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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




The directors of the Populist campaign proved to be no mean
political strategists. General Weaver himself toured the country,
accompanied by General Field when he was in the South and by Mrs.
Lease when he went to the Pacific coast. Numerous other men and
women addressed the thousands who attended the meetings, great
and small, all over the country. One unique feature of the
Populist campaign on the Pacific coast was the singing of James
G. Clark's People's Battle-Hymn, and other songs expressing the
hope and fears of labor in the field and factory. Everywhere it
was the policy of the new party to enlist the assistance of the
weaker of the old parties. In the South, the Populists, as a
rule, arrayed themselves with the Republicans against the old
Democracy. This provoked every device of ridicule, class
prejudice, and scorn, which the dominant party could bring to
bear to dissuade former Democrats from voting the People's
ticket. One Louisiana paper uttered this warning:

"Oily-tongued orators, in many cases the paid agents of the
Republican party, have for months been circulating among the
unsophisticated and more credulous classes, preaching their
heresies and teaching the people that if Weaver is elected
president, money may be had for the asking, transportation on the
railroad trains will be practically free, the laboring man will
be transferred from his present position and placed upon a throne
of power, while lakes filled with molasses, whose shores are
fringed with buckwheat cakes, and islands of Jersey butter rising
here and there above the surface, will be a concomitant of every
farm. The "forty-acres-and-a-mule" promises of the reconstruction
era pale into insignificance beside the glowing pictures of
prosperity promised by the average Populist orator to those who
support Weaver."

The Pensacola Address of the Populist nominees on September 17,
1892, which served as a joint letter of acceptance, was evidently
issued at that place and time partly for the purpose of
influencing such voters as might be won over by emphasizing the
unquestioned economic distress of most Southern farmers. If the
new party could substantiate the charges that both old parties
were the tools of monopoly and Wall Street, it might insert the
wedge which would eventually split the "solid South." Even before
the Pensacola Address, the state elections in Alabama and
Arkansas demonstrated that cooperation of Republicans with
Populists was not an idle dream. But, although fusion was
effected on state tickets in several States in the November
elections, the outcome was the choice of Cleveland electors
throughout the South.

As the Populists tried in the South to win over the Republicans,
so in the North and more especially the West they sought to
control the Democratic vote either by fusion or absorption. The
effort was so successful that in Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada,
and North Dakota, the new party swept the field with the
assistance of the Democrats. In South Dakota and Nebraska, where
there was no fusion, the Democratic vote was negligible and the
Populists ran a close second to the Republicans.

That the tide of agrarianism was gradually flowing westward as
the frontier advanced is apparent from the election returns in
the States bordering on the upper Mississippi. Iowa and Missouri,
where the Alliance had been strong, experienced none of the
landslide which swept out the Republicans in States further west.
In Minnesota the Populists, with a ticket headed by the veteran
Donnelly, ran a poor third in the state election, and the entire
Harrison electoral ticket was victorious in spite of the
endorsement of four Populist candidates by the Democrats. In the
northwestern part of the State, however, the new party was strong
enough to elect a Congressman over candidates of both the old
parties. In no Northern State east of the Mississippi were the
Populists able to make a strong showing; but in Illinois, the
success of John P. Altgeld, the Democratic candidate for
governor, was due largely to his advocacy of many of the measures
demanded by the People's party, particularly those relating to
labor, and to the support which he received from the elements
which might have been expected to aline themselves with the
Populists. On the Pacific coast, despite the musical campaign of
Clark, Mrs. Lease, and Weaver, California proved deaf to the
People's cause; but in Oregon the party stood second in the lists
and in Washington it ran a strong third.

More than a million votes, nearly nine per cent of the total,
were cast for the Populist candidates in this election--a record
for a third party the year after its birth, and one exceeded only
by that of the Republican party when it appeared for the first
time in the national arena in 1856. Twenty-two electoral votes
added point to the showing, for hitherto, since 1860, third-party
votes had been so scattered that they had affected the choice of
President only as a makeweight between other parties in closely
contested States.

A week after the elections General Weaver announced that the
Populists had succeeded far beyond their expectations. "The
Republican party," he asserted, "is as dead as the Whig party was
after the Scott campaign of 1852, and from this time forward will
diminish in every State of the Union and cannot make another
campaign . . . . The Populist will now commence a vigorous
campaign and will push the work of organization and education in
every county in the Union." There were those, however, who
believed that the new party had made a great mistake in having
anything to do with either of the old parties, that fusion,
particularly of the sort which resulted in combination tickets,
was a compromise with the enemy, and that more votes had been
lost than won by the process. This feeling found characteristic
expression in an editorial in a Minnesota paper:

Take an audience of republican voters in a schoolhouse where a
county fusion has taken place--or the press is full of the
electoral deal--and the audience will applaud the sentiments of
the speaker--but they wont vote a mongrel or democratic ticket! A
wet blanket has been thrown!

"Oh," says someone, "but the democratic party is a party of
reform!" Well, my friend, you better go down south and talk that
to the peoples party where they have been robbed of their
franchises by fraud and outrage!

Ah, and there the peoples party fused the republicans!!!

Oh whitewash! Where is thy lime-kiln, that we may swab off the
dark blemishes of the hour!! Aye,and on the whited wall, draw
thee a picture of power and beauty Cleveland, for instance,
thanking the peoples party for all the favors gratuitously
granted by our mongrel saints in speckled linen and green
surtouts.


As time gave perspective, however, the opinion grew that 1892 had
yielded all that could possibly have been hoped. The lessons of
the campaign may have been hard, but they had been learned, and,
withal, a stinging barb had been thrust into the side of the
Republican party, the organization which, in the minds of most
crusaders, was principally responsible for the creation and
nurture of their ills. It was generally determined that in the
next campaign Populism should stand upon its own feet; Democratic
and Republican votes should be won by conversion of individuals
to the cause rather than by hybrid amalgamation of parties and
preelection agreements for dividing the spoils. But it was just
this fusion which blinded the eyes of the old party leaders to
the significance of the Populist returns. Democrats, with a clear
majority of electoral votes, were not inclined to worry about
local losses or to value incidental gains; and Republicans felt
that the menace of the third party was much less portentous than
it might have been as an independent movement.



CHAPTER XI. THE SILVER ISSUE

A remarkable manifesto, dated February 22, 1895, summarized the
grievances of the Populists in these words:

"As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the
gold gamblers of Europe and America to accomplish the following
purposes: to fasten upon the people of the United States the
burdens of perpetual debt; to destroy the greenbacks which had
safely brought us through the perils of war; to strike down
silver as a money metal; to deny to the people the use of Federal
paper and silver--the two independent sources of money guaranteed
by the Constitution; to fasten upon the country the single gold
standard of Britain, and to delegate to thousands of banking
corporations, organized for private gain, the sovereign control,
for all time, over the issue and volume of all supplemental paper
currency."

Declaring that the "international gold ring" was summoning all
its powers to strike at the prosperity of the country, the
authors of this address called upon Populists to take up the
gauntlet and meet "the enemy upon his chosen field of battle,"
with the "aid and cooperation of all persons who favor the
immediate free coinage of silver at a ratio of 16-1, the issue of
all paper money by the Government without the intervention of
banks of issue, and who are opposed to the issue of
interest-bearing government bonds in the time of peace."

There was nothing new in this declaration of hostility to bank
issues and interest-bearing bonds, nor in this demand for
government paper money, for these prejudices and this
predilection had given rise to the "Ohio idea," by force of which
George H. Pendleton had hoped to achieve the presidency in 1868.
These same notions had been the essence of the platforms of the
Greenback party in the late seventies; and they had jostled
government ownership of railroads for first place in
pronunciamentos of labor and agricultural organizations and of
third parties all during the eighties. Free silver, on the other
hand, although not ignored in the earlier period, did not attain
foremost rank among the demands of the dissatisfied classes until
the last decade of the century and more particularly after the
panic of 1898.

Prior to 1874 or 1875 the "silver question" did not exist. In
1873 Congress, moved by the report of a commission it had
authorized, had demonetized silver; that is, it had provided that
the gold dollar should be the standard of value, and omitted the
standard silver dollar from the list of silver coins.* In this
consisted the "Crime of '73." At the time when this law was
enacted it had not for many years been profitable to coin silver
bullion into dollars because silver was undervalued at the
established ratio of sixteen to one. In 1867 the International
Monetary Conference of Paris had pronounced itself in favor of a
single gold standard of currency, and the principal countries of
Europe had preceded the United States in demonetizing silver or
in limiting its coinage. In 1874 as a result of a revision of the
statutes of the United States, the existing silver dollars were
reduced to the basis of subsidiary coins with only limited legal
tender value.

* The only reference to the dollar was to "the trade dollar" of
heavier weight, for use in the Orient.


The Act of 1873 was before Congress for four sessions; every
section, including that which made gold the sole standard of
value, was discussed even by those who later claimed that the Act
had been passed surreptitiously. Whatever opposition

developed at this time was not directed against the omission of
the silver dollar from the list of coins nor against the
establishment of a single standard of value. The situation was
quickly changed, however, by the rapid decline in the market
price of silver. The bimetallists claimed that this decline was a
result of the monetary changes; the advocates of the gold
standard asserted that it was due to the great increase in the
production of silver. Whatever the cause, the result was that,
shortly after silver had been demonetized, its value in
proportion to gold fell below that expressed by the ratio of
sixteen to one. Under these circumstances the producers could
have made a profit by taking their bullion to the mint and having
it coined into dollars, if it had not been for the Act of 1873.
It is not strange, therefore, that the people of those Western
States whose prosperity depended largely on the silver mining
industry demanded the remonetization of this metal. At the same
time the stringency in the money market and the low prices
following the panic of 1873 added weight to the arguments of
those who favored an increase in the quantity of currency in
circulation and who saw in the free and unlimited coinage of
silver one means of accomplishing this end. So powerful was the
demand, especially from the West, that in 1878 the Bland-Allison
Act, passed over the veto of President Hayes, provided for the
restoration of the silver dollar to the list of coins, with full
legal tender quality, and required the Treasury to purchase in
the open market from two to four million dollars' worth of
bullion each month. This compromise, however, was unsatisfactory
to those who desired the free coinage of silver, and it failed to
please the champions of the single standard.

For ten years the question of a choice between a single standard
or bimetallism, between free coinage or limited coinage of
silver, was one of the principal economic problems of the world.
International conferences, destined to have no positive results,
met in 1878 and again in 1881; in the United States Congress read
reports and debated measures on coinage in the intervals between
tariff debates. Political parties were split on sectional lines:
Western Republicans and Democrats alike were largely in favor of
free silver, but their Eastern associates as generally took the
other side. Party platforms in the different States diverged
widely on this issue; and monetary planks in national platforms,
if included at all, were so framed as to commit the party to
neither side. Both parties, however, could safely pronounce for
bimetallism under international agreement, since there was little
real prospect of procuring such an agreement. The minor parties
as a rule frankly advocated free silver.

In 1890, the subject of silver coinage assumed new importance.
The silverites in Congress were reenforced by representatives
from new States in the far West, the admission of which had not
been unconnected with political exigencies on the part of the
Republican party. The advocates of the change were not strong
enough to force through a free-silver bill, but they were able by
skillful logrolling to bring about the passage of the Silver
Purchase Act. This measure, frequently called the Sherman Law,*
directed the Secretary of the Treasury to purchase, with legal
tender Treasury notes issued for the purpose, 4,500,000 ounces of
pure silver each month at the market price. As the metal was
worth at that time about a dollar an ounce, this represented an
increase, for the time being, over the maximum allowed under the
Bland-Allison Act and more than double the minimum required by
that measure, which was all the Treasury had ever purchased. But
the Silver Purchase Act failed to check the downward trend in the
value of the metal. The bullion in a silver dollar, which had
been worth $1.02 in 1872, had declined to seventy-two cents in
1889. It rose to seventy-six in 1891 but then declined rapidly to
sixty in 1898, and during the next three years the intrinsic
value of a "cartwheel" was just about half its legal tender
value.

* John Sherman, then Secretary of Treasury, had a large share in
giving final form to the bill, which he favored only for fear of
a still more objectionable measure. See Sherman's Recollections,
pp. 1069, 1188.


Even under the Bland-Allison Act the Treasury Department had
experienced great difficulty in keeping in circulation a
reasonable proportion of the silver dollars and the silver
certificates which were issued in lieu of part of them, and in
maintaining a sufficient gold reserve to insure the stability of
the currency. When the Silver Purchase Act went into operation,
therefore, the monetary situation contributed its share to
conditions which produced the panic of 1893. Thereupon the silver
issue became more than ever a matter of nation-wide discussion.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific the country was flooded with
controversial writing, much of it cast in a form to make an
appeal to classes which had neither the leisure nor the training
to master this very intricate economic problem. W. H. Harvey's
Coin's Financial School was the most widely read campaign
document, although hundreds of similar pamphlets and books had an
enormous circulation. The pithy and plausible arguments of "Coin"
and his ready answers to questions supposedly put by prominent
editors, bankers, and university professors, as well as by J. R.
Sovereign, master workman of the Knights of Labor, tickled the
fancy of thousands of farmers who saw their own plight depicted
in the crude but telling woodcuts which sprinkled the pages of
the book. In his mythical school "the smooth little financier"
converted to silver many who had been arguing for gold; but--what
is more to the point--he also convinced hundreds of voters that
gold was the weapon with which the bankers of England and America
had slain silver in order to maintain high interest rates while
reducing prices, and that it was the tool with which they were
everywhere welding the shackles upon labor. "Coin" harped upon a
string to which, down to the time of the Spanish War, most
Americans were ever responsive--the conflict of interests between
England and the United States. "If it is claimed," he said, "we
must adopt for our money the metal England selects, and can have
no independent choice in the matter, let us make the test and
find out if it is true." He pointed to the nations of the earth
where a silver standard ruled: "The farmer in Mexico sells his
bushel of wheat for one dollar. The farmer in the United States
sells his bushel of wheat for fifty cents. The former is proven
by the history of the world to be an equitable price. The latter
is writing its history, in letters of blood, on the appalling
cloud of debt that is sweeping with ruin and desolation over the
farmers of this country."

When many men of sound reputation believed the maintenance of a
gold standard impossible what wonder that millions of farmers
shouted with "Coin": "Give the people back their favored primary
money! Give us two arms with which to transact business! Silver
the right arm and gold the left arm! Silver the money of the
people, and gold the money of the rich. Stop this legalized
robbery that is transferring the property of the debtors to the
possession of the creditors. . . Drive these money-changers from
our temples. Let them discover your aspect, their masters--the
people."

The relations of the Populist party to silver were at once the
result of conviction and expediency; cheap money had been one,
frequently the most prominent, of the demands of the farming
class, not only from the inception of the Greenback movement, as
we have seen, but from the very beginning of American history.
Indeed, the pioneer everywhere has needed capital and has
believed that it could be obtained only through money. The
cheaper the money, the better it served his needs. The Western
farmer preferred, other things being equal, that the supply of
currency should be increased by direct issue of paper by the
Government. Things, however, were not equal. In the Mountain
States were many interested in silver as a commodity whose
assistance could be counted on in a campaign to increase the
amount of the metal in circulation. There were, moreover, many
other voters who, while regarding Greenbackism as an economic
heresy, were convinced that bimetallism offered a safe and sound
solution of the currency problem. For the sake of added votes the
inflationists were ready to waive any preference as to the form
in which the cheap money should be issued. Before the actual
formation of the People's Party, the farmers' organizations had
set out to capture votes by advocating free silver. After the
election of 1892 free silver captured the Populist organization.

Heartened by the large vote of 1892 the Populist leaders prepared
to drive the wedge further into the old parties and even hoped to
send their candidates through the breach to Congress and the
presidency. A secret organization, known as the Industrial League
of the United States, in which the leaders were for the most part
the prominent officials of the People's Party, afforded for a
time through its lodges the machinery with which to control and
organize the silverites of the West and the South.

The most notable triumph of 1898 was the selection of Judge
William V. Allen, by the Democrats and Independents of Nebraska,
to represent that State in the United States Senate. Born in
Ohio, in a house which had been a station on the "underground
railroad" to assist escaping negroes, Allen at ten years of age
had gone with his family to Iowa. After one unsuccessful attempt,
he enlisted in the Union Army at the age of fifteen and served
from 1862 to the end of the War. When peace came, he resumed his
schooling, attended college, studied law, and in 1869 was
admitted to the bar. In 1884 he went to Madison County, Nebraska,
where seven years later he was elected district judge by the
Populists. Reared in a family which had been Republican, he
himself had supported this party until the campaign of 1890. "I
have always," said he, "looked upon a political party simply as a
means to an end. I think a party should be held no more sacred
than a man's shoes or garments, and that whenever it fails to
subserve the purposes of good government a man should abandon it
as cheerfully as he dispenses with his wornout clothes." As
Senator, Allen attracted attention not only by his powers of
physical endurance as attested by a fifteen-hour speech in
opposition to the bill for the repeal of the Silver Purchase Act,
but also by his integrity of character. "If Populism can produce
men of Senator Allen's mold," was the comment of one Eastern
review, "and then lift them into positions of the highest
responsibility, one might be tempted to suggest that an epidemic
of this Western malady would prove beneficial to some Eastern
communities and have salutary results for the nation at large."

In this same year (1893) Kansas became a stormcenter in national
politics once more by reason of a ,contest between parties for
control of the lower house of the legislature. The returns had
given the Republicans a majority in the assembly, but several
Republican seats had been contested on suspicion of fraud. If the
holders of these seats were debarred from voting, the Populists
could outvote the Republicans. The situation itself was fraught
with comedy; and the actions of the contestants made it nothing
less than farce. The assembly convened on the 10th of January,
and both Republican and Populist speakers were declared duly
elected by their respective factions. Loftily ignoring each
other, the two speakers went to the desk and attempted to conduct
the business of the house. Neither party left the assembly
chamber that night; the members slept on the benches; the
speakers called a truce at two in the morning, and lay down,
gavels in hand, facing each other behind the desk, to get what
rest they could. For over two weeks the two houses continued in
tumultuous session. Meanwhile men were crowding into Topeka from
all over the State: grim-faced Populist farmers, determined that
Republican chicanery should not wrest from them the fruits of the
election; equally determined Republicans, resolved that the
Populists should not, by charges of election fraud, rob them of
their hard-won majority. Both sides came armed but apparently
hoping to avoid bloodshed.

Finally, on the 15th of February, the Populist house retreated
from the chamber, leaving the Republicans in possession, and
proceeded to transact business of state in the corridor of the
Capitol. Populist sympathizers now besieged the assembly chamber,
immuring the luckless Republicans and incidentally a few women
who had come in as members of the suffrage lobby and were now
getting more of political equality than they had anticipated.
Food had to be sent through the Populist lines in baskets, or
drawn up to the windows of the chamber while the Populist mob sat
on the main stairway within. Towards evening, the Populist
janitor turned o$ the heat; and the Republicans shivered until
oil stoves were fetched by their followers outside and hoisted
through the windows. The Republican sheriff swore in men of his
party as special deputies; the Populist governor called out the
militia.

The situation was at once too absurd and too grave to be
permitted to continue. "Sockless" Jerry Simpson now counseled the
Populists to let the decision go to the courts. The judges, to be
sure, were Republican; but Simpson, ever resourceful, argued that
if they decided against the Populists, the house and senate could
then impeach them. Mrs. Lease, however, was sure that the
Populists would not have the courage to take up impeachment
proceedings, and the event proved her judgment correct. When the
struggle was finally brought to an end with the assistance of the
judicial machinery, the Republicans were left in control of the
house of representatives, while the Populists retained the
senate. In joint session the Republicans could be outvoted; hence
a silver Democrat, John Martin, was sent to Washington to work
with Peffer in the Senate for the common cause of silver.

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