Populist Insurgency, Alabama

In the spring of 1888, Alabama’s largest newspaper, the Montgomery Daily Advertiser, faced a crisis. The paper remained “the great central organ” of the state’s Democratic Party, but it was losing money, and its longtime editor and publisher, William Wallace Screws, feared he would have to sell the paper or shut it down. He had hired a business manager in 1885 to improve the newspaper’s finances, but three years later the Advertiser was still hemorrhaging cash.¹ In a bid to save the paper, Screws reached out to Thomas Goode Jones, the speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives. Jones was