Keyword – the United States

Paár, Ádám:

Two Periods of Populism in the USA

The populist movement, founded in the end of the 19th century in the USA, was a project based on writers. The movement, and the People’s Party (or Populist Party) based on it, promoted many progressive ideas, including progressive taxation, eight-hour workdays, women’s suffrage, and the protection of farmers and industrial workers, based on labour and farmer movement ideas. Politically, however, it was a failure, and the party was dissolved in 1908. Owing to the Great Depression, populism was reborn in the 1930s, and several self-appointed politicians came to voice old Populist slogans and phrases. The most famous of them, Governor of Louisiana Huey P. Long, served as a model for Governor Willie Stark, the protagonist of All the King’s Men, a novel by Robert Penn Warren. This paper presents the US populist movement based on two novels.

Keywords: capitalism, farmer, populism, the United States, utopia