Historians have long known that there were two sides to the Populist

Question

Historians have long known that there were two sides to the Populist movement of the 1890s: a progressive side, embodying the protests of farmers against big business, and a darker side, marked by a distrust of Easterners, immigrants, and intellectuals. In the 1950s, one school of U.S. social thinkers constructed a parallel between this dark side of Populism and the contemporary anti-communist crusade spearheaded by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, which attacked liberalism, Eastern intellectuals, and civil liberties in general. To Seymour Martin Lipset, McCarthyism represented “the sour dregs of Populism”; to Edward Shils, McCarthyism, like Populism, exemplified “the ambiguous American impulse toward ‘direct democracy.’”

Noting that McCarthyism and Populism had both found their strongest support in the agrarian Midwest, Lipset argued that voters who backed agrarian protest movements during earlier economic crises had supported McCarthy in the post-World War II period of prosperity. “It would be interesting to know,” Lipset wrote, “what percentage of those who supported the isolationist but progressive Bob La Follette in Wisconsin now backs McCarthy.” But, in the eyes of these writers, the appeal of McCarthyism extended beyond the agrarian base of Populism to include urban groups such as industrial workers. Lipset claimed that “the lower classes, especially the workers,” had backed McCarthy. In a more sweeping fashion, Lewis Feuer claimed that “it was the American lower classes . . . who gave their overwhelming support to the attacks in recent years on civil liberties.”

Writing a few years later, political scientist Michael Paul Rogin challenged these superficially plausible notions, contending that they merely embodied the writers’ own assumptions about the supposed intolerance of lower-class groups, rather than a valid interpretation of McCarthyism. Rogin critically examined their assertions by the simple method of testing them against the evidence. He tested Lipset’s claims about the continuity of McCarthyism and earlier agrarian protest movements by breaking down statewide voting statistics on a county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct basis. He found that Wisconsin counties that had voted strongly for Progressives before World War II did not support McCarthy; McCarthy’s support was concentrated in his home region and in ethnic German areas that had been traditionally conservative. The old Progressive vote had in fact gone to McCarthy’s opponents, the Democrats.

To test Lipset’s generalizations about McCarthy’s support among lowerclass groups, Rogin attempted to determine whether industrial workers had, in fact, backed McCarthy. Correlating income and employment statistics with voting records, Rogin found that the greater the employment in industry in a given Wisconsin county, the lower was McCarthy’s share ofthe vote. Rogin concluded that the thesis of “McCarthyism as Populism” should be judged “not as the product of science but as a . . . venture into conservative political theory.”    1 
 1. The author would probably assert that Populism and McCarthyism

A. were basically similar
B. were completely opposite in character
C. were responses to, respectively, agrarian and industrial conditions
D. were essentially dissimilar movements that shared some common features
E. each had both a progressive and a darker side

2 
 2. It can be inferred that Rogin’s most serious criticism of Lipset, Feuer, and Shils’s methodology would probably be that they

A. reached incorrect conclusions about McCarthy
B. equated support for McCarthyism with anti-intellectualism
C. placed too much emphasis on the dual character of Populism
D. failed to examine the evidence that could support or weaken their conclusions
E. offered a theory that could not easily be tested

3 
 3. Rogin studied the class character of Wisconsin voters in order to

I. challenge the idea that less affluent socioeconomic groups supported McCarthy
II. explain the underlying causes of the links between Populism and McCarthyism
III. account for important changes in voting patterns during the twentieth century

A. I only
B. III only
C. I and II only
D. II and III only
E. I, II, and III

4 
 4. It can be inferred that both Lipset and Rogin made which of the following assumptions about voter support for McCarthy?

A. The voting patterns of industrial workers are representative of lowerclass political preferences.
B. Industrial workers usually vote for conservative political candidates.
C. Supporters of McCarthy were almost exclusively of lower-class origin.
D. Lower-class voters generally tend to vote in favor of civil rights measures.
E. Voters in Midwestern counties are typical of American voters elsewhere.

5 
 5. According to the passage, Rogin concluded that the writings of Lipset, Shils, and Feuer

A.. intentionally distorted historical evidence
B. were flawed by political presuppositions
C. lent support to attacks on civil liberties
D. took an overly statistical approach to historical evidence
E. were marked by an anti-intellectual bias

6 
 6. The author is primarily concerned with

A. comparing positions in a political debate
B. advocating the use of statistical methods in historical research
C. examining the similarities between two political movements
D. explaining why historical conclusions should be revised according to later discoveries
E. describing an instance of flawed historiography

Sajjad1994 · Answer

Official Explanation

6. The author is primarily concerned with

Difficulty Level:   700+

Explanation

Topic and Scope:  Desert plants and the adaptations that help them survive.

Purpose and Main Idea:  This is a descriptive passage. The author is not concerned with attacking or defending a viewpoint; instead, she wants to detail how plants survive in arid environments. Basically, we have a shopping list of plant adaptations.

Paragraph Structure:  In paragraph 1, we find out how desert plants have evolved traits that help them survive, with illustrations of these traits. Paragraph 2 provides more adaptations.

For this global question, go to your purpose and main idea. The author’s main purpose is to describe the rebuff to the views on McCarthyism expressed in the second paragraph. The author states that these conclusions were not based on real evidence, and suggested that they were shaped by preconceived prejudices. These are flaws in historical methodology,  choice (D).

Choice (A)  uses the wrong verb. The author is not comparing the views; rather, he is supporting one particular view, that of Rogin.

Choice (B)  goes for a detail—Rogin’s research methods. And  choice (C)  distorts the author’s point of view that the two movements were fundamentally dissimilar.

Choice (D)  is out because, although the author would agree with it, it does not address the main point of the passage.

Answer: E

Historians have long known that there were two sides to the Populist

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Historians have long known that there were two sides to the Populist

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