Volume 23, Number 17 · October 28, 1976
The Promise of Populism
By C. Vann Woodward
Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America
by Lawrence Goodwyn
Oxford University Press, 702 pp., $19.95
'Populism' is a bad word in the current American political vocabulary and has been for a long time. Any aspirant for elective office who is tagged with the term or makes bold to own it himself is rendered immediately vulnerable to suspicions of a sinister sort. In circles of acknowledged sophistication the identification is sufficient to damn a candidate's motives and associate him with a host of symbols of that which is low, demagogic, retrograde, and irrational in the American tradition of democratic politics. As soon as Jimmy Carter admitted that his acceptance speech before the Democratic Convention in New York was in part inspired by a Populist heritage his fate was sealed with those in whose minds the prevailing stereotype was fixed.
Review, 2111 words
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