Henry Vincent

• Henry Vincent
• Born: January 1, 1862
• Died: October 29, 1935

Populist editor, was born in the farm country of Tabor, Iowa, one of five sons of James Vincent and Mary (Sholders) Vincent. James Vincent was an economic radical, abolitionist, and freethinker who at one time or other served as western correspondent for Horace Greeley’s The New-York Tribune and William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. Although the elder Vincent had worked his way through Oberlin College, family circumstances did not permit more than a high school education in Tabor for his son Henry.

In 1879, at the age of seventeen, Henry, following his father’s journalistic trade and political views, began publishing his own weekly journal, The American Nonconformist, in Tabor on a hand press. Seven years later, in October 1886, Vincent, with the help of two older brothers, moved to Winfield, Kansas, where they began to publish a paper for the “underdog,” which they called The American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator, a title later abbreviated to The American Nonconformist.

The details of Vincent’s life are exceedingly sketchy, but it is known that he married Elizabeth Lovella Hoop on August 8, 1887, in Sydney, Iowa, and that the couple had at least one daughter.

As an editor and writer, Vincent combined an effortless style of earthy clarity with a no-nonsense political approach. Both surfaced in his inaugural editorial: “This journal will aim to publish such matter as will tend to the education of the laboring classes, the farmers and the producer, and in every struggle it will endeavor to take the side of the oppressed as against the oppressor, provided the underdog has concern for his own hide to defend himself when he is given the opportunity, and not turn and bite the hand of him who has labored for his freedom, by voting both into a worse condition than before.”

The immediate political burden that Vincent carried flowed from the fact that he was a Greenbacker—that is, he believed the American banking and monetary system was so organically exploitative that basic structural reform of banking, the currency, and of money itself was required. He played a creative organizing role in various third parties that carried the Greenback message in the 1880s and founded an alliance of third-party editors in Kansas as well. But Vincent was convinced that formal organization should not be restricted to elite groups of reformers, whether in party structures or editorial coalitions: the rank and file of the citizenry had to be recreuited to mass institutions of self-help. It was only in such self-generated structures, he believed, that people could have the autonomy to think about the economic and political shape of their lives and formulate serious democratic remedies. Accordingly, the Nonconformist editor set up a wide network of communications with other newspapers so that he cold measre the pulse of political activity across the nation. He followed closely the growth of the Knights of Labor and participated in its organizing efforts in the West. When a self-organized group of farmers in Texas, calling themselves the Farmers’ Alliance, generated a radical Greenback platform in 1886 and embarked on a program of large-scale purchasing and marketing cooperatives in 1887, Vincent decided the alliance offered the possibility of providing the missing link between authentic democratic ideas and the voting constituencies of the nation.

Together with some radical associates, Vincent made a pilgrimage to the group’s headquarters in Dallas in 1888 to gain firsthand knowledge of the organizing message that had proved successful in recruiting some 200,000 Texas farmers. He discovered that farmers flocked to the Alliance to join its cooperative. He learned further that the cooperative movement itself was a transforming educational medium for bringing home to rural people the precise natre of their economic exploitation, and that this education in turn had a galvanizing political impact that turned ordinary states-rights Democrats in the South into activist Greenbackers.

As a direct legacy of the intense sectional loyalties engendered by the Civil War, most Kansas farmers were Republicans, not Democrats, but Vincent saw the cooperative movement as an economic and political bridge to an eventual third party that would unite “the producing classes” in both regions behind a program of serious structural reform of the American economy. He returned to Kansas with the complete blueprint of Alliance methods and promptly organized the first Alliance cooperative in Winfield, Kansas. Beyond this, he touted the Alliance cooperative program in his newspaper and utilized his personal contacts among western Greenbackers to see that they grasped the new organizing tool also.

The results were spectacular. The Alliance cooperative proved a breathtaking recruiting vehicle. Some 140,000 Kansas farmers joined the cooperative movement within a frantic eighteen-month period of organizing. Once inside the Alliance environment, they not only learned about the specific forms of economic exploitation that afflicted working Americans, they actually lived the experience in the course of building their cooperative programs in the face of banker and merchant opposition. The sub-alliance was indeed—as movement lecturers proclaimed—an effective “schoolroom” of democratic experimentation.

Though the Kansas marketing and purchasing cooperatives enjoyed some successes, such disruptions of the normal arteries of commerce engendered intense hostility in the commercial sectors of society. In 1891-92, the Kansas cooperatives began to be strangled by lack of access to bank credit; it became apparent that more fundamental reform of the nation’s banking and monetary system would be required to break the entrenched patterns of exploitation that consigned so much of the rural population to lives of peonage and near-peonage.

Henry Vincent played a central role in the complicated process whereby an economic movement—the Alliance cooperative crusade—transformed itself into a mass democratic political institution—the People’s party. He was one of the guiding spirits in the founding of the National Reform Press Association that, in the Populist era, mobilized over 1,000 country newspaper editors in the cause of popular democracy. Secure in the knowledge that Kansas was in good hands, both organizationally and journalistically, Vincent moved the Non-conformist to Indiana and, later, to Chicago, the latter an urban stronghold of traditional two-party politics. He also found time to write The Story of the Commonweal, a book about the organized unemployed who called themselves Coxey’s Army.

After the decline of the People’s party, Vincent remained a political independent sympathetic to the Socialist party. He regarded most of the progressive era reforms as ephemeral and searched vainly for an effective organizational formula to generate a mass democratic movement capable of breaking free of the two-party politics of corporate America. Throughout his long life, he clung to his “advanced” views on blacks, women, industrial unionism, agrarian cooperatives, and the inviolability of the first amendment. A Populist egalitarian of “the old school,” he died in Ypsilanti, Michigan, at seventy-three, mildly encouraged by but resolutely skeptical of the New Deal.

The single most influential causative agent of the planting and growth of the Populist movement in the Great Plains region of America was not Gen. James Weaver of Iowa who carried the presidential hopes of the People’s party in 1892, nor Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, who penned the lyrical preamble to the party’s national platform, nor “Sockless” Jerry Simpson of Kansas, the movement’s most colorful platform speaker. That distinction belongs, rather, to earnest, thoughtful, and tireless Henry Vincent.

Vincent is familiar to students of the late nineteenth-century reform movement because he was the founder and proprietor of The American Nonconformist. But his role in generating the agrarian revolt in the region was much more central than his mere competence in lending editorial support might indicate. Vincent’s gift to the Populist cause was that he understood the subtle relationship between political ideas and democratic movement-building. It is an understanding uncommon among American reformers—in the 1890s or since—a circumstance that helps explain why so many egalitarian concepts failed to find their way into the mainstream of the national culture in the twentieth century.

Vincent published two works: The Plot Unfolding (1890), and The Story of the Commonweal (1894). He has never been the subject of a formal biography. A sketch of his life can be found in Kansas State Historical Library, Biographical Circular, vol. 2. His role in the agrarian movement is detailed in L. C. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976).