by Berry Craig

I wish the media would quit saying "populist anger" is fueling the Tea
Bagger movement. It's giving the real Populists a bad name.

The Tea Baggers are on the side of millionaires. The Populists of the 1890s
weren't.

I teach history, but I used to be a reporter. Good reporters dig deep when
they write stories. They even read history books.

Granted, there are some similarities between Tea Baggers and Populists. Tea
Baggers are anti-government. So were Populists. Most Tea Baggers aren't
rich. Neither were most Populists.

But the Tea Bagger movement and Populism are fundamentally different.
Tea Baggers want government to step aside and let the "free market" prevail.
Millionaires love it.

Most Populists were poor farmers and laborers victimized by America's new
industrial order. They wanted government to step in and safeguard ordinary
citizens against the union-busting millionaires who, thanks to the "free
market," had gotten rich by impoverishing those who toiled in mines and
mills or tilled the soil.

The Populists called millionaires "Robber Barons." Tea Baggers would
probably call Populists "socialists." "Socialist" is, of course, the Tea
Baggers' big-time slam.

A lot of Populists didn't consider "socialist" a slur. Many of them became
socialists after their movement died.

Populists roundly denounced millionaires like John D. Rockefeller and the
politicians - Republicans and Democrats - they paid handsomely to keep
unions and government regulations off the back of big business.

In 1892, the Populists got so mad that they started their own party,
officially the People's Party. They didn't pull punches in the preamble to
their party constitution: "The fruits of the toil of millions are badly
stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history
of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and
endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we
breed the two great classes-tramps and millionaires."

The Tea Baggers, like millionaires, rail against "big government." At their
rallies Tea Baggers wave signs urging the "SOCIALIST OBAMA" to "LET THE FREE
MARKET WORK," demanding that "LEFTIST PARASITES" carry their "OWN WEIGHT!!!"
and mourning the death of "CAPITOLISM [sic]."

A lot of Republicans love the Tea Baggers, too. The GOP, many millionaires,
and Tea Baggers have made common cause against health care reform.

The Tea Baggers have bought into Social Darwinism, the 19th century gospel
of the rich and powerful that extolled the "free market" as almost divinely
inspired. "God gave me my money," Rockefeller said.

Social Darwinists said if you're poor and powerless, it's your own fault.
Some Tea Baggers feel that way about health care. "YOUR HEALTH YOUR
PROBLEM," said another sign at a Tea Bagger rally.

Rockefeller hated the Populists. So would the Tea Baggers.

"We believe that the power of government-in other words, of the
people-should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly
and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teaching of
experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty
shall eventually cease in the land," the Populist platform also said.

"We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the
two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs
have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the
controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the
existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or
restrain them."

No doubt, Rockefeller and the other high rollers of the 1890s would have
helped bankroll the Tea Bagger movement as some millionaires are doing
today.

Of course, the Robber Barons wouldn't have invited the "impeach Obama and
his socialist comrades in Congress" crowd to dinner or a round of golf at
the country club. I doubt many big bucks backers of the Tea Bagger movement
hobnob with actual Tea Baggers.

Anyway, the Robber Barons would have found the Tea Baggers useful
working-class foils for the Populists. The millionaires and well-heeled
Democratic and Republican pols were scared the Populists, who were strongest
in the Southern and Western farm states, would somehow unite all poor people
of all races at the ballot box.

The Populist Party collapsed about the time of the Spanish-American War of
1898. ".Where a threatening mass movement developed, the two-party system
stood ready to send out one of its columns to surround that movement and
drain it of vitality," Howard Zinn wrote in A People's History of the United
States. "And always, as a way of drowning class resentment in a flood of
slogans for national unity, there was patriotism."

At the same time, white supremacist Dixie Democrats split the Populist's
powerful Southern wing by playing the race card. Democratic legislatures in
the old Confederate states passed laws making African Americans second class
citizens by denying them the vote and segregating them from whites.

Not coincidentally, not to me anyway, almost every Tea Bagger is white.
Pointedly racist signs are not uncommon at their rallies.

But the powers-that-be have always been good at dividing working folks
against each other. When Yankee railroad tycoon Jay Gould employed
strikebreakers - unions call them "scabs" -- he boasted, "I can hire half of
the working class to kill the other half." (I read that one blogger called
the Tea Baggers "corporate scabs and the enemy of the working class.")

Anyway, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka knows history. "For corporate
America, dividing workers wasn't simply a tactic; it was fundamental to its
success," he said.

Meanwhile, some people - "liberal elitists" to the Tea Baggers and their
Republican friends -- see a ton of irony in the Tea Bagger movement. Joseph
Palermo does.

He teaches history at California State University-Sacramento. Last spring,
the prof turned Huffington Post reporter at a Tea Bagger rally in
Sacramento.

Palermo wrote that he heard speakers bash unions and the Employee Free
Choice Act, even though "most of the people in the crowd were clearly
working class."

His post on the Internet newspaper concluded: ".Therein lies the beauty of
the whole Tea Bag movement. Affluent people like [ultra-conservative
commentator, blogger and writer] Michelle Malkin and [far-right-wing
economist] Grover Norquist and the army of radio 'personalities' convince
working people, most of whom have a relative or are themselves on Medicare
or Social Security, to denounce taxes on affluent people. Many of the people
at the rally were from the eastern foothill communities that are pretty
impoverished and would benefit from Obama's health care, economic, and
education policies. The foreclosure rate alone east of Sacramento would lead
one to think that far more people in this region could use some government
help."

Anyway, John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould would have been crazy about the
Tea Baggers, too.