# Populist Party The Populist Party — formally the **People's Party** — was the great agrarian-revolt third party of the 1890s and the source of the word "populist" in American politics. Rising from the Farmers' Alliance and Granger movements, it gave voice to farmers and laborers crushed between falling crop prices, high railroad freight rates, tight credit, and the deflationary [[Gold Standard]]. Its 1892 **Omaha Platform** was a remarkably radical program for its time: free coinage of silver to inflate the money supply, a graduated income tax, public ownership of railroads and telegraphs, the direct election of senators, the secret ballot, and the eight-hour day. The party won several states and elected governors and members of Congress before largely **fusing** with the Democrats in 1896 behind [[William Jennings Bryan]] and his "Cross of Gold" free-silver crusade. Bryan's defeat by McKinley ended the Populist surge and triggered the realignment into the [[Fourth Party System]]. The party withered thereafter, but many of its once-radical demands — the income tax, direct election of senators, securities and railroad regulation — were enacted in the Progressive Era. For this KB the Populists are the **template for American economic populism**: an anti-elite, anti-monopoly, producerist mass movement that scrambles the left-right axis and whose rhetoric and grievances echo across both later left-populism and the modern right. ## See Also - [[Democratic Party]] — the party it fused with in 1896 - [[Bull Moose Party]] — the Progressive-Era reform insurgency that followed - [[Third Party System]] · [[Fourth Party System]]