by H. W. Brands
For such reasons farmers looked beyond the marketplace to solve their price problem. During the 1870s and early 1880s many joined the Greenback party, which agitated to extend the life of the paper currency introduced during the Civil War. Since the war’s end the Republican-controlled Treasury had gradually retired greenbacks in favor of gold, steadily shrinking the supply of currency, which fell from thirty dollars per capita in 1865 to less than twenty dollars in 1880. The Greenbackers loudly resisted this trend, not illogically equating more money with higher prices. Yet paper currency wasn’t the whole of the Greenback financial platform. Party theorists fully understood that currency constituted but part of the money question; increasingly money consisted of bank deposits and the checks drawn on them. For this reason the Greenbackers included strict regulation of banks among their political demands. Democracy must rescue what capitalism threatened. “Corporate control of the volume of money has been the means of dividing society into hostile classes, of the unjust distribution of the products of labor, and of building up monopolies of associated capital,” the party’s 1880 platform asserted. “It has kept money scarce, and scarcity of money enforces debt.… The right to make and issue money is a sovereign power to be maintained by the people for the common benefit. The delegation of this right to corporations is a surrender of the central attribute of sovereignty.”9
But the message didn’t catch on. After failing to prevent passage of the 1875 Specie Resumption Act, which accelerated the return to a hard-money standard, the Greenbackers fared dismally in the 1876 presidential election, in which candidate Peter Cooper polled but 80,000 votes nationwide. The labor troubles of 1877 gave the Greenbackers a momentary boost by attracting urban workers to the movement, and in 1878 they elected more than a dozen candidates to Congress and many more to state offices. But the farmer-labor coalition proved unstable, and with the return of prosperity the two groups gradually parted. James B. Weaver, the Greenback nominee for president in 1880, improved on Cooper’s dismal showing by mounting the first nationwide personal campaign. But the modest results didn’t repay the heroic effort, and the party disintegrated.
Many of the farmers took refuge in the Farmers’ Alliance. The roots of the alliance ran in various directions. In 1877 small farmers and ranchers in Texas gathered at Lampasas, northwest of Austin, to complain of the high cost of credit and transport, the low price of corn and beef, and the arrogance of corporate speculators and big cattlemen. They devised measures for catching rustlers, branding strays, and purchasing barbed wire and other necessities. And they agreed they’d have better luck if more like-minded people joined them. They talked up their program and persuaded their neighbors, till by 1885 the Texas alliance claimed fifty thousand members, enough to start thinking of itself as a political movement. Farmers in neighboring states, and then across the South, signed on; in 1890 the Southern alliance numbered a million.
During the same period, on the prairies west of Chicago, farmers mobilized similarly. The moving spirit of what became the Northern (or Northwestern) alliance was a Chicago editor named Milton George, who calculated that whatever else a farmers’ organization might accomplish, it ought to boost circulation of his paper, the Western Rural. George and the Rural got the alliance started and held it together through the good times of the early 1880s, which were bad for this protest movement, as good times are generally bad for protests. Brutal weather in 1886 and 1887—summer drought followed by winter blizzards—punished the Plains, killing crops by the section and livestock by the herd. The suffering farmers might not have blamed the political system but for a veto by President Cleveland of a bill to buy seed for destitute Texas wheat growers. Cleveland sympathized with the Texans but contended that the ten-thousand-dollar appropriation would promote an enervating dependency. “Though the people support the Government,” Cleveland asserted, “the Government should not support the people.”10
Cleveland’s words summarized the thinking of many, perhaps most, Americans in the 1880s, and in fact his pithy formulation would be quoted by small-government conservatives down to Herbert Hoover and beyond. Yet a countervailing philosophy—the one motivating the congressional supporters of the Texas-seed bill—contended that government should support the people, at any rate during emergencies. Abraham Lincoln went so far as to say that “the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but can not do at all or can not so well do for themselves.” Yet Lincoln added, “In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.”11
The trick was knowing where to draw the line. Cleveland and the conservatives drew it tightly around the Constitution and the prerogatives of capital; the farmers who joined the Southern and Northern alliances sketched a more generous role for government, at any rate regarding themselves and their troubles. The Texas-seed appropriation was small even by the modest standards of government in that era, but the bill became a symbol of what the farmers felt they were up against. Cleveland’s veto, combined with newly falling prices, reenergized the alliance movement. A Minneapolis convention in 1887 wrote a constitution for the Northern group, elected officers, and forecast a bright future for the organization, not least on account of the clouds over the farm economy. State after state and county after county in the upper Mississippi Valley sprouted alliance chapters like spring wheat after April rains. By 1890 the Northern alliance listed 130,000 members in Kansas and only somewhat fewer in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska. The secretary’s office reported new members enrolling at the rate of a thousand per week.12
“THIS SEASON IS without a parallel in this part of the country,” a farmer wrote to the editor of a Nebraska farm journal in 1891.
The hot winds burned up the entire crop, leaving thousands of families wholly destitute, many of whom might have been able to run through the crisis had it not been for the galling yoke put upon them by the money loaners and sharks—not by charging 7 per cent per annum, which is the lawful rate of interest, or even 10 per cent, but the unlawful and inhuman country-destroying rate of 3 per cent a month, some going still farther and charging 50 per cent per annum. We are cursed, many of us financially beyond redemption, not by the hot winds so much as by the swindling games of the bankers and money loaners, who have taken the money and now are after the property, leaving the farmer moneyless and homeless.
This writer explained farm finance from the perspective of the debtor.
I have borrowed, for example, $1,000. I pay $25 to the commission man. I give my note and second mortgage of 3 per cent of the $1,000, which is $30 more. Then I pay 7 per cent on the $1,000 to the actual loaner. Then besides all this I pay for appraising the land, abstract, recording, etc., so when I have secured my loan I am out the first year $150.… This is on the farm, but now comes the chattel loan. I must have $50 to save myself. I get the money; my note is made payable in thirty or sixty days for $35, secured by chattel of two horses, harness and wagon, about five times the value of the note. The time comes to pay. I ask for a few days. No, I can’t wait; must have the money [says the lender]. If I can’t get the money, I have the extreme pleasure of seeing my property taken.13
The editor of the Nebraska journal, receiving many such letters, responded with a grim summary of the average farmer’s plight. “Take a man, for instance, who labors hard from fourteen to sixteen hours a day to obtain the bare necessaries of life. He eats his bacon and potatoes in a place which might rather be called a den than a home; and then, worn out, lies down and sleeps. He is brutalized both morally and physically.” The horizons of this man were incomparably narrower than the horizons of the land on which he struggled. “He has no ideas, only propensities. He has no beliefs, only instincts. He does not, often cannot, read. His contact with other people is only the relation of servant to master, of a machine to its director.… This man’s name is Million. He is all about us.” And he would shake the world, or at least the capitalist system, wit
h the editor’s full approval. “The tendency of the competitive system is to antagonize and disassociate men. The survival of the fittest is a satanic creed.… Deny it if you can; competition is only another name for war. It means slavery to millions; it means the sale of virtue for bread; it means for thousands upon thousands starvation, misery, and death. After four thousand years of life, is this the best that we can achieve? If so, who cares how soon the end may come?”14
A North Carolina editor, after reading the laments of farmers in his own state, indicted the status quo in a voice that was less apocalyptic but more poignant.
There is something radically wrong in our industrial system. There is a screw loose. The wheels have dropped out of balance. The railroads have never been so prosperous, and yet agriculture languishes. The banks have never done a better or more profitable business, and yet agriculture languishes. Manufacturing enterprises never made more money or were in a more flourishing condition, and yet agriculture languishes. Towns and cities flourish and “boom” and grow and “boom,” and yet agriculture languishes. Salaries and fees were never so temptingly high and desirable, and yet agriculture languishes.15
The most obvious manifestation of the languishing was what it had been for two decades: the inexorable decline in the prices farmers received for their produce. From 1870 to the mid-1890s corn prices slumped by a third, wheat by more than half, cotton by two-thirds. Most farmers initially responded to the falling prices by working harder. But they didn’t take long to realize they were digging their hole deeper. “We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop; that was all we needed,” one farmer bitterly declared. “We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight cent corn, ten cent oats, two cent beef, and no price at all for butter and eggs—that’s what came of it. Then the politicians said that we suffered from over-production.”16
The politicians were partly right. Overproduction was one cause of the farmers’ distress. But overproduction wasn’t simply an American problem. Farmers in Canada and Argentina and Egypt and India responded to the low prices much as the American farmers did; the resulting glut in the major commodities wasn’t simply regional or national but global. Even if American farmers could solve their own overproduction problem, they’d still have to deal with the foreigners.
Closer to home but no more susceptible to the farmers’ control were the prices they had to pay to sustain their operations—prices that were rising either absolutely or relative to the prices farmers received for their crops. Cotton farmers, even in the best Black Belt districts, had to fertilize their fields or watch their harvests decline; the Southerners paid up to a third of the value of their crop for guano and other fertilizers. Wheat farmers had to mechanize lest their labor costs kill them; the machinery cut through profits faster than it cut through the standing wheat.
More painful than the costs for fertilizer and equipment were the charges the farmers paid to transport their crops to market. Nearly every farmer fell hostage to the railroads at harvest time—in particular, to the single railroad that typically held a local monopoly in the farmer’s district. By the 1880s barely a bushel of wheat or corn or a bale of cotton moved to market without riding the rails, and the railroads exploited their strategic advantage. This wasn’t to say they didn’t provide an essential service at an unprecedentedly low price. “What would it cost for a man to carry a ton of wheat one mile?” the president of the Union Pacific asked. “What would it cost for a horse to do the same? The railway does it at a cost of less than a cent.” Nor did the railroads rake in profits so egregiously as their critics alleged. Viewed nationally, the railroad industry was quite competitive, which was why roads kept sliding into receivership and why they cut wages even at the risk of crippling strikes.17
But what they lost on their trunk lines, where they faced direct competition, the railroads tried to recoup on the routes they monopolized. Farmers continually complained that it cost more to ship a bushel of wheat a hundred miles across Dakota than it did to ship the same bushel the seven hundred miles from Chicago to New York. Railroad operators acknowledged the differential and shrugged; this was simply how capitalism worked. Farmers responded that however capitalism worked for the railroads, it didn’t work for them. Northern farmers noted that rail rates rose in the winter, when lakes and rivers froze and barge traffic ceased; the railroaders shrugged again, citing the basic rule of pricing: whatever the traffic would bear. And when the farmers attacked the railroads for failing to serve the public, the more forthright of the railroad men quoted their colleague William Vanderbilt: “The public be damned.”
FINALLY THE FARMERS became overtly political. Against the money power of the capitalists they proposed to array their voting power. But to maximize their voting power they needed to organize more effectively than ever. An initial attempt to merge the Northern and Southern alliances took place in St. Louis in late 1889, when the two groups held simultaneous conventions. A general coincidence of views was obvious, but certain policies and practices caused friction. The Southern alliance admitted women but not blacks (the ostensible reason for excluding the blacks was to preserve the virtue of the white women); Southern black farmers had established a separate Colored Farmers’ Alliance (which suited many of its members, who distrusted their white neighbors). The Northern alliance included black members (albeit not many, as there were few black farmers in the North). The Southern alliance shrouded some of its activities in secrecy, which put off the Northerners. Personal considerations also inhibited a merger. The opposite sides included veterans of the Civil War whose wounds still smarted; even after twenty-five years Johnny Reb and Billy Yank found cause for anger. And at least some of the Northern alliance men felt intimidated by their Southern counterparts, who outnumbered them considerably and came to St. Louis more experienced and better organized.
The differences between the Northerners and Southerners trumped their desire for unity, and the proposed merger failed. Yet the two groups agreed to work together, and they endorsed similar platforms, which included demands for government ownership of the railroads, expansion of the currency, and preference for small farmers over corporations and speculators in the distribution of land.18
Each group went home eager to elect friendly candidates in the 1890 elections. Southern alliance members worked within the two-party system—which meant, in their case, within the Democratic party. Northerners often created or joined independent parties, which varied in name and composition by state. The overall success of the movement amazed even the most optimistic members. More than forty alliance-sponsored candidates were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where they dominated the delegations of Georgia and the Carolinas; several alliance candidates were elected to the Senate. Alliance members and allies controlled legislatures in seven Southern states and the lower house of the Kansas legislature.19
The strong showing confirmed the democratic faith of many alliance-men, who hoped to sustain the momentum. At the December 1890 convention of the Southern alliance, a substantial faction agitated for the creation of a new political party. Some alliance leaders demurred, in part for fear of losing control of such a party, in part from hope of capturing the Democratic party. The Northern alliance met a short while later and expressed greater enthusiasm for a third party, pulling many of the Southerners along. A preliminary meeting for the new party took place in the spring of 1891 and laid the groundwork for a major convention at Omaha in July 1892.
A thousand farmers traveled to Omaha, where they were joined by hundreds of other reforming types: workers, temperance advocates, Bellamyite socialists, Henry Georgian single-taxers. The talk was earnest and the optimism palpable. The world needed changing and they would do it. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin,” the preamble to the charter platform of the People’s party declared. “Corr
uption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.… The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” The existing parties had entrenched themselves but failed the people; hence the need for a new party “to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people.’ ”
The representatives of these plain people declared, therefore:
First: That the union of the labor forces of the United States this day consummated shall be permanent and perpetual; may its spirit enter all hearts for the salvation of the republic and the uplifting of mankind.
Second: Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The interests of rural and civic labor are identical; their enemies are identical.
