Reading Cory Haala’s When Democrats Won the Heartland stirred up a lot of political memories from my first 20 years living in the Upper Midwest—memories of being surprised, then truly encouraged and hopeful, and ultimately disappointed (but never cynical, at least not about progressive politics and possibilities). We had moved out here in 1977 for me to take up a one-year post at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, and moved again the following year to a tenure-track professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. I knew the basics of the region’s history, of course, but having trained in Latin American Studies, I really had a lot to learn about its past and present. That said, I was hoping to discover that the Midwestern progressive tradition embodied in Iowa’s and South Dakota’s Populist parties, Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor party, Wisconsin’s Progressive party (not to mention Milwaukee’s Socialist Party), and North Dakota’s Nonpartisan League had persisted and continued to influence the Democratic parties into which most of them had merged. But I didn’t—and when I asked people about where it all went, they would say things like “I hate to break it to you, but…”

Looking back now, I realize those immediate answers reflected the persistently glum post-1960s mood—one compounded by the failure of liberals and leftists to respond effectively to the advance of the New Right and neoliberalism in the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively, and to the corporate elite’s “class war” against the democratic achievements of the New Deal 1930s and Great Society 1960s (the long Age of Roosevelt). But little did we realize that while capital and the right were clearly in ascendance, things were starting to percolate on the left, at least here in the Upper Midwest.

In this well-researched, comprehensive, and very detailed work, Haala, an assistant professor and museum studies coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, recounts how a generation of Upper Midwestern liberal and progressive politicians and grassroots activists responded to the farm crises and deindustrialization of the 1970s and ’80s by turning to the past for ideas (though not nostalgically so). And how, drawing inspiration and example from their own region’s history of populist and progressive politics in the Gilded Age, they determinedly set themselves against the grain of the Reagan Revolution and our own Second Gilded Age by organizing new coalitions of farmers, workers, women, and people of color and trying to push national and state Democratic party establishments to the left.

Haala’s book excited me. Not just because it took me back to the question I had posed nearly 50 years ago, but all the more, I confess, because the story he tells about how Upper Midwestern progressive populists took hold of history and put it to work affirmed my own efforts to both redeem America’s long-suppressed progressive story and try to convince Democratic politicians to take hold of it today.

Consider Haala’s opening paragraph:

“The Populists of an earlier century proclaimed: ‘We seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of the plain people,’” Iowa Senator Tom Harkin told a Democratic fundraiser in April 1985. “As Democratic populists in the 1980s, we proclaim that same goal.” Running for U.S. Senate in 1984, Harkin beat an incumbent, conservative Republican by five points more than Reagan won Iowa the same year. Tapping what he called “populist coalitions”—“nurses, farm families, women, teachers, and small business”—in the 1980s, Harkin and others like Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Sarah Vogel of North Dakota, and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin fought to create “a new democratic majority in America” and “put in place a Democratic populist plan for the future.”

The “plan” was to curb and contain the political power of corporate wealth by developing a class-based progressive populist movement committed to both direct popular democratic action and electoral democracy. Moreover, to counter the racialist and sexist pseudo-populism of the right and reactionaries, progressive-populist politicians and activists were not supposed to simply preach human decency and communal unity. Instead, they needed to articulate a politics and a movement of class solidarity that not only spoke to the material needs and aspirations of all working people—farmers, workers, small-business owners, homemakers in all their diversity—but also never lost sight of the fact that it was capital and its conservative and neoliberal allies who were responsible for bringing about the economic crises and troubles that they were all enduring. They were not socialists. But neither were they simply looking for government to dole out financial aid. They were mobilizing to push for legislative action to reorder the economic and financial system that had engendered the debacles of the day. On this point, Haala quotes one of the contemporary heroes of this renewed progressive-populist movement, former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower. “If we’d have been liberals,” Hightower said, discussing struggling Texas watermelon growers, “we’d have retrained them to do something else. As populists, we changed the market structure that was fucking them over.”

In good part due to the fallout from Watergate, Democrats had weathered the economic crises of the 1970s nationally—aka stagflation—and in the Upper Midwest they had remained politically strong. But the New Right takeover of the GOP would lead to a radical, or should I say reactionary, change in the region’s electoral map. Launching a wave of attack ads portraying the Democrats as “pro-abortion, pro-feminist, and tax-and-spend liberals,” writes Haala, Republicans, with Ronald Reagan as their presidential candidate, effectively flipped the Upper Midwest from blue to red in 1980.

Things went a bit differently, however, in 1984. Yes, despite a major economic recession in his first two years in office, Reagan won the presidency a second time. In fact, he won in every state except his opponent Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota (a terrible loss that Mondale, who was not a progressive populist, probably guaranteed by declaring in one of the televised debates that he and the Democrats would definitely raise taxes if elected). But the “Reagan recession” had brought on a truly destructive farm crisis in the Upper Midwest that incited popular anger and rage and propelled and empowered progressive populists’ activism and organizing.

Farmers were in serious trouble—debts were piling up, farms were being lost, whole communities were suffering. Abandoning their long-standing organizations, farmers created new ones with good insurgent names like Groundswell and PrairieFire. And their collective rage led to direct action not only to block foreclosures and challenge banking practices, but also to stage demonstrations calling for government action, such as instituting moratoria on farm foreclosures, and legislative action to change tax policies and commodity pricing rules. And farmers were not the only ones mobilizing against Reaganomics. Diverse grassroots activists were also doing so, which involved building progressive coalitions and organizations such as Minnesota Citizens Organized Acting Together (COACT), Wisconsin Action Coalition (WAC), and Iowa Citizen Action Network (ICAN) with the goal of creating a “working-class, progressive bloc” and endeavoring to remake their state Democratic parties from the bottom up.

Responding to the region’s renewed grassroots activism and agitation, boosted by liberal victories at the state level in the 1982 midterm elections, and outfitted with a bibliography of histories of the nineteenth-century Populist Party, House members Tom Harkin of Iowa and Lane Evans of Illinois declared in 1983 that they were launching a new Congressional Populist Caucus to “act as the voice, and to serve the interests of the common people…the family farmer, small businesspeople, and the average consumer.” But again, as Haala details at length, progressive populism was no top-down affair. Nor was it to be just an agrarian movement. Industrial unions joined in the mobilizations, especially as national companies were now aggressively seeking to cut workers’ wages and break their unions—as happened most notoriously at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota (where meatpackers staged a long strike and ultimately lost). Similar confrontations occurred throughout the region, which served to propel new solidarities between farmers and workers based on the recognition that big business and its political allies were the real class enemy. By emphasizing who the real enemy was, progressive populists also found allies among people of color—Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinos.

The burgeoning movement also enlisted feminist groups in its ranks. The great obstacle to be overcome here was the abortion question. But by emphasizing the economic needs of women workers and homemakers, progressive populism overcame it—though, as Haala recounts, victories were tenuous. Most notably, abortion rights in North Dakota remained a most contentious matter, and ultimately depended on Governor George Sinner vetoing a bill passed by both houses of the legislature in 1991 that would have severely restricted access to abortion. But he was compelled to sign another bill that specified a “24-hour waiting period.”

The most persistent roadblock that progressive populists faced in their efforts to turn popular grassroots action into electoral politics and legislative action was their own party. Simply put, during the 1970s, the Democratic Party had turned its back both on the FDR tradition of what FDR himself called “militant liberalism” and on the labor movement and working class. Economic and industrial democracy was no longer in the party’s vocabulary. Pleasing donors and appealing to educated yuppies, middle-class suburbanites, and urban minorities took precedence over catering to and winning the votes of angry farmers and blue-collar workers in the Upper Midwest. Democratic Party establishments were composed mostly of centrists and neoliberals who did not trust progressive populists and their movement. But the latter was not only not going away, it was challenging control of the party.

Reagan’s victory in 1984 did not have coattails in the Upper Midwest. While Republicans lost congressional seats here, no incumbent Democrat lost. As Haala observes, “Progressive populism proved an effective response to Reagan.” And yet, the national party leadership was unmoved.

Haala does not fail to recount the challenge to the Democratic establishment rendered by Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaign for the nomination in 1984 and especially in 1988, and the way it even further infused progressive populism into national and state party politics. On this, I can attest to the fact that, to the welcome surprise of many of us, Jackson’s visits to northeast Wisconsin during the International Paper Company strike of 1987-88 gained him many a supporter among mostly white paper workers. But in truth, his campaign could only go so far. And centrism and neoliberalism continued to prevail at the DNC.

Nevertheless, progressive populism continued to advance energetically in the Upper Midwest. Fueled by the continuing farm crisis and the corporate elite’s intensifying class war on labor and working people (which was essentially licensed by President Reagan himself early on when he responded to the 1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike by firing all the striking air traffic controllers), grassroots activism continued and progressive populist candidates advanced their vision. As Haala notes of the 1980s:

Prioritizing voter registration and economic populism in policymaking and party-building…Midwestern liberals flipped Senate seats in North Dakota and South Dakota, elected progressive women to statewide office in Iowa and North Dakota, built majorities in the Minnesota and Wisconsin state legislatures, registered thousands of new voters, and built the scaffolding for a progressive populist challenge to the national Democratic Party.

Led by figures such as Harkin, South Dakota’s Tom Daschle, Minnesota’s Paul Wellstone, and Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, the progressive populists prevailed in the Upper Midwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But tragically, they could not reshape the national party. The Money Power that infuriated nineteenth-century populists won out. Neoliberalism trumped populism. And in 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency as a Democrat—and then governed as if he was a Republican. Among other things, he pushed ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act that ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that effectively killed the Banking Act of 1933, also known as Glass-Steagall, which had provided a wall between investment banking and commercial banking.

Arriving in the Upper Midwest in the late 1970s, I wondered what had happened to the Populists and Progressives of generations past. The region’s politics during the ensuing 20 years showed me they had not died. They just needed remembering and reawakening. And I sense that is what we are seeing once again as we confront authoritarianism head on. I just hope that those of us committed to saving American democratic life remember what abolitionist Wendell Phillips once said: “To be as good as our fathers were we must be better.” We can maintain and strengthen our liberties by working to gain new ones.

Haala’s book should encourage those of us who seek to take back America to start by grabbing hold of our history. The Midwestern progressive populists engaged their fellow citizens politically by reminding them of their region’s history of populism and progressivism. For too long we liberals and progressives—haunted by the tragedies and ironies of America’s past and present—have failed to appreciate and harness the democratic struggles of generations to secure the nation’s revolutionary democratic promise. As Haala shows, American working people, rural and urban, are waiting to be reminded of it.