Lynda Beck Fenwick Prairie Bachelor

Annotation

The Peoples Party, the most successful third party in Americas history, emerged from the Populist Movement of the late 1800s. And of the Peoples Party, there was perhaps no more exemplary proponent than homesteader Isaac Beckley Werner of Stafford County, Kansas. Very much a man of his community, Werner contributed columns to the County Capital and other Kansas newspapers, spoke at the county seat, regularly attended Populist lectures, andmost fortunately for posterityfrom 1884 until a few years before his death in 1895, kept a journal reporting on the world around him and noting the advice of Henry Ward Beecher. With this journal as a starting point, Isaac Beckley Werner, prairie bachelor, becomes an eloquent guide to the practical, social, and political realities of rural life in late nineteenth-century Kansas. In this portrait Lynda Beck Fenwick finds the Populist thinking that would eventually take hold in numerous ways, big and small, in American lifeand would make a mark the imprint of which can be seen in the nations political culture to this day.Expanding her search to local cemeteries, courthouses, museums, and fields where homesteaders once staked their claims, Fenwick reveals a farming community much denser than todays, where Prohibition, womens rights, and income inequality were shared concerns, and where enduring problems, like substance abuse, immigration, and racial bias, made an early appearance. The Populist Movement both arose from and focused upon these issues, as Werners journal demonstrates; and in his world of farmers, small-town businessmen, engaged women, and working people, Fenwicks Prairie Bachelor shows us the provenance and lived reality of a rural populism that would forever alter the American political scene.