Leonidas Lafayette Polk

• Leonidas LaFayette Polk
• Born: April 24, 1837
• Died: June 11, 1892

Farmer, editor, populist, and agrarian reformer (no relation to the confederate general), was born in Anson County, North Carolina, the son of Serena (Autry) Polk and Andrew Polk, a farmer and the descendant of colonial settlers in Maryland. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, Polk took up farming and in 1857 married Sarah P. Gaddy, with whom he had seven children, one of whom died in infancy.

Of Whig ancestry, Polk “stood for the Union” in 1860 and was elected to the North Carolina legislature in that year of political crisis. He opposed secession during the firing on Fort Sumter, during President Lincoln’s call for troops, and even through the period in April 1861 when Virginia seceded. He then “went with his state” and served as a lieutenant in the Confederate army.

Though popular with his troops and wounded at Gettysburg, Polk was periodically harassed during the war by ultrasecessionist elements who suspected his political tendencies as a Southern Unionist. This opposition did not, however, prevent his reelection to the legislature in 1864. A lifelong opponent of the planter-industrialist interests that dominated the postwar North Carolina Democratic party, Polk became active in agrarian reform circles and was instrumental in the creation in 1877 of the state department of agriculture, serving as its first commissioner. He founded the Progressive Farmer newspaper in 1886 and played an increasingly prominent role in the Farmers’ Alliance, which spread throughout the South and West in the period 1887-92. He became a vice president of the National Alliance in 1887 and chairman of the national executive committee in 1888. In December 1889 he was elected National Alliance president, a post he retained until his death.

Polk came gradually but firmly to the radical monetary interpretation known as “green-backism” that dominated Alliance circles in the Plains states and the Southwest. In 1890 he launched a national speaking tour and materially assisted in the growth of the movement by casting its radical principles in traditional language that had persuasive impact on rank-and-file farmers.

The enduring political legacy of the Civil War was the intense sectionalism that continued to shape party loyalties in both the North and the South. In the decades of the 1870s and 1880s so many Americans ritualistically “voted as they shot” that progressives faced great hazards in their effort to create a multisectional farmer-labor party to combat corporate and monopoly influence on both major parties. Polk’s entire political life as a Whig, a Southern Unionist, and as an agrarian reform Democrat uniquely equipped him to transcend the politics of sectionalism. His nationwide speaking tours in 1890-91 centered on an endlessly repeated refrain: In the Great Plains region, he announced, “I come to tell the farmers of the West that the farmers of the South stand with them.” In the South the litany was reversed: “I come to remind the farmers of the South that the farmers of the West stand with them.” The conclusion common to both regions emphasized the radical blueprint for fundamental political realignment in an era of emerging corporate politics: “There shall be no Mason-Dixon line on the Alliance maps of America’s political future.”

However, Polk’s cautious approach to the cooperative marketing program of the Alliance helped slow the political evolution of the order’s membership in his native North Carolina and elsewhere across the South because it failed to stress the very issue that made class exploitation clear to the Alliance rank and file—the highly visible opposition of banking and commercial interests to Alliance cooperatives. Ironically, then, Polk’s economic caution assisted in complicating his political task of weaning southern farmers from their inherited sectional loyalty to the Democratic party.

Polk’s zeal in setting up a national Alliance Lecture Bureau and his own persistent efforts on the hustings may thus be seen as attempts to overcome, through simple oratorical persuasion, American cultural rigidities that were grounded in decades of regional political habit. Polk’s method of presenting the radical Populist vision, in a language that was a marvelous blend of gothic syntax and evangelical passion, made him a singularly authentic representative for the popular movement that brought the People’s party onto the stage of American politics. In temperament, he stood closest to the movement’s middle-class radicals, such as Charles W. Macune; but, in his identification with the driving insurgent tactics necessary to generate independent political action, he was closer to the movement’s agitators, such as Henry Vincent in Kansas, William Lamb in Texas, or Ralph Beaumont of the Knights of Labor. Such a variegated blend of style and purpose served Polk well and accounted for his broad appeal as an Alliance spokesman throughout the country.

Polk was scheduled to be the first presidential candidate of the People’s party of the United States in 1892. Three weeks before its inaugural convention he died at the age of fifty-five in Washington, D.C., after a brief illness. At the time, he was the most prestigious advocate in the South of political realignment based on a national farmer-labor coalition. His untimely death was a heavy blow to the Populist cause, particularly in the South, where he brought much-needed regional credentials to relevant but culturally embattled ideas of political reform. Though his career was tragically truncated, L. L. Polk deserves to be remembered as one of populism’s great captains. His speeches would serve, in a later era, as a useful source for yet another evangelical southern reformer—Martin Luther King Jr.

Some of Polk’s papers may be found at the North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Raleigh. His published works include An Address . . . Delivered before the Interstate Convention of Farmers . . . Atlanta, 1887 (1887); Address of L. L. Polk … Indianapolis … 1891 (1891); Agricultural Depression: Its Causes—The Remedy (1890); The Farmers’ Discontent(1891);Handbook of North Carolina (1870);and The Protest of One Farmer. Address … 1891 (n.d.). An admirable biography of Polk is S. Noblin, Leonidas Lafayette Polk, Agrarian Crusader (1949). See also the sketch in N. A. Dunning, ed., Farmers’ Alliance History and Agricultural Digest (1891); W. S. Morgan, History of the Wheel and Alliance and the Impending Revolution (1891); L. C. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976); and the Dictionary of American Biography (1935).