both Buffalo Bills Wild West Show and Walt Disneys Disneyland permeated American culture in their day and continue to mold collective ideas about America, the west, and the California dream. The PopulistsIf one looks at history as a series of economic stages, as Marx did, then the Populists are easy to explain. In the 1890s as the American economy was transformed from an agricultural society to an industrial society, the losers of this transition, the small farmer, fought to stop the clock of history and secure the lifestyle of the past. Like the manufacturer of today who hopelessly fights globalization and the next stage of history, the so-called information-age (or what Toffler, Blair, Clinton and Gingrich call the third wave) the fight is doomed to failure. Nothing can stop the inevitable march of progress into the next stage of history, the argument goes, and the Populist movement was merely the last gasplike the recent WTO riots of the industrial stage, perhapsof the agricultural stage. While it is convenient to see history as a series of stages and the Populist in this light, they were far more successful then most third parties in US history, and their legacy is one of both failure and great achievement. The unprecedented demands of the Populist revolt forever changed America and the role of the Federal Government. It is with irony, then, that many historians now consider the Populists a vital part of the new America, the industrial America, then merely a residue of the past.The plight of the farmer in the post civil war era is somewhat contradictory. Never before had farm production expanded so rapidly, while at the same time the individual farmer suffered so much. For the first time, the American farmer competed in national and international markets where a surplus was sold for market prices. The farmers of the south and west, the backbone of the Populist movement, suffered from a shortage of money and sought to loosen ...
