Abstract: We study the rise and fall of the People’s Party, the first major populist party in American history, focusing on  fundamental economic  causes and  technological change. The  primary trigger of its rise was competition exposure caused by  railroad expansion between 1870 and  1890, which created identifiable winners and losers. The primary cause of its sudden fall after the peak success of the 1894 election was the feasible adoption of the People’s Party reform promises by the Democratic party. We introduce a new model that integrates the market access aggregate consequences of railroad network expansion  characterized by Donaldson, Hornbeck and Rottenberg  in influential economics recent papers with the important identifiable distributive consequences, linking the latter to the support of the People’s Party. For the empirical analysis we construct a novel county-level measure of Technological Disruption Exposure (TDE) that captures the change in competitive pressure each county faced from all other counties, driven by railroad-induced reductions in transportation costs between 1870 and 1890. TDE positively predicts People's Party vote share in the 1894 congressional elections: a one standard deviation increase raises Populist support by roughly 2.3 percentage points, and by 3.3 points once competitive displacement is separated from the aggregate benefits of market access. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect is concentrated in counties with high crop specialization---where competitive vulnerability translates into concentrated losses. A commitment-politics framework organizes these patterns: railroads reduced the probability of being a market winner in high-TDE counties, where  voters shifted to support politicians proposing drastic reforms. The 1890s episode is uniquely informative because, unlike today, there was fiscal and institutional room to rebuild trust: mainstream parties credibly adopted Populist demands, and the movement dissolved. Today those conditions do not hold---which may explain why modern populism has proven more persistent.

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