Can populists and socialists ever be friends? Daniel De Leon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party and longtime spokesman of the American left, certainly didn’t think so. In a 1910 entry for his (ironically named) magazine The People, he saw an unbridgeable gap between the two groups on a number of issues, ranging from wage legislation to rail nationalization. Populism, to De Leon, was a “false movement” that “proceeded upon lines of ignorance.” As he wrote after the movement’s defeat in 1898:

Good-bye, Populism, good-bye, thou wert an exhalation of the dead past. The present struggle of Civilization is not between WHAT IS and WHAT WAS; it is between WHAT IS and WHAT WILL BE.

De Leon’s sternness can be misleading, however. In the late 1890s and 1900s, American populists and socialists actually found plenty of things to agree upon. The first Socialist Party of America (SP) was founded by a group of Populists disillusioned by the People’s Party fusion with the Democrats (miserably defeated in the 1896 presidential election). As a candidate for the presidency, Socialist Eugene V. Debs consistently received his highest tallies in rural areas. States such as Minnesota and Virginia prided themselves on energetic worker-farmer alliances in the 1920s. In 1924, the Socialist Party endorsed the Wisconsin populist Robert La Follette’s presidential run.