“Pitchfork Ben” Tillman was a fiery defender of segregation from South Carolina in the U.S. Senate. During Reconstruction, he was a leader of the Sweetwater Sabre Club, which attacked local Republican officials in an attempt to regain control of the South after the Civil War. He participated in the Hamburg riots, which killed several black soldiers. At a time when many white farmers were afraid of the onslaught of black voters, he was able to successfully disenfranchise the black vote at the 1895 constitutional convention. In his 23-year Senate career, he helped institutionalize segregation. One biographer writes that Tillman “fatally undermined the possibility of the development of a race-neutral language of manhood and citizenship.” He was censured by the Senate in 1902 for assaulting his fellow Senator from South Carolina.
The Silver Shirts, a self-styled “Christian militia” in the 1930s, promoted “Loyalty to the American Republic,” and they wore silver L’s to depict this. Their membership swelled to 15,000 members in the heart of the Great Depression and they were able to gain followers by promising a new distribution of wealth, combining anti-communist and anti-Semitic policies with conscious similarities to another fascist and socialist organization—the Nazi Party.
Despite James Michael Curley’s dubious ethics—he served several prison terms for various types of fraud, and was re-elected from jail—he still managed to inspire the people of Massachusetts to elect him to several different posts. Curley, who migrated to the U.S. following the Irish Potato Famine, practiced a brand of populism for the common man that rang especially true in the Great Depression-era Boston. He was famous for insisting the cleaning women in City Hall be given long-handled brushes, to help their knees. This was populism with a smiling face and a slight of hand, suited to a man whose nick-name was “the purple shamrock.”
When Robert Boliver DePugh started the Minutemen in the 1960s, he wanted to organize violent “counteraction” to what he believed was a Communist takeover. The turbulent era was a fruitful time for his recruitment efforts. Inspired by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he used his publication On Target to call out 20 congressmen who allegedly criticized the committee, announcing: “Traitors beware! Even now the cross hairs are on the back of your necks.” In 1968, he was imprisoned for violations of federal firearms laws—and was indicted for conspiracy to commit a bank robbery. But he had a lasting impact on the American psyche: his survivalist guide is still used.
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"The Revolution has co-ome, it's time to pick up the gu-un. Off the pigs!" This was a typical chant offered by the militant Black Panthers during the late 1960s. The founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Bobby Seale, declared: “They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.” The group was associated not just with community programs and revolutionary rhetoric but violence, and was accused of multiple murders. In 2000, one of the group’s most prominent members, H. Rapp Brown was imprisoned for murdering an African-American policeman in Georgia.
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The political commentator held a religious revival on the Washington mall this past weekend that attracted a huge number of followers. The speech proved controversial primarily because it was scheduled on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech—and because Beck had a history of calling President Obama ‘racist.’ The message at the rally was one of spiritual uplift. But his television and radio show present a much less holy vision—preaching a message of conflict, tension, fear and resentment. One repeated trick in the service of his advertisers is to encourage listeners to buy gold because the next Weimar Republic is coming. Although he is considered a member the conservative movement, some on the right are wary of him; conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg said “I confess if Beck wasn’t a libertarian, I would find his populism terrifying.” Has Beck’s brand of populism slipped over to demagoguery? Just ask Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who asked his voters to “turn Glenn Beck off” last year at a town hall meeting, and was met with boos. Beck returned fire on Inglis, and nearly a year later Inglis lost the GOP primary in South Carolina to a more conservative challenger.
