History of the United States II / Unit 5 USH2 0620 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Omaha Platform
The idea
The alliances founded the Populist Party in eighteen ninety-one, and at its convention in Omaha in July eighteen ninety-two it adopted a platform written by Ignatius Donnelly. The Omaha Platform called for a subtreasury plan for farm credit, government control of the railroads, a federal income tax, direct election of senators, and monetary reform. The Populists nominated James B. Weaver, who won more than a million votes and, Digital History adds, twenty-two electoral votes. Grover Cleveland won the presidency.
In practice
A third party's platform listing reforms that the major parties still refused to touch.
Where people slip
The Populists lost the election and won much of the argument. Two of their planks, the income tax and the direct election of senators, became the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments in nineteen thirteen, as unit six shows. A platform can outlive the party that wrote it.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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