CHAPTER XI
THE POPULIST CONVENTION
From the New York “Sun,” July 4, the early 1890s:
Kansas Kicking
Cranks’ Convention in Tumult at Topeka
Wild Asses of Prairie Bray
Millennium by Majority Vote Scheduled for Next November
Topeka, Kan., July 3. (Special to the “Sun.”) The open season for devil-hunting is on in Topeka today. From Nemaha County on the North to Comanche on the South, from Cherokee County on the East to Cheyenne on the West, the hunters are pouring into their state capital; money-devil hunters and speculator-devil hunters, railroad-devil hunters and rum-devil hunters. The streets of the city swarm with them, the lobbies of the hotels are packed with them, spell-binders and oratorical wizards, political quack-doctors and prohibitionist cranks, long-haired men and short-haired women, partisans of free money, free land and free love. For months they have been looking forward to this convention, which is to wrest the powers of government from the hands of a predatory plutocracy; today, if there is a lunatic in Kansas who is not in Topeka, it is only because the Wall Street devil has got him behind bars in one of the asylums.
The lobby of the American House this evening is more like the menagerie tent of a circus than like anything else ever seen in the effete East. The convention opens at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and tonight every orator has a last chance to save the nation before the platform is made up. Audiences are not necessary, everybody talks at once, and there are a dozen men delivering exhortations, standing on the leather seats of hotel-lobby chairs. Here is “Sockless” Jeremiah Simpson, expecting to be nominated for Congress tomorrow. Coatless and tieless, his collar wilted flat, he shouts to the corn-field cohorts his denunciations of the blood-sucking leeches which have picked the bones of the farmers of Kansas. Here is Isaiah Woe, weird figure having whiskers almost to his belt and pants almost to his shoe-tops, waving his skinny arms and justifying his surname—“Woe, woe, woe—woe unto this and woe unto that—woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the rights from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!”
Isaiah is known as a “prophet” among this prairie population; he roars the grievances of the dear peepul of the prairie-country, and shakes the hayseeds and corn-dust out of his white whiskers until his audience really believes it sees a halo about his head. He does not hesitate to claim divine inspiration, declaring to the mob: “The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.”
Isaiah has no rival in lung-power, unless it be Micah, the Pottawatomie Prophet—“Mournful Mike,” as he is known in the state capital. This aged replica of Uncle Sam is out on a cracker-box in front of the Elks’ Club, and your reporter took down some of his sentences verbatim: “They build up Washington with blood, and New York with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money.... Therefore shall Washington for your sake be plowed as a field, and New York shall become heaps, and the buildings of Wall Street as the high places of a forest.”