Glimmerings of legal and legislative support for the rights and needs of women workers were beginning to appear.

As a Democratic politician-statesman, Bryan depended on the Solid (Democratic) South, which meant turning a blind eye to Jim Crow

Gold meant continued scarcity of money and credit; silver meant a better-lubricated flow of goods and services.

“the full dinner pail.

The platform proposed deep reforms, not to abolish the capitalist system but to restore it to the people.

At least, southern Populism woke up the Democratic power structure so that after 1900, in the Progressive period, the South firmly supported agrarian programs at the same time that racial segregation laws became stricter.

The result was a demand for reform that gained powerful force during the 1890s until it reached a widespread sense of crisis by 1900.

neither the United States nor any other developed country could operate today without paper currency not backed by gold or silver. But few believed it then.

Railroads, the grain and cattle markets, and sellers of goods protected by high tariff walls called more and more of the shots, squeezing producers—farmers and urban workers—between low incomes and high costs.

the majority of the population was homogeneous, white, and native-born, but it also included sizeable minorities of blacks in the South, Asians and Indians in the West, and immigrants in eastern and midwestern cities.

Nonetheless, the ideal of harmony, and the democratic, wide dispersal of economic and political power that permitted and supported it, continued to satisfy a great many Americans as an answer to the question, what should America be like