The story of Georgia’s political firebrand Tom Watson will never be a defining national myth. Its extraordinary implications for American democracy notwithstanding, Watson’s life is saturated with too much tragedy to qualify for the righteous optimism demanded by the national canon. When Watson’s statue was removed from the steps of the Georgia state Capitol in 2013, the event went virtually unnoticed outside Atlanta. Without historian C. Vann Woodward’s transcendent 1938 biography, Watson would have surely disappeared even from academic study, like most politicians of his era.
But Watson’s life retains an unsettling power that, once encountered, inescapably colors interpretations of the American past and present. Watson was the most charismatic leader of the late-19th-century political thunderclap that came to be known as American populism, and his story resonates with the full promise and peril of the American project—he can be understood without exaggeration as the heroic scion of the Boston Tea Party and the fevered progenitor of Donald Trump’s violent fantasies.
Born to slave-owning Confederate parents, Watson watched his family descend into poverty after the Civil War, and rose to prominence in Georgia politics as a lawyer and newspaperman who assailed the prevailing economic order. Watson accurately described Gilded Age political rule as a predatory alliance of Southern political bosses and Northern capitalists. As the 1880s turned to the 1890s, Watson came to understand racial division as an essential tool of this bipartisan system—one that elites in both parties inflamed to weaken the political power of Black and white working people by turning them against each other. He ran for Congress as a member of the independent People’s Party, winning support from prominent Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, with his pledge to erase America’s “color line” in pursuit of agrarian liberation. The radicalism of the People’s Party is easily obscured by the fact that so many of its early demands were eventually enacted, from an eight-hour workday to free mail delivery to a progressive income tax. But the most extraordinary aspect of the Populist Party was its coalition. When Georgia police arrested Black voting rights activist H.S. Doyle on the streets of Augusta ahead of the 1892 election, one of Watson’s henchmen sprang Doyle from prison and sheltered him at Watson’s estate, where more than 2,000 members of the People’s Party armed themselves to successfully defend Doyle from a state-backed lynch mob.
But Watson eventually lost his 1892 campaign, and the populist movement that had gripped the country disintegrated within a few years. By the early 20th century, the party was gone, and Watson had transformed himself from a prophet of racial cooperation into a fountain of white-hot racial resentment. He endorsed the complete disenfranchisement of Black voters, ranted against Catholics and socialists, and eventually used his newspaper to incite a lynch mob into murdering Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank.
Watson’s embrace of the dark side brought him his greatest electoral success. When he died in 1922, Watson was a United States senator from Georgia, representing the very Democratic Party he once denounced.
Watson was an effective demagogue because he practiced a politics of anger in an era that demanded it. Even at his most inspiring—and his losing 1892 campaign was an intoxicating cultural phenomenon—Watson didn’t so much promise to help as fight. He had a policy platform, but he was also operating an economic cooperative and very nearly an armed rebellion. Throughout the Gilded Age, workers and farmers really were being exploited by a predatory oligarchy. The political system was indeed thoroughly corrupt, and the economy was a system of mass deprivation marked by financial crises, endless deflation, agricultural mismanagement, mechanized industrial cruelty, and child labor. People had a right to be angry.
It’s not hard to understand how a politics of anger can be mobilized when the political system fails ordinary people while taking extraordinary measures to protect the wealthy. What is more difficult to process is how that anger has been sustained over the past eight years.
The unemployment rate was below 5 percent for all but the final nine months of Donald Trump’s presidency and for all but the first six months of Joe Biden’s. For context, the unemployment rate never moved below 5 percent between January 1974 and April 1997. And while nobody enjoyed the bout of inflation that set in between 2021 and 2022, worker wage gains have outpaced price increases since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation peaked at 7.2 percent in June 2022—but inflation was actually higher across the entire first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (followed by nine consecutive months of double-digit unemployment) without a populist uprising. The U.S. labor market hasn’t been as robust as it is today in 50 years, and even accounting for inflation, the overall economic performance of the past two years has been the best since at least the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The U.S. economy is not without problems; housing is too expensive, for instance, and just about everything associated with being a parent has become extremely difficult. But it just isn’t true that the nation’s political system has been ignoring the plight of ordinary workers. It has responded quite vigorously to their needs in the form of repeated multi-trillion-dollar investments in domestic industry and direct household support.
