Wharton Barker

• Wharton Barker
• Born: May 1, 1846
• Died: April 8, 1921

Financier, publicist, and populist, was born in Philadelphia, third among five sons and eight children of Abraham Barker and Sarah (Wharton) Barker. Ancestors on both sides had come to America in the seventeenth century— the Barkers to Massachusetts, the Whartons to Pennsylvania. His grandfather Jacob Barker, a colorful New York financial figure and a founder of Tammany Hall, the Democratic political organization, was renowned for the controversies he stirred up, and Wharton Barker apparently inherited some of his combativeness. After attending public schools he entered the University of Pennsylvania, and while still in college helped to organize the Third United States Regiment of Colored Troops. He was graduated in 1866, entered the banking business, and later, while retaining his interest in the family firm, founded the Investment Company and the Finance Company, both of Philadelphia. In 1867 he married Margaret Corlies Baker of New York. They had three sons: Samuel H., Rodman, and Folger.

In 1878 Barker began a period of association with the Russian government. As a special financial agent, he superintended the construction of four cruisers in American shipyards, and in 1879 traveled to Russia to advise on the development of the coal and iron fields north of the Sea of Asov. For his services, Czar Alexander II made him a Knight of St. Stanislaus. Barker also organized a Philadelphia syndicate to underwrite telegraph, telephone, and banking concessions that his somewhat questionable associate, a Polish promoter, claimed had been granted from the Chinese viceroy. These concessions were later revoked, according to Barker, because of pressure from British interests. He continued to give economic advice to the Chinese government for years. He also maintained a correspondence with many prominent Russians of various political persuasions, and traveled widely in the Far East, Europe, and Latin America as well as in the United States.

From the beginning of his career Barker was eager to obtain an audience for his views on a wide range of social, political, and especially economic issues. In 1869 he founded the Penn Monthly and in 1880 merged it into the weekly American, which except for the years 1891-1894 he published through 1900. Until the mid-1890s he belonged to the Republican party. In 1880 he helped to lead those opposing of a third term for Ulysses S. Grant and managed James A. Garfield’s preconvention campaign, and subsequently those of Benjamin Harrison in 1884 and 1888. Throughout this period he frequently urged his economic views on influential congressmen and officials. He emphasized his plan for dividing the surplus derived from the protective tariff among the states to relieve the burden of state and local taxes. Otherwise, he pointed out, the assessments would continually grow heavier because of the demands of higher living standards and the “new church of science.” He believed that the United States and Canada should levy the same tariff on all other nations and none between themselves, dividing the resultant surplus on a per capita basis. He also advocated an “American Zollverein,” a tariff union of all the North and South American countries.

By 1896 Barker moved to the support of populism because of his views on currency and on the growing political power of what he called the moneyed oligarchy spawned by the Civil War and nurtured by federal economic policies. In that year Barker published Bimetallism, which concluded with a long quotation from Senator Benjamin F. Tillman of South Carolina predicting a revolution by urban and rural masses “unless we take the hands of the conspirators off the people’s throats.” Barker agreed: “Hopeless toil breeds despair, despair breeds hate and hate revolution.” Despite the book’s title, Barker favored bimetallism only as a temporary expedient, advocating as a permanent policy an “absolute,” government-issued currency, not redeemable for gold or silver, to those who performed public works. He believed that banks and railroads should be nationalized and favored a graduated income tax. Convinced that government had moved too far from the people, he advocated not only the initiative and referendum but also a constitutional amendment that would make any measure approved by direct vote of the people “part of the fundamental law.”

A convention of “middle-of-the-road” populists (those who opposed fusion with the Democrats), in 1900 nominated Barker for president and Ignatius Donnelly for vice president. This group’s platform stated that “whatever can better be done by the government for the enrichment of the many shall not be turned over to individuals for the aggrandizement of the few, but Barker’s letter of acceptance had a some-what gentler tone, calling for “a rule of justice and love in place of a rule of greed.” The Barker-Donnelly ticket polled slightly more than 50,000 votes.

After the election, Barker retired from active politics and devoted more time to his other interests. He had been a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania since 1880 and remained active in university affairs until his death. He was a member the American Philosophical Society, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and several social clubs.

Throughout the early years of the twentieth century Barker continued to express his dislike of England and of the plutocracy in his prolific writings. In 1914 he declined an invitation to serve on the Philadelphia Committee to Celebrate One Hundred Years of Peace With England pointing out that for more than two-thirds of those years, especially during the Civil War, England had been hostile to the United States. And he continued to advocate a third party to represent the people in their forthcoming “irrepressible conflict” with the moneyed interests, a crisis he believed would be “more momentous than 1776 or 1860.” Barker died at home following a month’s illness.

As a reformer Wharton Barker was one of a small but influential group of upper-class eastern populists whose dislike of the plutocracy’s power was edged with social contempt. He was also one of a somewhat larger group of theoreticians and intellectuals whom historians of populism have until recently neglected in favor of more colorful and eccentric characters, and whose contributions must be thoroughly analyzed in order to arrive at an adequate assessment of the populist movement.

Bimetallism (1896) and The Great Issues (1902) represent a good sample of Barker’s opinions. For biographical data see Who’s Who in America, 1920-1921 and an article in The Dictionary of American Biography (1928). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times and The New York Tribune, April 9, 1921.