At the forefront of Populist politics and ideology was the relationship between the individual worker and the increasingly complex international economy. Frank Doster, who later served as chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, argued against monopolies in his remarks at a Labor Day rally in Topeka, Kansas, in 1894.

Everything which goes to sustain his physical life, which enables him to conduct his daily toil, which makes existence possible in this fierce competitive strife have become the monopoly of others—others to whom he sustains only the harshest and most exacting kind of contract relations. Formerly the tools of agriculture were the wagon and the plow; the tools of the worker in wood his plane and chisel and saw; the tools of the worker in iron his hammer and anvil and forge; and they were sufficient for all the purposes of industrial life. Now the terrible elements of physical nature which the gods can scarce bridle or control—steam, electricity, compressed air—are utilized to do the work of man. But these, the common property of all, have been made the monopoly of the few, have been turned aside from the beneficent ends for which designed, to serve the selfish purposes of avarice and greed. In the face of the power exerted by the monopolists of these tremendous engines of industry and commerce the republican and democratic parties stand paralyzed—hypnotized as it were, unable to control it or give it direction and shape for common good.

Against the tyrannical exercise of this power the People’s Party in behalf of the laborers of the land protests. The failure to adapt the legislation of the country to the strange conditions which this new life has forced upon us is the cause in greater part of our industrial ills. . . .

The Populist Party proposes as the only means to the desired end to utilize the power of the combined whole, to bring the power of the social mass to bear upon the rebellious individuals who thus menace the peace and safety of the state. It says that the subjects of those monopolies and trusts are public in their nature, and that the powers exercised through them are in reality the functions and agencies of government itself. It would have the government, that is, the people, assert their rightful dominion over the same, and as the philosophic basis of its claim it prescribes at least two political formulae: One that it is the business of the government to do that for the individual which he cannot successfully do for himself, and which other individuals will not do for him upon just and equitable terms, the other, that the industrial system of a nation, like its political system, should be a government of and for and by the people alone.

Source: Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 12–13.