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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




One disappointment after another, however, made it apparent that
little was to be expected from the Republican or the Democratic
party. Trust in individual politicians proved equally vain, since
promises easily made during a hot campaign were as easily
forgotten after the battle was over. One speaker before a state
convention of the Northwest Alliance put into words what many
were thinking: "There may be some contingencies when you may have
to act politically. If other parties will not nominate men
friendly to your interest, then your influence will have to be
felt in some way or you may as well disband. If all parties
nominate your enemies, then put some of your own friends into the
race and then stand by them as a Christian stands by his
religion." In other words, if nothing was to be gained by
scattering votes among the candidates of the old parties,
independent action remained the only course. Hence it was that
the late eighties saw the beginnings of another party of protest,
dominated by the farmers and so formidable as to cause the
machine politicians to realize that a new force was abroad in the
land.

After the Greenback party lost the place it had for a fleeting
moment obtained, labor once more essayed the role of a third
party. In 1886, for instance, the Knights of Labor and the trades
unions, for once cooperating harmoniously, joined forces locally
with the moribund Greenbackers and with farmers' organizations
and won notable successes at the polls in various parts of the
Union, particularly in the Middle Atlantic and Western States.
Emboldened by such victories, the discontented farmers were
induced to cast in their lot with labor; and for the next few
years, the nation saw the manifestoes of a party which combined
the demands of labor and agriculture in platforms constructed not
unlike a crazy-quilt, with Henry George, James Buchanan, and
Alson J. Streeter. presiding at the sewing-bee and attempting to
fit into the patchwork the diverse and frequently clashing shades
of opinion represented in the party. In 1888, Streeter,
ex-president of the Northwestern Alliance, was nominated for
President on the Union Labor ticket and received 146,935 votes in
27 of the 38 States. Despite its name and some support from the
Eastern workers, the new party was predominantly Western: more
than half of its total vote was polled in Kansas, Texas,
Missouri, and Arkansas. In the local elections of 1889 and 1890
the party still appeared but was obviously passing off the stage
to make way for a greater attraction.

The meager vote for Streeter in 1888 demonstrated that the
organized farmers were yet far from accepting the idea of
separate political action. President Macune of the Southern
Alliance probably voiced the sentiments of most of that order
when he said in his address to the delegates at Shreveport in
1887: "Let the Alliance be a business organization for business
purposes, and as such, necessarily secret, and as secret,
necessarily nonpolitical."* Even the Northwestern Alliance had
given no sign of official approval to the political party in
which so many of its own members played a conspicuous part.

* At the next annual meeting, in December, 1888, no change in
policy was enunciated: the plan for a national organ, unanimously
adopted by the Alliance, provided that it should be "strictly
non-partisan in politics and non-sectarian in religion."


But after the election of 1888, those who had continued to put
their trust in non-political organizations gradually awoke to the
fact that neither fulminations against transportation abuses,
monopolies, and the protective tariff, nor the lobbying of the
Southern Alliance in Washington had produced reforms. Even Macune
was moved to say at the St. Louis session in December, 1889: "We
have reached a period in the history of our Government when
confidence in our political leaders and great political
organizations is almost destroyed, and estrangement between them
and the people is becoming more manifest everyday." Yet the
formation of a new party under the auspices of the Alliance was
probably not contemplated at this time, except possibly as a last
resort, for the Alliance agreed to "support for office only such
men as can be depended upon to enact these principles into
statute laws, uninfluenced by party caucus." Although the demands
framed at this St. Louis convention read like a party platform
and, indeed, became the basis of the platform of the People's
Party in 1892, they were little more than a restatement of
earlier programs put forth by the Alliance and the Wheel. They
called for the substitution of greenbacks for national bank
notes, laws to "prevent the dealing in futures of all
agricultural and mechanical productions," free and unlimited
coinage of silver, prohibition of alien ownership of land,
reclamation from the railroads of lands held by them in excess of
actual needs, reduction and equalization of taxation, the issue
of fractional paper currency for use in the mails, and, finally,
government ownership and operation of the means of communication
and transportation.

The real contribution which this meeting made to the agrarian
movement was contained in the report of the committee on the
monetary system, of which C. W. Macune was chairman. This was the
famous sub-treasury scheme, soon to become the paramount issue
with the Alliance and the Populists in the South and in some
parts of the West. The committee proposed "that the system of
using certain banks as United States depositories be abolished,
and in place of said system, establish in every county in each of
the States that offers for sale during the one year $500,000
worth of farm products--including wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye,
rice, tobacco, cotton, wool, and sugar, all together--a
sub-treasury office." In connection with this office there were
to be warehouses or elevators in which the farmers might deposit
their crops, receiving a certificate of the deposit showing the
amount and quality, and a loan of United States legal tender
paper equal to eighty per cent of the local current value of the
products deposited. The interest on this loan was to be at the
rate of one per cent per annum; and the farmer, or the person to
whom he might sell his certificate, was to be allowed one year
in which to redeem the property; otherwise it would be sold at
public auction for the satisfaction of the debt. This project was
expected to benefit the farmers in two ways: it would increase
and make flexible the volume of currency in circulation; and it
would enable them to hold their crops in anticipation of a rise
in price.

The Northwestern Alliance also hesitated to play the role of a
third party, but it adopted a program which was virtually a party
platform. In place of the sub-treasury scheme as a means of
increasing the volume of currency in circulation and at the same
time enabling the farmer to borrow money at low rates of
interest, this organization favored the establishment of a land
loan bureau operated by the Government. Legal tender currency to
the amount of $100,000,000 or more if necessary, was to be placed
at the disposal of this bureau for loans upon the security of
agricultural land in amounts not to exceed one-half the value of
the land and at an interest rate of two per cent per annum. These
loans might run for twenty years but were to be payable at any
time at the option of the borrower.

With two strong organizations assuming all the functions of
political parties, except the nomination of candidates, the stage
was set in 1890 for a drama of unusual interest. One scene was
laid in Washington, where in the House and Senate and in the
lobbies the sub-treasury scheme was aired and argued. Lending
their strength to the men from the mining States, the Alliance
men aided the passage of the Silver Purchase Act, the nearest
approach to free silver which Congress could be induced to make.
By the familiar practice of "log-rolling," the silverites
prevented the passage of the McKinley tariff bill until the
manufacturers of the East were willing to yield in part their
objections to silver legislation. But both the tariff and the
silver bill seemed to the angry farmers of the West mere bones
thrown to the dog under the table. They had demanded FREE silver
and had secured a mere increase in the amount to be purchased;
they had called for a downward revision of the duties upon
manufactured products and had been given more or less meaningless
"protection" of their farm produce; they had insisted upon
adequate control of the trusts and had been presented with the
Sherman Act, a law which might or might not curb the monopolies
under which they believed themselves crushed. All the unrest
which had been gathering during the previous decade, all the
venom which had been distilled by fourteen cent corn and ten
per cent interest, all the blind striving to frustrate the
industrial consolidation which the farmer did not understand but
feared and hated, found expression in the political campaign of
1890.

The Alliance suited its political activities to local
necessities. In many of the Southern States, notably Florida,
Georgia, and the Carolinas, Alliance men took possession of the
Democratic conventions and forced both the incorporation of their
demands into the platforms and the nomination of candidates who
agreed to support those demands. The result was the control of
the legislatures of five Southern States by members or supporters
of the order and the election of three governors, one United
States Senator, and forty-four Congressmen who championed the
principles of the Alliance. In the West the Alliance worked by
itself and, instead of dominating an old party, created a new
one. It is true that the order did not formally become a
political party; but its officers took the lead in organizing
People's, Independent, or Industrial parties in the different
States, the membership of which was nearly identical with that of
the Alliance. Nor was the farmer alone in his efforts. Throughout
the whole country the prices of manufactured articles had
suddenly risen, and popular opinion, fastening upon the McKinley
tariff as the cause, manifested itself in a widespread desire to
punish the Republican party.

The events of 1890 constituted not only a political revolt but a
social upheaval in the West. Nowhere was the overturn more
complete than in Kansas. If the West in general was uneasy,
Kansas yeas in the throes of a mighty convulsion; it was swept as
by the combination of a tornado and a prairie fire. As a
sympathetic commentator of later days puts it, "It was a
religious revival, a crusade, a pentecost of politics in which a
tongue of flame sat upon every man, and each spake as the spirit
gave him utterance."* All over the State, meetings were held in
schoolhouses, churches, and public halls. Alliance picnics were
all-day expositions of the doctrines of the People's Party. Up
and down the State, and from Kansas City to Sharon Springs, Mary
Elizabeth Lease, "Sockless" Jerry Simpson, Anna L. Diggs, William
A. Peffer, Cyrus Corning, and twice a score more, were in
constant demand for lectures, while lesser lights illumined the
dark places when the stars of the first magnitude were
scintillating elsewhere.

* Elizabeth N. Barr, "The Populist Uprising", in William E.
Connelly's "Standard History of Kansas and Kansans", vol. II, p.
1148.


Mrs. Lease, who is reported to have made 160 speeches in the
summer and autumn of 1890, was a curiosity in American politics.
Of Irish birth and New York upbringing, she went to Kansas and,
before she was twenty years old, married Charles L. Lease. Twelve
years later she was admitted to the bar. At the time of the
campaign of 1890 she was a tall, mannish-looking, but not
unattractive woman of thirty-seven years, the mother of four
children. She was characterized by her friends as refined,
magnetic, and witty; by her enemies of the Republican party as a
hard, unlovely shrew. The hostile press made the most of popular
prejudice against a woman stump speaker and attempted by ridicule
and invective to drive her from the stage. But Mrs. Lease
continued to talk. She it was who told the Kansas farmers that
what they needed was to "raise less corn and more HELL!"

Wall Street owns the country [she proclaimed]. It is no longer a
government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but
a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street
.... Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our
laws are the output of a system that clothes rascals in robes and
honesty in rags. The parties lie to us, and the political.
speakers mislead us. We were told two years ago to go to work and
raise a big crop and that was all we needed. We went to work and
plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled,
and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of
it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef, and no price
at all for butter and eggs--that's what came of it . . . . The
main question is the money question . . . . We want money, land,
and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks,
and we want the power to make loans directly from the Government.
We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out. Land equal to
a tract 30 miles wide and 90 miles long has been foreclosed and
bought in by loan companies of Kansas in a year . . . . The
people are at bay, and the blood-hounds of money who have dogged
us thus far beware!


A typical feature of this campaign in Kansas was the contest
between Jerry Simpson and Colonel James R. Hallowell for a seat
in Congress. Simpson nicknamed his fastidious opponent "Prince
Hal" and pointed to his silk stockings as an evidence of
aristocracy. Young Victor Murdock, then a cub reporter, promptly
wrote a story to the effect that Simpson himself wore no socks at
all. "Sockless Jerry," "Sockless Simpson," and then "Sockless
Socrates" were sobriquets then and thereafter applied to the
stalwart Populist. Simpson was at this time forty-eight years
old, a man with a long, square-jawed face, his skin tanned by
exposure on shipboard, in the army, and on the farm, and his
mustache cut in a straight line over a large straight mouth. He
wore clerical eyeglasses and unclerical clothes. His opponents
called him clownish; his friends declared him Lincolnesque.
Failing to make headway against him by ridicule, the Republicans
arranged a series of joint debates between the candidates; but
the audience at the first meeting was so obviously partial to
Simpson that Hallowell refused to meet him again. The supporters
of the "sockless" statesman, though less influential and less
prosperous than those of Hallowell, proved more numerous and
triumphantly elected him to Congress. In Washington he acquitted
himself creditably and was perhaps disappointingly conventional
in speech and attire.

The outcome of this misery, disgust, anger, and hatred on the
part of the people of Kansas focused by shrewd common sense and
rank demagogism, was the election of five Populist Congressmen
and a large Populist majority in the lower house of the state
legislature; the Republican state officers were elected by
greatly reduced majorities. In Nebraska, the People's Independent
party obtained a majority of the members of the legislature and
reduced the Republican party to third place in the vote for
governor, the victory going to the Democrats by a very small
plurality. The South Dakota Independent party, with the president
of the state Alliance as its standard bearer, was unable to
defeat the Republican candidates for state offices but obtained
the balance of power in the legislature. In Indiana, Michigan,
and Minnesota, the new party movement manifested considerable
strength, but, with the exception of one Alliance Congressman
from Minnesota and a number of legislators, the fruits of its
activity were gathered by the Democrats.

Among the results of the new party movements in the Western
States in 1890 should be included the election of two United
States Senators, neither of whom was a farmer, although both were
ardent advocates of the farmers' cause. In South Dakota, where no
one of the three parties had a majority in the legislature, the
Reverend James H. Kyle, the Independent candidate, was elected to
the United State Senate, when, after thirty-nine ballots, the
Democrats gave him their votes. Kyle, who was only thirty-seven
years old at this time, was a Congregational minister, a graduate
of Oberlin College and of Alleghany Theological Seminary. He had
held pastorates in Colorado and South Dakota, and at the time of
his election was financial agent for Yankton College. A radical
Fourth of July oration which he delivered at Aberdeen brought him
into favor with the Alliance, and he was elected to the state
senate on the Independent ticket in 1890. Prior to this election
Kyle had been a Republican.

The other senatorial victory was gained in Kansas, where the
choice fell on William A. Peffer, whose long whiskers made him a
favorite object of ridicule and caricature in Eastern papers. He
was born in Pennsylvania in 1831, and as a young man had gone to
California during the gold boom. Returning after two years with a
considerable sum of money, he engaged in farming first in Indiana
and then in Missouri. When the Civil War began, his avowed
Unionist sentiments got him into trouble; and in 1862 he moved to
Illinois, where after a few months he enlisted in the army. At
the close of the war he settled in Tennessee and began the
practice of law, which he had been studying at intervals for a
number of years. He removed in 1870 to Kansas, where he played
some part in politics as a Republican, was elected to the state
senate, and served as a delegate to the national convention of
1880. After a number of newspaper ventures he became the editor
of the Kansas Farmer of Topeka in 1880 and continued in that
position until he was elected to the United States Senate. He was
a member of the Knights of Labor and was an ardent prohibitionist
and, above all, an advocate of currency inflation.

After the elections of November, 1890, came definite action in
the direction of forming a new national party. The Citizens'
Alliance, a secret political organization of members of the
Southern Alliance, held a convention with the Knights of Labor at
Cincinnati on May 19, 1891. By that time the tide of sentiment in
favor of a new party was running strong. Some fourteen hundred
delegates, a majority of whom were from the five States of Ohio,
Kansas, Indiana, Illinois, and Nebraska, attended the convention
and provided for a committee to make arrangements, in conjunction
with other reform organizations if possible, for a convention of
the party to nominate candidates for the presidential election of
1892. To those who were anxious to have something done
immediately the process of preparing the ground for a new third
party seemed long and laborious. Seen in its proper perspective,
the movement now appears to have been as swift as it was
inevitable. Once more, and with greater unanimity than ever
before, the farmers, especially in the West, threw aside their
old party allegiance to fight for the things which they deemed
not only essential to their own welfare but beneficial to the
whole country. Some aid, it is true, was brought by labor, some
by the mining communities of the mountain region, some 'by
various reform organizations; but the movement as a whole was
distinctly and essentially agrarian.



CHAPTER X. THE POPULIST BOMBSHELL OF 1892

The advent of the Populists as a full-fledged party in the domain
of national politics took place at Omaha in July, 1892. Nearly
thirteen hundred delegates from all parts of the Union flocked to
the convention to take part in the selection of candidates for
President and Vice-President and to adopt a platform for the new
party. The "Demands" of the Alliances supplied the material from
which was constructed a platform characterized by one
unsympathetic observer as "that furious and hysterical
arraignment of the present times, that incoherent intermingling
of Jeremiah and Bellamy." The document opened with a general
condemnation of national conditions and a bitter denunciation of
the old parties for permitting "the existing dreadful conditions
to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them."
Then followed three declarations: "that the union of the labor
forces of the United States this day consummated shall be
permanent and perpetual"; that "wealth belongs to him who creates
it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is
robbery"; and "that the time has come when the railroad
corporations will either own the people or the people must own
the railroads." Next came the demands. Heading these were the
monetary planks: "a national currency, safe, sound, and flexible,
issued by the general Government poly, a full legal tender for
all debts," with the subtreasury system of loans "or a better
system; free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the
present legal ratio of sixteen to one"; and an increase in the
circulating medium until there should be not less than $50 per
capita. With demands for a graduated income tax, for honesty and
economy in governmental expenditures, and for postal savings
banks, the financial part of the platform was complete. The usual
plank declaring for government ownership and control of railroads
and telegraphs now included the telephone systems as well, and
the land plank opposed alien ownership and demanded the return of
lands held by corporations in excess of their actual needs. Other
resolutions, adopted but not included in the platform, expressed
sympathy with labor's demands for shorter hours, condemned the
use of Pinkerton detectives in labor strife, and favored greater
restriction of immigration, the initiative and referendum, direct
election of United States senators, and one term for the
President and Vice-President.

The platform, according to a news dispatch of the time, was
"received with tremendous enthusiasm . . . and was read and
adopted almost before the people knew it was read. Instantly
there was enacted the mightiest scene ever witnessed by the human
race. Fifteen thousand people yelled, shrieked, threw papers,
hats, fans, and parasols, gathered up banners, mounted shoulders.
Mrs. Lease's little girl was mounted on Dr. Fish's shoulders--he
on a table on the high platform. The two bands were swamped with
noise . . . . Five minutes passed, ten minutes, twenty, still the
noise and hurrahs poured from hoarse throats." After forty
minutes the demonstration died out and the convention was ready
to proceed with the nomination of a presidential candidate.

No such unanimity marked this further procedure, however. Just
before the convention the leaders of the People's Party had
thrown the old parties into consternation by announcing that
Judge Walter Q. Gresham, of Indiana, would be offered the
nomination. Judge Gresham, a Republican with a long and honorable
public record, had been urged upon the Republican party in 1884
and 1888, and "Anti-Monopolists" had considered him with favor on
account of his opinions and decisions regarding the operation and
control of railroads. Just after the adoption of the platform a
telegram from the judge announced that he would accept a
unanimous nomination. Since unanimity was unobtainable, however,
his name was withdrawn later in the day.

This left the field to General James B. Weaver of Iowa and
Senator James H. Kyle of South Dakota. Weaver represented the
more conservative of the Populists, the old Alliance men. His
rival had the support of the most radical element as well as that
of the silver men from the mountain States. The silverites were
not inclined to insist upon their man, however, declaring that,
if the platform contained the silver plank, they would carry
their States for whatever candidate might be chosen. The old
campaigner proved the stronger, and he was nominated with General
James G. Field of Virginia for Vice-President. Unprejudiced
observers viewed Weaver's nomination as a tactical error on the
part of the Populist leaders: "Mr. Weaver has belonged to the
group of third-party 'come-outers' for so many years that his
name is not one to conjure with in either of the old camps; . . .
his name suggests too strongly the abortive third-party movements
of the past to excite much hope or enthusiasm. He is not exactly
the sort of a Moses who can frighten Pharaoh into fits or bring
convincing plagues upon the monopolistic oppressors of Israel.
The wicked politicians of the Republican and Democratic parties
breathed easier and ate with better appetites when the Gresham
bogie disappeared and they found their familiar old enemy,
General Weaver, in the lead of the People's movement."

It may be suspected, however, that even with Weaver at its head
this party, which claimed to control from two to three million
votes, and which expected to draw heavily from the discontented
ranks of the old-line organizations, was not viewed with absolute
equanimity by the campaign managers of Cleveland and of Harrison.
Some little evidence of the perturbation appeared in the
equivocal attitude of both the old parties with respect to the
silver question. Said the Democratic platform: "We hold to the
use of both gold and silver as the standard money of the country,
and to the coinage of both gold and silver without discrimination
against either metal or charge for mintage." The rival Republican
platform declared that "the American people, from tradition and
interest, favor bimetallism, and the Republican party demands the
use of both gold and silver as standard money." Each party
declared for steps to obtain an international agreement on the
question. The Republicans attempted to throw a sop to the labor
vote by favoring restriction of immigration and laws for the
protection of employees in dangerous occupations, and to the
farmer by pronouncements against trusts, for extended postal
service--particularly in rural districts--and for the reclamation
and sale of arid lands to settlers. The Democrats went even
further and demanded the return of "nearly one hundred million
acres of valuable land" then held by "corporations and
syndicates, alien and domestic."

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