16. The Law Condemns the Man or Woman    

Source:  Anthony Weekly Bulletin (KS), January 4, 1895  

| The 1892 Omaha Platform of the People's Party |

The poem used with this illustration originated with the English Enclosure Movement, which drove many farmers into destitution and subservient dependence.  It was centuries old by the 1890s.  For Populists, and many other Americans, the Enclosure Movement symbolized what was wrong with the Old World.  The Omaha Platform called for an end to alien land ownership.  The wording was unfortunate.  Democrats and Republicans misrepresented the plank as anti-immigrant.  In fact, Populists wanted land set aside for actual settlers, whether foreign or native-born.  They opposed land ownership by foreign speculators.  Foreign investment in western ranching corporations was significant by the 1890s.  The plank was largely a product of the farmer-rancher rivalry of the late nineteenth century West.   

Another product of this rivalry was the euphemism, "Cattle Baron."  The earliest use of this phrase that I have seen was by Samuel Crocker, editor of the Oklahoma War Chief (Caldwell, KS), in 1885.  He was active in the Greenback, Union Labor, and Populist movements.  Crocker's allusion to aristocracy (Baron) was conscious.  He was born in England.  

Critics of Populism have labeled the movement Anglophobic.  To Populists, England symbolized aristocratic privilege.  It had nothing to do with ethnicity.  Several prominent Populists (or their parents) were born in England, including the father of Henry and Leo Vincent.  Their newspaper, the American Nonconformist, was named after an English newspaper of the 1840s and 1850s.

Signs reading "Keep off the Grass" and "No Trespass" became common in Populists cartoons after Jacob Coxey's poor people's march on Washington in 1894.  Police arrested Coxey for stepping on the White House Lawn when he tried to deliver a petition to President Cleveland.  The Constitution, of course, gives citizens the right to petition their government.  The event symbolized how far America had strayed from popular control of politics.

For more on the land issue, see:

Ashby, N.B. The Riddle of the Sphinx: A Discussion of the Economic Questions Relating to Agriculture, Land, Transportation, Money, Taxation and Cost of Interchange.... 474 p. Des Moines, Iowa: Industrial Publishing, 1890.

Clements, Roger V. "British Investment and American Legislative Restrictions in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1880-1900." Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 42(2): 207-28. September 1955.

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