diverse models of such efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• politics of resentment
• racism
• Southern US
• Thomas E. Watson
• William Faulkner

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ To distinguish populism as a recurrent, transcultural phenomenon from Populism as an 1890s US political movement, I will capitalize the term when referring specifically to the latter.

² See Boehm, “Ancestral Precursors, Social Control, and Social Selection,” 754–61.

³ Ibid., 764–79; Boehm, Moral Origins, 75–87, and Hierarchies of the Forest, 90–224. See also Flannery and Marcus, The Creation of Inequality, 91–183.

⁴ See Boehm, Moral Origins, and Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox.

⁵ Flannery and Marcus, The Creation of Inequality, 187–337, and Wei-Ming, “The Structure and Function of the Confucian Intellectual,” 360–73.

⁶ For the latter, see especially Zolbrod, Diné bahané, 171.

⁷ See especially Scheub, Trickster and Hero.

⁸ See Graeber, Debt.

⁹ Micah 3: 10–11 (King James Version).

¹⁰ Ibid., 6: 12.

¹¹ See Eisenstadt, “Introduction: The Axial Age Breakthroughs,”1–25; Taylor, A Secular Age, 147–53; and Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 265–566.

¹² Taylor, A Secular Age, 147–211.

¹³ Postel, The Populist Vision, 21; Postel cites Cator, Millionaires or Morals, 11.

¹⁴ Pollack, The Populist Response, 6.

¹⁵ Woodward, Tom Watson, viii.

¹⁶ Postel, The Populist Vision, 4. See also Ransom et al., I’ll Take My Stand.

¹⁷ For education, see Postel, The Populist Vision, 45–67; for women, 69–101; for cooperatives, 103–23; for government regulation, 137–71; for unionism, 205–42; and for progressive religiosity and respect for science, 243–68.

¹⁸ See especially Cash, The Mind of the South, and Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism.

¹⁹ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, 38.

²⁰ Ibid., 43–4.

²¹ Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson, 19.

²² Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Movement, 1–48.

²³ See Postel, The Populist Vision, 137–63, and Hicks, The Populist Revolt, 153–237.

²⁴ Thomas E. Watson Papers, quoted in Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson, 72.

²⁵ Postel, The Populist Vision, 4.

²⁶ Ibid., 133.

²⁷ Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson, 73,.

²⁸ Watson, Life and Speeches, 41, quoted in Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson, 73.

²⁹ Ibid., 50–51, quoted in Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson, 75.

³⁰ Watson, People’s Party Paper, 14 April 1893, reprinted in The Populist Mind, 25–6.

³¹ Watson, People’s Party Paper, 10 March 1892, reprinted in The Populist Mind, 46.

³² Watson, People’s Party Campaign Book, reprinted in The Populist Mind, 198.

³³ Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson, 75.

³⁴ Watson, “The Negro Question in the South,” quoted in The Populist Mind, 366, 372.

³⁵ Ibid., 372.

³⁶ Woodward, Tom Watson, 187.

³⁷ Watson, “The Negro Question in the South,” quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 191.

³⁸ Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Movement, 50, 52.

³⁹ Woodward, Tom Watson, 192.

⁴⁰ T. Warren Allen, quoted in Atlanta Journal, 7 April 1892, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 195.

⁴¹ Woodward, Tom Watson, 199.

⁴² James C. Black, Constitution, 26 August 1892, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 201.

⁴³ Woodward, Tom Watson, 204.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 208.

⁴⁵ See Postel, The Populist Vision, 173–203, 196 cited; see also Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Movement, 97–113.

⁴⁶ Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Movement, 112.

⁴⁷ Watson, Atlanta Journal, 27 July 1906, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 321.

⁴⁸ Woodward, Tom Watson, 321.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 348.

⁵⁰ Watson, “Socialists and Socialism,” (1909), 914, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 351. The emphasis is Watson’s.

⁵¹ Watson, Jeffersonian, 24 June 1915, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 382.

⁵² Watson, Jeffersonian, 12 August 1915, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 384.

⁵³ Woodward, Tom Watson, 421.

⁵⁴ Watson, Bethany, 19, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 5.

⁵⁵ Watson, “The Negro Question,” quoted in The Populist Mind, 362.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 374.

⁵⁷ Hinrichsen, Possessing the Past, 6.

⁵⁸ See Hinrichsen, Possessing the Past, 1–28.

⁵⁹ See Maxwell and Shields, The Long Southern Strategy; Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority; and Lind, Made in Texas.

⁶⁰ For India, see Chacko, “Marketizing Hindutva, 377–410; Kinnvall, “Populism, Ontological Insecurity, and Hindutva,” 283–302; Anderson and Longkumer, “Neo-Hindutva,” 371–7; Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste, and Politics in India; and Jaffrelot, ed., Hindu Nationalism. For Hungary, see Palonen, “Performing the Nation,” 308–21, and Toomey, “History, Nationalism, and Democracy,” 87–108. For Turkey, see Umut, “Glorification of the Past as a Political Tool,” 330–57, and Türk, “A Glance at the Constitutive Elements of the Leadership-Centered Perspective,” 601–23.

⁶¹ Chacko, “Marketizing Hindutva,” 377.

⁶² Postel, The Populist Vision, 173–203.

⁶³ Child, “Astonishing Byblows,” 286–310.

⁶⁴ Kinney, Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time, 5–6, 16, and 74–76. See also Hinrichsen, Possessing the Past, 1–28, and Davis, Games of Property.

⁶⁵ See especially Sederberg, “A Momentary Anesthesia of the Heart,” 79–96; Clark, “Twain and Faulkner,” 97–109; and Taylor, “Horror and Nostalgia,” 74–84.

⁶⁶ Davis, Games of Property, 5.

⁶⁷ See Weinstein, Faulkner’s Subject, 42–81.

⁶⁸ Davis, Games of Property, 5.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 43–76.

⁷⁰ Faulkner, Go Down, Moses.

⁷¹ Ibid., 131.

⁷² Ibid., 380–1.

⁷³ Ibid., 111.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 113.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 114.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 111, 270.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 209.

⁷⁸ Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, 259.

⁷⁹ Kinney, Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time, 65–66.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 66–67.

⁸¹ Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, 364. See Rieger, Clear-Cutting Eden, 135–58, and Aiken, Faulkner and the Southern Landscape, 1–5, 58–74.

⁸² Davis, Games of Property, 221.

⁸³ Faulkner, The Hamlet, 5.

⁸⁴ Langdon, “Commodifying Freedom,” 31, 32.

⁸⁵ Lutz, “That Texas Disease,” 72.

⁸⁶ Child, “Astonishing Byblows,” 289.

⁸⁷ Ibid., 295–6.

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Donald R. Wehrs

Donald R. Wehrs is Hargis Professor of English Literature at Auburn University where he teaches literary theory, eighteenth-century British studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial fiction. He is author of three books on twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African narratives (Islam, Ethics, Revolt, 2008; Pre-Colonial Africa in Colonial African Narratives, 2008; African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values, 2001). The editor or co-editor of four collections on literary theory and criticism (most recently, The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, 2017, co-edited with Thomas Blake), he has published book chapters and journal articles on subjects ranging from eighteenth-century British literature (Sterne, Fielding, Richardson, Behn, and Godwin) and British and European fiction (Rousseau, Goethe, Austen, Hardy, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Proust, and Joyce) to Shakespeare, medieval romance, Cervantes, postcolonial studies, and cognitive literary theory.