Preamble To The “Omaha
Platform” of the People’s Party, Presented By Ignatius Donnelly,
July 4, 1892, Omaha, Nebraska.
PREAMBLE
The conditions which
surround us best justify our co-operation; we meet in the midst of a
nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin.
Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress,
and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized;
most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the
polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. The
newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion
silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor
impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.
The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for
self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a
hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to
shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European
conditions. 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 those, 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.
The national power to
create money is appropriated to enrich bondholders; a vast public
debt payable in legal tender currency has been funded into
gold-bearing bonds, thereby adding millions to the burdens of the
people.
Silver, which has been
accepted as coin since the dawn of history, has been demonetized to
add to the purchasing power of gold by decreasing the value of all
forms of property as well as human labor, and the supply of currency
is purposely abridged to fatten usurers, bankrupt enterprise, and
enslave industry. A vast conspiracy against mankind has been
organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of
the world. If not met and overthrown at once it
forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of
civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism.
We have witnessed for more
than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political
parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been
inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling
influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing
dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or
restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform.
They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every
issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered
people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that
capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered
stock, the demonetization of silver and the oppressions of the
usurers may all be lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our
homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the
multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.
Assembled on the
anniversary of the birthday of the nation, and filled with the spirit
of the grand general and chief who established our independence, we
seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of “the
plain people,” with which class it originated. We assert our
purposes to be identical with the purposes of the National
Constitution; to form a more perfect union and establish justice,
insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote
the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for
ourselves and our posterity.
We declare that this
Republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the
love of the whole people for each other and for the nation; that it
cannot be pinned together by bayonets; that the civil war is over,
and that every passion and resentment which grew out of it must die
with it, and that we must be in fact, as we are in name, one united
brotherhood of free men.
Our country finds itself
confronted by conditions for which there is no precedent in the
history of the world; our annual agricultural productions
amount to billions of dollars
in value, which must, within a few weeks or months, be exchanged for
billions of dollars' worth of commodities consumed in their
production; the existing currency supply is wholly inadequate to make
this exchange; the results are falling prices, the formation of
combines and rings, the impoverishment of the producing class. We
pledge ourselves that if given power we will labor to correct these
evils by wise and reasonable legislation, in accordance with the
terms of our platform.
We believe that the power
of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded
(as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the
good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience
shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty
shall eventually cease in the land.
While our sympathies as a
party of reform are naturally upon the side of every proposition
which will tend to make men intelligent, virtuous, and temperate, we
nevertheless regard these questions, important as they are, as
secondary to the great issues now pressing for solution, and upon
which not only our individual prosperity but the very existence of
free institutions depend; and we ask all men to first help us to
determine whether we are to have a republic to administer before we
differ as to the conditions upon which it is to be administered,
believing that the forces of reform this day organized will never
cease to move forward until every wrong is remedied and equal rights
and equal privileges securely established for all the men and women
of this country.
Neither do they now
promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to
ignore, in the coming campaign, every issue but one. They propose to
drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham
battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national
banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver and
the oppressions of the usurers may all be lost sight of. They propose
to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon;
to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the
millionaires.
