Populist Party: Omaha Platform

American farmers and workers faced a range of obstacles and challenges in the late 1800s. The sharecropper system mired many agricultural workers in debt, because they had to purchase seeds and supplies on credit from their landlords with the hope of repaying those debts when the crops were harvested. If there was a bad harvest, the sharecropper was left in debt. Meanwhile, industrial workers suffered from stagnant wages that were not keeping up with increases in the costs of housing, goods, and services. Both farmers and industrial workers faced long hours, with low pay and little to no health care. Women were not able to vote at the federal level, although they could vote in local and state elections in some states, and African Americans were losing their political and economic rights in the South. Throughout the United States, disadvantaged groups eagerly sought political and economic reforms to create a more fair and just society.

Industrial workers formed unions to try to use collective action to force employers to pay more and improve working conditions. Among these efforts was the attempt to limit the number of hours a person worked each day to eight or to forty hours per week. Farmers also began to organize in groups such as the Grange Movement and Farmers Alliance to protect their interests. These organizations endeavored to improve the economic conditions of farmers. At its height, the Farmers Alliance had between ninety thousand and a hundred thousand members.

During the late 1880s the Populist movement emerged from these agricultural groups in an effort to create a viable political party that could challenge the dominance of the Republican and Democratic Parties. The culmination of the Populist movement was the creation of the Populist or People's Party. Beginning in Kansas, the new party quickly brought together a range of disadvantaged groups in the United States. It represented an alliance between poor cotton farmers in states such as Texas, Alabama, and North Carolina and wheat farmers from the Plains states, primarily Nebraska and Kansas. The movement, which evolved from the earlier Farmers Alliance, emerged in response to falling crop prices, high railroad rates, and a general perception that the economic system, dominated by national banks, Wall Street, absentee landowners, and eastern elites, was stacked against the common people—and that the existing Democratic and Republican Parties were not equal to the task of representing agrarian interests. The leadership of both parties was perceived to be dominated by elites, who were corrupt and not concerned with the plight of the average American.

The Populist Party was considered very radical at the time. The movement supported women's suffrage and a graduated income tax. It also called for the direct election of senators (as opposed to election of senators by a state's legislature, the system in effect before passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913). The party also endorsed nationalization of the railroad industry and the growing telephone sector. It backed a greater role for government in regulating the economy, including establishing an eight-hour workday and stricter laws against child labor.

In elections in 1890, the Populists roared onto the political scene. William A. Peffer, a Populist from Kansas, was elected to the U.S. Senate, while eleven other Populists were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Populists also won victories in local and state races, including the governorship of Tennessee. The success of these candidates led people such as Peffer and Donnelly to believe the time was right to launch a national party and contest the 1892 presidential election. A Farmers Alliance convention in February 1892 drew representatives from more than twenty minor parties to discuss how to band together to fight the Republican and Democratic Parties. At the close of the convention, Donnelly gave a fiery speech that inspired the attendees to agree to create the People's Party, which was then launched in Omaha in July.

The new party actually enjoyed some initial success. In the presidential election of 1892, the Populist candidate, James Weaver, garnered over a million votes and won five states, and in 1896 the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, campaigned on many of the planks of the Omaha Platform. Additionally, numerous Populist candidates won state and local office during these years, and eleven were elected governor of various states. Forty-five members of the party served in the U.S. Congress—six in the Senate and thirty-nine in the House of Representatives between 1891 and 1903. However, the party suffered from divisions over economic policy, and its coalition with the Democratic Party in 1896 led to the demise of the formal movement.