6. What God freely Gives to Man

Anthony Weekly Bulletin (KS), April 24, 1895

Most Americans would agree that the industrious should get ahead.  In this cartoon, capitalistic greed upsets nature's order.  Populists charged that exploiters, such as landlords, gained their wealth illegitimately.  Populists were exponents of the "labor theory of value" -- the idea that all value comes from the physical labor involved in creating a product.  With this theory, wages, rents, and interest were thinly-disguised robbery by owners, landlords, and financial speculators.  Today, the idea sounds Marxist.  In fact, Karl Marx took the idea from Adam Smith, the great proponent of laissez faire capitalism.  Populists, however, more likely got the idea from the Founding Fathers who also read Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776).  The idea probably filtered down to Populists through the ideas of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, who Populists considered America's three greatest democratic heroes.

For more on Populism and the "labor theory of value," see:

Palmer, Bruce. "Man Over Money": The Southern Populist Critique of  American Capitalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Pollack, Norman. The Just Polity: Populism, Law, and Human Welfare. Urbana and Chicago: university of Illinois Press, 1987.

 

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