Kansas Populist Newspaper Editorial Response to the Homestead and Pullman Strikes: An Application of Sewell’s Theory of Structure

Abstract

Scholars disagree on the reasons the Populist and industrial labor movements failed to achieve a political coalition. Some attribute the cause to a backward-looking Populist ideology that searched for solutions in an imaginary yeoman republic.Populists neither understood nor had sympathy with the problems facing late nineteenth-century industrial workers. Essentially, Populists engaged in status politics. Others argue that Populism was a progressive movement that accepted industrialization but sought to bring it under government control through a political coalition of the producer class consisting of farmers, workers, and small businessmen. I argue in this paper that the editors of Populist newspapers in Kansas attempted to promote a coalition by utilizing the labor theory of value to educate farmers that their fate was linked to that of workers. I employ Sewell’s theory of structure, specifically his axiom on the transposability of schemas, to illustrate the editors’ transposition of the labor theory of value into a schema that defined the 1892 Homestead and 1894 Pullman Strikes as contests between the producer class (including farmers) and monopoly capital. I further argue that in addition to accounting for routine change, Sewell’s framework is useful in examining how groups attempt to make sense of altered social contexts resulting from large-scale social dislocations. I reviewed Populist newspaper editorials on the strikes from communities throughout Kansas. In all, over 200 newspaper editions were examined. Spatial dispersion of sources and the two-year interval between strikes served as a check on regional and chronological variations.