Paul Greenberg's Historical Malpractice
For these same reasons, of course, Cleveland was universally hated by the populists who sought massive inflation and other big government initiatives such as a confiscatory income tax, central banking, nationalization of railroads, and massive economic regulation. Before 1896, though not necessarily later, most populists also promoted a war-like foreign policy.
In what has to be the worst misuse of American history by a major journalist in quite some time, Paul Greenberg mangles the facts to claim that Ron Paul is a modern version of the very populists who so despised Paul's hero, Grover Cleveland!
There is no longer a Populist Party that I know of, but populism itself is alive and deliriously well. One can hear its old delusions whenever Ron Paul speaks....
Dr. Paul is as American as a tintype, a reincarnation of a once familiar type — the money crank — who had a simple, single-cause explanation for any and all problems with the American economy. Namely, that a small, insidious group is manipulating the money supply. To any taxonomist of American radicalism, Ron Paul is a familiar type — genus Conspiracist, species Populist. He fits right in with a mentality that hasn’t changed all that much since Arkansas’ own great money crank, William “Coin” Harvey, was all the vogue in the 1890s. His “Coin’s Financial School,” at a mere 155 pages, may have been the most popular and influential American manifesto since Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” It overran the American South and West like a contagious fever.