In Chapter 2, "Cultures of Protest, 1867-86," we read that the Populist feat did not emerge from a assort of farmers who had been defeated by right institutions and who had no sense of narration. To the contrary, the movement of Populism came out of a impost in which protest was essential: "It began among people who possessed, as phonation of their birthright, cultures of protest---patterns of thought and action growing out of their own history on the land" (50). The farmers saw themselves and their products as essential to the natural selection of the nation, and they were determined not to be taken advantage of. The owing(p) Strike of 1877 and the formation of the Farmers' Alliances were major results of this determined protest.
By 1887 these alliances began to drive together in a cooperative union, as Chapter 3 explains. To the farmers, the powers of monopoly and bully were enemies which could only be fought with complete cooperation. One perceiver declared that "co-operation . . . will place a limit to the encroachments of organised monopoly, and will [allow] the mortgage-burdened farmers [to] assert their freedom from the tyranny of organized capital" (84).
However, as we read in Chapter 4, "Farmers, Laborers, and Politics," it is more difficult to desire for cooperation than to
Steinberg argues that American society expresses biases against cultural and racial groups in proportion to their scotch outsider status. In other words, the more a group is outside the economic mainstream, the more it will suffer ethnic and/or racial biases. For example, "the prejudice directed against immigrants was rooted in the fact that they were some(prenominal) alien and poor, and gradually declined as these groups became more assimilated and achieved middle-class reputability" (42-43).
If blacks had been allowed, at the turn of the century, to compete for the industrial jobs that provided opportunity to millions of immigrants, they would at present occupy a position in the class body similar to that of the Irish, Italians, Poles, and other immigrants who were entering the industrial labor commercialise for the first time (221).
Steinberg goes on to explore the detail experiences of Jews, Italians, blacks and others, and in every case he convincingly argues that it is not specific ethnic or racial differences which determine economic and educational success in the United States. To the contrary, the major determinants leading to such(prenominal)(prenominal) success and achievement are the unique societal, material and diachronic experiences the groups have experienced. For example, the argument by Steinberg is that
As a group experiences success, so it comes to expect success, to have high expectations of its members, to pursue mod educational accomplishments, professional employment, and so on. A group which from the blend was kept on the lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder, such as the blacks, come to lower their expectations and to respond accordingly. As Steinberg writes, members of a group "are born into a given put in life and adopt values that are concurring(a) with their circumstances and their life chances" (127).
The final chapter covers the "Crisis of Populism," and it repeats the author's conclusion that the Populist movement was doomed when it aligned itself wit
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