[Hawthorn]

>> The “populists” were inflationists and socialists who wanted gubment to OWN private businesses <<

In other words, you’re saying that Andrew Jackson was not a populist? I always thought he was the only 100% unalloyed populist to win the POTUS job.

[LS]

No he was not. Historically, the populists did NOT come around until the 1880s out of the Grange movement. Jackson "appealed to the common man" vs. the elites would be accurate, but there was no such thing as "populist" in 1828.

But even Jackson, as research by McCormick and Benson and others has shown, was not truly the first "democratic" candidate---that was William Henry Harrison. Lee Benson showed with detailed quantitative work that the 1828, 1832, and 1836 elections were still heavily based on religion and ethnicity, and that it wasn't until 1840 that a true economic vote occurred that might be called a vote of the "common man."