Settler populism is a response to settler crisis: Andrew Varsanyi, Authorized Agent: Alonzo Wardall and the Settler-Colonial Backlash on the Middle Border, 1861–1918, PhD dissertation, The University of Nebraska, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler populism is a response to settler crisis: Andrew Varsanyi, Authorized Agent: Alonzo Wardall and the Settler-Colonial Backlash on the Middle Border, 1861–1918, PhD dissertation, The University of Nebraska, 2026

06Aug26

Abstract: This dissertation recovers the life and work of Alonzo Wardall (1845–1918) to argue that the Populist revolt of the late nineteenth century was, at its core, a rebellion against the collapse of the settler-colonial economy. Known to contemporaries as the “father of cooperatives,” Wardall, a Union veteran, Iowa farmer, and tireless cooperative organizer, spent four decades as an “Authorized Agent,” the principal salesman and business manager, for farmers’ cooperative businesses. Settlers, like Wardall, who came West in the 1850s and 1860s expected that free land and hard labor would secure their independence. Republican Reconstruction broke that promise, rebuilding the economy around railroads, eastern capital, and big business. The middle-class revolt that followed is best understood as “Middle Border Populism,” a liberal, entrepreneurial, petit-bourgeois radicalism native to the borderland stretching from the Midwest across the Plains and into the Canadian Prairies. Wardall’s career as a middle-class radical questions the chronological categorization that merges Populism with Progressivism, highlights a transnational geography often overlooked due to the field’s emphasis on Kansas and Texas, and challenges the enduring image of Populists as backward provincials—demonstrating that middle-class radicalism has never been exclusive to the left or the working class.

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