The grass-roots Populist movement that swept rural America a century ago drew millions of farm men and women
and clusters of non-farmers into a powerful crusade to reshape the nation's political economy. Populists sought
to usher in a "cooperative commonwealth" to reverse the growth of America's monopoly capitalism and harness
the engine of private ownership for the common good. Thus, Populism became a bridge between the nineteenth-century
traditions of republicanism and producerism and the regulatory state of this century. McMath crisply interprets
the development of the Populist crusade from its early beginnings in the turbulent 1870s to the emergence of the
Farmers' Alliances a decade later. He deals with the founding of the People's (Populist) Party in 1892, and its
ultimate demise. He describes Populism's important regional components, and he places the crusade in a larger context
as he compares it to parallel movements in the Great Plains and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. American Populism
is an impressive book about a major social, cultural, and political movement.
This work attempts to present "a summary of the current understanding of populism, the rural social and
political reform movement of the last quarter of the 19th century." (Libr J) Index.