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The Agrarian Crusade, A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics

S >> Solon J. Buck >> The Agrarian Crusade, A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics




In the fall of 1873 came the greatest panic in the history of the
nation, and a period of financial depression began which lasted
throughout the decade, restricting industry, commerce, and even
immigration. On the farmers the blow fell with special severity.
At the very time when they found it most difficult to realize
profit on their sales of produce, creditors who had hitherto
carried their debts from year to year became insistent for
payment. When mortgages fell due, it was well-nigh impossible to
renew them; and many a farmer saw years of labor go for nothing
in a heart-breaking foreclosure sale. It was difficult to get
even short-term loans, running from seed-time to harvest. This
important function of lending money to pay for labor and thus
secure a larger crop, which has only recently been assumed by the
Government in its establishment of farm loan banks, had been
performed by private capitalists who asked usurious rates of
interest. The farmers' protests against these rates had been
loud; and now, when they found themselves unable to get loans at
any rate whatever, their complaints naturally increased.
Looking around for one cause to which to attribute all their
misfortunes, they pitched upon the corporations or monopolies, as
they chose to call them, and especially upon the railroads.

At first the farmers had looked upon the coming of the railroads
as an unmixed blessing. The railroad had meant the opening up of
new territory, the establishment of channels of transportation by
which they could send their crops to market. Without the
railroad, the farmer who did not live near a navigable stream
must remain a backwoodsman; he must make his own farm or his
immediate community a self-sufficing unit; he must get from his
own land bread and meat and clothing for his family; he must be
stock-raiser, grain-grower, farrier, tinker, soap-maker, tanner,
chandler--Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. With the
railroad he gained access to markets and the opportunity to
specialize in one kind of farming; he could now sell his produce
and buy in exchange many of the articles he had previously made
for himself at the expense of much time and labor. Many farmers
and farming communities bought railroad bonds in the endeavor to
increase transportation facilities; all were heartily in sympathy
with the policy of the Government in granting to corporations
land along the route of the railways which they were to
construct.

By 1878, however, the Government had actually given to the
railroads about thirty-five million acres, and was pledged to
give to the Pacific roads alone about one hundred and forty-five
million acres more. Land was now not so plentiful as it had been
in 1850, when this policy had been inaugurated, and the farmers
were naturally aggrieved that the railroads should own so much
desirable land and should either hold it for speculative purposes
or demand for it prices much higher than the Government had asked
for land adjacent to it and no less valuable. Moreover, when
railroads were merged and reorganized or passed into the hands of
receivers the shares held by farmers were frequently wiped out or
were greatly decreased in value. Often railroad stock had been
"watered" to such an extent that high freight charges were
necessary in order to permit the payment of dividends. Thus the
farmer might find himself without his railroad stock, with a
mortgage on his land which he had incurred in order to buy the
stock, with an increased burden of taxation because his township
had also been gullible enough to buy stock, and with a railroad
whose excessive rates allowed him but a narrow margin of profit
on his produce.

When the farmers sought political remedies for their economic
ills, they discovered that, as a class, they had little
representation or influence either in Congress or in the state
legislatures. Before the Civil War the Southern planter had
represented agricultural interests in Congress fairly well; after
the War the dominance of Northern interests left the Western
farmer without his traditional ally in the South. Political power
was concentrated in the East and in the urban sections of the
West. Members of Congress were increasingly likely to be from the
manufacturing classes or from the legal profession, which
sympathized with these classes rather than with the
agriculturists. Only about seven per cent of the members of
Congress were farmers; yet in 1870 forty-seven per cent of the
population was engaged in agriculture. The only remedy for the
farmers was to organize themselves as a class in order to promote
their common welfare.



CHAPTER III. THE GRANGER MOVEMENT AT FLOOD TIDE

With these real or fancied grievances crying for redress, the
farmers soon turned to the Grange as the weapon ready at hand to
combat the forces which they believed were conspiring to crush
them. In 1872 began the real spread of the order. Where the
Grange had previously reckoned in terms of hundreds of new
lodges, it now began to speak of thousands. State Granges were
established in States where the year before the organization had
obtained but a precarious foothold; pioneer local Granges invaded
regions which hitherto had been impenetrable. Although the only
States which were thoroughly organized were Iowa, Minnesota,
South Carolina, and Mississippi, the rapid spread of the order
into other States and its intensive growth in regions so far
apart gave promise of its ultimate development into a national
movement.

This development was, to be sure, not without opposition. When
the Grangers began to speak of their function in terms of
business and political cooperation, the forces against which they
were uniting took alarm. The commission men and local merchants
of the South were especially apprehensive and, it is said,
sometimes foreclosed the mortgages of planters who were so
independent as to join the order. But here, as elsewhere,
persecution defeated its own end; the opposition of their enemies
convinced the farmers of the merits of the Grange.

In the East, several circumstances retarded the movement. In the
first place, the Eastern farmer had for some time felt the
Western farmer to be his serious rival. The Westerner had larger
acreage and larger yields from his virgin soil than the Easterner
from his smaller tracts of well-nigh exhausted land. What crops
the latter did produce he must sell in competition with the
Western crops, and he was not eager to lower freight charges for
his competitor. A second deterrent to the growth of the order in
the East was the organization of two Granges among the commission
men and the grain dealers of Boston and New York, under the aegis
of that clause of the constitution which declared any person
interested in agriculture to be eligible to membership in the
order. Though the storm of protest which arose all over the
country against this betrayal to the enemy resulted in the
revoking of the charters for these Granges, the Eastern farmer
did not soon forget the incident.

The year 1873 is important in the annals of the Grange because it
marks the retirement of the "founders" from power. In January of
that year, at the sixth session of the National Grange, the
temporary organization of government clerks was replaced by a
permanent corporation, officered by farmers. Kelley was reelected
Secretary; Dudley W. Adams of Iowa was made Master; and William
Saunders, erstwhile Master of the National Grange, D. Wyatt Aiken
of South Carolina, and E. R. Shankland of Iowa were elected to
the executive committee. The substitution of alert and eager
workers, already experienced in organizing Granges, for the dead
wood of the Washington bureaucrats gave the order a fresh impetus
to growth. From the spring of 1873 to the following spring the
number of granges more than quadrupled, and the increase again
centered mainly in the Middle West.

By the end of 1873 the Grange had penetrated all but four
States--Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Nevada--and
there were thirty-two state Granges in existence. The movement
was now well defined and national in scope, so that the seventh
annual session of the National Grange, which took place in St.
Louis in February, 1874, attracted much interest and comment.
Thirty-three men and twelve women attended the meetings,
representing thirty-two state and territorial Granges and about
half a million members. Their most important act was the adoption
of the "Declaration of Purposes of the National Grange,"
subscribed to then and now as the platform of the Patrons and
copied with minor modifications by many later agricultural
organizations in the United States. The general purpose of the
Patrons was "to labor for the good of our Order, our Country, and
Mankind." This altruistic ideal was to find practical application
in efforts to enhance the comfort and attractions of homes, to
maintain the laws, to advance agricultural and industrial
education, to diversify crops, to systematize farm work, to
establish cooperative buying and selling, to suppress personal,
local, sectional, and national prejudices, and to discountenance
"the credit system, the fashion system, and every other system
tending to prodigality and bankruptcy." As to business, the
Patrons declared themselves enemies not of capital but of the
tyranny of monopolies, not of railroads but of their high freight
tariffs and monopoly of transportation. In politics, too, they
maintained a rather nice balance: the Grange was not to be a
political or party organization, but its members were to perform
their political duties as individual citizens.

It could hardly be expected that the program of the Grange would
satisfy all farmers. For the agricultural discontent, as for any
other dissatisfaction, numerous panaceas were proposed, the
advocates of each of which scorned all the others and insisted on
their particular remedy. Some farmers objected to the Grange
because it was a secret organization; others, because it was
nonpartisan. For some the organization was too conservative; for
others, too radical. Yet all these objectors felt the need of
some sort of organization among the farmers, very much as the
trade-unionist and the socialist, though widely divergent in
program, agree that the workers must unite in order to better
their condition. Hence during these years of activity on the part
of the Grange many other agricultural societies were formed,
differing from the Patrons of Husbandry in specific program
rather than in general purpose.

The most important of these societies were the farmers' clubs, at
first more or less independent of each other but later banded
together in state associations. The most striking differences of
these clubs from the Granges were their lack of secrecy and their
avowed political purposes. Their establishment marks the definite
entrance of the farmers as a class into politics. During the
years 1872 to 1875 the independent farmers' organizations
multiplied much as the Granges did and for the same reasons. The
Middle West again was the scene of their greatest power. In
Illinois this movement began even before the Grange appeared in
the State, and its growth during the early seventies paralleled
that of the secret order. In other States also, notably in
Kansas, there sprang up at this time agricultural clubs of
political complexion, and where they existed in considerable
numbers they generally took the lead in the political activities
of the farmers' movement. Where the Grange had the field
practically to itself, as in Iowa and Minnesota, the restriction
in the constitution of the order as to political or partisan
activity was evaded by the simple expedient of holding meetings
"outside the gate," at which platforms were adopted, candidates
nominated, and plans made for county, district, and state
conventions.

In some cases the farmers hoped, by a show of strength, to
achieve the desired results through one or both of the old
parties, but they soon decided that they could enter politics
effectively only by way of a third party. The professional
politicians were not inclined to espouse new and radical issues
which might lead to the disruption of party lines. The outcome,
therefore, was the establishment of new parties in eleven of the
Western States during 1873 and 1874. Known variously as
Independent, Reform, Anti-Monopoly, or Farmers' parties, these
organizations were all parts of the same general movement, and
their platforms were quite similar. The paramount demands were:
first, the subjection of corporations, and especially of railroad
corporations, to the control of the State; and second, reform and
economy in government. After the new parties were well under way,
the Democrats in most of the States, being in a hopeless
minority, made common cause with them in the hope of thus
compassing the defeat of their hereditary rivals, the old-line
Republicans. In Missouri, however, where the Democracy had been
restored to power by the Liberal-Republican movement, the new
party received the support of the Republicans.

Illinois, where the farmers were first thoroughly organized into
clubs and Granges, was naturally the first State in which they
took effective political action. The agitation for railroad
regulation, which began in Illinois in the sixties, had caused
the new state constitution of 1870 to include mandatory
provisions directing the legislature to pass laws to prevent
extortion and unjust discrimination in railway charges. One of
the acts passed by the Legislature of 1871 in an attempt to carry
out these instructions was declared unconstitutional by the state
supreme court in January, 1873. This was the spark to the tinder.
In the following April the farmers flocked to a convention at the
state capital and so impressed the legislators that they passed
more stringent and effective laws for the regulation of
railroads. But the politicians had a still greater surprise in
store for them. In the elections of judges in June, the farmers
retired from office the judge who had declared their railroad law
unconstitutional and elected their own candidates for the two
vacancies in the supreme court and for many of the vacancies in
the circuit courts.

Now began a vigorous campaign for the election of farmers'
candidates in the county elections in the fall. So many political
meetings were held on Independence Day in 1873 that it was
referred to as the "Farmers' Fourth of July." This had always
been the greatest day of the farmer's year, for it meant
opportunity for social and intellectual enjoyment in the picnics
and celebrations which brought neighbors together in hilarious
good-fellowship. In 1873, however, the gatherings took on
unwonted seriousness. The accustomed spread-eagle oratory gave
place to impassioned denunciation of corporations and to the
solemn reading of a Farmers' Declaration of Independence. "When,
in the course of human events," this document begins in words
familiar to every schoolboy orator, "it becomes necessary for a
class of the people, suffering from long continued systems of
oppression and abuse, to rouse themselves from an apathetic
indifference to their own interests, which has become habitual .
. . a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that
they should declare the causes that impel them to a course so
necessary to their own protection." Then comes a statement of
"self-evident truths," a catalogue of the sins of the railroads,
a denunciation of railroads and Congress for not having redressed
these wrongs, and finally the conclusion:

"We, therefore, the producers of the state in our several
counties assembled . . . do solemnly declare that we will use all
lawful and peaceable means to free ourselves from the tyranny of
monopoly, and that we will never cease our efforts for reform
until every department of our Government gives token that the
reign of licentious extravagance is over, and something of the
purity, honesty, and frugality with which our fathers inaugurated
it, has taken its place.

"That to this end we hereby declare ourselves absolutely free and
independent of all past political connections, and that we will
give our suffrage only to such men for office, as we have good
reason to believe will use their best endeavors to the promotion
of these ends; and for the support of this declaration, with a
firm reliance on divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each
other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

This fall campaign of 1873 in Illinois broke up old party lines
in remarkable fashion. In some counties the Republicans and in
other counties the Democrats either openly joined the "Reformers"
or refrained from making separate nominations. Of the sixty-six
counties which the new party contested, it was victorious in
fifty-three. This first election resulted in the best showing
which the Reformers made in Illinois. In state elections, the new
party was less successful; the farmers who voted for their
neighbors running on an Anti-Monopoly ticket for lesser offices
hesitated to vote for strangers for state office.

Other Middle Western States at this time also felt the uneasy
stirring of radical political thought and saw the birth of third
parties, short-lived, most of them, but throughout their brief
existence crying loudly and persistently for reforms of all
description. The tariff, the civil service system, and the
currency, all came in for their share of criticism and of
suggestions for revision, but the dominant note was a strident
demand for railroad regulation. Heirs of the Liberal Republicans
and precursors of the Greenbackers and Populists, these
independent parties were as voices crying in the wilderness,
preparing the way for national parties of reform. The notable
achievement of the independent parties in the domain of
legislation was the enactment of laws to regulate railroads in
five States of the upper Mississippi Valley.* When these laws
were passed, the parties had done their work. By 1876 they had
disappeared or, in a few instances, had merged with the
Greenbackers. Their temporary successes had demonstrated,
however, to both farmers and professional politicians that if
once solidarity could be obtained among the agricultural class,
that class would become the controlling element in the politics
of the Middle Western States. It is not surprising, therefore,
that wave after wave of reform swept over the West in the
succeeding decades.

* See Chapter IV.


The independent parties of the middle seventies were distinctly
spontaneous uprisings of the people and especially of the
farmers, rather than movements instigated by politicians for
personal ends or by professional reformers. This circumstance was
a source both of strength and weakness. As the movements began to
develop unexpected power, politicians often attempted to take
control but, where they succeeded, the movement was checked by
the farmers' distrust of these self-appointed leaders. On the
other hand, the new parties suffered from the lack of skillful
and experienced leaders. The men who managed their campaigns and
headed their tickets were usually well-to-do farmers drafted from
the ranks, with no more political experience than perhaps a term
or two in the state legislature. Such were Willard C. Flagg,
president of the Illinois State Farmers' Association, Jacob G.
Vale, candidate for governor in Iowa, and William R. Taylor, the
Granger governor of Wisconsin.

Taylor is typical of the picturesque and forceful figures which
frontier life so often developed. He was born in Connecticut, of
parents recently emigrated from Scotland. Three weeks after his
birth his mother died, and six years later his father, a sea
captain, was drowned. The orphan boy, brought up by strangers in
Jefferson County, New York, experienced the hardships of frontier
life and developed that passion for knowledge which so frequently
is found in those to whom education is denied. When he was
sixteen, he had, enough of the rudiments to take charge of a
country school, and by teaching in the winter and working in the
summer he earned enough to enter Union College. He was unable to
complete the course, however, and turned to teaching in Ohio,
where he restored to decent order a school notorious for bullying
its luckless teachers. But teaching was not to be his career;
indeed, Taylor's versatility for a time threatened to make him
the proverbial Jack-of-all-trades: he was employed successively
in a grist mill, a saw mill, and an iron foundry; he dabbled in
the study of medicine; and finally, in the year which saw
Wisconsin admitted to the Union, he bought a farm in that State.
Ownership of property steadied his interests and at the same time
afforded an adequate outlet for his energies. He soon made his
farm a model for the neighborhood and managed it so efficiently
that he had time to interest himself in farmers' organizations
and to hold positions of trust in his township and county.

By 1873 Taylor had acquired considerable local political
experience and had even held a seat in the state senate. As
president of the State Agricultural Society, he was quite
naturally chosen to head the ticket of the new Liberal Reform
party. The brewing interests of the State, angered at a drastic
temperance law enacted by the preceding legislature, swung their
support to Taylor. Thus reenforced, he won the election. As
governor he made vigorous and tireless attempts to enforce the
Granger railroad laws, and on one occasion he scandalized the
conventional citizens of the State by celebrating a favorable
court decision in one of the Granger cases with a salvo of
artillery from the capitol.

Yet in spite of this prominence, Taylor, after his defeat for
reelection in 1875, retired to his farm and to obscurity. His
vivid personality was not again to assert itself in public
affairs. It is difficult to account for the fact that so few of
the farmers during the Granger period played prominent parts in
later phases of the agrarian crusade. The rank and file of the
successive parties must have been much the same, but each wave of
the movement swept new leaders to the surface.

The one outstanding exception among the leaders of the
Anti-Monopolists was Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota "the sage of
Nininger"--who remained a captain of the radical cohorts in every
agrarian movement until his death in 1901. A red-headed
aggressive Irishman, with a magnetic personality and a remarkable
intellect, Donnelly went to Minnesota from Pennsylvania in 1856
and speculated in town sites on a large scale. When he was left
stranded by the panic of 1857, acting upon his own principle that
"to hide one's light under a bushel is to extinguish it," he
entered the political arena. In Pennsylvania Donnelly had been a
Democrat, but his genuine sympathy for the oppressed made him an
opponent of slavery and consequently a Republican. In 1857 and
1858 he ran for the state senate in Minnesota on the Republican
ticket in a hopelessly Democratic county. In 1859 he was
nominated for lieutenant governor on the ticket headed by
Alexander Ramsey; and his caustic wit, his keenness in debate,
and his eloquence made him a valuable asset in the battle-royal
between Republicans and Democrats for the possession of
Minnesota. As lieutenant governor, Donnelly early showed his
sympathy with the farmers by championing laws which lowered the
legal rate of interest and which made more humane the process of
foreclosure on mortgages. The outbreak of the Civil War gave him
an opportunity to demonstrate his executive ability as acting
governor during Ramsey's frequent trips to Washington. In this
capacity he issued the first proclamation for the raising of
Minnesota troops in response to the call of President Lincoln.
Elected to Congress in 1862, he served three terms and usually
supported progressive legislation.

Donnelly's growing popularity and his ambition for promotion to
the Senate soon became a matter of alarm to the friends of
Senator Ramsey, who controlled the Republican party in the State.
They' determined to prevent Donnelly's renomination in 1868 and
selected William D. Washburn of Minneapolis to make the race
against him. In the spring of this year Donnelly engaged in a
controversy with Representative E. B. Washburn of Illinois, a
brother of W. D. Washburn, in the course of which the Illinois
congressman published a letter in a St. Paul paper attacking
Donnelly's personal character. Believing this to be part of the
campaign against him, the choleric Minnesotan replied in the
house with a remarkable rhetorical display which greatly
entertained the members but did not increase their respect for
him. His opponents at home made effective use of this affair, and
the outcome of the contest was a divided convention, the
nomination of two Republicans, each claiming to be the regular
candidate of the party, and the ultimate election of a Democrat.

Donnelly was soon ready to break with the old guard of the
Republican party in national as well as in state politics. In
1870 he ran for Congress as an independent Republican on a low
tariff platform but was defeated in spite of the fact that he
received the endorsement of the Democratic convention. Two years
later he joined the Liberal Republicans in supporting Greeley
against Grant. When the farmers' Granges began to spring up like
mushrooms in 1873, Donnelly was quick to see the political
possibilities of the movement. He conducted an extensive
correspondence with farmers, editors, and politicians of radical
tendencies all over the State and played a leading part in the
organization of the Anti-Monopoly party. He was elected to the
state senate in 1873, and in the following year he started a
newspaper, the Anti-Monopolist, to serve as the organ of the
movement.

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