Tom Watson

Southern Populist leader Thomas E. Watson was a figure alternately eminent and notorious. Born before the Civil War, he lived through the turn of the century and past the close of the First World War, pursuing his career in an era as changing and paradoxical as himself. In the nineteenth century, Watson championed the rising Populist movement, an interracial alliance of agricultural interests, against the irresistible forces of industrial capitalism. The movement was broken under the wheels of t