Common Humanity: Kansas Populism and the Battle for Justice and Equality, 1854-1903

O. Gene Clanton believes that Populism remains relevant. He holds a lasting hope for the movement and calls its aspirations "an ideal of human rights, not just for the favored few but for all Americans." In his extensively updated revision of Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men, he depicts the rise and fall of Kansas Populism within general and national political contexts, and includes some previously unpublished material on its intellectual and political background. Clanton also furnishes thoughtful biographies of Populist leaders like Annie Diggs, Frank Doster, Mary Lease, William Peffer, and Jerry Simpson.

"Populists and Populism aimed at implementing the nation's unfulfilled democratic ideals in the new industrial age. The movement's leaders concerned themselves with that challenge, and in the dialogue they conducted, in the program they advanced, they assisted in launching a progressive quest that should continue as long as most Americans subscribe to the nation's great democratic ideals.

To be sure, it was not Populist principles that were retrogressive. What made them appear so to an influential segment of American society was the fact that they were championed in the name of the farmers and laborers and in terms of the old producer-class ideology that had so long associated strictly with agrarian radicalism."--O. Gene Clanton