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The Agrarian Crusade, A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics

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VOLUME 45
THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES
ALLEN JOHNSON, EDITOR





THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE, A CHRONICLE OF THE FARMER IN POLITICS

BY SOLON J. BUCK




PREFACE

Rapid growth accompanied by a somewhat painful readjustment has
been one of the leading characteristics of the history of the
United States during the last half century. In the West the
change has been so swift and spectacular as to approach a
complete metamorphosis. With the passing of the frontier has gone
something of the old freedom and the old opportunity; and the
inevitable change has brought forth inevitable protest,
particularly from the agricultural class. Simple farming
communities have wakened to find themselves complex industrial
regions in which the farmers have frequently lost their former
preferred position. The result has been a series of radical
agitations on the part of farmers determined to better their lot.
These movements have manifested different degrees of coherence
and intelligence, but all have had something of the same purpose
and spirit, and all may justly be considered as stages of the
still
unfinished agrarian crusade. This book is an attempt to sketch
the course and to reproduce the spirit of that crusade from its
inception with the Granger movement, through the Greenback and
populist phases, to a climax in the battle for free silver.

In the preparation of the chapters dealing with Populism I
received invaluable assistance from my colleague, Professor
Lester B. Shippee of the University of Minnesota; and I am
indebted to my wife for aid at every stage of the work,
especially in the revision of the manuscript.

Solon J. Buck.

Minnesota Historical Society.
St. Paul.

CONTENTS

I. THE INCEPTION OF THE GRANGE

II. THE RISING SPIRIT OF UNREST

III. THE GRANGER MOVEMENT AT FLOOD TIDE

IV. CURBING THE RAILROADS

V. THE COLLAPSE OF THE GRANGER MOVEMENT

VI. THE GREENBACK INTERLUDE

VII. THE PLIGHT OF THE FARMER

VIII. THE FARMERS' ALLIANCE

IX. THE PEOPLE'S PARTY LAUNCHED

X. THE POPULIST BOMBSHELL OF 1892

XI. THE SILVER ISSUE

XII. THE BATTLE OF THE STANDARDS

XIII. THE LEAVEN OF RADICALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE

CHAPTER I. THE INCEPTION OF THE GRANGE

When President Johnson authorized the Commissioner of
Agriculture, in 1866, to send a clerk in his bureau on a trip
through the Southern States to procure "statistical and other
information from those States," he could scarcely have foreseen
that this trip would lead to a movement among the farmers, which,
in varying forms, would affect the political and economic life of
the nation for half a century. The clerk selected for this
mission, one Oliver Hudson Kelley, was something more than a mere
collector of data and compiler of statistics: he was a keen
observer and a thinker. Kelley was born in Boston of a good
Yankee family that could boast kinship with Oliver Wendell Holmes
and Judge Samuel Sewall. At the age of twenty-three
he journeyed to Iowa, where he married. Then with his wife he
went on to Minnesota, settled in Elk River Township, and acquired
some first-hand familiarity with agriculture. At the time of
Kelley's service in the agricultural bureau he was forty years
old, a man of dignified presence, with a full beard already
turning white, the high broad forehead of a philosopher, and the
eager eyes of an enthusiast. "An engine with too much steam on
all the time"--so one of his friends characterized him; and the
abnormal energy which he displayed on the trip through the South
justifies the figure.

Kelley had had enough practical experience in agriculture to be
sympathetically aware of the difficulties of farm life in the
period immediately following the Civil War. Looking at the
Southern farmers not as a hostile Northerner would but as a
fellow agriculturist, he was struck with the distressing
conditions which prevailed. It was not merely the farmers'
economic difficulties which he noticed, for such difficulties
were to be expected in the South in the adjustment after the
great conflict; it was rather their blind disposition to do as
their grandfathers had done, their antiquated methods of
agriculture, and, most of all, their apathy. Pondering on this
attitude, Kelley decided that it was fostered if not caused by
the lack of social opportunities which made the existence of the
farmer such a drear monotony that he became practically incapable
of changing his outlook on life or his attitude toward his work.

Being essentially a man of action, Kelley did not stop with the
mere observation of these evils but cast about to find a remedy.
In doing so, he came to the conclusion that a national secret
order of farmers resembling the Masonic order, of which he
was a member, might serve to bind the farmers together for
purposes of social and intellectual advancement. After he
returned from the South, Kelley discussed the plan in Boston with
his niece, Miss Carrie Hall, who argued quite sensibly that women
should be admitted to full membership in the order, if it was to
accomplish the desired ends. Kelley accepted her suggestion and
went West to spend the summer in farming and dreaming of his
project. The next year found him again in Washington, but this
time as a clerk in the Post Office Department.

During the summer and fall of 1867 Kelley interested some of his
associates in his scheme. As a result seven men--"one fruit
grower and six government clerks, equally distributed among the
Post Office, Treasury, and Agricultural Departments"--are usually
recognized as the founders of the Patrons of Husbandry, or, as
the order is more commonly called, the Grange. These men, all of
whom but one had been born on farms, were O. H. Kelley and W. M.
Ireland of the Post Office Department, William Saunders and the
Reverend A. B. Grosh of the Agricultural Bureau, the Reverend
John Trimble and J. R. Thompson of the Treasury Department, and
F. M. McDowell, a pomologist of Wayne, New York. Kelley and
Ireland planned a ritual for the society; Saunders interested a
few farmers at a meeting of the United States Pomological Society
in St. Louis in August, and secured the cooperation of McDowell;
the other men helped these four in corresponding with interested
farmers and in perfecting the ritual. On December 4, 1867, having
framed a constitution and adopted the motto Esto perpetua, they
met and constituted themselves the National Grange of the Patrons
of Husbandry. Saunders was to be Master; Thompson, Lecturer;
Ireland, Treasurer; and Kelley, Secretary.

It is interesting to note, in view of the subsequent political
activity in which the movement for agricultural organization
became inevitably involved, that the founders of the Grange
looked for advantages to come to the farmer through intellectual
and social intercourse, not through political action. Their
purpose was "the advancement of agriculture," but they expected
that advancement to be an educative rather than a legislative
process. It was to that end, for instance, that they provided for
a Grange "Lecturer, " a man whose business it was to prepare for
each meeting a program apart from the prescribed ritual--perhaps
a paper read by one of the members or an address by a visiting
speaker. With this plan for social and intellectual advancement,
then, the founders of the Grange set out to gain members.

During the first four years the order grew slowly, partly because
of the mistakes of the founders, partly because of the innate
conservatism and suspicion of the average farmer. The first local
Grange was organized in Washington. It was made up largely of
government clerks and their wives and served less to advance the
cause of agriculture than to test the ritual. In February, 1868,
Kelley resigned his clerkship in the Post Office Department and
turned his whole attention to the organization of the new order.
His colleagues, in optimism or irony, voted him a salary of two
thousand dollars a year and traveling expenses, to be paid from
the receipts of any subordinate Granges he should establish. Thus
authorized, Kelley bought a ticket for Harrisburg, and with two
dollars and a half in his pocket, started out to work his way to
Minnesota by organizing Granges. On his way out he sold four
dispensations for the establishment of branch
organizations--three for Granges in Harrisburg, Columbus, and
Chicago, which came to nothing, and one for a Grange in Fredonia,
New York, which was the first regular, active, and permanent
local organization. This, it is important to note, was
established as a result of correspondence with a farmer of that
place, and in by far the smallest town of the four. Kelley seems
at first to have made the mistake of attempting to establish the
order in the large cities, where it had no native soil in which
to grow.

When Kelley revised his plan and began to work from his farm in
Minnesota and among neighbors whose main interest was in
agriculture, he was more successful. His progress was not,
however, so marked as to insure his salary and expenses; in fact,
the whole history of these early years represents the hardest
kind of struggle against financial difficulties. Later, Kelley
wrote of this difficult period: "If all great enterprises, to be
permanent, must necessarily start from small beginnings, our
Order is all right. Its foundation was laid on SOLID NOTHING--the
rock of poverty--and there is no harder material." At times the
persistent secretary found himself unable even to buy postage for
his circular letters. His friends at Washington began to lose
interest in the work of an order with a treasury "so empty that a
five-cent stamp would need an introduction before it would feel
at home in it." Their only letters to Kelley during this trying
time were written to remind him of bills owed by the order. The
total debt was not more than $150, yet neither the Washington
members nor Kelley could find funds to liquidate it. "My dear
brother," wrote Kelley to Ireland, "you must not swear when the
printer comes in . . . . When they come in to 'dun' ask them to
take a seat; light your pipe; lean back in a chair, and suggest
to them that some plan be adopted to bring in ten or twenty
members, and thus furnish funds to pay their bills." A note of
$39, in the hands of one Mr. Bean, caused the members in
Washington further embarrassment at this time and occasioned a
gleam of humor in one of Kelley's letters. Bean's calling on the
men at Washington, he wrote, at least reminded them of the
absentee, and to be cursed by an old friend was better than to be
forgotten. "I suggest," he continued, "that Granges use black and
white BEANS for ballots."

In spite of all his difficulties, Kelley stubbornly continued his
endeavor and kept up the fiction of a powerful central order at
the capital by circulating photographs of the founders and
letters which spoke in glowing terms of the great national
organization of the Patrons of Husbandry. "It must be advertised
as vigorously as if it were a patent medicine," he said; and to
that end he wrote articles for leading agricultural papers,
persuaded them to publish the constitution of the Grange, and
inserted from time to time press notices which kept the
organization before the public eye. In May, 1868, came the first
fruits of all this correspondence and advertisement--the
establishment of a Grange at Newton, Iowa. In September, the
first permanent Grange in Minnesota, the North Star Grange, was
established at St. Paul with the assistance of Colonel D. A.
Robertson. This gentleman and his associates interested
themselves in spreading the order. They revised the Grange
circulars to appeal to the farmer's pocketbook, emphasizing the
fact that the order offered a means of protection against
corporations and opportunities for cooperative buying and
selling. This practical appeal was more effective than the
previous idealistic propaganda: two additional Granges were
established before the end of the year; a state Grange was
constituted early in the next year; and by the end of 1869 there
were in Minnesota thirty-seven active Granges. In the spring of
1869 Kelley went East and, after visiting the thriving Grange in
Fredonia, he made his report at Washington to the members of the
National Grange, who listened perfunctorily, passed a few laws,
and relapsed into indifference after this first regular annual
session.

But however indifferent the members of the National Grange might
be as to the fate of the organization they had so irresponsibly
fathered, Kelley was zealous and untiring in its behalf. That the
founders did not deny their parenthood was enough for him; he
returned to his home with high hopes for the future. With the aid
of his niece he carried on an indefatigible correspondence which
soon brought tangible returns. In October, 1870, Kelley moved his
headquarters to Washington. By the end of the year the Order had
penetrated nine States of the Union, and correspondence looking
to its establishment in seven more States was well under way.
Though Granges had been planted as far east as Vermont and New
Jersey and as far south as Mississippi and South Carolina, the
life of the order as yet centered in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin,
Illinois, and Indiana. These were the only States in which, in
its four years of activity the Grange had really taken root; in
other States only sporadic local Granges sprang up. The method of
organization, however, had been found and tested. When a few
active subordinate Granges had been established in a State, they
convened as a temporary state Grange, the master of which
appointed deputies to organize other subordinate Granges
throughout the State. The initiation fees, generally three
dollars for men and fifty cents for women, paid the expenses of
organization--fifteen dollars to the deputy, and not infrequently
a small sum to the state Grange. What was left went into the
treasury of the local Grange. Thus by the end of 1871 the ways
and means of spreading the Grange had been devised. All that was
now needed was some impelling motive which should urge the
farmers to enter and support the organization.



CHAPTER II. THE RISING SPIRIT OF UNREST

The decade of the seventies witnessed the subsidence, if not the
solution, of a problem which had vexed American history for half
a century--the reconciliation of two incompatible social and
economic systems, the North and the South. It witnessed at the
same time the rise of another great problem, even yet
unsolved--the preservation of equality of opportunity, of
democracy, economic as well as political, in the face of the
rising power and influence of great accumulations and
combinations of wealth. Almost before the battle smoke of the
Civil War had rolled away, dissatisfaction with prevailing
conditions both political and economic began to show itself.

The close of the war naturally found the Republican or Union
party in control throughout the North. Branded with the
opprobrium of having opposed the conduct of the war, the
Democratic party remained impotent for a number of years; and
Ulysses S. Grant, the nation's greatest military hero, was easily
elected to the presidency on the Republican ticket in 1868. In
the latter part of Grant's first term, however, hostility began
to manifest itself among the Republicans themselves toward the
politicians in control at Washington. Several causes tended to
alienate from the President and his advisers the sympathies of
many of the less partisan and less prejudiced Republicans
throughout the North. Charges of corruption and maladministration
were rife and had much foundation in truth. Even if Grant himself
was not consciously dishonest in his application of the spoils
system and in his willingness to receive reward in return for
political favors, he certainly can be justly charged with the
disposition to trust too blindly in his friends and to choose men
for public office rather because of his personal preferences than
because of their qualifications for positions of trust.

Grant's enemies declared, moreover, with considerable truth that
the man was a military autocrat, unfit for the highest civil
position in a democracy. His high-handed policy in respect to
Reconstruction in the South evoked opposition from those

Northern Republicans whose critical sense was not entirely
blinded by sectional prejudice and passion. The keener-sighted of
the Northerners began to suspect that Reconstruction in the South
often amounted to little more than the looting of the governments
of the Southern States by the greedy freedmen and the
unscrupulous carpetbaggers, with the troops of the United States
standing by to protect the looters. In 1871, under color of
necessity arising from the intimidation of voters in a few
sections of the South, Congress passed a stringent act,
empowering the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and
to use the military at any time to suppress disturbances or
attempts to intimidate voters. This act, in the hands of
radicals, gave the carpetbag governments of the Southern States
practically unlimited powers. Any citizens who worked against the
existing administrations, however peacefully, might be charged
with intimidation of voters and prosecuted under the new act.
Thus these radical governments were made practically
self-perpetuating. When their corruption, wastefulness, and
inefficiency became evident, many people in the North frankly
condemned them and the Federal Government which continued to
support them.

This dissatisfaction with the Administration on the part of
Republicans and independents came to a head in 1872 in the
Liberal-Republican movement. As early as 1870 a group of
Republicans in Missouri, disgusted by the excesses of the
radicals in that State in the proscription of former Confederate
sympathizers, had led a bolt from the party, had nominated B.
Gratz Brown for governor, and, with the assistance of the
Democrats, had won the election. The real leader of this movement
was Senator Carl Schurz, under whose influence the new party in
Missouri declared not only for the removal of political
disabilities but also for tariff revision and civil service
reform and manifested opposition to the alienation of the public
domain to private corporations and to all schemes for the
repudiation of any part of the national debt. Similar splits in
the Republican party took place soon afterwards in other States,
and in 1872 the Missouri Liberals called a convention to meet at
Cincinnati for the purpose of nominating a candidate for the
presidency.

The new party was a coalition of rather diverse elements.
Prominent tariff reformers, members of the Free Trade League,
such as David A. Wells and Edward L. Godkin of the Nation,
advocates of civil service reform, of whom Carl Schurz was a
leading representative, and especially opponents of the
reconstruction measures of the Administration, such as Judge
David Davis and Horace Greeley, saw an opportunity to promote
their favorite policies through this new party organization. To
these sincere reformers were soon added such disgruntled
politicians as A. G. Curtin of Pennsylvania and R. E. Fenton of
New York, who sought revenge for the support which the
Administration had given to their personal rivals. The principal
bond of union was the common desire to prevent the reelection of
Grant. The platform adopted by the Cincinnati convention
reflected the composition of the party. Opening with a bitter
denunciation of the President, it declared in no uncertain terms
for civil service reform and the immediate and complete removal
of political disabilities. On the tariff, however, the party
could come to no agreement; the free traders were unable to
overcome the opposition of Horace Greeley and his protectionist
followers; and the outcome was the reference of the question "to
the people in their congressional districts and the decision of
Congress."

The leading candidates for nomination for the presidency were
Charles Francis Adams, David Davis, Horace Greeley, Lyman
Trumbull, and B. Gratz Brown. From these men, as a result of
manipulation, the convention unhappily selected the one least
suited to lead the party to victory Horace Greeley. The only hope
of success for the movement was in cooperation with that very
Democratic party whose principles, policies, and leaders, Greeley
in his editorials had unsparingly condemned for years. His
extreme protectionism repelled not only the Democrats but the
tariff reformers who had played an important part in the
organization of the Liberal Republican party. Conservatives of
both parties distrusted him as a man with a dangerous propensity
to advocate "isms," a theoretical politician more objectionable
than the practical man of machine politics, and far more likely
to disturb the existing state of affairs and to overturn the
business of the country in his efforts at reform. As the Nation
expressed it, "Greeley appears to be 'boiled crow' to more of his
fellow citizens than any other candidate for office in this or
any other age of which we have record."

The regular Republican convention renominated Grant, and the
Democrats, as the only chance of victory, swallowed the candidate
and the platform of the Liberals. Doubtless Greeley's opposition
to the radical reconstruction measures and the fact that he had
signed Jefferson Davis's bail-bond made the "crow" more palatable
to the Southern Democrats. In the campaign Greeley's brilliant
speeches were listened to with great respect. His tour was a
personal triumph; but the very voters who hung eagerly on his
speeches felt him to be too impulsive and opinionated to be
trusted with presidential powers. They knew the worst which might
be expected of Grant; they could not guess the ruin which
Greeley's dynamic powers might bring on the country if he used
them unwisely. In the end many of the original leaders of the
Liberal movement supported Grant as the lesser of two evils. The
Liberal defection from the Republican ranks was more than offset
by the refusal of Democrats to vote for Greeley, and Grant was
triumphantly reelected.

The Liberal Republican party was undoubtedly weakened by the
unfortunate selection of their candidate, but it scarcely could
have been victorious with another candidate. The movement was
distinctly one of leaders rather than of the masses, and the
things for which it stood most specifically--the removal of
political disabilities in the South and civil service
reform--awakened little enthusiasm among the farmers of the West.
These farmers on the other hand were beginning to be very much
interested in a number of economic reforms which would vitally
affect their welfare, such as the reduction and readjustment of
the burden of taxation, the control of corporations in the
interests of the people, the reduction and regulation of the cost
of transporation, and an increase in the currency supply. Some of
these propositions occasionally received recognition in Liberal
speeches and platforms, but several of them were anathema to many
of the Eastern leaders of that movement. Had these leaders been
gifted with vision broad enough to enable them to appreciate the
vital economic and social problems of the West, the Liberal
Republican movement might perhaps have caught the ground swell of
agrarian discontent, and the outcome might then have been the
formation of an enduring national party of liberal tendencies
broader and more progressive than the Liberal Republican party
yet less likely to be swept into the vagaries of extreme
radicalism than were the Anti-Monopoly and Greenback parties of
after years. A number of western Liberals such as A. Scott Sloan
in Wisconsin and Ignatius Donnelly in Minnesota championed the
farmers' cause, it is true, and in some States there was a fusion
of party organizations; but men like Schurz and Trumbull held
aloof from these radical movements, while Easterners like Godkin
of the Nation met them with ridicule and invective.

The period from 1870 to 1873 has been characterized as one of
rampant prosperity, and such it was for the commercial, the
manufacturing, and especially the speculative interests of the
country. For the farmers, however, it was a period of bitter
depression. The years immediately following the close of the
Civil War had seen a tremendous expansion of production,
particularly of the staple crops. The demobilization of the
armies, the closing of war industries, increased immigration, the
homestead law, the introduction of improved machinery, and the
rapid advance of the railroads had all combined to drive the
agricultural frontier westward by leaps and bounds until it had
almost reached the limit of successful cultivation under
conditions which then prevailed. As crop acreage and production
increased, prices went down in accordance with the law of supply
and demand, and farmers all over the country found it difficult
to make a living.

In the West and South--the great agricultural districts of the
country--the farmers commonly bought their supplies and
implements on credit or mortgaged their crops in advance; and
their profits at best were so slight that one bad season might
put them thereafter entirely in the power of their creditors and
force them to sell their crops on their creditors' terms. Many
farms were heavily mortgaged, too, at rates of interest that ate
up the farmers' profits. During and after the Civil War the
fluctuation of the currency and the high tariff worked especial
hardship on the farmers as producers of staples which must be
sold abroad in competition with European products and as
consumers of manufactured articles which must be bought at home
at prices made arbitrarily high by the protective tariff. In
earlier times, farmers thus harassed would have struck their
tents and moved farther west, taking up desirable land on the
frontier and starting out in a fresh field of opportunity. It was
still possible for farmers to go west, and many did so but only
to find that the opportunity for economic independence on the
edge of settlement had largely disappeared. The era of the
self-sufficing pioneer was drawing to a close, and the farmer on
the frontier, forced by natural conditions over which he had no
control to--engage in the production of staples, was fully as
dependent on the market and on transportation facilities as was
his competitor in the East.

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