In 1948, Truman political advisor Clark Clifford noted that the glue holding the unruly Democratic Party coalition together was a populist fear of big finance. “Today,” he wrote, “the South can agree on no issue with the West—except ‘Wall Street.’” Clifford encouraged Truman to use the same political template that had helped his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt win the presidency four times. It worked. Truman won the 1948 election, and then called for laws against monopolies in his 1949 State of the Union address, which new Democratic congressional majorities enacted. More broadly, populism helped Democrats control American politics for four decades, from the 1930s until the 1970s.