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  Others, Volume II: Third Parties During the Populist Period
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TitleOthers, Volume II: Third Parties During the Populist Period
ASIN0595443044 - Purchase This Book
CategoryHistory
ContributorCraverguy
Last ModifiedCraverguy - May 09, 2009 12:30am
DescriptionThis engrossing narrative chronicles the period immediately following the collapse of the Greenback-Labor Party in the 1880s and the subsequent rise of Populism a few years later. Originating in the Midwest and the South as a political response to the increasingly painful economic distress of the nation’s farmers, the Populist Party -- the most powerful agrarian movement in American history -- achieved major-party status in several states while electing governors in Colorado, Kansas, and South Dakota. In addition to winning nearly 400 state legislative races and holding five seats in the U.S. Senate, the Populists also captured twenty-two congressional seats during their high-water mark in 1896 -- the largest bloc of third-party congressmen since the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s.

Culminating with the party’s demise in 1908, this period of rapid and unprecedented industrialization in American society also included the founding of the Socialist Party, a young and virile organization led by labor leader Eugene V. Debs that quickly eclipsed the older Socialist Labor Party on the American Left, and witnessed the venerable Prohibitionists -- the country’s oldest minor party -- briefly emerge as the leading third-party movement in the United States.

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