Jeremiah (Jerry) Simpson

• Jerry Simpson
• Born: March 31, 1842
• Died: October23, 1905

Populist leader and congressman, was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, the son of Joseph Simpson, a sawmill owner and sailor. His mother’s family name was Washburn. Simpson moved with his parents in 1848 to Oneida County, New York, where he attended the public schools. Subsequently, the family moved to Indiana. He gave up formal education for good at the age of fourteen and became a sailor. During the Civil War he served in the 12th Illinois volunteer infantry and then returned to the Great Lakes. He married Jane Cape, an Englishwoman, in October 1870. At thirty-one he settled in Barber County, Kansas, and became a farmer and cattle rancher, then lost almost everything he had in a single hard winter.

Exorbitant interest rates and monopolistic practices in the transportation and marketing of agricultural produce were placing enormous strain on farmers at that time. One of the more practical remedies proposed for this situation lay in a flexible currency geared to the demands of expanding production and population—a remedy that found theoretical and practical expression in the doctrines of greenbackism and in the Greenback and Union Labor parties of the 1870s and 1880s. Simpson, originally a Lincoln Republican, was an early convert to greenback monetary theory and ran unsuccessfully for Congress on third-party tickets in the 1880s. When the National Farmers’ Alliance, imbued with greenback ideas, began recruiting a mass base for an attempted democratic restructuring of American politics, Simpson quickly joined the movement as it swept through Kansas in 1889. He became a speaker for the Barber County Farmers’ Alliance and learned, to his surprise and joy, that the Alliance cooperative movement provided something he had never previously enjoyed—an environment in which his radical ideas could receive a prolonged hearing.

It is by no means certain that Simpson ever deeply internalized this fundamental premise of democratic politics—that the recruitment of a mass constituency is not something that depends on dramatic platform oratory but rather is a product of the development of effective programs of action. In any case, he understood the result, if, perhaps, not the precise cause. In 1888, just prior to the Alliance organizing sweep, Simpson expressed his despair following his latest congressional defeat: “I know that for the man who see the evils of the time—the want, ignorance and misery caused by unjust laws—who sets himself so far as he has strength to right them, there is nothing in store but ridicule and abuse. The bitterest thought, and the hardest to bear, is the hopelessness of the struggle, ‘the futility of sacrifice.’ “ Less than a year later, after Alliance organizers had provided Simpson with the forum he so desperately sought, his whole outlook on politics underwent a wondrous change: “Our meetings are growing; at first they were held in country school houses while the other parties held theirs in the open air; now ours are outside, and the other parties are never heard of at all.”

When the cooperative programs of the Alliance ran into legislative opposition in 1890, Kansas farmers began the process of transforming their economic movement into a political one; debates between Alliance advocates and political representatives of the business community became the order of the day in Kansas. At one such gathering, which pitted Allianceman Simpson against a Republican named “Prince Hal” Hallowell, Simpson ridiculed the silk socks that the patrician Hallowell wore. In so doing, he earned for himself one of the most colorful sobriquets (and, as it turned out, one of the most useful) ever visited upon an American politician by a hostile press. “Sockless Jerry” Simpson became the very essence of prairie populism to the rest of the nation. He was, simply and uncon-testably, the most flamboyant Populist of them all—the movement’s foremost talker, its platform thespian, its most inveterate headline hunter. With flair and his own special kind of radical pragmatism, Simpson carried his oratorical thunder to the halls of Congress (he served as a Populist from 1891 to 1895 and as a Democrat-Populist from 1897 to 1899), where he gave the staid “gold-bugs” of the two major parties a closeup look at the style and substance of Populist economic theory.

Simpson was a complicated personality to carry such symbolic weight. He was very well read, yet could barely spell. To Populists, he was a “good talker” and a “brilliant advocate”; to Republicans, he was a “rabid fiat greenbacker with communistic proclivities.” The novelist Hamlin Garland called him “a clear thinker, a remarkable speaker with a naturally philosophical mind.” Quite possibly, all these judgments are accurate. If Jerry Simpson was perceived in diverse ways, so was the agrarian movement to which he gave such passionate expression.

After his defeat in the election of 1898, Simpson returned to Kansas, where he briefly published a periodical, Jerry Simpson’s Bayonet. He moved in 1902 to Roswell, New Mexico, and worked for the Santa Fe Railroad as a land agent. He died at the age of sixty-three in Wichita, Kansas, survived by his wife and one son.

A number of Simpson’s speeches were published in the 1890s. The most extensive study of Simpson is A. L. Diggs, The Story of Jerry Simpson (1908). His career is placed in the context of the agrarian movement in L. C. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976). A critical account of his political career is K. D. Biche, “Jerry Simpson, ‘Populist Without Principle,’ “Journal of American History, September 1967. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1935). An obituary appeared in The Leavenworth Times, October 24, 1905.