Farmers' Alliance

Farmers' Alliance
First banner of the Southern Farmers' Alliance, organized on a statewide basis in Texas in 1878
Abbreviation	FA
Members	• National Farmers's Alliance (Northern) • National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union (White Southerners) • National Alliance and Cooperative Union (Black Southerners)
Part of	Farmers' Movement
Founded	1877
Dissolved	1890's
Preceded by	The Grange
Succeeded by	People's Party
Newspaper	see below
Ideology	Agrarianism Populism Progressivism Land reform Monetary reform
Political position	Left wing
Politics of United States Political parties Elections

The Farmers' Alliance was an organized agrarian economic movement among American farmers that developed and flourished ca. 1875. The movement included several parallel but independent political organizations — the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union among the white farmers of the South, the National Farmers' Alliance among the white and black farmers of the Midwest and High Plains, where the Granger movement had been strong, and the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union, consisting of the African American farmers of the South.

One of the goals of the organization was to end the adverse effects of the crop-lien system on farmers in the period following the American Civil War. The Alliance also generally supported the government regulation of the transportation industry, establishment of an income tax in order to restrict speculative profits, and the adoption of an inflationary relaxation of the nation's money supply as a means of easing the burden of repayment of loans by debtors. The Farmers' Alliance moved into politics in the early 1890s under the banner of the People's Party, commonly known as the "Populists."

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CCUS 26: The Gilded Age Hi, I’m John Green, this is CrashCourse U.S. history, and today we’re going to continue our look at the Gilded Age by focusing on political science. Mr. Green, Mr. Green, so it’s another history class where we don’t actually talk about history? Oh, Me From the Past, your insistence on trying to place academic exploration into little boxes creates a little box that you yourself will live in for the rest of your life if you don’t put your interdisciplinary party hat on. So the Gilded Age takes its name from a book by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that was called The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. It was published in 1873 and it was not that successful, but while The Gilded Age conjures up visions of fancy parties and ostentatious displays of wealth, the book itself was about politics, and it gives a very negative appraisal of the state of American democracy at the time. Which shouldn’t come as a huge surprise coming from Twain, whose comments about Congress included, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” And also, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly Native American criminal class except Congress.” So when faced with the significant changes taking place in the American economy after the Civil War, America’s political system both nationally and locally dealt with these problems in the best way possible: by becoming incredibly corrupt. intro Stan says I have to take off my party hat. Rrrr rrrr rrrrr.... So House Speaker Tip O’Neill once famously said that all politics is local and although that’s not actually true, I am going to start with local politics today, specifically with one of America’s greatest inventions, the urban political machine. So a political machine is basically an organization that works to win elections so that it can exercise power. The most famous political machine was New York City’s Tammany Hall, which dominated Democratic party politics in the late 19th century, survived until the 20th, and is keenly associated with corruption. Oh, it’s already time for the Mystery Document? This is highly unorthodox, Stan. Well, the rules here are simple. I guess the author of the Mystery Document. I’m usually wrong and I get shocked with the shock pen. Alright, let’s see what we’ve got here. “My party’s in power in the city, and it’s going to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight. Of course it is. That’s honest graft.” Stan, I know this one. It’s about machine politics. It’s from New York. It doesn’t say it’s from New York, but it is because it is George Plunkitt. Yes! How do you like them apples? Oh, you wanna know the name of the book? It’s “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.” Stan, transition me back to the desk with a Libertage, please. Plunkitt became famous for writing a book describing the way that New York City’s government actually worked, but he was a small fish compared with the most famous shark-like machine politician of the day, William “Boss” Tweed, seen here with a head made of money. “Boss” Tweed basically ran New York in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and his greatest feat of swindling helps explain how the machine system worked. It revolved around the then-new County Courthouse that now houses the New York City Department of Education. Building the courthouse was initially estimated to cost around $250,000, but ended up costing $13 million by the time it was finished in 1871. Included in that cost was a bill of $180,000 for three tables and forty chairs, $1.5 million for lighting fixtures, and $41,000 for brooms and cleaning supplies. A plasterer received $500,000 for his initial job and then $1 million to repair his shoddy work. The standard kickback in these situations was that Tammany Hall received two dollars for every one dollar received by the contractor. That may seem like a bad deal for contractors, but remember: That plasterer still got to keep half a million dollars, which is worth about $9 million in today’s money. Now of course that makes it sound like political machines were pure evil, especially if you were a taxpayer footing the bill for that courthouse. But machines also provided valuable services to immigrants and other poor people in cities. As Plunkitt explained, Tammany could help families in need: “I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up until they get things running again.” In return for this help, Tammany expected votes so that they could stay in power. Staying in power meant control of city jobs as well as city contracts. Plunkitt claimed to know “every big employer in the district – and in the whole city, for that matter --- and they ain’t in the habit of saying no to me when I ask them for a job.” But with all the corruption, sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Fortunately Tammany politicians could always fall back on fraud. Tammany found bearded men to vote, then took them to the barber to shave off the beard, but left the moustache, so that they could vote a second time. And then, they would shave off the ‘stache so they could vote for a third. And then of course, there was always violence and intimidation. By the end of the century a Tammany regular lamented the good old days when, “It was wonderful to see my men slug the opposition to preserve the sanctity of the ballot.” But, corruption wasn’t limited to big cities like New York and Chicago. Some of the biggest boondoggles involved the United States Congress and the executive branch under president Ulysses Grant. The first big scandal, dubbed the “King of Frauds” by the New York Sun, involved Credit Mobilier, the construction company that did most of the road building for the Union Pacific Railroad. This two pronged accusation involved, first: overcharging the public for construction costs and siphoning off profits to Credit Mobilier, and second: bribery of Congressmen. Now, this second charge was, of course, much juicier and also more partisan because only Republican congressmen, including the Speaker of the House, were implicated in it. Eventually Massachusetts Congressman Oakes Ames was found guilty of giving bribes, but no one was ever found guilty of receiving those bribes. As you can imagine, that did wonders for the reputation of Congress. The second major scandal involved the so-called Whiskey Ring, which was a group of distillers in St. Louis who decided that they didn’t like paying excise taxes on their product, perhaps a slightly more noble cause than that of the 2009 Bling Ring, who just wanted to dress like Paris Hilton. John McDonald, a Grant administration official, helped distillers reduce their taxes by intentionally undercounting the number of kegs of booze. But then in 1875, the tax evasion grew out of control. And McDonald eventually confessed and was convicted, thereby tainting the presidency with corruption just as Credit Mobilier had tainted Congress. That leaves the Supreme Court untainted, but don’t worry, the Dred Scott decision is worth at least, like, eighty years of tainting. So with all this distrust in government, after Grant served two terms, presidential elections featured a series of one-termers: Hayes, Garfield (whose term was filled out by Chester Arthur after Garfield was assassinated), Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and then Cleveland again. McKinley, who was elected twice, but then he was assassinated. As for their parties, Gilded Age Republicans favored high tariffs, low government spending, paying off national debt and reducing the amount of paper money – or greenbacks – in circulation. Democrats opposed the tariffs and were often linked to New York bankers and financiers. In short, both parties were pro-business, but they were pro-different-businesses. Despite that and the widespread corruption, some national reform legislation actually did get passed in the Gilded Age. The Civil Service Act of 1883 – prompted by Garfield’s assassination by a disgruntled office seeker – created a merit system for 10% of federal employees, who were chosen by competitive examination rather than political favoritism. But, this had an unintended effect. It made American politicians much more dependent on donations from big business rather than small donations from grateful political appointees, but, you know, nice idea. And then in 1890 the Sherman Anti-Trust act forbade combinations and practices that restrained trade, but again it was almost impossible to enforce this against the monopolies like U.S. Steel. More often it was used against labor unions, which were seen to restrain trade in their radical lobbying for, like, health insurance and hard hats. But all in all the national Congress was pretty dysfunctional at the end of the 19th century, stop me if that sounds familiar. So state governments expanded their responsibility for public health and welfare. Cities invested in public works, like transportation, and gas, and later, electricity, and the movement to provide public education continued. Some northern states even passed laws limiting the workday to 8 hours. “What is this, France?” is what courts would often say when striking those laws down. Reform legislation was less developed in the South, but they were busy rolling back reconstruction and creating laws that limited the civil rights of African Americans, known as Jim Crow Laws. In the west, farmers became politically motivated over the issue of freight rates. Wait, are we talking about railroads? Let’s go to the ThoughtBubble. In the 1870s, farmers formed the Grange movement to put pressure on state governments to establish fair railroad rates and warehouse charges. Railroads in particular tended to be pretty monopolistic: They owned the track going through town, after all, so it was hard for farmers to negotiate fair shipping prices. The Grange Movement eventually became the Farmer’s Alliance movement, which also pushed for economic cooperation to raise prices, but was split into Northern and Southern wings that could never really get it together. The biggest idea to come out of the Farmers Alliance was the subtreasury plan. Under this plan, farmers would store grain in government warehouses and get low-rate government loans to buy seed and equipment, using the stored grain as collateral. This would allow farmers to bypass the banks who increasingly came to be seen, along with the railroads, as the source of all the farmers’ troubles. Eventually these politically motivated farmers and their supporters grew into a political party, the People’s Party or Populists. In 1892 they held a convention in Omaha and put forth a remarkably reform minded plan, particularly given that this was put forth in Omaha, which included: The Sub-Treasury Plan, (which didn’t exactly happen, although the deal farmers ended up with was probably better for them) Government Ownership of Railroads (which sort of happened, if you count Amtrak) Graduated Income Tax (which did happen, after the passage of the 16th amendment) Government Control of the Currency (which happened with the creation of the Federal Reserve System) Recognition of the Rights of Laborers to Form Unions (which happened both at the state and federal level) and Free Coinage of Silver to produce more money, which we’ll get to in a second The People’s Party attempted to appeal to a broad coalition of “producing classes” especially miners and industrial workers, and it was particularly successful with those groups in Colorado and Idaho. As the preamble to the party platform put it: “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the Legislatures, the congress and touches even the ermine of the bench … From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes – tramps and millionaires.” Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, some western states were so Populist, they even granted women the right to vote in the 1890s, which added tremendously to the Populist’s electoral power. But most American voters stuck with the two main parties. Industrial workers never really joined in large numbers because the Populist calls for free coinage of silver would lead to inflation, especially in food prices, and that would hurt urban laborers. But if it hadn’t been for that threat of silver inflation, we might have three major political parties in the U.S. today. Or at least two different ones. Stupid inflation, always ruining everything. Populist leaders also struggled to unify because racism. Some Populist leaders, like Tom Watson, argued that black and white poor farmers were in the same boat, but Southern populists were not inclined to take up the fight against segregation, and even Watson himself later began spouting anti-Semitic rhetoric. But, in the halcyon Populist days of 1892, their presidential candidate, James Weaver, gained 1 million votes as a third party candidate. He carried 5 western states and got 22 electoral votes, which is better than Mondale did. But the best known Populist candidate was actually the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, who once spoke of America as being crucified on a cross of gold, firmly supported free coinage of silver in the hopes that increasing the amount of money in circulation would raise prices for farmers and make it easier for people to pay off their debts. Williams Jennings Bryan is probably better known for the anti-evolution stance he took in the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” where he was up against none other than Clarence Darrow. But he did almost become president. So, the Populists were really wary of Bryan as a Democrat, because they feared that their ideas would be reduced to simply “free silver,” but they voted for him anyway. But Bryan still lost the 1896 election to William McKinley in what has become known as the first modern political campaign, because the business classes gave McKinley’s campaign an unprecedented $10 million. Which these days will buy you nine ads in Iowa. But back then, it won you an entire presidential election. He won the electoral college in a landslide 271-176. Bryan’s defeat in 1896 effectively put an end to the Populist Party. The corruption in government, both federal and local, continued, and new journalists called Muckrakers began exposing it in the press. Even though they were defeated at the polls, Populist ideas, especially direct election of senators and a progressive income tax, quickly became mainstream. Now, these days we don’t necessarily associate those ideas with Populists, which suggests that maybe they were right to worry about hitching their wagon to Bryan’s star. But in the end, would you rather have your name survive or see your ideas enacted? But of course many of the problems that the Populists were concerned with persisted, as did the scourge of Jim Crow. We’ll discuss those next week when we look at the Progressive Era. Thanks for watching. Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko. The associate producer is Danica Johnson. The show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer, Rosianna Rojas, and myself. And our graphics team is Thought Café. Okay, I’ll make the transition, but I think you’ll want to keep filming this. Every week there’s a new caption for the Libertage. If you’d like to suggest one in comments, you can do so where you can also ask questions about today’s video that will be answered by our team of historians. Thank you for watching Crash Course and as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome. Gilded Age Politics -

Background

Agricultural crisis in the US Midwest and Plains

The quest to achieve a First transcontinental railroad across the U.S. was delayed somewhat by the American Civil War before being finally completed in May 1869. There followed a rush to complete additional railway lines to open up new frontier areas for economic development, a situation in which the United States government and the great railroad companies of the day maintained a common interest. Rather than directly undertaking railroad construction as a public works project of the federal government, Congress granted cash loans and grants of public land to subsidize construction.^[1] Some 129 million acres (52.2 million hectares) of public land was ultimately transferred from public ownership to the privately owned railways as part of this process.^[2]

A great part of this massive stockpile of land needed to be converted into cash by the railways to finance their building activities, since railroad construction was a costly undertaking. New settlement had to be attracted to the virgin lands west of the Missouri River, which had been previously regarded by the public as worthless to the needs of agriculture due to insufficiencies of the soil as well as the arid climate.^[3] Millions of advertising dollars were spent by the railway companies promoting the agricultural development of the land which they had to sell.^[4] This effort was to be rewarded, particularly after the Panic of 1873 left many unemployed and seeking a new start.^[4] Settlers began to flood into the Midwest and Northern Great Plains in response to the railway companies' blandishments.

Populations skyrocketed. The state of Kansas grew from a population of just under 365,000 to nearly a million people during the 1870s.^[5] The number of inhabitants in Nebraska nearly tripled, rising to nearly half a million.^[5] Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakota Territory showed parallel population gains.^[5] New counties, villages, and towns sprang up by the hundreds throughout the region and a speculative bubble emerged around the buying and selling of farmland and urban lots.^[6] Population continued to surge throughout the region well into the decade of the 1880s.^[6]

Unfortunately for those who chose to attempt to farm new lands in such places as Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Eastern Colorado, the unusually rainy years of the early 1880s which had buoyed land prices gave way to a protracted drought beginning in the summer of 1887, bringing an end to the giddy, speculative boom.^[7] With crops failing, artificially inflated land prices plummeted; Eastern capital began to withdraw from the region.^[8] Banks collapsed and credit dried up.^[8] A decade of hard times followed, marked by the abandonment of entire communities.^[9] A sense of deep discontent with the current state of affairs was felt by the farmers who remained.

Agricultural crisis in the southeastern US

The agrarian and plantation-based economy of the Southern United States was virtually destroyed by the American Civil War. Those who had their fortunes invested in Confederate bonds and currency saw them lost, as did those whose wealth was tied up in the ownership of African American slaves.^[10] Great landed estates were broken up or rendered unworkable by the lack of a free labor supply and the flood of land sold on the marked depressed prices and reduced the economic possibilities of those who counted their dollars in acres.^[11]

The region faced enormous costs to replace the buildings destroyed in the war and the factories looted.^[12] The capacity of the gutted financial market to make loans was grossly insufficient for the needs of the region, exemplified by the 123 counties in Georgia with no banks whatsoever even in 1895.^[13] Merchants, finding a sellers' market, extracted extraordinary profits through inflated prices and usurious credit terms.

A new mode of production replaced the slave-based large-scale agriculture of the pre-war years. Now it would be small-scale agrarian enterprise that would proliferate and the emergence of the so-called "share system" or "cropping system," in which non-landowners paid rent for the use of the land they farmed in the form of a fixed percentage of the output generated.^[14] This system in theory served the needs of landowners and poor farmers alike, as the sharecroppers would have the incentive to produce more and benefit from increased output while landowners would be provided with a labor source to produce upon the land they held without the necessity of paying cash wages.^[15]

In practice, however, a system of virtual slavery emerged, in which poor whites and freed blacks became enmeshed in the usury of merchants and landowners providing essential supplies on credit. A crop-lien system emerged in which future crops would be mortgaged to merchants or landowners (often one and the same) in exchange for credit for current purchases.^[16] Written contracts made these loans legally enforceable and those so enmeshed frequently found themselves forced to pay inflated prices at high rates of interest.^[17] If the value of the credit exceeded the cash value of the crop, the arrangement was automatically rolled over for another year and a never-ending cycle amounting to a condition of perpetual servitude resulted.^[16]

Moreover, this crop-lien system contributed to the establishment of a cotton monoculture, as merchants demanded this easily storable, readily marketable commodity to be produced for the satisfaction of debt.^[18] Not accidentally, the requirement by merchants for cotton production made production of adequate food and fodder for sustenance virtually impossible, further deepening the debt of the farmer to his merchant-creditor.^[18] A sense of deep discontent with the current state of affairs was felt by the small-holding and tenant farmers of the South.

Organizational histories

The Northern Alliance

The National Farmers' Alliance, commonly known as the "Northern Alliance," was established on March 21, 1877, by a group of members of the Grange movement from New York state.^[19] The group sought to organize in order to fight what they deemed the unfair practices of the railroad transportation mill, for the reform of the tax system, and for the legalization of Grange-sponsored insurance companies.^[19]

This first organization proved largely ineffectual but does seem to have provided the inspiration for the first effective Alliance group, which was established on April 15, 1880, by newspaper editor Milton George in Chicago.^[20] George's paper, Western Rural, gave the new organization public exposure and inspired the establishment of chartered local organizations, beginning in Filley, Nebraska and soon spreading throughout the American Midwest.^[21] Dues were not collected in the earliest phase of Northern Alliance's existence, with editor George financing the group's launch — a fact which spurred growth.^[22] Within a month more than 200 locals had been chartered, with claims made that 1,000 local groups had been established by the end of the organization's first year.^[23]

The Northern Alliance made its greatest inroads in areas which were stricken by drought in 1881, including the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota.^[23] Growth was slower in states less severely affected, including as Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.^[23] Local organizations proved easier to launch than did statewide bodies and in its first years the Alliance was dominated by these local groups, with state-level bodies floundering.^[23] The locals did organize themselves at the state level, however, with delegates gathering in founding conventions in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan between January 1881 and the middle of 1882.^[24]^[25]

The new movement strove to protect farmers from the capitalistic and industrial powers of monopolies (such as railroads) and unsympathetic public officials.^[26] The Northern Alliance sought to enact a more equitable tax system on mortgage property, pass income tax law, abolish free travel passes to public officials, and regulate interstate commerce by Congress.^[26]

By the time of the organization's 2nd Annual Convention, held early in October 1881, the organization claimed a membership of 24,500.^[27] A year hence, at the 3rd Convention of October 1882, some 2,000 locals and a total membership of 100,000 was claimed.^[27] This proved to be a high-water mark for the organization, however, as prosperity returned to Midwestern agriculture in 1883 and the 4th Convention was poorly attended and no convention was held at all in 1884.^[27] With work to do and money to be made, early enthusiasm in the new radical reform organization fell precipitously. Even National Secretary Milton George lost heart, publishing less and less news of the Farmers' Alliance in his newspaper's pages.^[27] State and local organizations became moribund.^[27]

A fall of wheat and livestock prices following the harvest of 1884 reinvigorated the Farmers' Alliance and activity again exploded.^[27] In 1885 a new Alliance group was established for the Dakota Territory, where wheat reigned supreme, followed by a state organization for Colorado, as interest spread westward.^[28] New national principles were composed and mailed out to the entire readership of Western Rural and a 5th Convention was successfully held in November 1886.^[28] A system of dues was established, thereby funding and energizing the state organizations.^[28]

The program of the organization became steadily more radical in this interval, including demands for government ownership of one or more of the intercontinental railroad lines as well as for unlimited coinage of silver at its historic ratio to gold.^[29] Connections began to be forged with the Knights of Labor, the leading industrial trade union organization of the day.^[30] Ten state organizations were fully functioning by 1890 and new members flooded into the Farmers' Alliance at the rate of 1,000 per week.^[30] Kansas alone boasted 130,000 members, closely followed by Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, and the national office optimistically projected 2 million members in the near future.^[30]

The idea emerged to put this enthusiastic and growing membership to work to advance the group's goals through a political organization.

The Southern Alliance

Dr. Charles W. Macune, a top leader of the Southern Farmers' Alliance.

The roots of the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union, commonly known as the "Southern Alliance," dated back to approximately 1875, when a group of ranchers in Lampasas County, Texas organized as a Texas Alliance as a means of cooperating to apprehend horse thieves, round up stray animals, and cooperatively purchase large stores of supplies.^[31] This group gradually moved into more extensive action in response to the perceived abuses towards smaller operators engaged in by land speculators and massive cattle operations.^[31] The organization grew and was organized on a statewide basis in 1878 but was almost immediately killed when it attempted to enter the political field and was torn asunder by antagonistic factions favoring the Democratic and Greenback parties.^[31]

In 1879 the influence of the Northern Alliance made itself felt in Parker County, Texas when a new group was established there by a former member of the Lampasas County Alliance group.^[31] The Northern Alliance's constitution and its precedent of non-partisan activity were closely followed and in short order a dozen local groups had been established upon that model.^[31] This Texas group was incorporated in 1880 as the "Farmers' State Alliance" and it subsequently expanded throughout the Central and Northern parts of the state and into the neighboring Indian Territory (today's Oklahoma).^[32] By the end of 1885 this growing organization claimed a membership of approximately 50,000, scattered between more than 1200 local groups, known as "Sub-Alliances."^[33]

During the early 1880s this Texas Farmers' State Alliance was considered to be a loose part of the Northern Alliance organization.^[34] Owing to the lack of dues of the national group in this period, such a relationship was more theoretical than practical. The adoption of a dues system in the middle part of the decade forced the Texas group to closely consider its organizational affiliation.

Charles W. Macune, the son of a Methodist preacher, emerged as the leader of this Texas organization when he was elected Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Texas organization in 1886.^[35] Macune immediately stifled an impending split of the organization threatened by a faction inside the Texas Alliance pushing to launch the group as an independent political party.^[36] He then united the group around a vision of organizational independence from the Northern Alliance coupled with a program of active expansion.^[34] As a first step towards this end, Macune negotiated a merger with the Louisiana Farmers' Union, a group established in 1880 and transformed into a secret society in 1885.^[37] The groups were joined under a new name, the National Farmers' Alliance and Cooperative Union of America.^[37]

This was one of the first steps in unifying farmers along the American cotton belt. The demands of the Southern Alliance were similar to those of its northern counterpart. They pressed for abolition of national banks and monopolies, free coinage of silver, issuance of paper money (Greenback or Fiat money), loans on land, establishment of sub-treasuries, income tax acts, and revision of tariffs.

In 1889 the National Farmers' Alliance and Cooperative Union united with a large rival organization known as the Agricultural Wheel to form a new group called the National Farmers' and Laborers' Union of America. Negotiations were begun to further unify forces by joining this newly expanded Southern Alliance with its Northern Alliance counterpart. While merger of the two organizations would have created a larger and more powerful organization, unity was stalled over terms of the union, including the composition of the governing bodies, divergent views on non-white membership, and disagreement over program owing to divergence between Southern and Northern farmers' economic interests.^[38]

At its December 1889 convention in St. Louis, the National Farmers' and Laborers' Union of America changed its name again, this time to the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union — the name by which it would be known for the rest of its existence.

The Colored Alliance

The Southern Farmers' Alliance was unapologetic about its color bar banning black farmers from membership. The Alliance's National Secretary-Treasurer J.H. Turner, himself the son of a former slave-owner, wrote that in fact the liberated slaves' "worst enemies" had been the Northern carpetbaggers of the Reconstruction era, who "promised each head of family forty acres of land and a mule if only he would vote right."^[39]

Moreover, Turner noted, the liberated slaves of the South had been promised "social equality with the whites, and a great many other things which, since he has found out better, he neither needs nor wants."^[40] Turner argued that relations between the races were fundamentally benevolent now that black farmers had recognized that "his old master" had "almost invariably" been on hand to provide "the best advice" regarding agricultural problems and had very often been the one to "protect and defend him in his business affairs."^[41]

Such a view of the indebted and impoverished black sharecroppers of the South, also typical of Southern whites of the era, did nothing to reassure African-American farmers that their concerns were shared by their European-American counterparts. With their presence from the Southern Farmers' Alliance barred due to racism, African-American farmers were forced to establish an organization of their own.

In December 1886 a group of black farmers organized themselves in Houston County, Texas as the Alliance of Colored Farmers of Texas — forerunner of the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union, commonly known as the "Colored Farmers' Alliance."^[42] A declaration of principles was adopted which identified the new organization as a mutual aid society dedicated to education, improvement of agricultural efficiency, and the raising of funds for collective benefits for "sick or disabled members, or their distressed families."^[42] The initial form of the organization was that of a secret society.^[43]

In February 1887 the group was chartered under the laws of Texas as the Alliance of Colored Farmers.^[43] This was followed by a convention in Lovelady, Texas held on March 14, 1888, at which the group was redefined as national in scope under the name Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union.^[43] A national newspaper was launched by the organization called The National Alliance.^[44]

The organization rapidly spread across the American South, establishing a presence in every Southern state of the union.^[45]

The Colored Farmers' Alliance sponsored cooperative stores at which members could obtain necessary goods at reduced prices, published newspapers which attempted to educate members of the organization as to new farming techniques, and in some places raised money to help support the underfunded segregated black schools of the region.^[45]

The Colored Farmers' Alliance's organizational strength peaked in 1891, with some 1.2 million members claimed.^[45]

Opposition

The Alliance was opposed by a group called the Knights of Reciprocity, founded in Garden City, Kansas in winter of 1890 by a group of Republicans including Jesse Taylor, D. M. Frost and S. R. Peters. By 1895 the Knights claimed 125,000 members and had lodges in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Ohio. Founders included Masons, Oddfellows and Pythians. Its program included trade reciprocity, protection of American industries, just pensions for Union veterans and disenfranchisement of those who accepted or offered a bribe for a vote.^[46]

The Knights were adamant in their opposition to what they called the Democratic Union Labor - Farmers Alliance combination in politics. One of their circulars from 1891 reads:^[47]

The only way for the farmers to meet the Alliance secret political society is with a secret society the object of which shall not be to nominate men for office, but to assist in educating the people and making them thoroughly acquainted with the wants of all the people and the fallacies of the Alliance "calamity" howlers, who are traveling from State to State, county to county, town to town, township to township, schoolhouse to schoolhouse, not for the good of the people, but for the money they make and in hopes of political promotion. The people should organize at once in opposition to this gigantic scheme.

Agenda and achievements

As a widespread movement consisting of three independent branches and existing for more than two decades, reduction of the Farmers' Alliance to a few universal objectives is problematic. As Southern Alliance leader C.W. Macune noted in 1891, the agenda of the organization was both amorphous and dynamic, a response to local problems and conditions:

No man ... can give a perfect definition of the purposes of the Farmers' Alliance; and he who attempts a definition simply gives his own personal conception of the subject, which may be more or less valuable, according to whether his field of observation and his accuracy of judgment are good or otherwise. In a broad sense, the purposes of the Farmers' Alliance ... cover today a remedy for every evil known to exist and afflict farmers and other producers, and in the future should cover every contingency that may arise, presenting evil to be combatted by means of organization; they are accumulative and ever changing, as the enemy assumes a new guise.^[48]

Included among these concerns to greater or lesser extent were the question of exploitative terms of credit, insufficient money supply to sustain the economic needs of society, super-profits extracted by merchants, millers, and other middlemen, systemically unfavorable terms of trade levied upon small-scale agricultural shippers by the railroad industry, negative impacts on land prices caused by speculation.

The accomplishments of the Farmers' Alliance are numerous. For example, many Alliance chapters all set up their own cooperative stores, which bought directly from wholesalers and sold their goods to farmers at a lower rate, at times 20 to 30 percent below the regular retail price. Such stores achieved only limited success, however, since they faced the hostility of wholesale merchants who sometimes retaliated by temporarily lowering their prices in order to drive the Alliance stores out of business.

Additionally, the Farmer's Alliance established its own mills for flour, cottonseed oil, and corn, as well as its own cotton gin. Such facilities allowed debt-laden farmers, who often had little cash to pay third-party mills, to bring their goods to markets at a lower cost.

The national agenda

The limited effects of the local policies of the Alliance did little to address the overall problem of deflation and depressed agricultural prices. By 1886, tensions had begun to form in the movement between the political activists, who promoted a national political agenda, and the political conservatives, who favored no change in national policy but a "strictly business" plan of local economic action. In Texas, the split reached a climax in August 1886 at the statewide convention in Cleburne. The political activists successfully lobbied for passage of a set of political demands that included support of the Knights of Labor and the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. Other demands include changes in governmental land policy, and railroad regulation. The demands also included a demand for use of silver as legal tender, on the grounds that this would alleviate the contraction in the money supply that led to falling prices and scarcity of credit (see gold standard).

The Alliance wanted to change the way Americans worked by pushing for an eight-hour workday. It did away with national banks so private, local banks could be formed. The Alliance wanted an income tax, the freedom to coin its own money and the freedom to borrow money from the government to buy land. The Alliance also tried to do away with foreign competitors who owned land in America. It wanted to directly elect federal judges and senators. The Alliance gained powerful political strength and controlled elections in states in the South and the West.

In the South, the agenda centered on demands of government control of transportation and communication, in order to break the power of corporate monopolies. From 1890 it also included a demand for a national "Sub-Treasury Plan" calling for the establishment of a network of government-owned warehouses for the storage of non-perishable agricultural commodities, operated at minimal cost to participating farmers.^[49] Farmers would then be permitted to draw low interest loans of up to 80% of the value of warehoused goods, payable in U.S. Treasury notes, under the plan.^[49] The failure of the Democratic Party to endorse this initiative was instrumental in causing the Farmers' Alliance to become directly involved in partisan politics through an organization largely of its own making, the People's Party.^[49]

The Southern Alliance also demanded reforms of currency, land ownership, and income tax policies. Meanwhile, the Northern Alliance stressed the demand for free coinage of large amounts of silver.

Political activists in the movement also made attempts to unite the two Alliance organizations, along with the Knights of Labor and the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union, into a common movement. The efforts and unification proved futile, however.

Transition to the Populist movement

As an economic movement, the Alliance had a very limited and short term success. Cotton brokers who had previously negotiated with individual farmers for ten bales at a time now needed to strike deals with the Alliance men for 1,000 bale sales. This solidarity was usually short-lived, however, and could not withstand the retaliation from the commodities brokers and railroads, who responded by boycotting the Alliance and eventually broke the power of the movement. The Alliance had never fielded its own political candidates. It preferred to work through the established Republican Party in the Midwest and Democratic Party in the South — although these often proved fickle in supporting the agenda of the Alliance.

The Alliance failed as an economic movement, but it is regarded by historians as engendering a "movement culture" among the rural poor. This failure prompted an evolution of the Alliance into a political movement to field its own candidates in national elections. In 1889–1890, the Alliance was reborn as the People's Party (commonly known as the "Populists"), and included both Alliance men and Knights of Labor members from the industrialized Northeast. The Populists, who fielded national candidates in the 1892 election, essentially repeated all the demands of the Alliance in its platform.

Elected officials

Ezra T. Champlin, member of the Minnesota House of Representatives and its 20th Speaker.^[50]
James Cockrell, member of the Illinois House of Representatives from Marion County (1891–1893)^[51]^[52]
Marion Butler, U.S. Senator from North Carolina (1895–1901)
Hosea H. Moore, member of the Illinois House of Representatives from Wayne County (1891–1893)^[51]
John Rankin Rogers, Governor of Washington (1897–1901)
Herman Taubeneck, member of the Illinois House of Representatives from Clark County (1891–1893)^[51]^[53]

Selected Alliance newspapers

American Nonconformist, Tabor, Iowa. Edited by Henry Vincent.
Alliance Vindicator, Texas. Edited by James H. Davis.
Kansas Farmer, Topeka, Kansas. Edited by William A. Peffer.
National Alliance, Houston, Texas. —No copies known to have survived.
National Economist, Washington, D.C. Edited by Charles William Macune.
Progressive Farmer, Raleigh, North Carolina. Edited by Leonidas LaFayette Polk.
Southern Mercury, Dallas, Texas. Edited by Harry Tracy.
Western Rural and Family Farm Paper, Chicago, Illinois. Edited by Milton George.

Footnotes

^ John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Crusade for Farm Relief. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1931; pg. 3.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 3–4.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 5.
^ ^a ^b Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 15.
^ ^a ^b ^c Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 16.
^ ^a ^b Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 18.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 18–19, 31.
^ ^a ^b Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 31.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 32.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 36.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 36–37.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 37.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 39–40.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 38.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 38–39.
^ ^a ^b Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 43.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 43–44.
^ ^a ^b Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 45–46.
^ ^a ^b Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 97.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 98.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 98–99.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 99.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 100.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 100–101.
^ Farmers' Alliance in Minnesota, MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society.
^ ^a ^b Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South, 1865–1933. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1964.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 101.
^ ^a ^b ^c Hicks. The Populist Revolt, pg. 102.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 102–103.
^ ^a ^b ^c Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 103.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 104.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 104–105.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 105.
^ ^a ^b Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 108.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 107.
^ Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 106–107.
^ ^a ^b Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pg. 109.
^ Herman C. Nixon, "The Cleavage within the Farmers' Alliance Movement," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 1, (June 1928), pp. 22–33.
^ J.H. Turner, "The Race Problem," in Dunning (ed.), Farmers' Alliance History and Agricultural Digest, pg. 272.
^ Turner, "The Race Problem," pp. 272–273.
^ Turner, "The Race Problem," pg. 273.
^ ^a ^b R.H. Humphrey, "History of the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union," in Dunning (ed.), Farmers' Alliance History and Agricultural Digest, pg. 288.
^ ^a ^b ^c Humphrey, "History of the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union," pg. 289.
^ Humphrey, "History of the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union," pg. 290.
^ ^a ^b ^c William F. Holmes, "The Demise of the Colored Farmers' Alliance," Journal of Southern History, vol. 41, no. 2 (May, 1975), pg. 187.
^ Stevens, Albert C. Cyclopedia of Fraternities: A Compilation of Existing Authentic Information and the Results of Original Investigation as to the Origin, Derivation, Founders, Development, Aims, Emblems, Character, and Personnel of More Than Six Hundred Secret Societies in the United States New York, E. B. Treat and Company, 1899 pp.303-4
^ Stevens pp.303-4
^ C.W. Macune, "The Purposes of the Farmers' Alliance," in N.A. Dunning (ed.), Farmers' Alliance History and Agricultural Digest. Washington, DC: Alliance Publishing Co., 1891; pg. 257.
^ ^a ^b ^c Bruce Palmer and Charles W. Macune, Jr., "Charles William Macune," Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association.
^ King, Tim (February 21, 2014). "Alliance Party Made Political Waves in 1890". The Land. p. 15. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
^ ^a ^b ^c Illinois Blue Book 1913-1914. p. 394.
^ Scott, Roy V. (1962). "John Patterson Stelle: Agrarian Crusader from Southern Illinois". Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. 55 (3): 244. Retrieved August 21, 2022.
^ "H. E. Taubeneck Dead". San Jose Herald. Associated Press. March 19, 1900. Retrieved August 21, 2022.

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1905 New International Encyclopedia article "Farmers' Alliance".

Donna A. Barnes, "Farmers' Alliance," Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association.
Gilbert C. Fite, "Farmers' Alliance," Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society.
Matthew Hild, "Farmers' Alliance," New Georgia Encyclopedia.
William F. Holmes, "Colored Farmers' Alliance," Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association.
Adrienne Petty, History of the South: The Southern Revolt. Guest lecture, Columbia University, December 1998.
The People's Advocate, newspaper of the Farmer's Alliance and Industrial Union in Washington State, from The Labor Press Project

This page was last edited on 1 May 2024, at 04:25

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