Agony of the American Left Quotes

“Populist and Marxist rhetoric sometimes coincided. The Populist platform of 1892 contained the ringing declaration: “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” Some historians have concluded from this rhetorical coincidence that the Populist critique of capitalism, though arrived at independently, was essentially the same as the Socialist critique. (Norman Pollack: The Populist Response to Industrial America [Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 1962.]) This conclusion, as I have argued in the Pacific Historical Review (February 1964, pp. 69–73), rests almost entirely on verbal correspondences; it is arrived at by piecing together a series of quotations abstracted from their context and treated with equal weight, without regard for speaker or occasion, so as to form a wholly synthetic system which is then attributed to the Populists themselves. In his Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Pantheon Books; 1968), Staughton Lynd, using a similar technique that is open to the same objections, tries to show that the populist tradition of Thoreau and other American radicals complemented and was consistent with Marxism.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left