HIST348: Peoples of Kansas

If you are feeling stuck and don’t know what to write for this week’s blog, here is something for you to think about.  According to Mary Elizabeth Lease (pictured) and her fellow Populists, the government was controlled by the wealthy and the corrupt. In a speech given in 1890 she stated:

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East. Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.*

Questions for consideration:

1) How might these sources relate to our current state of affairs as a country (in the 21st century)? Do you see parallels today, and if so, where?
2) For those of you who are history majors or who have taken both halves of the introductory U.S. survey, where else in American history can we find criticisms of this so-called “money power”?

*Available online on several radical sites, including History is a Weapon and History Matters. It is also published in Howard Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004).