Blizzard Bag Assignment

November 27, 2018

Welcome to our first Blizzard Bag 2018.  Below are 4 parts to the assignment about the Populist movement.  Please answer each part using the primary source document provided.  I apologize, I had some picture ones but they wouldn't show up on the blog.  

You can write your answers and turn them in Wednesday morning or type them and email them to me.  Please be clear on identifying which part you are answering.

I will be around, if you have questions, email me.  Have fun!

Blizzard Bag:  Part I:

(Document Based Question: What are the three most important issues of the Populist Movement?)

SOURCE 1: Mary Lease Raises Hell Among the Farmers

1. According to Lease, who owns the country?

2. What role do politicians play in this process?

3. Whom do you believe Lease thinks should be running the country?

4. What historical evidence does she use to support her cause?

5. What occupation would you guess Lease favors the most and why?

6. What occupation would you guess Lease favors the least and why?

Source Note: Women are not often thought of in association with the Populists, but the best-known orator of the movement in the early 1890s was a woman, Mary Elizabeth Lease. Born in Pennsylvania in 1850 to Irish parents, Lease became a school teacher in Kansas in 1870. She and her husband, a pharmacist, spent ten years trying to make a living farming, but finally gave up in 1883 and settled in Wichita. Lease entered political life as a speaker for the Irish National League, and later emerged as a leader of both the Knights of Labor and the Populists. Lease mesmerized audiences in Kansas, Missouri, the Far West, and the South with her powerful voice and charismatic speaking style. In hundreds of speeches, she apparently never said the one phrase most often associated with her name—the injunction that farmers should “raise less corn and more hell.” Regardless of who called explicitly for more hell-raising, Lease was a powerful voice of the agrarian crusade.

This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first.

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.

The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East.

Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.

The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. . . . The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 100,000 shop girls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them. . . .

We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us thus far beware.

Source: W.E. Connelley, ed., History of Kansas, State and People 2, (1928), 1167.

(found at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5304)

Blizzard Bag: Part II:

(Document Based Question: What are the three most important issues of the Populist Movement?)

SOURCE 2: THE SILVER DOG WITH THE GOLDEN TAIL

Based on the document below, answer the following multiple choice questions:

1. Based on the cartoon, which type of currency has the most support?

a. Silver

b. Gold

c. Doubtful

d. None of the above

2. Which states produce the most wealth in terms of farm production?

a. Gold

b. Silver

c. Doubtful

d. None of the above

3. Based on the cartoon, which political party would you predict to win the 1896 Presidential election?

a. The Republican party with the support of the gold states

b. The Democratic party with the support of the silver states

c. A third party supported by neither gold nor silver states

d. None of the above

4. Which occupation do you believe the author of this cartoon would support the most?

a. Stock broker

b. Politician

c. Farmer

d. Factory worker

SOURCE 2: THE SILVER DOG WITH THE GOLDEN TAIL

Source: Boston Globe 13 September, 1896, from Salt Lake Utahnian

(found at http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/populists.html)

WILL THE TAIL WAG THE DOG, OR THE DOG WAG THE TAIL?

ELECTORAL VOTE.

 Gold states: 151

Silver states: 226

White, doubtful: 70

Total: 447

Necessary for election: 224

PRODUCTION OF SILVER STATES. 100 percent of all the gold. 100 percent of all the silver. 100 percent of all the cotton. 97 percent of all the corn. 92 percent of all the wheat. 92 percent of all the barley. 87 percent of all the oats.

Amount of mortgage debt on farms: $6,019,679,985

Amount of public debt: $17,174,879,990

TOTAL: $23,194,559,975

VALUE OF FARM PRODUCTS Gold states: $418,309,068 Silver states: $2,041,798,422

Blizzard Bag:  Part III

SOURCE 5: Gold Standard Poem (below)

1. Generally, what type of consequences does the author connect to the gold standard?

2. Specifically, list two that you feel are the most impactful.

3. What class of society would be the most impacted if this poem is correct?

4. What members of society by age and gender might suffer the most?

5. What class of society would feel the impact least? Why?

6. Based on this poem, describe someone whom you think would not support the gold standard.

The continuance of the "present gold standard" means:

Ruin;

Rage;

Riots;

Debts;

Crime;

Strikes;

Tramps;

Poverty;

Mortgages;

Hard times;

Sheriff sales;

More panics;

Less churches;

Close factories;

Business failures;

Fewer preachers;

More soup houses;

Homeless families;

A debauched ballot;

Twenty-cent wheat;

Less improvements;

Uneducated children;

Suffering and misery;

Crowded alms houses;

A dearth of marriages;

Two-dollars-a-ton hay;

Idleness and stagnation;

Two-cent-a-pound hogs;

Five-cent-a-pound butter;

Ten-dollars-a-head mules;

Falling prices for all product;

Hungry women and children;

Ten-cent-a-bushel potatoes;

Pauper prices for vegetables;

Two-dollars-and-a-half horses;

A contraction of the currency;

A dear dollar and a cheap man;

Twenty-five-cents-a-day labor;

Half clothed women and children;

Coxey armies marching through the land.

SOURCE: --People's Party Paper, 16 October 1896 (reprinted from Times-Democrat, Idaho)

Blizzard Bag: 

Part 4:

SOURCE 6: Populist Party Platform, 1892.

Precedent: any act, decision, or case that serves as a guide or justification for subsequent situations.

Commodity: an article of trade or commerce, especially a product as distinguished from a service, such as grain, fruits, vegetables, or precious metals.

1. According to the Populist platform, why was 1892 such as important time in history?

2. By what means did the Populists seek to correct what they believed to be wrong in the country?

3. What goal(s) did the Populists have by making these corrections?

Our country finds itself confronted by conditions for which there is no precedent in the history of the world; our annual agricultural productions amount to billions of dollars in value, which must, within a few weeks or months, be exchanged for billions of dollars’ worth of commodities consumed in their production; the existing currency supply is wholly inadequate to make this exchange; the results are falling prices, the formation of combines and rings, the impoverishment of the producing class. We pledge ourselves that if given power we will labor to correct these evils by wise and reasonable legislation, in accordance with the terms of our platform.

We believe that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.

Blizzard Bag Part 5:  After going through the documents, what (do you think) are the three most important issues of the Populist Movement?

1.

2.

3.