Milford Wriarson Howard

• Milford Howard
• Born: December 18, 1862
• Died: December 28, 1937

Populist member of Congress and author, was born in Floyd County, Georgia, the son of Stephan Howard, a blacksmith, Baptist minister, and tenant farmer, and Martha (Maddry) Howard. In 1881 he moved to Fort Payne, Alabama, in the hilly, small-farming region in the northeast corner of the state, and was admitted to the bar the following year. He married Sarah A. Lankford, who lived with her grandparents on a farm near Fort Payne, on December 23, 1883. The couple had three children: Clyde (born in 1885), Clarence (1887-1888), and Claude (born in 1890).

Howard held the posts of city attorney and county solicitor and from 1888 to 1894 headed the DeKalb County Democratic committee. Through his connections with a local bank and the Fort Payne Coal and Iron Company, Howard prospered in the boom years between 1888 and 1892, but he sustained serious losses when the real estate market collapsed. After taking a course at a school of oratory in Washington, D.C., in 1891, his interest turned to the free silver and government reform movements; he lectured extensively and in 1894 published a book called if Christ Came to Congress, an exposé of the venality of politicians that included a vivid description of the capital’s vice district.

At the urging of Alabama Populists, Howard sought and received the Populist nomination for Congress from the state’s Seventh Congressional District. He pledged to support “the free coinage of silver at sixteen to one . . . the eternal principles of truth and justice,” and white supremacy. The Republican party also endorsed his candidacy. In the ensuing campaign the Democrats attacked Howard relentlessly, charging, among other things, that a Georgia Baptist church had once expelled him for stealing cotton and that he had hired a thug to beat up a black Republican. The Democratic Gadsden (Alabama) Times-News made his book an issue, conjecturing that he must have gotten his “inspiration” for it “in some midnight revel in some house of ill fame, while his brain was giddy with wine, and all his lower animal passions in full play.” After one opening salvo, Howard avoided personalities and focused his campaign on the farmers’ grievances. Cotton was selling for from three to five cents a pound, and unemployment was widespread in his district.

Howard was a personally appealing man—a journalist once described him as “of enormous stature, tall and swarthy, with raven black hair that falls to his shoulders”—with a folksy campaign style that was attractive to his constituents. Statewide, the Populists narrowly lost the elections of 1894—although they were probably counted out—but Howard carried his district by a comfortable margin. Harassment of Howard did not end with the election, however. He was obliged to remove his two sons from the local school; rumors of assassination plots proliferated; and armed Cherokee County Populists once guarded his house for several nights. Life in what had become known as the “Bloody Seventh” district finally became so unbearable that he moved his family to Cullman, Alabama.

Two years later, at their 1896 presidential nominating convention in St. Louis, the Populists faced the dilemma of either endorsing William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic party nominee and free-silver crusader, who had co-opted their major issues, or splitting the reform forces by nominating a Populist. Reuben Kolb, head of the Alabama Populist party, favored fusion with the Democrats; Howard belonged to the so-called middle-of-the-road faction of the state party, which was not moderate, but purist, insisting that the Populists protect their party identity by making their own nomination.

Howard disrupted Senator Benjamin Butler’s speech to the convention—Kolb later told the press that Howard had been drunk—and then stormed the back of the rostrum when the fusionists attempted to suspend the rules to nominate Bryan by a voice vote. In nominating the Georgia Populist Tom Watson for vice president, Howard parodied Bryan by calling Watson the “man who has borne the cross and should wear the crown.” Bryan’s defeat in the fall virtually killed the Populist party in Alabama as it did nationwide; Kolb campaigned against Howard in the Seventh District, yet Howard handily won reelection. As an officeholder Howard had something concrete to lose by fusion with the hated Seventh District Democratic organization, but it is difficult to judge how much this might have had to do with his opposition to Bryan. He did not run for reelection in 1898; he subsequently joined the Republican party and went down to defeat on its ticket in the Seventh District in 1910.

Howard’s congressional career was generally undistinguished. He once had a “seizure” on the floor of the House—there were again charges that he had been intoxicated—and in May 1896 he attempted to start impeachment proceedings against President Grover Cleveland. Cleveland, he asserted, had sold bonds at less than their value, had not enforced the antitrust laws, and had unconstitutionally sent troops into Illinois to break the Pullman strike.

Howard had an unstable personality; following periods of personal crisis he had a series of nervous breakdowns. In 1895 he published a second book, The American Plutocracy, condemning the political and economic establishments as an association of plutocrats whose fortunes were built on the backs of the worker and the farmer.

In 1904 Howard resumed his Fort Payne law practice. He lived and worked in Birmingham from 1911 to 1915, when he gave up his profession and moved to a suburb of Los Angeles. After taking a screenwriting course, he wrote The Bishop of the Ozarks (1923). The film was produced and marketed, with Howard in the title role as the convict who assumes the bishop’s life; the screenplay was then converted into a novel. Howard wrote a second script, Peggy Ware (probably based on the life of Martha Berry) about a woman who founds a school for mountain children in northern Alabama.

Howard returned to Alabama in 1923 and established the Masters Schools for underprivileged children; he was elected president of the Lookout Mountain Scenic Highway Association in 1926. In 1928, longing for a return to the traditional community, Howard praised what he saw as a spiritual renaissance and a sense of belonging in Italian fascism in Fascism: A Challenge to Democracy; this defense of Benito Mussolini based on a series of interviews he had with the dictator. A romantic and a mystic, Howard met and corresponded with a number of other mystics in the 1920s. He died in Los Angeles on December 28, 1937, and is buried on Lookout Mountain, near Mentone, Alabama.

The secret of Howard’s success as a Populist politician was his ability to identify with and articulate the grievances of the small white Alabama farmer, whose economic fortunes and social status were in serious decline. The yeoman farmers were sliding into tenancy and were being swallowed up by Alabama’s “Big Mules”; Howard had himself failed at real estate speculation and had experienced the humiliation felt by men who believed they had been cheated of the rewards of their labor. In his case he was able to find an outlet for his frustration by becoming a political animal and bellowing the outrage of other disappointed men.

Howard wrote If Christ Came to Congress (1894); The American Plutocracy (1895); The Bishop of the Ozarks (1923), Peggy Ware (n.d.); and Fascism: A Challenge to Democracy (1928). The only full-length biography is E. S. Howard, The Vagabond Dreamer (1977). His papers are held by his grandson, C. M. Howard of Alabama, and his autobiography is being edited by D. A. Harris, who has provided additional information for this article. See also D. A. Harris, “Campaigning in the Bloody Seventh: The Election of 1894 in the Seventh Congressional District,” The Alabama Review, April 1974; W. W. Rogers, The One Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865-1896 (1970); S. Hackney, From Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (1968); and The Biographical Dictionary of the American Congress (1971). The definitive study of populism is now L. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976).