There is an eerie silence in this country today, like the deep quiet before a storm. If you have ever survived a tornado, the atmosphere has that same humid, weighted feeling as if sound itself had been sucked away. Much like the cries of birds and other creatures disappear just before a bad storm, I wonder where the firebrands have gone. Periodic flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder from the dark sky suggest something of what might be coming.
If you follow this country’s current economic situation as closely as you follow the weather, you have to be worried about the power of this brewing storm. A recent LinkedIn survey showed American workers feel less and less confident about their job security. The numbers are the lowest since researchers began tracking them in 2020. Those reading earlier posts already know about stagnant wages and increasing business concentration. Yet, unlike the late nineteenth century, this tilted playing field has not provoked an outbreak of firebrands. History helps us understand why.
Late Nineteenth Century Firebrands
During the late nineteenth century’s Age of Discontent, a bumper crop of firebrands arose to express dissatisfaction with where the country was headed. People were angry about how growing corporate power produced low wages and high tariffs. Republicans sought to cut back what was a frayed and inadequate safety net because they thought it boosted big-city Democratic machines and coddled lazy, criminal immigrants.
It was a time when families were one workplace accident, unforeseen medical crisis, layoff, crop failure, or unexpected natural disaster from losing the roof over their heads and/or being unable to put enough food on the table. Inadequate sanitation, little regulation of food production, and primitive medical care meant diseases like cholera, diphtheria, and tuberculosis loomed over everyone like a funeral shroud. Fear combined with powerlessness and anger created an unstable mixture that did not take much to set off.
Charismatic, fire-breathing orators rose out of this tumult. Although they came from a variety of backgrounds, they shared two traits. An uncommon number of them had faced severe hardships and all were driven by the principle that one of this country’s core beliefs was a level playing field. There was Texas Farmer’s Alliance organizer “Cyclone” Davis, a lawyer whose histrionics were legendary. Iowan “Calamity” Weller was never far from the latest ruckus. Kansan Mary Lease acquired monikers like “Mary Yellin,” as she became the most incendiary speaker of her time. In the 1890s, the words of reed-thin, charismatic Iowa College Social Gospel minister George Herron thundered across the Midwest to Wall Street, as audiences hung on every word of his high-pitched voice:
There is not one kind of right for God and another for man; one for the church and another for the market; one for the individual and another for the state; one for men acting singly and another for men acting collectively as a commonwealth or a financial corporation.
Sockless Jerry Simpson
One of the most feared and effective firebrands was Medicine Lodge, Kansas, town marshal, and part-time sewer digger Jerry Simpson. As a marshal Simpson was more Andy Griffith than Matt Dillon, using his sense of humor rather than a gun to defuse crises. There is no record he was even in a gunfight, although he administered a beating to a miscreant who took a few swings at him in the local livery stable. Sporting a bushy mustache and slicked-back hair, Simpson resembled a storekeeper rather than a TV western marshal. Underneath that mild-looking exterior were brewing passions like those of others who found their calling in giving voice to the Discontented.
Simpson’s difficult history parallels that of firebrands like fellow Kansan Mary Lease. Her father died as a Confederate prisoner at Andersonville, where she believed he had been buried alive. She and her husband lost their farm in the Panic of 1873, then spent the rest of the decade bouncing from state to state trying to find stability. Ambitious and articulate, she studied law while taking in washing, tacking her lessons to the wall above her washtub to memorize them while working.
Like Lease, Jerry Simpson struggled to find stability. He worked as a Great Lakes sailor, dabbled in the lumber business, and ran a cattle ranch. The lumber business killed his daughter when an errant log crushed her. The ranch did well until a bad winter took most of his stock. Seemingly unable to do well at anything, Simpson learned he was a natural orator when he ventured to speak at local Farmers’ Alliance meetings and other gatherings.
He made a few futile runs for office in 1882 and 1884, and then in 1889 Kansas farmers hit bottom as corn prices dropped so low they burned the cobs as fuel. Simpson decided to run for Congress under the banner of the newly formed People’s Party. An offshoot of the Farmers’ Alliance that had followed the Grange as a home for discontented rural Americans, the Populists were a grassroots movement that arose because workers and farmers were unhappy with the two dominant parties. The Republicans were unabashedly pro-corporate and pro-tariff. The Democrats had been captured by Grover Cleveland’s Bourbons, who like today’s New Democrats, were Republican-lite.
Today, the word populist has become almost meaningless, corrupted by mainstream media commentators with so little sense of history they apply it to anti-government Republicans. The real Populists were a profoundly anti-corporate, pro-government group who espoused positions like government control of railroad and telegraph operations. Our media populists would label these positions socialistic, adding a string of unprintable epithets.
Jerry Simpson earned the People’s Party nomination with a stem-winding speech at the state convention. A factor in his nomination may have been other candidates declining to face an uphill fight against an incumbent in a safe seat Republicans had won by 14,000 votes. One of his biographers and fellow Alliance member, Annie Diggs explained, “There was no miracle or mistake about the fame that came to Jerry Simpson; it was merely that the man was ready when the time arrived.” Although he never attended school, Simpson learned much through the Alliance’s extensive education programs and its system of traveling lecturers.
What made Simpson, Lease, and other firebrands so effective was more than education. These were authentic leaders whose credibility came from lives as hard as those of the people they represented. They had been down so far, they weren’t sure they would ever get up again. Their speeches were not written by consultants and tested with polls and focus groups, but delivered from the heart.
This man who “ain’t afraid to get up and say what he thinks,” never forgot where he came from, often lapsing into his characteristic drawl: “Many a feller went down into his pocket and gave me a quarter who didn’t have hardly another to rub agin it.” Simpson could also craft moving poetry. Asked why he came to Kansas, he answered, “The magic of a kernel, the witchcraft in a seed; the desire to put something into the ground and see it grow and reproduce its kind.”
Simpson would earn a nickname and fame during a spirited debate with his Republican opponent, a railroad attorney Simpson nicknamed “Prince Hall” because he campaigned from his private railroad car. The contrast between the two candidates enabled Simpson to shape a message that went viral when it hit the telegraph lines:
This prince of royal blood, travels in his special car, his dainty person is gorgeously bedizened, his soft white hands are pretty things to look at, his tender feet are encased in fine silk hosiery, what does he know of the life and the toil of such plow-handlers as we are? I can’t represent you in Congress with silk stockings-I can’t afford to wear ’em.
The retort earned Simpson the nickname, “Sockless Jerry.” As he gained confidence, he became one of the most feared stump speakers in the state. Editor William Alan White referred to him as the “Sockless Socrates.” Farm wives began filling the Medicine Lodge post office with knitted socks sent to the candidate.
Unpacking Simpson
To understand why this retort from an unknown Kansan representing a new third party went viral during the Age of Discontent, we need to unpack it, paying attention to its context. We also must acknowledge Jerry Simpson may have liked to fall into a country drawl much as another firebrand, labor organizer Leonora Barry favored her native Irish brogue, but he knew how to use language. Simpson was not accusing his opponent of wearing women’s hose. Stockings was a common late nineteenth-century term for socks, often used to describe the footwear of the rich. He could have used socks, but it would not have had the same impact.
The real incendiary word was silk. In those years, even more than today, silk was a luxury item. Wearing silk was the equivalent of someone today wearing Versace, Gucci, or Dior. We glimpse this status in a New York Times society maven’s rant, “On paper, the [silk] mitts are always placed on white and shapely hands; on the street, unfortunately, they are permitted to encase hands of every description.” A graph of silk imports roughly parallels economic downturns during an era some referred to as the Long Depression. When people could buy silk, times were good; when they could not, times were bad.
In true firebrand fashion, Simpson made the election a contest about principles as he accused his opponent of something far more serious than wearing women’s hosiery. Prince Hall was living a life of luxury while the rest of the country could not afford socks. The contrast evoked a tilted playing field where the rich held all the cards while bleeding dry workers and farmers. “It is a struggle between the robbers and the robbed,” cried Simpson.
He was giving voice to the anger and frustration of another time when storm clouds rose like the great, slate-colored anvils that produce a tornado. Author Frank Baum, who led a life not unlike Simpson or Lease, made a tornado the center of his tale about a mythical kingdom whose name he borrowed from a filing cabinet. Some think Jerry Simpson may have even been the inspiration for the Scarecrow in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The Role of Firebrands
What is less recognized is how firebrands like Simpson and Lease served to galvanize public opinion during an era when the Chicago Civic Federation bought a Gatling gun, rifles, and ammunition to protect corporations from an anticipated uprising. It was a time when a Greenback Party official openly talked of arming citizens and drilling them like a militia to prepare for what he thought was an inevitable class war. It was a time when rival factions at a Farmer’s Alliance meeting opened fire on each other, killing five.
In 1820, an elderly Thomas Jefferson wrote about the debate over the admission of Missouri to the Union, “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” Over half a century later, the rhetoric of people like Jerry Simpson was another kind of fire bell, this one warning about the consequences of a tilted playing field. Some spoke openly of a second civil war.
Without the firebrands, the story of the Age of Discontent and the history of this country could have been far different. They laid the groundwork and did much of the heavy lifting for a series of laws passed during the late 1880s and early 1890s that reinvented American democracy.
Simpson served three terms in Congress where he was a constant thorn in the side of those coddling corporate misbehavior. Other firebrands, like Simpson’s fellow Kansan, William Peffer, rose to leadership positions. Mary Lease accompanied 1892 Populist presidential candidate James Weaver on campaign tours. The most famous firebrand, William Jennings Bryan, became a three-time presidential candidate while steering the Democratic Party away from the Bourbons, preparing the way for Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives. At the 1912 convention, Bryan succeeded in passing the Morgan-Ryan-Belmont Resolution purging tycoons who had been serving as delegates, then threw his support to Wilson.
What Happened to Firebrands?
That history explains why we need firebrands today and why their absence is so troublesome. There have been rumblings in social media that fear of retribution by MAGA zealots has stifled potential firebrands. Yet late nineteenth-century firebrands had far more to fear than social media nastiness. Mary Bryan recalled how people sent her husband various medieval-looking devices to protect him from a potential assassination. He refused to use them, but the fear was real. When Mary Lease campaigned with James Weaver in the South they braved mobs lobbing eggs and vegetables and, in one case had to flee their hotel in the middle of the night when warned an angry mob was on the way to harm them.
Today’s potential firebrands find their voices muted or muzzled not by mobs but by mainstream media more interested in getting along with the new administration than reporting the news. Independent Bernie Sanders gave a rousing reply to the presidential address to Congress that was barely mentioned by the New York Times, the paper that bills itself as the home of all the news that is fit to print. Sanders even channeled Mary Lease. She reportedly railed against a government “of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” Sanders said, “The Trump administration is a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class and for the billionaire class.”
Others like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who acquired a reputation as a firebrand during the Biden Administration, have been eerily subdued during and since the election, almost as if the Democratic Party had slapped a gag order on them. Recent actions by Democrats, opinion pieces by Reagan-lite Democrats like James Carville, and interviews with leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries all suggest the Democratic Party is coalescing around a strategy of weathering the storm by retreating to a shelter and riding it out, hoping the chaos will either blow over or cause so much misery people will change allegiances.
That may preserve their skins but will do little to help the rest of the country. Holding up slogans on pickleball paddles like a bunch of petulant fifth graders or waving canes at the president will not prevent further damage. It only looks impotent and ridiculous.
That is what happens when you use polls not principles to decide policy. That is what happens when you pay more attention to the voices of big donors than the voices of the people. That is what happens when the algorithms of Google and Facebook decide what is important. Instead of waving paddles, Democrats could be saying, “Take Back Our Country” and borrowing from Jerry Simpson to shout about a tilted playing field.
Suppression of firebrands, whether by the media or political parties, is appeasement. History tells us in no uncertain terms appeasement only fuels a storm. People may try to bottle up the firebrands, but eventually, frustration and anger will build to a point where it can no longer be suppressed. The longer it is bottled up, the more destructive the storm, the way two violent weather fronts collide over the plains. That is why this country needs a new generation of Jerry Simpsons.