While most urban working-class voters did not support the Populists, Chicagoans proved to be exceptions. The People’s Party developed a strong — but brief — presence there. In 1894, the local party convention nominated for Congress Henry Demorest Lloyd (1847–1903), a leading reform journalist who had recently published an important critique of concentrated corporate power, Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894). Lloyd delivered the speech that follows in October 1894. The speech was printed in the Duluth, Minnesota, Searchlight, a Populist newspaper that ran it under the title “The Revolution is Here.” Lloyd lost the election, but his writings helped paved the way for later “muckraking” journalists, as well as for antitrust legislation and other government measures to rein in the power of large corporations.
The millions produce wealth; only the tens have it. There is the root of the whole matter. The first and last political issue of our time is with its concentrated wealth. Not with wealth, but with its concentration: . . . the contraction of currency, the twin miseries of monopoly and pauperism, the tyranny of corporations, the corruption of the government, the depopulation of the country, the congestion of the cities, and the host of ills which now form the staple theme of our novelists and magazinists, and the speeches of the new party orators. . . .
We see materializing out of the shadows of our great counting-rooms a new system of government—government by campaign contribution. The people maintain their national, state, city, and local governments . . . ; but the trusts, and armor-plate contractors, and the whisky ring, and the subsidized steamship companies, and the street [car companies] and other railways, buy the privilege of running these governments to enrich themselves, to send troublesome leaders of the people to jail, to keep themselves out of jail. By campaign contributions of a few millions is thus bought away from the people the government. . . .
In organizing against modern capitalism the workingmen set the example which all the people are now driven by self-preservation to follow. The trades union of the workingmen was the precursor of the farmers’ alliance, the grange, and the people’s party. Chicago to-day leads the van in this great forward movement. . . . The workingmen of Chicago . . . [stand] firm as a rock for the principle without which the industrial liberties of the people can never be established — the principle that they have the right at their option to own and operate collectively any or all of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. . . . [E]verywhere the people are giving utterance to their belief that they are the only competent administrators of the wealth which they create. . . .
Our liberties and our wealth are from the people and by the people and both must be for the people. Wealth, like government, is the product of the co-operation of all, and, like government, must be the property of all its creators, not a privileged few alone. . . . Government exists only by the consent of the governed. Business, property, capital are also governments and must also rest on the consent of the governed. . . .
Women will vote, and some day we will have a woman president when the people come in. The post office will carry your telegrams and your parcels as well as your letters, and will be the people’s bank for savings, and their life and accident insurance company, as it is elsewhere already. Every dark place in our cities will be brilliant with electricity, made by the municipalities for themselves. Working men and women will ride for 3 cents and school children for 2 ½ cents, as in Toronto, on streetcar lines owned by the municipalities, and paying by their profits a large part of the cost of government now falling on the tax-payer. . . . Political corruption, boss rule, and boodle will go out, because these spring mainly from the intrigues and briberies of syndicates to get hold of public functions for their private profit. We will have a real civil service [and] a system of public education which shall give every child of the republic the opportunity to fit himself for the public service. The same constitution which granted empires of public lands to create the Pacific railroad kings will find land for workingmen’s homes and land for co-operative colonies of the unemployed. . . .
Every man who works will get a living and every man who gets a living shall work. . . . At the coming election let every man and woman vote — for the women must vote through the men until they vote themselves — let every man and woman vote for those, and only those, who accept this grand principle of the liberation of the people by themselves.
Source: Chester McArthur Destler, American Radicalism, 1865–1901: Essays and Documents (New London: Connecticut College, 1946), 214–21.
Evaluating the Evidence