The economic context of the farmers' political revolt is indicated by the data in tables 4.1-4.4. During the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, a lag in the growth of gold production for the world's money supply and expanding international competition in grain and textile fibers contributed to a sharply falling agricultural price level. While the number of farms more than doubled, farm income lagged the 130 percent increase in total national income, and its share of that [101] total declined from one-fourth to one-fifth. [see footnote] For the two-thirds of U.S. farmers who lived in the southern, plains, and mountain states, the contrasts were more glaring. Whereas northeastern farmers had secure and rapidly expanding urban markets to supply with a diverse produce, over easily accessible and competitive transportation lines, periphery farmers faced severe credit stringencies, transportation monopolies, and the vulnerabilities of one-crop dependency. The growth of world markets in staple commodities brought [102] great and hitherto unknown price fluctuations in those products, with often devastating results for cotton and wheat farmers. Producers of corn, most of which was used for domestic animal feed, and dairy, truck-crop, and livestock producers faced a much better price calculus. Arguments that railroad rates were falling and that overall relationships between farm and general price levels were not deteriorating in the 1865-1900 period [see footnote 4] ignore sectoral and regional variations; although many cash-crop southern and midwestern farmers were extremely hard-pressed, a considerable segment of the farm population was relatively unaffected by the grievances that produced the 1870-96 wave of farm protest and thus remained outside the agrarian reform movement.
At the extremes of the credit spectrum, Alabama, Arkansas, Montana, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming farmers paid 9 to 11 percent interest for a farm mortgage loan in the early twentieth century--if they could get one at all--while northeastern farmers paid 5 to 6 percent. [see footnote 5] Some of the premium reflected the higher risk of lending in distant, newly settled areas of variable rainfall. However, recent studies have concluded that risk alone cannot account for the interest-rate differentials. For residents of the southern and west north central states, dependent on out-of-state lenders for 43-67 percent of mortgage lending, these differentials smacked of monopoly and exploitation. [see footnote 6] American mortgage companies reaped high profits in the late nineteenth century, and competition was limited by the fact that Congress in 1863 had prohibited the national banks from loaning money on real estate. Farmers in the periphery were at the mercy of agents or brokers who charged their own hefty commissions on top of the company interest rate. [see footnote 7] State usury laws were common by the early twentieth century but had little beneficial effect where [103] money was scarce and may well have aggravated the shortage. The bottom line was that where debt burdens were already high, sharply falling prices and/or more than one bad harvest presented a high risk of foreclosure, and the pattern of agrarian unrest reflected that vulnerability to loss of income and independence. [see footnote 8] [105]
~concise summary of the movement's catalyst; important difference between farmers in the periphery & core; important rebuttal to Hofstadter
Table 4.1 Crop Prices and Percent of Domestic Production Exported, 1866-1900 [102]
Table 4.2 Farm Mortgage Interest Rates and Tenancy by Region [102]
Table 4.3 Total Bank Deposits by Region, 1909 [103]
Table 4.4 Railroad Freight Rates by Section, 1870-1900 (gold prices per ton-mile) [104]
The Granger Movement
Table 4.5 Membership in the Patrons of Husbandry (Grange) at Its 1875 Peak [105-6]
~origins
The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, was founded in 1867 by Minnesota farmer Oliver H. Kelley, who had served as a clerk in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A tour of the war-devastated South had convinced him of the need for a fraternal and self-improvement organization of farmers. Kelley and his farmer correspondents developed an organization open to both men and women, with a secret, colorfully labeled ritual following the fraternal enthusiasms of the times. From chapters in the mid-Atlantic states and Washington, D.C., the organization quickly took root and blossomed in the Midwest. In Minnesota there were, by the end of 1869, thirty-seven active chapters and a state organization prepared to embark on the cooperative purchase of agricultural supplies. Such cooperation, in both purchasing and marketing, and agitation against railroads became the principal activities of the early organization. [see footnote 9]
The Grange began to grow rapidly in 1872 as Grangers plunged into cooperative projects, arranging the shipment of wheat to foreign ports, operating grist mills, offering life and fire insurance, and even manufacturing their own farm machinery and organizing a few banks. (see footnote 10) By 1875, at its peak, the organization counted 758,768 members in nearly 19,000 granges (see table 4.5) This [105] membership constituted 11.2 percent of the entire male and female population over ten years old engaged in agriculture, making the Grange far and away the most successful "producer" organization of its time. [see footnote 11]
Although Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa were the early organizational leaders (and Illinois was the locus of the most extensive Granger political campaign), Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky had surpassed the pioneers by 1875, and the ratios of Grangers to agricultural population were highest in the mountain states. In 1874, Kansas and Nebraska had one grange for every one hundred people on farms. (see footnote 12) In the South, Solon J. Buck points out, density of membership by the white population (blacks were not admitted) was even higher than in the Midwest. (see footnote 13) [107]
~different approach from labor
The Grange declared itself a "nonpolitical" organization and discouraged partisan pronouncements, but it encouraged members to be politically active as individuals. Many Grangers were involved in the farmers' conventions and mass meetings triggered by the 1873 panic, and many belonged to parallel farmers' clubs and state farmers' associations that made open political nominations and endorsements. [see footnote 14] Farmers' uprisings in 1873 preceded the enactment of a strong railroad-commission law in Illinois (replacing an 1871 rate-setting law declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court), as well as a similar commission bill in Minnesota and the enactment of maximum statutory rate and antidiscrimination laws in Iowa and Wisconsin in 1874. Illinois farmers not only held mass meetings to demand a new railroad law and created a Farmers' Club in the legislature to press their demands but also defeated for reelection the chief justice who had presided over the voiding of the 1871 law. (see footnote 15) [107]
~more effectual than shown in previous accounts
In the same elections, farmers' independent "antimonopoly" tickets were successful in fifty-three of the sixty-six counties in which they ran. (see footnote 16) Similar movements by farm organizations were mounted against conservative Republican dominance in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, with the Democratic parties there endorsing or fusing with the independents under the Antimonopoly or Reform label. By 1874, farmers' independent political movements were in operation in Kansas, Nebraska, and California, and a state-level party had developed in Illinois. By 1876, the movement encompassed eleven midwestern and western states. The principal concerns of the latter were enforcement of the railroad laws, civil-service reform, and economy in government-- the latter two representing thrusts against widely perceived corruption in the one-party-dominant Midwest. There was also the beginning of an affinity for a soft-money ("greenback") policy in Illinois and some rumbling against high tariffs. In state and national elections in the fall of 1874, the Illinois [107] Independent Reform Party elected (with the help of the Democrats) the state superintendent of education, three congressmen, and a swing bloc in the state legislature. (see footnote 17) [108]
~powerful case against Goodwyn & Magliocca
The outcome of the seventies midwestern reform movement was a spate of state laws regulating railroads and warehouse facilities, through independent commissions or legislative rate-setting or both. This legislation, upheld in 1877 by the Supreme Court, established the right of governments to institute close supervision of the most powerful corporations in the country. The original "Granger laws" of 1870-74 were subsequently repealed or weakened in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin after a determined counterattack by the railroads. However, these precedents stimulated subsequent state regulatory efforts across the South, Midwest, and West, and midwestern experience under the Granger laws would inform the drive for federal railroad control. The first such bill to pass the U.S. House of Representatives (in 1874) was sponsored by an Iowa congressman and drew its principal support from states where the Grange was strongest. (see footnote 18)
The Grange was the first large-scale, national, reform-oriented occupational organization, and it left its imprint on subsequent labor and farmers' organizations, particularly the Farmers' Alliance. (see footnote 19) In politics, the state and local Independent, Reform, and Antimonopoly Parties spawned by the Granger movement were overtaken by a nationally organized protest party focused on financial reform. The National Greenback Party absorbed the independent reform movements in Illinois and Indiana in mid-decade. (see footnote 20) From the Midwest, the soft money ideology swept south and west, embraced by many credit-starved farmers who saw it as the essential remedy for their economic distress. [108]
Agrarian Greenbackism
~rational for greenbackism
The decline of farm commodity prices and the rising debt burden indicated in tables 4.1 and 4.2 reflected economic factors such as rising international [108] competition and increased production, but they were also the results of political decisions made by the national government: (1) to create a national banking system tied to government bonds and biased against agriculture; (2) to return to a currency based on gold, the production of which was not keeping pace with the growth of population and commerce; (3) to pay interest on and redeem Civil War bonds, which had been purchased in depreciated money, in gold rather than in greenbacks; (4) to take a large portion of the latter out of circulation; and (5) to demonetize silver. To working men and women in the late 1870s, but particularly to farmers, these decisions came to represent a colossal "fraud against the people" perpetrated by the national state on behalf of a financial elite. [109]
~role of the banks; monetary background
The primary function of the national banks created under the 1863-64 banking acts was to provide a market for government bonds issued to finance the war. National banks had to purchase those bonds as security for their note issues. State bank notes were effectively abolished by a 10 percent tax. Whether because of legal requirements or because of low interest rates on their bond backing, the national banks before 1900 put into circulation only about 30 percent of the notes their bondholdings permitted. (see footnote 21) Thus, the two major forms of circulating currency in 1867 were (1) national bank notes produced in rather constricted volume, concentrated in the Northeast and extremely scarce in the South (the latter was out of the Union when the system was inaugurated, the poverty of the South made the conditions set for chartering such banks difficult to meet, and the region had, of course, seen its national currency made worthless overnight with the collapse of the Confederacy); (see footnote 22) and (2) greenbacks, or U.S. government notes issued during the war as an "emergency" currency backed by nothing but the government's word that they were legal tender. By a law of 1866 the amount of greenbacks in circulation was reduced from 449 million (at its 1865 peak) to 356 million. Greenbacks could not be exchanged for gold (specie exchanges for paper money having been suspended in 1861) until the provisions of the Resumption Act of 1875 went into effect in 1879. After 1875, the treasury secretary, a diehard deflationist, further retired greenbacks in tandem with a national bank note issue, aggravating the mid-seventies depression. The government also moved to retire $240 million in other wartime U.S. currency. Furthermore, as a result of an 1873 statute that very few people (except its deflationist authors) understood, the minting of silver dollars was discontinued. (see footnote 23) The purpose of these actions was to return, as soon as (politically) possible, to the gold standard. The outcome was a drop in the total amount of money in circulation from $30.35 per capita in 1865 to $19.36 by 1880. (see footnote 24) [109]
As Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz have pointed out, deliberate currency contraction and the slow growth of the gold supply did not prevent a remarkable postwar industrial expansion. (see footnote 25). However, the lurching toward a monometallic currency standard produced very uneven costs and benefits and was increasingly contested in the political arena as its effects were felt. Creditors who could have debts repaid in appreciated currency and long-term bond holders who could receive interest in gold and exchange, for "dear" money, bonds purchased in "cheap" money were the direct beneficiaries. On the other hand, some businessmen and manufacturers away from the seacoast cities were convinced, at least in the late 1860s and the 1870s, that monetary contraction denied them sufficient credit to expand and caused financial panics and prolonged recessions (see footnote 26).
A much larger number of workers subscribed to these theories as they felt the pain of layoffs (see chapter 3). There was a decline in wage levels in 1877, and throughout the decade of the seventies, when labor greenbackism was at its height, real wages were essentially flat. However, the effects of deflation were less severe for workers than for staple-crop farmers because wage cutting lagged the fall in prices (and falling prices increased real wages). The average daily wage in manufacturing increased about 7 percent between 1865 and 1890. Steep price declines, combined with wage increases secured in the militant 1880s, produced a real wage increase of almost 50 percent over the period. (see footnote 27) Even in periods of significant improvement, however, the purchasing power of wages increased at a much lower rate than profits. (see footnote 28) Furthermore, late-nineteenth-century unemployment was higher and fluctuated more sharply in the United States than in other industrial countries. There was severe unemployment in midwestern coal- and iron-producing regions in the mid-seventies, and data for the 1890s, when reliable statistics first became available, show unemployment levels of 15-17 percent in manufacturing and of over 30 percent in the coal-mining and building industries. (see footnote 29) This insecurity must have underlain labor leaders' early enthusiasm for "soft" money and the repeated endorsements of bimetallism by AFL conventions in the depressed 1890s. [110]
~the link between the lack of currency & sharecropping is a very interesting point, a possible inroad to a paper topic
Farmers were not significant among the earliest advocates of soft money, a fact that Robert Sharkey attributes to the relative well-being of nonsouthern farmers amid still-high price levels in the late 1860s. (see footnote 30) But a decade later, farmers were the principal soft-money constituency and would remain so well into the twentieth century. The key to the spread of agrarian greenbackism was the extreme disadvantage of the South in the political economy of the [110] late nineteenth century, a position that turned even locally conservative "redeemers" into radicals on issues of national monetary and regulatory policy. (see footnote 31) [111]
The shortage of money in the postbellum South had thwarted the establishment of a wage-labor system. What emerged instead was the only plausible alternative in the circumstances: sharecropping. Under this system, a landless farmer unable to pay cash rent took up residence on a parcel (say, fifty acres) of a landowner's estate and paid "rent" with a share of the crop, keeping the rest for himself. Whether his share was one-fourth, one-third, or one-half depended on what the tenant brought to the bargain. If he had his own mule, plow, and tools, his share was bigger and the degree of supervision less. In the old plantation areas in the immediate aftermath of the war, the system had clear advantages for the large landowner, who was desirous of binding his newly freed labor force to the land and who was himself hard-pressed to come up with cash for wages. (see footnote 32) Newly freed blacks also preferred independent sharecropping to tightly controlled gang-labor for wages; they hoped to be able to buy their own land, and remarkably, the percentage of black farm operators who did own their land grew from zero to one-fourth by 1900. For white farmers, movement was in the other direction. As the cotton economic spread into the upcountry and the southwestern frontier, the furnishing merchant and crop lien followed, with diminishing prospects for small farmers to acquire or hold deeds to the land. From a South-wide tenancy rate of about one-fifth before the war, dependence reached 37 percent of white farmers by 1900 (by which point the majority of southern tenants were white). This was, of course, still well below the 75 percent black tenancy rate. And among the tenant class, black farmers were found much more often in the lowest order of "croppers" working on half shares. (see footnote 33) [111]
~rationale for greenbackism
The notorious crop-lien system entrapped both black and white tenants and small farm owners and would oppress southern staple-crop producers well into the 1930s. To secure essential supplies for farming and household sustenance, cash-poor farmers were forced to go to a merchant (sometimes their actual landlords), who advanced the supplies in return for a share of the crop In this transaction, borrowers paid extraordinary interest rates ranging from 40 to 110 percent--and most found themselves burdened with increasing debt. When the merchant or landlord finished the tallying up of what was owed him (an accounting that took place directly at harvest time, denying the farmer the flexibility of holding his crop for a better price), very little cash was left to the tenant. Indebtedness and cash-crop dependency were aggravated by the "furnisher's" frequent insistence that cotton be planted on [111] all available land, crowding out space on which the tenants might have grown their own food or raised other crops or livestock for a better diet and additional income. This ensured the lender a readily marketable cash crop as security for the loans while putting the borrower more and more in debt for the ordinary food and feedstuffs in which farmers had once been self-sufficient. (see footnote 34) [112]
The shortage of banks and money in the South was responsible for the monopolistic position of the merchant-landlord and diminished the ability of young farmers to purchase land. Only the wealthiest farmers, with high land values, chattel, and other assets, could qualify for even an 8 percent mortgage. Most paid multiples of that rate to purchase basic provisions from a supply merchant. With little industry, a small middle class, and a high regional debt burden, few citizens had suficient means to charter public or private banks, few towns were large enough to house them, and only very small accumulations of deposits were available to be lent out. Many local lenders were in or near monopolistic positions. (see footnote 35)
Thus a complex of economic and political factors emanating from the effects of the Civil War and the anomalous position of an export-based agricultural economy in a rapidly industrializing nation trapped the South in a downward spiral of poverty and near-colonial dependence. Most southerners were farmers. With little regional opportunity for industrial employment and with limited skills and education to seek their fortunes outside the South, the only means to a decent life was ownership of a farm, a goal increasingly out of reach in the late nineteenth century. Even the one significant southern industry--textiles--depended on limited local funds, being unable to attract any significant outside capital. (see footnote 36) The South as a region was starved for credit. Not surprisingly, it became the core of the movement for money and bank reform in the 1880s and remained so for the next three decades. [112]
~early legislation efforts from periphery & reaction from the core
As roll-call analysis by Carl V. Harris has shown (see table 4.6), southern Democrats in Congress moved away from their hard-money northeastern copartisans to align themselves with midwestern and western soft-money advocates as early as the 43rd Congress. Numerous attempts were made by the southern-midwestern-western bloc to repeal the Resumption Act passed by the lame-duck Rupublican Congress in 1875 and to restore silver to the place it had held before its demonetization in 1873. (see footnote 37)
Midwestern representatives had taken the lead on monetary issues while the South was still under Reconstruction. Farmers in newly settled regions of the north central states, having incurred heavy debts to purchase land and supplies, had been hard hit by depression and were attracted to soft-money doctrines in the 1870s. (see footnote 38) The sympathies of many of the region's manufacturers [112] and businesspeople propelled even the Republican Party in the Midwest to vote overwhelmingly for the 1874 Inflation Act, against a large opposing vote from northeastern Republicans (see table 4.6). (footnote 39) However, as the monetary debate intensified, manufacturers in western Pennsylvania and Ohio, who had earlier been attracted to the program, began to turn away from the radical potential of Greenbackism. They did so amid Republican charges that inflationists were inciting class war. The greenbackers of the mid-seventies became the first in a long line of American reformers to be branded "communists." (see footnote 40) [113]
Table 4.6 Party and Regional Patterns on "Soft Money Issues (Yea-Nay) [113]
~rationale for silver
After 1876, as silver's price in relation to gold dropped, soft-money forces became more receptive to the remonetization of silver as an alternative strategy. Silver, a precious metal seen as possessing "intrinsic value," had once enjoyed a place alongside gold in the nation's currency. Hence restoration of silver was a more moderate way to oppose contraction than the greenback printing so loathed by the creditor class. Taking their place in the House after the landmark elections of 1876, southern Democrats voted 68 to 4 for a silver-coinage bill sponsored by another rural Democrat, Rep. Richard Bland of Missouri. Midwestern Democrats cast a unanimous vote for the bill as did the handful of western Democrats. Republicans from these regions were almost unanimously for the bill as well. In the same pattern that runs through all the votes in table 4.6, the industrial Northeast backed hard money--the Democrats with some division, the Republicans almost without exception. However, when Iowa Republican Sen. William B. Allison devised a milder version in the midwestern vein, making the silver dollar legal tender again but saving the gold standard by sharply limiting the amount of silver to be coined, midwestern representatives flocked to the compromise. A majority of southern and the few western Democrats held out for unlimited silver coinage. (see footnote 41) [114]
~silver was always a compromise
The ease with which southern Democrats responded to agrarian demands and embraced silver in the 1870s helped to blunt the appeal of a radical third-party movement in the region. The outburst of southern Greenback and other "independent" campaigns in 1877-78 was thus directed more against local political monopolies than against national economic policy. The local issues included taxation, support for public schools, lien laws and the plight of the sharecropper, land grants to and regulation of railroads, and the convict lease system--issues that divided small farmers and workers from planters. There were also issues that divided small farmers and workers from planters. There were also hotly contested proposals to "readjust" or even repudiate the inflated state debts incurred (often in subsidizing rail lines and public improvements that never materialized) by Reconstruction governments. (see footnote 42).
Though coalitions were messy because of the tendency of southern Republicans to join any crusade against Bourbon Democrats, the animus behind readjustments, as that behind the other reform issues, came mostly from small farmers. The Virginia Grange played an active role in the agitation; the business and conservative political establishment led the "funder" defense. The campaign for readjustment led to competition for the black vote and farmer-labor appeals, demonstrating the power of financial issues in the late [114] nineteenth century to sweet up social protests among the have-nots. [115]
National attempts to organize a greenback party had not originated with farmers' organizations but grew out of the labor-reform movement in the Midwest in the early 1870s. However, in the wake of the panic of 1873 and President Ulysses S. Grant's veto of the inflation bill, farm leaders became increasingly active in monetary reform, including the formation of an independent party in 1875. In the momentous presidential election of 1876, the new Independent (Greenback) Party, with New York philanthropist (and former iron manufacturer) Peter Cooper as its presidential nominee, polled only 80,000 votes, mostly in the midwestern Granger states. However, deepening agricultural depression and the great railroad strikes of 1877 unleashed the diverse Independent-Greenback politial campaigns described above and in chapter 3. (see footnote 44)
The political reformers who worked to build the national Greenback Party came to the effort by way of earlier experience in the midwestern and Pacific Coast labor movements, the Grange, and farmer-backed independent-party movements. They envisioned a broad-based reform movement, welcoming delegates from the National Women's Suffrage Association and the Socialist Labor Party. (see footnote 45) But the key to their hopes and strategy was a farmer-labor coalition. To that end, Greenback platforms incorporated virtually the whole of labor's political agenda. The 1880 platform declared
But the heart of the Greenback critique of American politics and capitalism lay in its radical proposals for government appropriation of the money-creating power.that labor should be so protected by National and State authority as to equalize the burdens and insure a just distribution of its results; the eight-hour law of Congress should be enforced, the sanitary condition of industrial establishments placed under rigid control; the competition of contract labor abolished, a bureau of labor statistics estalished, factories, mines, and workshops inspected, the employment of children under fourteen years of age forbidden, and wages paid in cash... [and as] the importation of Chinese serfs tends to brutalize and degrade American labor, therefore immediate steps should be taken to abrogate the Burlingame Treaty. (see footnote 46) [115]
~railroads & imperialismCorporate 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 endowed with power to confiscate private property. It has kept money scarce, and scarcity of money enforces debt... [and] ends in the bankruptcy of the borrower. Other results are deranged markets, uncertainty in manufacturing enterprise and agriculture, precarious and intermittent employment for the laborers, industrial war, increasing pauperism and crime, and the consequent intimidation and disfranchisement of the producer and a rapid declension into corporate feudalism; therefore we declare:First-- That 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, (void) of constitutional sanction, conferring upon a subordinate and irresponsible power absolute dominion over industry and commerce. All money, whether metallic or paper, should be issued and its volume controlled by the Government, and not by or through banking corporations, and when so issued should be a full legal-tender for all debts, public and private. (see footnote 47)
It was logical that a state that was to be entrusted with such fundamental economic powers should have other responsibilities as well. Hence, in addition to the labor provisions, it was the duty of Congress that "all lines of communication and transportation should be brought under such legislative control as shall secure moderate, fair and uniform rates for passenger and freight traffice." To support its increased responsibilities, the state required a graduated income tax. But the expanded functions of the national state were to be limited to domestic affairs: "We are opposed to an increase of the standing army in times of peace, and the insidious scheme to establish an enormous military power under the guise of militia laws."
With respect to citizenship rights and the form of the expanded democratic state, the platform denounced efforts to restrict suffrage and urged the states to ensure "that every citizen of due age, sound mind and not a felon, be fully enfranchised." "Absolute democratic rules for the governance of Congress" were demanded, abolishing committee "veto power."
A Jeffersonian republicanism for a new industrial era, Greenbackism in 1880 caught up the major strands of political reform in the post-Civil War era. The party's standard-bearer, James B. Weaver of Iowa, became the first [116] presidential candidate to conduct a genuinely popular campaign, traveling, by his own estimate, some twenty thousand miles across the country and addressing large crowds. (see footnote 48) When the ballots were counted, however, the Greenbacker had garnered only 3 percent of the vote. The farmer-labor reform impulse ran up against entrenched major-party loyalties and, as it happened, not only a bountiful harvest at unusually stable prices but also an upturn in business conditions. (see footnote 49) Except for the weakness of the southeastern vote, the country-level Greenback vote was highest where per capita bank deposits were lowest. (see footnote 50) [117]
Clearly, Greenbackism was a movement whose time had not yet arrived. A decade later, its doctrines and farmer-labor coalition project would find a new life in populism and, through that movement, in the Democratic Party; however, the failure of urban labor to respond to Greenback Party appeals in 1880 was an omen of things to come. [117]
The Farmers' Alliance
~FA most successful farmer-labor alliance thus far
~greenbackism in the FA
The Southern Farmers' Alliance had its beginnings in north-central Texas. In the late 1870s, it was another self-help organization for the "agricultural classes," taking root in several frontier counties with a surprising (to twentieth-century urban dwellers) density of social organization. Its founding members were dissatisfied with the Grange but well acquainted with its cooperative activities. They were also attracted to greenbackism--so much so that one wing of the early organization was destroyed by Greenback-Democratic contention. Rebuilt in 1879, the early Farmers' Alliance (FA) devoted itself to the needs of the small yeoman farmers and husbandmen who were its members. Its activities included recovering stray animals and chasing rustlers, avoiding eviction by unscrupulous "land sharks," and participating in vigilante action (fence cutting and post burning) against the large ranchers who were rapidly enclosing the open range. The FA managed, within a few years, to create a complex organization with great missionary potential, drawing on the experience of rural churches, fraternal organizations, and the Grange. Like the last and like the contemporary Knights of Labor, the Alliance heightened camaraderie (and it was a fellowship of both sexes) by secrecy and ritual. (see footnote 53) [117]
~very different argument--NOT a tragedy
It would be the progenitor of the Populist Party, and the Populists' fusion with the Democratic Party in 1896 would plant the agrarian radical ideology in that organization, giving it an extended life and the means to make a profound impact on the national state decades later. [118]
~this was actually radical
The Alliance's modest outreach to black southerners and the commitment of individual leaders to protect black rights and foster class unity were bold enough to violate the region's hardening racial mores and to provoke outrage and ridicule from Bourbon Democrats. By late-twentieth-century standards these efforts were, of course, quite limited and imbued with condescension. (see footnote 54) interesting "progressivism"
The FA began its rapid growth in 1884. The key to the new dynamism was its system of "lecturers." Appointed by the state organization, they were drawn disproportionately from the class of modest rural professionals--ministers, teachers, and doctors. Most were also farmers and had unimpressive formal education, but they possessed experience and abilities above those of their rustic neighbors. The lecturers spread the Alliance "gospel" of political education, social criticism, and economic collective action to remote rural settlements. [118]
~the "boy orator" rode the coattails of other less heralded orators
The man responsible for establishing the network was the first "Traveling Lecturer," S.O. Daws. An energetic lay preacher and small farmer, Daws was a stirring orator with a self-constructed philosophy that emphasized the reform role of the yeoman farmer in a time of growing monopoly and concentration of wealth. His strategy for the Alliance was twofold: to build, through the lecturers, a network for economic and political education; and to use [118] the county alliances as the basis for a new cooperative movement designed to break the hold of the furnishing merchant. The alliances organized by Daws might contract with one merchant who agreed to fair prices and credit in exchange for Alliance business; but increasingly, they also organized their own stores, their own cotton grading, weighing, and storage yards, and their own cooperative marketing ventures. The last involved "bulking" cotton and seeking buyers willing to make the highest bid. These activities taxed the capabilities of unschooled farmers with little cash or business acumen and provoked the wrath of merchants and cotton brokers, but they mushroomed Alliance membership. By the fall of 1885, there were over 500 suballiances, each with its designated lecturer and each bound in county organizations, which were also headed by lecturers. A few months later, the number of suballiances reached over 1,650, with membership pegged at over 92,000. (see footnote 56)
The year 1886 proved momentous for the Texas Alliance. A severe drought struck the plains, causing extensive crop and livestock losses. After President Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill appropriating $50,000 for seed grain, the Alliance coordinated an extensive relief effort. (see footnote 57) Solidarity was not limited to farmers, however. Labor organization in Texas was also growing rapidly in 1885-86, and to many Alliance members it seemed logical that the FA and the KOL make common sense. Though some leaders (including the current president) opposed the move, Daws's protege William Lamb proclaimed an Alliance boycott in support of the Knights, who were battling with the Gould railroad colossus and a Dallas mercantile company. Joint political meetings were held, and Alliance farmers shared food and funds with the railroad strikers. (see footnote 58). Farmer-labor political coalitions formed in at least twenty Texas counties in 1886, and the political rhetoric of the Alliance moved from a focus on the yeoman to appeals directed at the "laboring class" of farmers and workers. The FA was beginning to move into class politics. (see footnote 59)
At the 1886 state convention at Cleburne, Texas, the majority political faction won the adoption of a set of legislative demands conceived as the basis of a political alliance of "the industrial classes...now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations." [119] did Bryan fail to capitalize on & push forward the great success of the FA?
~the Cleburne Demands of 1886
The program, in other words, incorporated "the greenback critique of American finance capitalism" (see footnote 61) and interwove the specific demands of farmers and workers. Its radical tone and the break it seemed to portend with the Democratic Party almost led to the secession of a minority faction wedded to a nonpolitical posture. A split was averted by the efforts of the man who was to become the principal economic theorist and publicist of the organization: Charles Macune. Another of the remarkable "rural professionals" attracted to the Alliance, Macune was self-educated in medicine and law, was editor of an Alliance newspaper, and possessed unusual writing and organizing talents. He convinced the new FA leadership and the antipolitical dissidents that, without abandoning the Cleburne political program, the organization should dedicate its energies to renewing and expanding economic [120] cooperation and to seeding new branches and merging with similar progressive farm organizations in other southern states. (see footnote 62)
One of those organizations, the Arkansas Agricultural Wheel, had an estimated membership of 75,000 in that state alone, was represented in almost every county, and had chartered branches in Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Indian Territory. The total membership of the Wheel was estimated at several hundred thousand in 1887. The parent Arkansas organization has been described by Carl C. Taylor as "equally active in economic projects and more militant in its political attitudes than the Texas Alliance." Like the Alliance, it had pledged itself to concerted action with labor unions. In 1887-88, after a whirlwind of organizing activity, the Alliance merged with the Wheel, with the smaller Louisiana Farmers' Union, and with the North Carolina Farmers' Association, led by Col. Leonidas L. Polk, a former Granger and editor of Progressive Farmer. The combined organization called itself the Farmers' and Laborers' Union of America, indicating the outreach to labor. (see footnote 63) [121]
Less is known about the CFA [Colored Farmers' Alliance] than the FA, since secrecy protected its members from landlord and merchant retaliation. Humphrey, who served as its national spokesman, claimed over one million members for the organization by 1890, but Lawrence Goodwyn puts the figure closer to a quarter million. (see footnote 64)
In the upper Mississippi Valley, another farmers' alliance had also begun to take shape in the late 1870s; like the southern FA and the Wheel, it combined local cooperative efforts with antimonopoly political demands. Spurred, like the Texas movement, by drought, grievances against the railroads, and the hard times of the mid-eighties, the organization grew rapidly in the old Granger states of the Midwest. A convention in Minneapolis in 1887 drew delegates from seven states, the most active representing Kansas and the Dakotas. (see footnote 65). A Minnesotan with some fame in antimonopoly politics, Ignatius Donnelly, served as official state lecturer and general promoter. The [121] "north-western" alliances around this time claimed about 27,000 members. In Illinois the Farmers' Mutual Benefit Association, known for its well-run grain cooperative in the corn belt, claimed several thousand in 1887, spurting to perhaps 40,000 members by the end of 1888. It held itself aloof from the larger regional organization, as well as from the earnest entreaties to merge with the southern FA. (see footnote 66) [122]
~failure to join with labor
The southern and northwestern alliances agreed to hold a joint meeting in St. Louis in 1889 and to seek an expanded confederation of all the farmer organizations and organized labor. The hoped-for union, however, could not be consummated. The ostensible barriers were the northwestern alliance's objections to the southern organization's secrecy and rituals, its exclusion of blacks, its adherence to Macune's radical "subtreasury" plan (see below) introduced at the St. Louis meeting, and southern opposition to a proposed federal law banning a cottonseed oil product (oleomargarine) in competition with the butter and lard produced in the Midwest. The southerners were willing to drop the race stricture from the national constitution, but they held secrecy essential to the success of the cooperative movement. More important to the failure of the merger, in the view of recent scholarship, was the organizational weakness and the programmatic timidity of the northwestern alliance. (see footnote 67) The much smaller northern organization lacked the strong grass-roots base of the southern suballiance cooperative and lecture system and had not developed a comparable critique of capitalism around which to rally the "producer" forces. Its leaders, in Goodwyn's view, hesitated before the organizational and ideological zeal of the Farmers' and Laborers' Union because "the [southern alliance] had a program which produced both internal structure and external purpose, while the Northwestern group did not." Further, the northern leaders "had no intention of participating in an organized revolt against the structure of Gilded Age politics and did not do so." (see footnote 68)
Surrounding all these differences, there must have been a substantial cultural alienation between the two organizations, reflecting the different life-worlds of the northern and the southern farmers. There were also different and deeply rooted partisan traditions. Macune, for example (himself strongly attached to the Democratic Party), believed that the secretary of the northwestern alliance, an Iowa Republican, "wanted nothing to do with an organization composed largely of southern Democrats." (see footnote 69) [122]
~fragmentation & reorganization
At St. Louis, representatives of the more radical Kansas and South Dakota chapters broke away from the Northwestern Alliance and joined the southern group in a renamed National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union (NFA&IU). Representatives of the KOL, its membership by now much [122] diminished but increasingly political, joined with the NFA&IU delegates in an endorsement of a seven-point platform devoted to banking and currency and "land to the tiller" demands, along with a call for nationalization of the means of communication and transportation. (see footnote 70)
After St. Louis, the NFA&IU continued to expand into the Midwest but also attracted a substantial membership in the Pacific Coast states and even chartered small groups in the mid-Atlantic region. (see footnote 71) The southern-based but now genuinely biregional Farmers' Alliance claimed about 1.5 million members in forty-three states and territories by 1891. (see footnote 72) Michael Schwartz gives a lower estimate, pegging membership at no more than 964,000. Even the lower figure, he points out, would imply that the FA reached at least 25 percent of the adult male population of the rural South, 50 percent in Texas. (see footnote 73) Thousands of women also poured into the organization, which actively recruited them. (see footnote 74) A state-by-state breakdown of FA membership, compiled in early 1890, is given in table 4.7. The source of these figures, the 1891 Appleton's Annual Cyclopedia, reported estimates that the combined total of the colored and white alliances might have reached 3 million by the end of the year. [123]
Table 4.7 Estimated Membership, by State, of the National Farmers' Alliance, 1890 [123]
The lifeblood of the FA was its system of collective education. Meetings were devoted to the study of political economy, broadly conceived, based on "lessons" printed in Macune's paper, the National Economist, and led by the unit's lecturer. Topics of the lessons in the first six months of 1892 included [123] the British class structure, the Russian peasantry, and the position of millionaires in American life. The underlying theme, in Theodore Mitchell's words, was "a warning that the centralization of wealth and power...always leads to the repression by the rich and powerful of the poor and powerless." The lecturer led the discussion and guided those farmers present through exercises designed to drive home points of the economic analysis (Macune helpfully provided the lecturers with hints on pedagogy). Meetings concluded with rousing Alliance songs and group prayer. (see footnote 75) [124]
~the FA press
The National Economist had a circulation of over 100,000, and many copies were undoubtedly shared, but the Alliance movement had other organs as well. The Texas Southern Mercury and the Kansas Advocate together had about 110,000 subscribers, and the North Carolina-based Progressive Farmer, the American Nonconformist, and the Kansas Commoner were also among the more important communication mechanisms. Macune organized a National Reform Press Association of over one thousand newspapers, and the National Economist Publishing Company produced a "torrent of pamphlets, broadsides, and books" on the concentration of wealth, "the financial question," and other Alliance issues. (see footnote 76) [124]
~also see Goodwyn here
One of the most important functions of the communications network was to promote economic cooperation in order to free the farmer from the crop-lien system. Statewide cooperative enterprises were undertaken to store and market cotton and tobacco and to buy wholesale, at the lowest prices, everything the farmer might need. To help the poorest farmers, Macune designed an ingenious "joint note" credit plan. Each suballiance would amass its members' mortgages, crop liens, and available cash and send them to the state FA business agent, who would use them as security for credit purchases, in bulk, of all supplies requested by the members. In the fall, the Farmers' Alliance Exchange would sell members' crops (stored at local FA warehouses) in huge lots directly to manufacturers and exporters. The Fa exchanges, "the most ambitious counterinstitutions ever undertaken by an American protest movement," aimed to "replace much of the supply and marketing systems of cotton tenancy, while returning huge savings to the local farmer." And, for a few years, they worked. In Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina, the exchanges indeed generated large savings for farmers and posed a formidable threat to the economic power structure. (see footnote 77)
While the exchanges flourished, the FA was also able to mount a successful boycott against a national cartel formed to monopolize the supply of the jute that was used to wrap cotton bales. [124]
Concerted action finally forced the "Jute Trust" to lower prices to pretrust levels--a significant victory for the farmers. However, the shortage of cotton-bagging and Liverpool's insistence that cotton-wrapped bales be discounted made the boycott impossible to sustain. (see footnote 78)
The threat the exchanges posed to the merchants, landlords, banks, and middlemen brought massive resistance, and the dependency and cash shortage of members provided no cushion to weather setbacks. Banks in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Galveston, and New Orleans refused to lend money to the Texas Exchange. Manufacturers declined to sell to the exchange on credit, since its notes could not be easily redeemed. Heroic effort got the organization through its first year, but the concerted attacks and rumors of exchange insolvency in the conservative press ultimately to make further contributions. The effort collapsed after twenty months. (see footnote 79)
~see also Goodwyn's narrative
Similar catastrophes befell other Alliance cooperatives in 1889. "Locals in the Southeast discovered in early 1889 that all the wholesalers in Norfolk, Virginia, had agreed to boycott the Alliance coops. Manufacturers all over the country boycotted the Alliance: Mississippi locals could not get wholesale farm implements, clubs in North Carolina were denied wholesale prices on shoes... Alabama and South Carolina banks foreclosed on Alliance mortgages. Virginia railroads refused to give discount shipping rates available to other large customers. (see footnote 80) As economic conditions worsened for the farmers, fewer and fewer could pay their dues. The Florida, North Carolina, and Kansas state exchanges went bankrupt in 1891. (see footnote 81) The Georgia Exchange, one of the strongest, survived an agent's sticky fingers and continuous external opposition until 1893. (see footnote 82) The Dakota Farmers' Alliance Company apparently experienced less-devastating credit problems. It had developed the strongest and most diversified cooperative enterprise outside the South, including a unique crop, fire, and life insurance program for members. Nevertheless, the Dakota Exchange was also going under by 1891. Desperate schemes to unite all the tottering state exchanges came to naught. As the cooperatives declined, so did Alliance membership. (see footnote 83)
As the Texas and other state exchanges began to experience severe difficulties, Macune made another bold leap. He developed a plan by which the federal government would construct warehouses in every significant agricultural county. At these "subtreasuries," farmers would safely store their produce rather than sell at depressed harvest-time prices and could receive from [125] the government loans of up to 80 percent of the stored crop's value at the time of entry. At any point, they could sell the subtreasury certificate of deposit for whatever the commodity would bring and repay the loan, forfeiting a small fee for grading, storage, and insurance costs. (see footnote 84) By this mechanism, the farmers would escape the snares of the crop-lien system, avoid the dishonest warehouseman, and receive the best price for their crops; and the nation would benefit as the major demand for currency, triggered each year by the need to transfer money from northeastern banks to the interior "to move the crops" at harvest, would be met by this highly flexible, automatic money-creating system. Half a century later, such federal government mechanisms for agricultural credit and money creation would be accepted public functions. But in the late 1880s, Macune's proposal was by far the most radical idea placed on the political agenda by a major social organization. The subtreasury plan posed a clear threat to existing creditors, commodity brokers, warehousemen, and speculators. Critics also argued that it would centralize power in the federal government and necessitate a great expansion of federal employment to man the warehouses. (see footnote 85) And it was, after all, a scheme for creating the dreaded fiat currency, although Sen. William A. Peffer of Kansas liked to point out that U.S. bank notes carried notices that they were secured by U.S. bonds held in vaults; why was it so radical to base a currency on wheat, corn, or cotton held in government warehouses? (see footnote 86)
But radical is was. The subtreasury promised not only the emancipation of farmers from the merchants and landlords to whom they were indebted but also a source of credit and currency creation outside the control of the nation's bankers. The amount of new currency to be added, estimated at around $550 million, exceeded the peak greenback circulation and thus promised a significant inflation. Further, the National Economist argued, the plan would create hundreds of local markets for cotton, keeping at home the profits and opportunities that now flowed to middlemen in the great entrepot cities. (see footnote 87)
At the 1889 meeting in St. Louis, a committee of southern Alliancement presented the subtreasury plan to the assembled delegates, who adopted it with surprisingly little discussion. No longer president of the Alliance (Leonidas Polk of North Carolina was elected at St. Louis), Macune threw himself into the campaign for the new program. As editor of the National Economist, he tirelessly prepared materials for use by the Alliance lecturers, who now fanned out across the country with the message of agricultural salvation through the subtreasury. (see footnote 88) [126]
~FA begins serious political engagement
The Alliance communication structure was harnessed to press its demands on candidates for office and endorse those who pledged support to the St. Louis platform. Across the South and Great Plains, the farmers surged into politics in 1890. The FA president, Polk, accompanied by Ralph Beaumont of the Knights of Labor, traveled to the western plains to preach radical economics, political mobilization, and an end to sectionalism. (see footnote 89) In Washington, D.C., the Alliance leaders, coordinating their efforts with the KOL, lobbied for their program. Representatives from North Carolina and South Dakota introduced the subtreasury bill, but it was buried in the Republican Congress without even coming to a vote. The Alliance therefore set out to elect sympathetic legislators and seemed to have achieved impressive successes in the 1890 elections. Candidates pledged to the Alliance program (many of them FA members) appeared to control the legislatures of seven southern states and 70 percent of the congressional seats from Georgia and the Carolinas. (see footnote 90) In Kansas, an independent Alliance/Populist ticket narrowly lost the governor's race but elected five congressmen and a senator and gained control of the House on an electoral base consisting of disaffected Republicans joined by Democrats, 1888 Union Labor voters, and Prohibitionists. (see footnote 91) As many as forty-four Alliance-endorsed candidates took their seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, contributing to the GOP rout there; in addition, several senators were elected from the South. (see footnote 92) Polk spoke exuberantly of "the coming revolution." (see footnote 93)
Midwestern and western Alliance members, as the Kansas case demonstrates, had been much less reticent about independent party politics than their southern colleagues. Sectional traditions lay behind both tendencies. In the Midwest, Antimonopoly and Greenback parties had broken the ice, and the continuing power of "bloody shirt" rhetoric made the minority Democratic Party an inappropriate vehicle for Alliance demands. In the South, of course, the reverse held. The Democratic Party was the seat of southern nationalism and white supremacy and was extremely difficult for the average southerner, even a member of the Alliance, to abandon. There was great hope that the existing party apparatus could simply be captured by the Alliance, and in 1890, this goal seemed attainable. (see footnote 94)
However, the southern Democrats who had courted the Alliance proved disappointing. Texas Governor James Hogg refused to support the subtreasury and responded weakly to demands for a state commission, free school textbooks, and mechanics' lien and usury laws. Many congressional endorsees--even Zebulon Vance of North Carolina, who introduced the bill in the [127] Senate--were lukewarm to hostile toward the subtreasury. Across the South, the officeholders elected with Alliance votes proved much more conservative on the range of Alliance issues than the FA membership. (see footnote 95)
At the organization's December 1890 convention at Ocala, Florida, delegates drew up a platform that consisted of the financial, land, and transportation/communication planks adopted at St. Louis (the last being softened to call for a trial period of tight regulation before moving toward nationalization); to these were formally added the subtreasury, a graduated federal income tax, direct election of senators, and removal of tariff duties from "the necessities of life." The radical politics faction within the Alliance, centered around Texans William Lamb, James Perdue, Evan Jones, H.S.P. Ashby, and R.M. Humphrey, Arkansan W. Scott Morgan, and Kansan Cuthbert Vincent, insisted that the best hope for securing these demands was through an independent party. Macune, always opposed to the third-party route, could, at this point, do little to restrain the drive. But the National Reform Press Association that he chaired provided, in 1891-92, "the basic internal communication agency through which greenbackers [Alliance leaders committed to the subtreasury and independent politics] labored for the third party." (see footnote 96)
The People's Party was tentatively launched at a National Union Conference in May 1891. It was a diverse gathering of fourteen hundred reformers including Prohibitionists, women's suffrage advocates, Greenbackers, and "hundreds of habitual reformers." The modal number came as Farmers' Alliance members, but almost all were from the Midwest and West; though Lamb and Humphrey were there, fewer than forty represented the southern alliance. Macune attended, but as one of a hundred or so members of the National Reform Press Association and not as a third-party advocate. The Kansas delegates took the lead, with a more cautious group, around FA President Polk and James Weaver of Iowa, counseling delay. Since little could be done without the enlistment of the southerners, the conference only appointed a provisional national party committee headed by H.E. Taubeneck of Illinois and endorsed the St. Louis and Ocala demands. (see footnote 97)
The southern alliances were committed to politics, though not uniformly to the third party. Across the South in the summer of 1891, county and district lecturers addressed open rallies to explain and promote the subtreasury and the other Ocala demands. Whereas the cooperative movement operated mostly in segregated farmer institutions, the political movement that grew out of it required broad collaboration across racial and occupational lines. Alliance officials now urged an outreach to the Colored Farmers' Alliance [128] members, and in 1891-92 it was possible to envision a new era in southern race relations, one based on a politicized movement of farmers as a class. (see footnote 98) This was a vision held, on both sides of the racial divide, by those most committed to the People's Party. In Georgia, Tom Watson spoke fervently of the common economic problems of black and white tenant farmers and of the efforts of elites to keep them apart by racial demagoguery. (see footnote 99) The Georgia Alliance opened the state exchange to black Alliancemen and attempted to woo them away from their traditional Republican loyalties. Similar overtures took place in North Carolina. (see footnote 100) At its Dallas organizing meeting, the Texas Alliance elected two black men to the statewide executive committee of the Texas People's Party. (see footnote 101) An Alabama newspaper dared to endorse racial solidarity in the "war against trusts." (see footnote 102) However, efforts toward biracial politics were interrupted by events of September 1891. R.M. Humphrey, the white superintendent of the Colored Farmers' Alliance, called for a South-wide strike by black cotton pickers, with the goal of doubling their daily pay. FA President Polk denounced the strike, reminding the CFA that the price of cotton had dropped to seven or eight cents a pound. A number of prominent CFA members also opposed the strike, and except in the Arkansas delta, it seems not to have taken place. Nevertheless, the incident was a brutal reminder that white and black farmers did not occupy the same rungs on the economic ladder. (see footnote 103)
This was by no means the end of the experiment in biracial politics, however. In its state platform, the Arkansas Populist Party declared for policies on behalf of "the downtrodden regardless of race," establishing, Goodwyn argues, "the clearest record of racial liberalism" in the South. In neighboring Texas, he notes, the 1894 Populist platform "offered a nineteenth century version of 'black power.'" Alabama populists (who called themselves "Jeffersonians") also declared for the protection of black voting rights in 1892. The Democrats conducted a virulent attack on this "Negro Plank," and their own platform pledged "the passage of such election laws will better secure the government of the State in the hands of the intelligent and virtuous." (see footnote 104)
It was the Democratic counterattack on the Alliance, unleashed in 1891, that drove many southern Alliance members to the third party. However, whereas the southerners moved reluctantly, the midwesterners were much bolder. In December 1891, five Alliance congressmen from Kansas, three from Minnesota and Nebraska, and Tom Watson of Georgia formed "the first distinctive political body" of the People's Party by organizing a House caucus that nominated Watson for Speaker. The decisive event, however, was a huge conference of "industrial organizations" in St. Louis in February 1892. [129] About eight hundred delegates from twenty-two reform organizations were allotted seats, with the southern alliance (NFA&IU) holding about a third. Polk was elected chairman. The conference adopted a ringing platform with a preamble, written by Ignatius Donnelly, that condemned the injustices and corruption of American society. The platform demands were based on the previous lists of the NFA&IU; in a logroll among the northern and southern Alliance and labor delegates, the conference accepted the subtreasury (which had little support outside the South) and reinstated government ownership of railroads, for which the southerners were less enthusiastic. (see footnote 105)
Within a month after the St. Louis meeting, "grass roots Populist organizations were springing up from Alliance seedbeds across the South," and county alliances were meeting to endorse the St. Louis demands. (see footnote 106) But opinion on the wisdom of a third-party campaign was still sharply divided, and although strong Alliance networks in Alabama, North Carolina, and Texas spawned vigorous populist parties, not all vibrant alliances did so. (see footnote 107) Nor was a deeply rooted Alliance organization necessary to agrarian populist politics. As Scott G. McNall has shown, the Kansas Alliance had barely been organized in 1889-90 when the independent party took off. There, the state alliance leadership was dominated by men and women with previous third-party (mainly Greenback and Union Labor) experience; they easily made the transition to independent politics and took the Alliance with them. (see footnote 108)
Schwartz, sympathetic to the Alliance goal of building economic "counter-institutions," has described the political turn of 1892 as a fateful move that "destroyed the Farmers' Alliance as a protest group." (see footnote 109) For Goodwyn, the problem was not politics per se but a compromised, superficial politics, the kind that seemed inevitable in states where political action did not grow from a cooperative base. Without the "movement culture" incubated in the cooperatives, Goodwyn has argued, the farmers' discontent could all too easily be harnessed to a pallid "shadow movement" focused on the single cause of free silver rather than the rich tapestry of Greenbackism, and led by southern and western politicians not adverse to fusion with the Democrats. (see footnote 110)
In response to these arguments, it should be noted that the political activists in the Alliance were the ones who reached out to black farmers, creating an unprecedented recognition of biracial class similarity and mutual need. It was the political activists too who adopted the grievances of the Knights of Labor as their own. The cooperative purchasing and marketing movement promised benefits only for farmers, whereas the political arena was the natural meeting place for occupationally dissimilar producers with the same class and institutional antagonists. It was the case, apparently, that the move into [130] politics led to the abandonment of most of what remained of the cooperative movement and the withering of the Alliance organizational structure. (see footnote 111) A movement's participants have only so much energy and their leaders only so much time. But the accounts of Goodwyn, McMath, Schwartz, and Donna A. Barnes all make clear that the cooperative movement was doomed anyway. Only political action could salvage its goals of emancipating the farmer from bondage to bankers, trusts, railroads, merchants, and land barons; and it might even save the cooperatives themselves. State legislation was important, and Alliance members did what they could at that level. (see footnote 112) But national politics was clearly the key to the greenback-antimonopoly program. (see footnote 113)
The People's Party platform endorsed at Omaha in July 1892 called for a "union of labor forces" to redeem democratic politics in a polity corrupted and oppressed by unchecked capitalist power. It condemned, as before, the demonetization of silver and called for free and unlimited silver coinage at the traditional sixteen-to-one ratio. It affirmed the power of the national government to create and distribute money through the subtreasury plan "or a better system," increasing the circulating medium to $50 per capita. The platform also called for a system of postal savings banks where people could safely deposit their earnings; nationalization of the railroads, telephone, and telegraph; government reclamation of unused railroad, corporate, and foreign-owned lands and their designation for actual settlers only; and a graduated income tax. Finally, it declared: "We believe that the power of government--in other words, of the people--should be expanded...as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land." Appended to this agrarian-greenback platform were ten resolutions. These encompassed labor's demands for abolition of the Pinkerton "mercenary armies"; enforcement of the eight-hour day on government contracts and restriction of immigration; tax reductions for producers; support for "fair and liberal" military pensions; opposition to corporate subsidies; and electoral reform through adoption of the Australian ballot, the initiative and referendum, direct election of senators, and limitation of the president and vice-president to two terms. (see footnote 114)
This was to be the last flowering of native American greenback radicalism in its pure form--that is, before its dilution and absorption into the Democratic party. Its philosophy was anticorporate, though not anticapitalist. It sought, as recent scholars have established, not to turn the clock back on industrial development but to harness the new technological power for social good, to use the state to check exploitative excesses, to uphold the rights and [131] opportunities of labor (farm and factory), and to maintain a healthy and creative business competition. (see footnote 115) The program was profoundly opposed to concentrated corporate power. Where concentration seemed inevitable, and for the vital economic functions on which the well-being of the entire society depended, it was best that complete government control be established. This applied to money and probably to railroads and communications as well.
Norman Pollack has attributed to the midwestern Populists a statism more transcendent and transformative than that of their southern brethren. He describes the subtreasury plan, though massively interventionist, as narrowly economic in character, lacking in "philosophical dignity." The southern Populists, in Pollack's view, suffered an "ideological shortfall" in failing to appreciate the full potential for the redistribution of wealth through the income tax (which they backed for rather pragmatic reasons), in advocating nationalization of railroads only as a last resort, and in perceiving nationalization as "a self-contained measure which did not promise further collective activities." (see footnote 116) To these charges the southern Populist leaders and most Populist voters would undoubtedly have pleaded guilty. they wanted to use the state to restore what they envisioned as the freer and more egalitarian relationships of an earlier democratic republic and to redress the accumulated grievances of farmers and workers. They hoped to tame capitalism, to deconcentrate it, but not to destroy it. They were, undoubtedly, radical reformers, but not socialist revolutionaries. Their view of the state was both idealistic and pragmatic. The Populists did not relish bureacracy. They elevated direct democracy and specific statutes and surely would have felt, to use Pollack's words, "dimly menaced" by the notion of an expansively powerful, transformative state (a conception he does find in the ideas of Senator Peffer of Kansas, Alliance lecturer and novelist Donnelly of Minnesota, and particularly, the patrician Illinois intellectual Henry Demarest Lloyd). However, at a century's remove, the Populists' pragmatic willingness to use public power to balance and constrain market forces, coupled with uneasiness about an unconstrained national executive power, seems more prudent than intellectually deficient.
The theorists of the Populist movement appear to have believed sincerely and strongly in the commonality of interests between farmer and worker. By virtue of the dominance and exploitation of large corporate and financial interests, farmers and workers occupied similar positions in the social and economic order. The redemption of the state to serve the interests of ordinary people, and its use to effect the democratization of the industrial and commercial economy, would serve the interests of both, argued Populists like Peffer, Weaver, Watson, Morgan, and Lamb. (see footnote 117) Although there was, at this point, [132] little evidence among trade-union leaders of a similar probing analysis of social conditions and the effects of large-scale economic change on class positions, the guiding figures of the agrarian movement had thought long and hard about these processes. They wrote books in which they drew out the political implications of the convergence of farmer and worker interests. It was an alliance on which they pinned all their hopes. [133]
Populism at the Polls
~see History of the Wheel and Alliance and the Impending Revolution (1891) by W. Scott Morgan as a primary source for agrarian language & thought
The Omaha convention nominated as its standard-bearers the ex-Greenbacker James WEaver of Iowa and James G. Field of Virginia. The combination of Union and Confederate generals could not overcome sectional feelings, however. When General Weaver took his campaign to the dusty country towns of Georgia, Democratic opponents pelted him with words and rotten eggs for alleged Civil War atrocities. General Field, likewise, was vilified in Iowa for his Rebel past. A reversal of position, with a respected southerner like Leonidas Polk at the head, might have produced better results in the South without a corresponding northern handicap. Though a Rebel officer himself, Polk had strongly opposed secession in North Carolina (for which he suffered considerable abuse in the 1860s) and had long campaigned against sectionalism. Unfortunately, the Alliance president died a month before the convention. (see footnote 118) [133]
Along with the "bloody shirt" and racial demagoguery, the Populists' opponents charged that the Omaha platform was a program of unthinkable radicalism. The New York Times branded the subtreasury plan "one of the wildest and most fantastic projects ever seriously proposed by sober man." (see footnote 119) The New York Sun supplied a campaign ditty: "Why should the farmer delve and ditch? Why should the farmer's wife darn and stitch? The government can make 'em rich, And the People's Party knows it." (see footnote 120)
In both North and South, the Populists appealed for the votes of the weaker majority party. In Kansas, North Dakota, and the western silver-mining states, effective fusion with the Democrats brought electoral advantage. (see footnote 121) In the South, alliances were made with Republicans, leading Democrats to charge that the Populists had betrayed sectional interests and undermined white supremacy.
In North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, the Democrats fought populism by imitating it in their own platforms. Populists in Texas had criticized the Democratic governor, James Hogg, for the limited nature of his railroad reforms, but many supported the Democratic ticket rather than risk Hogg's defeat by a powerful conservative rival. In Alabama, Reuben Kolb's independent "Jeffersonian" ticket was backed by Populists, Republicans, and a Democratic faction opposed to the regular Democratic machine; when the ticket seemed headed for victory in state elections, the Democrats responded with massive vote fraud. The black vote was still formally unrestricted, but economic dependence allowed Kolb's opponents to pile up huge votes against him in the plantation counties. (see footnote 122) In Georgia, as in five other southern states, the beginning of suffrage restrictions aimed at blacks had already reduced the potential anti-Bourbon vote. But here, as in Alabama, the greater effect was achieved by hauling black farmworkers to the polls and murdering a number who had allied with the Populists. (see footnote 123) Predictably, the 1892 Populist vote in the Alliance heartland was a disappointment.
Considering the multiple handicaps of a third-party campaign, the results were not unimpressive: 1,024,280 popular votes (about a fifth of that received by each of the major-party candidates) and, thanks largely to the western silver states, twenty-two electoral votes. At 8.5 percent, the Populist percentage of the popular vote was more than twice the 1880 Greenback ratio; since 1860, it has been exceeded only by Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive) in 1912, Robert M. La Follette (Progressive) in 1924, George Wallace (American Independent) in 1968, and Ross Perot (Independent) in 1992. Weaver got over one-fifth of the vote in nine periphery states and Oregon. In Kansas, the Populists swept five of seven House seats, the state senate, and the governorship. [134] Nebraska and Colorado also elected Populist governors, and in all, thirteen Populists (including the hyphenated ones) were sent to the U.S. House of Representatives; Nebraska and North Carolina also chose Populist senators. (see footnote 124) [135]
Table 4.8 Populist Vote, 1892 (%)
The miniscule urban labor vote was a great disappointment, its implication evident in the second column of table 4.8. If workers unhappy with the Republican regime had bolted, it appeared that they had thrown their votes to the conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland rather than to the party whose platform incorporated the sum of organized labor's political demands. (see footnote 125) In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where the Homestead steel strike had been crushed a few months earlier, the Populists got only 578 votes out of a total of 78,504, slightly below the Pennsylvania average of 0.9 percent. (see footnote 126) The party of protection carried the steel county and the state.
Two years later, the depression was deep, the tide of greenback-silver sentiment was high, and there was no presidential election to bolster party regularity. The Democratic president's rigidity and conservatism, particularly his insistence on repeal of the 1890 Sherman Silver Purchase Act, (see footnote 127) were in fact producing massive defections across the South and West. President Cleveland demonstrated his lack of sympathy for labor distress by meeting the bedraggled protest march of "Coxey's Army" with mounted police and arresting its leader, Jacob Coxey, and by calling out federal troops against the Pullman strikers. (see footnote 128) A context more favorable to a radical third party could hardly be imagined. [135]
Efforts to forge an alliance with labor intensified in 1894. While conservatives in the two major parties condemned strikes and the protest marches of [135] "industrial armies," prominent Populists backed the dissident workers, and a Populist convention in Kansas collected money for the unemployed marchers. (see footnote 129) In Alabama, Kolb's "Jeffersonians" condemned the state's governor for calling out the militia against strikers and adopted a platform that demanded an end to convict labor, a lien law for miners, state inspectors, limitations on the employment of children, and even a tariff policy "to protect the laborer." (see footnote 130) Populists in Tennessee backed the miners in their successful campaign to abolish the convict-lease system in that state; throughout the South, the party campaigned to end the practice. In Congress, Populists took prominent, and lonely, pro-labor stances. (see footnote 131) Widespread sympathy was expressed for Eugene Debs and the ARU in the Pullman strike. (see footnote 132) The Dallas Mercury ran editorials about "the bitter and irrepressible conflict between the capitalist and the laborer" and, after Debs's arrest, declared, "With Debs in jail, no American is a freeman." (see footnote 133) In view of this record, and the incorporation into the Omaha platform of the demands expressed by the political voices of labor, the familiar criticism that agrarian Populists "simply did not know what to say" to industrial workers seems wide of the mark. (see footnote 134) The fact is that while farmers struggled to run the gauntlet of the two-party system, and lost many of their troops along the way, northern urban labor scarcely responded at all to the inducements of the Omaha program or to local Populist appeals.
The most impressive percentage gains in 1894 came in the South. With "no Union general yoked to their tickets," the third party had become a real threat to the Democrats. (see footnote 135) The ten leading Populist states in this year's elections were North Carolina, where fusion with the Republicans boosted the total to 53.8 percent, Nebraska (49), Alabama (47.6), Georgia (44.5), Colorado (41.4), Washington (39), Kansas (39), Texas (36.1), South Dakota (35.5), and Montana (30.9). In the Midwest and West, Populist totals dropped wherever the party, either out of independence or rejection, did not ally with the Democrats. In Kansas, Colorado, Nevada, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Idaho, these losses were severe. (see footnote 136)
Despite the western losses, the party's national vote had increased 42 percent, to almost a million and a half, despite repeated massive fraud by the Democrats in Alabama and Georgia. Donnelly was sure that the Democrats would soon go the way of the Whigs, leaving the Populist Party in contention with the party of the plutocrats. (see footnote 137) However, pragmatists within the party viewed the difficult terrain of the South, the western losses, and the failure of the labor outreach as signposts of a dead end for the third party. The Populist Party needed to pick a different road, either to become a major party or to take over the one most ideologically compatible. Either way, these [136] pragmatists reasoned, the party had to deemphasize its more radical demands (especially fiat money and the nationalization of railroads) and raise the flag of silver to broaden its electoral base. (see footnote 138) [137]
~***KEY***~
The farmers' movement thus confronted the same set of political alternatives and agonizing choices that labor and, indeed, all social movements before or since we had to reckon with in the American political system (see chapter 3). These were single-member-district, territorial elections, overlain by, in those years and for a long time thereafter, the powerful sociohistorical divide of the Civil War. This system produced two major parties to which attachments were strong. A movement with genuinely national ambitions would plausibly attempt to avoid major-party alliance because of the inevitable watering down of its program and loss of members with strong prior attachment to the other party. But was there a genuine alternative for the farmers? The purist collective action (cooperatives) had met a dead end. Tactical alliances had borne little fruit, and the third party had not done well nationally in a year in which economic conditions were dismal (hence presumably most promising for a party of the disadvantaged). In the aftermath of the 1894 elections, as Goodwyn himself acknowledges, Populist leaders had to confront the fact that: "the People's Party had done its best to convince American voters of the need for the Omaha Platform. After four years the party had gained a following of anywhere from 25 to 45 percent of the electorate in twenty-odd states. ...Politically, the mathematics of the situation were fatal. The People's Party needed to broaden its base or see the cause of reform die completely. One did not have to be a populist politician to accept the fact that reformers had to be in office to enact reforms." (see footnote 139)
Free silver was not greenbackism, not a program on which to build a movement, but it was more than an empty panacea. It proposed to found the nation's monetary system on a metal in expanding production (and domestic production at that). Friedman and Schwartz have written: "As between the early adoption of silver as the standard...and an early commitment to gold, it seems likely that on the whole, the adoption of silver would have been preferable, though this is clearly a difficult and complex judgment. Adoption of silver by the United States would certainly have moderated or eliminated deflationary tendencies here. It would also have moderated and might have eliminated delation in the world at large." (see footnote 140)
Stable general price levels might have saved many thousands of farmers from crushing debt loads and descent into tenancy and sharecropping. The [137] "automatic" aspect of coinage on demand also promised to wrest control of money creation from banks and bondholders and their allies in the Treasury Department. These were no small aims. [138]
~silver was a GOOD idea!?
As a common denominator on which to build a winning national coalition, silver was probably unmatched. It was "hard money," the "dollar of the daddies," and could accomplish many of the purposes of greenback printing without the "fiat money" ideological baggage. Specifically, silver was an entree to the following voting blocs and campaign resources: (a) southern, western, and midwestern Democrats; (b) those farmers, particularly in the North, who felt the effects of high interest rates, mortgage-debt burdens, and declining cash-crop prices but found the subtreasury program of the southern Farmers' Alliance too radical; (c) miners and mine owners, the latter able to put significant sums of money for the educational phase of the national campaign; and (d) urban workers. The last group, of course, was the most critical and problematic. However, the currency-expansion remedy had first caught on with northern labor leaders, and more recently, AFL conventions had repeatedly endorsed free silver. In 1895, Samuel Gompers, John McBride, James Sovereign, Max Hayes, and five carpenter and railroad union chiefs had signed a petition to Congress demanding free coinage. Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, a prominent (and aptly named!) friend of labor, was already a leading campaigner for bimetallism, and labor advocate Clarence Darrow also endorsed the silver strategy. Thus the agrarians could reasonably hope that the silver issue would be the key to victory for a national farmer-labor reform coalition. (see footnote 141) [138]
1896: The Farmer-Labor Alliance Miscarries (?)
The fate of the Populists in 1896 is well known and need not be recounted in detail. Chairman Herman Taubeneck and his allies in the People's Party [138] assumed that the conservative, Cleveland wing of the Democratic Party would maintain control of the presidential nominating convention. The silverites would then bolt to the People's Party. The latter would win a three-way election and thereafter take its place as one of the two major parties (the gold Democrats would ultimately vanish as their adherenats bled off into the Republican Party). would this have worked? Instead, reform forces took control of the Democratic Party, nominated the buoyant young silverite William Jennings Bryan, and wrote a platform condemning "government by injunction" and federal repression of strikes, demanding stronger railroad regulation and a constitutional amendment to restore the income tax, and of course, declaring for free coinage of silver. The Populists, who had scheduled their convention after the Democrats in order to receive into their fold the dissenting reformers, were left with no real choice but to nominate Bryan. (see footnote 142) The Democrats then became the only plausible party of reform, the vehicle of the farmer-labor alliance.
The 1896 election has been described as "the first modern class-struggle political contest" of industrial America. (see footnote 143) The Bryan campaign attracted the enthusiastic support of the country's diverse reform leaders, ranging from the fiery South Carolina Sen. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman to the genteel Illinois factory inspector Florence Kelley. Eugene Debs lent his masterful oratorical gifts to woo labor audiences, arguing that free silver was "the only solution to the problem now staring us in the face, as to how to open the mills and factories to the working men." (see footnote 144) As Debs wrote later: "I supported Mr. William J. Bryan and the platform upon which he stood, not because I regarded the free coinage of silver as a panacaea for our national ills...but because I believed that the triumph of Mr. Bryan and free silver would blunt the fangs of the money power.... The free silver issue gave us not only a rallying cry, but afforded common ground upon which the common people could unite against the trusts, syndicates, corporations, monopolies--in a word, the money power." (see footnote 145)
~booyah! but was it good that he refused to address the tariff?
This was certainly the way Bryan viewed the issue, and the early enthusiastic response to his campaign appearances by huge crowds of workers and farmers belies historians' post hoc judgment that the Democratic candidate made a fatal mistake with silver. The Republicans had inteded to make the tariff the central issue of the campaign. It was a natural decision, considering the tendency of the northern public to accept the argument that the Wilson-Gormley Tariff of 1894 had deepened the depression. (see footnote 146) But Bryan would not be drawn into the trap. Assiduously refusing the discuss the issue, he emphasized a stable, steadily expanding money supply as the key to raising employment and prosperity. Farmers and workers could never thrive on an [139] appreciating currency, he argued; the impoverishment of the millions of cash-crop farmers would, by shrinking the market for the urban worker's goods, impoverish the latter as well. (see footnote 147) He supplemented this argument with more targeted discussions of autocratic courts, the need for an income tax and trust regulation, and the abuse of injunctions, along with support for greater use of mediation in labor disputes. (see footnote 148) The program was well received; by early August, the enthusiastic response to Bryan's fast-paced campaign tour had the GOP in a panic. (see footnote 149) [140]
~***!***~but silver WAS how they got him; via their argument against it--> not Bryan's fault but the ability of the Republican party fo create a frame around silver; likely they would have done this to anyone who did what Bryan did
Mark Hanna's oft-quoted boast--"Bryan's talking silver all the time and that's where we've got him"--was misleading bravado. The GOP recognized the breadth and appeal of the Democratic challenge, and it "got him" by pulling out all the stops, harnessing the vast (one can hardly avoid the term "hegemonic") material and cultural resources of northern capital to defeat the insurgency. A fund estimated at $4 to $16 million, secured from corporations and wealthy individuals, enabled William McKinley's campaign to mount a massive and unprecedented "educational" campaign, targeting northern farm, labor, and middle-class groups vulnerable to Bryanite seduction and developing multilingual pamphlets warning of the dire consequences of Democratic policies. (see footnote 150) Big-city newspapers kept up a drumbeat of alarmist rhetoric. The New York Times quoted business predictions of "the worst panic the world ever saw" if the candidate of "tramps, deadbeats and anarchists" should win. (see footnote 151) Considerable effort was made to link Bryan to anarchism, communism, treason, and revolution. Particularly stressed were his ties with three great bugbears of the northeastern establishment: Debs, Tillman, and Altgeld (who, as governor, had pardoned the remaining Haymarket "bombers") (see footnote 152). Northeastern academicians and scholarly journals were almost uniformly antagonistic to the free coinage of silver, which, they argued, would bring economic disaster. (see footnote 153) In addition to the massed hostility of the academy and the press, "torrents of abuse poured forth from the clergy who held Bryan and the Chicago platform as the equivalents to the Devil and the Great Temptation." (see footnote 154) Three prominent New York ministers described Bryan as "a mouthing, slobbering demagogue" with a platform that "was made in hell" and that would bring a "revolution," the destructive consequences of which no man can picture." (see footnote 155)
The Democratic platform had excoriated the federal courts for overturning the income tax and for oppressing labor via injunctions and seemed to advocate an end to life tenure for judges as well as other civil servants. The eastern press was particularly incensed by this "dangerous attack" on a sacrosanct conservative institution, and the breakaway gold Democrats, in drafting [140] their own platform, took pains to distinguish their position, condemning "all efforts to degrade that [Supreme Court] tribunal or impair the confidence and respect which it has deservedly held." (see footnote 156) [141]
~very important
In addition, businessmen mounted a vast, diverse, and decentralized effort to convince their employees and customers of the dangers of a Bryan vote. Eastern insurance companies warned midwestern farmers that mortgages would be refused or foreclosed and insurance policies devalued if Bryan won. Northeastern newspapers carried many accounts of factory closings related to anxiety about the monetary, tariff, and social policies of a Bryan administration. The Southern Pacific Railroad in California sent its workers pamphlets forecasting inevitable wage reductions following a Bryan victory, and it transported workers into San Francisco for a huge pro-Republican rally; the Pennsylvania Railroad hauled one thousand employees into Canton, Ohio, to demonstrate their "spontaneous support" for McKinley (they followed a delegation of now unionless steelworkers from Homestead, Pennsylvania, marching up the street "with military precision behind its own squad of Homestead policemen," according to an enthusiastic newspaper account). (see footnote 157) Some historians have discounted the impact of this employer "persuasion" on the vote; after all, the secret ballot was in wide use in 1896, and besides, the Republicans continued to win northern elections without such extraordinary employer mobilization. It seems plausible, however, that workers were influenced by this powerful regional elite consensus and the demonstrated threat of withheld investment. The efforts of the press, intellectuals, the clergy, and employers rose to a crescendo in the early fall, choking the initial momentum of the Democrats, whose woefully inadequate treasury simply lacked the resources to counter the Republican "educational" campaign. ***DONE***
Lack of money had dictated the Democrats' campaign strategy. (see footnote 158) The near-solid hostility of the northeastern middle and upper classes, and the dubious prospect of winning over the more economically secure farmers of the core, argued against putting scarce resources into a northeastern campaign. (see footnote 159) Taking New England and the mid-Atlantic states for granted, the Republicans were concentrating on the critical, silver-sympathetic Midwest, but that region was also the necessary addition to Bryan's southern-western heartland. Thus, the Midwest became the major battleground in 1896, and it was here that Bryan concentrated his efforts to woo labor.
However, despite the urging of advisors to waste little time in the Northeast, Bryan refused to concede the region and insisted on presenting the country's cause first "in the heart of what now seems to be the enemy's country, but which we hope will be our country before the campaign is over." (see footnote 160) He [141] began the intensive postconvention campaigning in early August with a speech in Madison Square Garden, followed by a trip to Albany, where he addressed an enthusiastic crowd of ten thousand. From there Bryan turned toward the critical Midwest, but en route to the campaign's Chicago headquarters, he delivered speeches in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, South Bend, Milwaukee, and Chicago, with stops in many small towns and hamlets in between.
The next leg of the campaign circuit, lasting from September 11 to September 30, took him south to Kansas City, St. Louis, Louisville, Lexington, and Knoxville. Then Bryan turned north, traveling through Asheville, Richmond, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Wilmington, and Philadelphia and reaching Brooklyn, New York, on September 24. His punishing speaking tour subsequently carried him to several Connecticut cities. In New Haven, an aggressively hostile audience of Yale University students heckled the candidate off the platform. Undaunted, he forged on to Worcester and Boston, where he addressed a crowd of about seventy-five thousand before heading back again to New York and urban New Jersey.
The next campaign swing began with an early October foray through West Virginia and Maryland en route to St. Louis, then turned back to the Midwest. October was spent once more in the cities and towns of that critical region, with major appearances in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Terre Haute, Peoria, and Chicago. After addressing large rallies in the last city and meeting with Democratic clubs and ethnic and labor organizations, Bryan concluded the campaign with visits to Wisconsin before heading back to Nebraska to vote and await the results. By his own account, he had traveled eighteen thousand miles and made an unprecedented six hundred speeches in twenty-seven states. (see footnote 161)
The crowds were large and enthusiastic, judging by the reports of a hostile press. (see footnote 162) The common theme of the speeches offered bimetallism as a means both to steady economic growth and to democratization of the economy, a "bottom-up" strategy to counter the Republicans' gold-and-protection "trickle-down" theory. (see footnote 163) [142]
See footnotes 165 & 166 [143]
Was Bryan's message, as a number of historians have suggested, inherently defective? Paul Kleppner finds the Democratic program backward-looking (in contrast to the more modern ring of McKinley's politics of growth) and [143] Bryan's appeal to workers rooted in a "jarringly anachronistic perception" of urban laborers as "petty entrepreneurs" rather than wage earners. Bryan's plea for recognition of the fundamental contributions of farmers to the nation's prosperity was hardly an appropriate tack to take with urban labor, Kleppner argues. Further, Kleppner and others have contended that the campaign's revivalistic style, as well as the presence of some elements among Bryan's rural supporters (particularly the midwestern Prohibitionists), was offputting to urban Catholic workers. (see footnote 167) The neutrality to hostility of the big-city machine leadership was, along with the aloofness of Gompers, a cue to the "alien" nature of the Bryan campaign for urban workers, and endorsements by Debs and Sovereign--neither of whom had large or enthusiastic followings in the Northeast or organizational bases competitive with that of Gompers--could not have carried much weight against the hegemonic sectional program of the Republicans.
Bryan himself assiduously counseled tolerance and avoided divisive social issues. Indeed, as Robert F. Durden and Samuel T. McSeveney have reported, it was the conservative opposition that consistently invoked moral and religious judgments, and it was the Republican spokesmen who exploited sectional antagonisms to discredit Bryan and his Populist supporters. (see footnote 168) And, as even Kleppner acknowledges, it was Bryan's mission and strategy to supersede the old ethnic, religious, and sectional politics and to persuade urban workers to see the new Democratic Party not simply as a pluralist amalgam, or a "preserver of their religious value system..., but as a vehicle through which they could implement class objectives." (see footnote 169) That this appeal failed does not constitute evidence that cultural perceptions were all-powerful but may indicate that at the ballot box, workers simply (with a lot of prodding from their "betters" and with considerable anguish) gave less weight to the predicted long-term advantages of class-based, redistributive politics than to the capitalist-led politics of growth offered by the other side. (see footnote 170)
The itinerary described above and the campaign coverage of the New York Times evidence Bryan's unprecedented efforts to mobilize urban workers behind a farmer-labor ticket and leave little doubt that the campaign struck a powerful chord. Although the Times editorially insisted on Bryan's weak and fading support among workers, stringers on the campaign trail sent in reports of frenzied enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate. Bryan was "wildly cheered" in Pittsburgh, the heart of protectionist sentiment (September 11). At Toledo, Ohio, a torchlight procession led th candidate to the high school square, where he addressed an audience estimated at 30,000 to 40,000 (September 3). At Canton (McKinley's home), "the enthusiasm of the crowd was [144] manifested in every conceivable way" (September 11). "Never before has the present generation seen so large a crowd assembled in Albany, and seldom has there been more enthusiasm displayed (August 26). "No public man ever received a heartier reception in Buffalo" (August 28). "The audience [of 8,000 working people at a Brooklyn skating rink] was a scene of wild enthusiasm" (September 24)
The last assembly joined in the chorus of a song dubbed "the American Marseillaise" and "liberally applauded" a speaker who urged, "Let us not fear the word 'revolutionist.' Franklin, Paine and Jefferson were revolutionists." A "howling, pushing, good natured, police-resisting crowd" of about 75,000 greeted the candidate at Boston Common--"Probably the Biggest Crowd that Ever Gathered to Hear a Speaker on that Class Ground" (September 26). A noisy audience of 15,000 greeted his speech at Paterson, New Jersey, "with tremendous outbursts of applause" (September 29). When, at a later speech to 5,000 working people in New York City, Bryan collapsed from exhaustion and had to be taken away in a carriage, "a wild mob of men and women and boys followed through the drenching rain as fast as they could run" (September 30). In a round of speeches in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the crowds swelled to 25,000, Bryan was "the recipient of a continuous ovation" (October 16). At his midwestern campaign stops, workers' organizations gave him symbolic gifts made of gold and silver, and a group of Jewish Democrats presented him with a silver star. The "cheering multitudes" that greeted the candidate during his last visit to Chicago included "a Negro free silver club, and Bryan clubs composed of Germans, Irish, French, Polish, Bohemians, Hebrews, and other foreign nationalities" (October 28).
Such reports belie the conventional assertions about the Bryan campaign's parochialism and weak outreach to workers. The contrast between this enthusiasm and the weakness of the final labor vote on November 3 suggests that even though many workers were sincerely drawn to the "Popocrat," the powerful economic warnings of the core establishment and charges that the "sectional" program of periphery farmers would bring ruin to the northern industrial economy were ultimately persuasive on election day.
Part of this calculus must have included, as Walter Dean Burnham suggests, considerable skepticism among urban working-and lower-middle-class voters about the advantage to them of the agrarian inflation program. (see footnote 171). Although the silver strategy was a plausible counter to the Republicans' gold-and-protection politics of growth, all such common denominators are inherently problematic. The Republican protection program carried dubious benefit for working-class consumers in a mature and actually quite [145] internationally competitive industrial economy, and the labor-capital contradiction of the GOP was at least as great as the labor-farmer disjuncture for the Democrats. However, such coalition strategies are essential in large and diverse societies with broad-based two-party systems. A more narrowly focused group-benefit politics, such as some historians have retroactively urged on Bryan, would not have been considered legitimate in the nineteenth century and would hardly have improved the chances of a candidate already accused of "class politics." [146]
~very important
The charge that Bryan's appeal to urban labor was inherently flawed echoes the complaint, discussed above, that the Populists "simply did not know what to say to the industrial worker," and one may find merit in the charge without laying all the blame on Bryan and his agrarian constituents. As McNall puts it, the workers "did not develop a radical class language that farmers could appropriate. So conservative, in fact, was the language of workers that it inhibited the development of a common organizational structure for farmers and workers." (see footnote 172) What was true in 1894 also held in 1896 and through the first two decades of the twentieth century. If the preeminent labor organization asked so little from the state, what could the agrarian Democrats do but try to recruit workers into the farmers' program while offering them legal emancipation to pursue the trade-union organization project and restricted immigration (the dual foci of labor's limited national demands), along with a promise of economic expansion through a steadily expanding money supply?
~silver was not a universal value
In sum, Bryan's problem in the industrial cities lay not in a weak or misguided appeal to labor. Rather, it was rooted in sectional political economy, the intense and monolithic hostility of elites to the Democratic-Populist program, the inadequacy of the AFL as a vehicle for labor political mobilization, and the fact that Bryan was compelled to spend most o fhis time in this unprecedented grass-roots campaign defending, to audiences of workers, as a universal value what the periphery farmers so desperately needed--a more plentiful, publicly controlled currency. The Democrat defended this fundamental Greenback premise with more eloquence and wit than any previous politician, but it was an idea whose time had not come--and would not come until, step by step, in 1913, 1933, and 1971, the United States finally abandoned the gold standard and gave itself the "fiat currency" that had so terrified nineteenth-century bankers. (see footnote 173)
Bryan came very close to winning--in spite of the enormous elite opposition and the charge of Democratic responsibility for the depression--on the basis of a highly sectional South-West-Midwest (periphery plus diverse [146] region) vote. Despite his failure to carry a single core industrial state, a shift of under 20,000 votes in states contiguous to his periphery bastions--in closely contested California, Oregon, North Dakota, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia--would have brought the Democrat within two electoral votes of victory. Another 1,700 votes in Delaware would have put him over. (see footnote 174) Had Bryan won, the reform Democrats would have been the party to benefit from the rising farm prices that attended crop failures abroad and the imminent expansion of gold production (which would have increased the money supply even before, or without, the restoration of unrestricted silver minting). Whether a victorious Democratic coalition would have inaugurated an agrarian-led social democracy, and what that would have meant for American capitalism, can only be a subject of speculation. What is clear is that the chance for a bottom-up, farmer-labor coalition led by a sympathetic populist president was lost in 1896. Disfranchisement and industrialization would gradually undermine southern populism. And future Democratic presidents would be closer to northeastern capital, more weakly committed to labor and domestic reform, and more strongly attracted to the augmentation of national military power than was William Jennings Bryan. [147]
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