The Agricultural Wheel, the Union Labor Party, and the 1889 Arkansas Legislature

In Populist historiography, Peter Argersinger argues, scholars continue to comb the same newspapers and manuscript collections, in the belief that . . . . 'we have no other sources.' While some scholars have utilized quantitative analysis to get at popular voting behavior or to characterize the constituency of Populists and other insurgents of the late nineteenth century, little effort has gone into examining what legislative journals can tell us about third-party politics, even though Allan Bogue termed such material the largest body of opinion data, systematically collected and organized, that American society has preserved. [...] parties rarely held a majority or controlled the legislature, and their majorparty counterparts prevented equal access to the electorate by ensuring that their own party was given preferential treatment on the ballot and in the voting process.