He grew up in Wyoming and taught there briefly before attending Northwestern University for his BA and MA degrees in history.
Martin Ridge finds that," Reviewers of The Populist Revolt commended Hicks for his judicious and objective treatment of a complex subject and praised not only his style but also his careful synthesis of the existing literature."
Hicks emphasized economic pragmatism over ideals, presenting Populism as interest group politics, with have-nots demanding their fair share of America's wealth which was being leeched off by nonproductive speculators.
Corruption accounted for such outrages and Populists presented popular control of government as the solution, a point that later students of republicanism emphasized.
For example, historian George Fort Milton Jr. admired Hicks's "capacity for extraordinary compression without at the same time either getting the style too bare-bones for pleasurable reading; or the facts too black-and-white for the necessary implications of gradations of gray.