POPULISM TO INSURGENCY 33 



Roosevelt's Republicanism all had in common the emphasis upon the need 

 of governmental regulation of industrial tendencies in the interest of 

 the common man; the checking of the power of these business Titans 

 who emerged successful out of the competitive individualism of pioneer 

 America." a If this end was ever to be achieved, however, the people must 

 somehow take over their government, and the desire to see this ambition 

 achieved survived intact long after the disappearance of the Populist party. 

 Throughout the western Middle West, and to a considerable extent 

 throughout the country as a whole, this legacy of Populism determined 

 the course of political development during the opening years of the twen- 

 tieth century. What reforms could be instituted to make sure that the 

 people really governed? The movement for the direct primary, for the 

 initiative and referendum, and for various other instruments of popular 

 government grew naturally out of the soil prepared by the Populists. 

 The campaign to limit the power of the speaker of the national House 

 of Representatives was led by an outraged Nebraskan. 6 The activities of 

 insurgents and progressives generally, culminating in the formation of the 

 Progressive party of 1912, followed an evolutionary pattern easily con- 

 nected with Populism. This is not to say that the only force that lay back 

 of twentieth-century American radicalism was nineteenth-century middle 

 western agrarianism. The contributions of the labor movement, of im- 

 ported socialistic concepts, of a host of journalistic muckrakers must not 

 be overlooked. But one extremely important ancestral line a long and 

 sturdy line led back to a multitude of Granger-Greenback-Populist 

 progenitors. As convinced antimonopolists, these reformers believed that 

 the state must use its power to regulate and control the "trusts," most of 

 which, in the western Middle West, turned out to be railroads. They 

 believed, too, that if the state was to be charged with this responsibility, 

 its power must be lodged firmly in the hands of the people. Probably they 

 expected greater results from popular rule than was reasonable, but judged 

 by any standards, they did accomplish a great deal. As a result of their 

 efforts "something new had been brought into politics." 7 



5. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 

 1921), p. 281. 



6. George W. Norris, Fighting Liberal: The Autobiography of George W. Norris 

 (New York, 1945), pp. 107-19. 7. Wilcox, "Northwestern Radicalism," p. 107. 



