“A spectre is haunting the world—populism”: That ominous observation could have been uttered at various times in recent years, but it opened a now classic 1969 book of essays by an international group of scholars seeking to define populism and to identify its specific national, as well as cross-cultural, features. While the authors ofPopulism: Its Meaning and National Characteristicsgenerally viewed their subject negatively, through lenses shaped by the excesses of anticommunist hysteria in the 1950s or of the New Left in the 1960s, their critiques of populist social movements and political parties now appear tame compared to...

In the colonies and then states during the 1760s and 1770s Americans drew repeatedly on the notion of popular sovereignty to justify crowd actions and riots and then armed resistance to British authority. During the eighteenth century, in England and America, traditions of popular insurgency were already “quasi-legitimate,” even regarded as part of the “natural order.” Routinely, popular disturbances broke out in defense of local communities when authorities failed to act or acted unlawfully. Though common, crowds and mob actions showed remarkable restraint and sought to avoid violence, and especially bloodshed, whenever possible. After 1765 the conflict with British officials...

The rhetorical ascent of “the people” was not only gradual, but from the outset any lip service paid to the people’s sovereignty also came with implicit assumptions as to just who—in the eyes of the gentry—the people were. In theory, “the people were everything.” Abstractly, the people ruled. But as governments actually operated, “the sovereigns were asked to assume their proper place. . . . In a well-ordered republic, the leaders instructed, the people learned, leaders acted, the people responded.” Indeed, the honor code by which gentlemen conducted themselves dictated that they make clear their avoidance of any...

While notions of what “the people” meant continued to vary after 1789 and on into the new century, the idea of the people’s sovereignty became entrenched, and the inclusiveness of the term inevitably expanded. A glance at the appearance of the word “people” or “the people” in presidential inaugural addresses during the early republic reveals that frequent references to “the people” were accompanied often by the implication of the people’s sovereignty. Ironically, the Revolutionary generation of presidents (through James Monroe), though having a more constricted view of the entity, used the terms somewhat more often than their successors.

George Washington’s...

The trade unionism and Workingmen’s parties of the late 1820s and 1830s, while issuing a populist message but failing to mobilize a broad grassroots movement, ran parallel to a new kind of populist insurgency that mobilized tens of thousands of men and women throughout New England and the middle states. Anti-Masonry was in many ways, as a contemporary commented as early as 1832, “sui generis.”¹ Although historians often have misunderstood or slighted its importance, as a mass enthusiasm Anti-Masonry was unparalleled, and its political career served as a catalyst for the formation of the first true mass party organizations in...

Anti-Masonry as populist movement and political party, as New York’s example indicated, exhibited both progressive and reactionary tendencies.¹ Some of the latter long preoccupied historians, with the result that recognition of Anti-Masonry’s egalitarian attitudes tended to be brushed aside. Anti-Masonry fits the profile of populist movements of mixed character discussed in the introduction. An unequivocal reading of the movement as predominantly progressive or predominantly reactionary is inappropriate, and all the more inaccurate because of regional and state variations. In addition, much more is known about Anti-Masonry in some places than others, and, except for the kind of research Kathleen Smith...

Anti-Masonry as movement and party substantially influenced the creation of a populist political culture and an expansion and invigoration of the public sphere. Contemporaries observed the rise of egalitarian attitudes among the American people in the 1820s and 1830s, and historians early on pointed to this central theme of the period by characterizing it variously as “the Age of the Common Man” or “the Age of Egalitarianism.” Less commonly now do historians assign credit to Andrew Jackson as a democratizing in-fluence—rather, they see Jackson’s popularity and rise to the presidency in 1828 as a result, rather than as a...

The demise of Anti-Masonry and the difficulties encountered by radical labor reformers did not diminish the continuing centrality of the idea of the people’s sovereignty in American political culture. As universal white male suffrage became a reality in the 1820s and 1830s, movements to remove any restrictions came with “a new explicitness about popular sovereignty, a new assertion of the people’s right actually to rule.” As property qualifications were reduced or abolished, demands arose that “the people shall choose their judges, their governors, [and, as seen in New York] their presidential electors.”¹

By the 1840s, both major political parties had...

During the era of the American Revolution, many ordinary white Americans, men and women, believed that the people’s sovereignty enabled them—or perceived majorities representing “the people”—to “regulate” wayward authority. Throughout different regions of the country, many Americans saw ultimate authority as invested not in particular governments but in the people. By the end of the eighteenth century “Americans had come to the view that ultimately ‘sovereignty . . . remains in the people,’ that all government is but ‘the 8 . . . of the people andaccountableto them.’”¹ These beliefs underpinned not only various efforts to...