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Part
I: "Not a Revolt, A Revolution"
.
1886-1889: From Cleburne to St. Louis,
the Rise of the Farmer’s Alliance
The farmer is the man, the farmer is the
man
Lives on credit ‘till the fall
Then they take him by the hand and they lead him from
the land
And the merchant is the man who gets it all
From the traditional American folk song: “The
Farmer is the Man”
In 1886, the fast-swelling ranks of the Farmer’s
Alliance held their first formal convention in
Cleburne, Texas. From it emerged a bold declaration
of agrarian rights. Stated in clear terms, the “Cleburne
Demands” forged a platform planked of cooperative
economic exchange, government regulation of banking
/ industry and a flexible national currency. In spirit,
the “Demands” were an angry indictment
of the political / economic machines that controlled,
with an iron grip, the agricultural (and industrial
labor) system in post Civil War America. Across the
South, that anger had been set to a boil. A “New
South” was said to have emerged in the wake
of Reconstruction (roughly 1866 – 1876). Yet
in his classic treatise, Origins of the New South,
C. Vann Woodward writes, “the prophets of the
New Order were hard put to explain where the farmers
[fit in] . . . and why it was that as the cities rose
the country seemed to decline.” On the farms,
many viewed this New South as the “industrialization
of agriculture.” Profit, not community, seemed
the single motivating factor and many wondered if
slavery had simply been replaced by absentee-landlords,
tenant-farming and sharecropping – all of which
worked to enslave across race lines. Woodward summarizes
the Southern farmer’s plight as “a state
of hopeless peonage.” In his 1992 work, The
Promise of the New South, Ed Ayers documents:
“Farmers felt abused by both the major parties
and exploited by every level of business from national
corporations to local storekeepers.” This future
seemed to promise only penury and serfdom for all
the small farmers of America. It was time to demand
changes . . . At Cleburne the Populist movement
received not only written doctrine, but its marching
orders.
>>>
The seeds of agrarian discord in the South were sown
in the years following the Civil War. The war had
destroyed the plantation economy, the South –
in an apt description from John D. Hicks’ classic,
The Populist Revolt – having generally
regressed into a “frontier stage of development.”
Within this void the industrial interests of the Northeast
and the banks that supported their efforts were left
to expand with virtually no competition or regulation.
Equally important was a shift in the agrarian way
of life. Throughout Reconstruction economic power
passed from the “landed” plantations –
most of which had been broken up and parceled off,
precipitating the explosion in small farms and tenancy
– to the merchant shops in the small crossroad
towns that had sprung up (often with railroads) across
the South during the mid-1800s. The result was a slide
away from the self-sustaining traits that were once
typical. Whereas the small white landowning farmer
(or yeoman) was notably independent and rarely pressed
by debt prior to the Civil War, the town merchant
became a major factor in the economic life of all
small farmers in the years following the war. The
South’s resources had been ravaged, its economy
left bankrupt. Self-sufficient traits once common
gave way to the pursuit of more “commercial
agriculture,” mainly cotton, in order to meet
the payment demands of the furnishing merchant –
who supplied farmers with most everything, including
the credit by which to purchase it. This restructuring
of the concentration of wealth ran against the personable
interdependence that had marked antebellum relations
between white agrarians, regardless of social position.
The result was a contraction of autonomy for small
farmers, the vast majority of the southern populace.
And this, predictably, did not sit well – especially
with the yeomen landowners who stood to lose their
land to the merchant and plunge into tenancy . . .
Prior to the war, small farmers viewed their ilk as
getting along well enough without any outside economic
interference. In Steven Hahn’s work, The
Roots of Southern Populism, he richly illustrates
these “small communities of producers.”
They were inheritors of the great “Jeffersonian”
ideal: rural individual agriculturalists, self-sustaining,
self-regulating and living free off the land. But
following the war the small farmer had become part
of the “market.” And the market seemed
to have less the interest of small farmers and their
communities in mind, and more those of Wall Street
and the furnishing merchants that they controlled.
The financial arrangements behind the often abused
crop-lien in the South – the merchant’s
securing of a percentage of a farmer’s crop
as collateral for loans – and what was derided
as the “chattel (or slave) mortgage” made
infamous in the Plains states, irritated this humiliation
of dependency more than any other factor. Together
they would spawn agrarian revolt.
Agrarian organizations and “alliances”
had been in existence from Illinois to the Carolinas
since the late 1870s. But the Farmer’s Alliance
that would be most directly associated with the larger
Southern and National Alliance came
into existence in Texas. With the exception of Kansas,
the core of Alliance / Populist
support would always reside deep in the South. Yet
in testament to the non-sectionalism that defined
the early stages of the movement (not to mention a
blindness to gender and race that was remarkable for
the era), the Alliance’s structure
mimicked the fraternal order of The Grange,
and its demand for legislation on behalf of poor farmers.
In parallel, the Alliance drew its inspiration
for currency policy from the Greenbackers,
a defunct 1870s reform-party that stumped for incontrovertible
paper money with the end goal of expanding the national
circulation of currency. Both were Western organizations.
Though of Southern origin, the Alliance ideology
would pursue “producing / working class”
interests on the whole.
Despite
its roots, the Alliance’s early leaders
were not paralyzed by tradition. They avoided the
weaknesses of the reformers they emulated and proved
exceedingly bold. Whereas past reform movements proceeded
meekly and were marginalized as provincial anomalies,
Populism came on, in the words of an early
observer in Mississippi, “like a cyclone”
. . . Still, it met the same end . . . Populism
would not be defeated for its lack of popularity.
Its fall can be traced directly to a watering-down
of its platform by later leaders. In The Populist
Response to Industrial America, Norman Pollack
writes: “everything Populism sought to avoid
came about.” Though writing on the movement
from a Midwestern perspective, Pollack’s observation
is true across the board. Populism was no
more popular – and feared – than when
it was on the attack. But in the end it was ground
up by the entrenched powers due in large part to a
drift away from its early intensity, and inter-party
divisions which would allow much of its platform to
be co-opted . . . Today, the term “populist”
often serves up the fire-breathing caricature of a
radical crusader out-of-touch with sociopolitical
/ economic realities (thanks chiefly to the later
flood of manic self-serving demagogues such as Huey
Long and Eugene Talmedge). This modern filter all
but guarantees that the actual movement of the late
19th century will remain popularly unknown, aside
from topical representations of what it did wrong
– which does not exempt the depths to which
some Populists sank as withered political
“has-beens” in the early 20th century.
But in its day Populism’s “popularity,”
rising as it did from the sweeping popularity of the
National Farmers Alliance, was no fluke.
It was no “shadow” movement. Pollack cites:
“scholars agree that the movement offered highly
concrete remedies designed to meet existing conditions.”
It struck a deep chord among the mass of small farmers
at the time. It was real and its successes have been
left off the American record in lieu of its failures
. . . In turning to some of what it did right, the
kind of popularity that was afforded the movement
doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It was hard-earned;
and early Alliance leaders understood this.
They also knew that cooperative action would only
be achieved by getting the message out. Many of the
problems that the farmers encountered were due to
a general ignorance of everything from “the
lien” to the latest science in agriculture –
chief being crop rotation and diversification, a key
to pre Civil War agrarian independence. Alliance
lecturers from the national to the local level fanned
out with these notions in tow. This led to the signal
democratic success of the movement: mass organization
through education. Hicks parallels the thoughts
of an earlier historian in writing: “Like the
Grange before it, the Alliance became a great ‘national
university.’ ”
>>>
The Alliance rose out of Lampasas County
in central Texas. By 1886, it was sweeping across
the state. Lawrence Goodwyn explains: “It is
only linear that the Alliance began in Texas,
flooded as it became with the dispossessed, disillusioned
poor from across the agrarian South.” Inside
of two years, the Alliance message would flare up
across the South – indeed the entire country
(there was even a state Alliance chapter
in industrialized New York) . . . Early Alliance
leaders, despite many of them being large landowners
of considerable wealth, were nonetheless outside of
the socioeconomic rank of the merchants and large
Northeastern trusts. They were bound to the simmering
servile condition of the small farmer. To spread their
ideas on how to combat this inequity – and gain
power enough to do something for themselves –
they created this prodigious and proficient lecturing
circuit. This, as much as the feudal conditions of
the small farmer, led to the swelling angry ranks
that poured into Cleburne in 1886. The early Populist
leaders proved excellent marketers. They knew how
to talk to the people’s problems.
S. O. Daws and William Lamb helped establish the ardent
lecturing system in Texas that would flood the South
with like men. They established their points early:
governmental regulation of railroads, fair credit
standards, self-sustaining methods of crop diversification,
equitable currency distribution, all with the end
goal of commercial cooperation amongst the agrarian
poor. Making their points stick would prove difficult
at best. Cooperation and competition – if ever
co-joined in American capitalism – were never
further apart than in the late 19th century era of
the centralized monopoly. Still, the message got out.
Goodwyn records an observation of the day that states:
lecturers were “sweeping everything before them.”
In Promise Ed Ayers quotes a North Carolina
lecturer who during the active Alliance recruitment
drive of the late 1880s stated: “The farmers
seem like unto ripe fruit – you can gather them
by a gentle shake of the bush” . . . At Cleburne,
leaders saw the potential of mass organization through
education. A united movement of the disaffected could
not be ignored for long.
Cleburne
also gave rise to one of the movement’s true
visionaries: the brilliant yet enigmatic Charles W.
Macune. Macune’s leadership skills were put
to the test in steering the often heated discussions
between those who preferred direct political involvement
and those – like himself – who preferred
business-only solutions. But it was at the 1887 convention
in Waco, Texas, where Macune emerged as the chief
mind of the Alliance. At Waco he unveiled
plans for a statewide “cooperative farmer’s
exchange.” Instead of being held to the peonage
rates offered for crops by the merchants, farmers
would store their crop yields in a co-op run by the
Alliance and hold out for better rates –
a bold attempt to squeeze the lenders into equitable
terms. As important was Macune’s encouragement
for this experiment in cooperative bargaining to spread,
via lecturing, to all corners of producing-class America.
Macune wanted this to be a nationwide economic revolution.
Still, many others wanted the revolution to go further.
William Lamb was a strong proponent of direct political
action from his first days with the organization.
As they had the previous year, many Alliancemen
took up Lamb’s position at Waco. Again Macune’s
leadership was required to quell a near split in the
Texas Alliance over the issue of politics
v. business-only, keeping the larger picture in view
by reminding the convention that only as a united
front could they effect either. Though Macune’s
personal position was clear, it was quite clear that
political activism – Populism –
had arrived to stay . . . Politics would lead the
movement to its greatest successes and its end failures.
For radical economic theory in late-Victorian age
America was one thing; radical politics was another.
This was especially true in the South. Economics and
politics were institutionally enmeshed in the ironclad
rule of the Southern Democratic Party. Having lately
“redeemed” the South from the Republican-induced
Reconstruction, and having re-established “home
rule,” any challenge to Democratic leaders was
anathema. Woodward explains in Origins: “changing
one’s party in the South [at the time] . . .
involved more than changing one’s mind . . .
it might even call in question one’s loyalty
to his race and his people.” Still, many Alliancemen
– and the many more Populists that
would follow – were game; for as Woodward documents
in his essay Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,
“there was not much further downward for most
Populists to go.” Driven by the desperation
of their economic situation, many figured: “what
do we have to lose?” Ed Ayers quotes an Alliance
leader whose summation stated bluntly: “if this
be party treason, make the most of it.” In the
wake of the convention at Waco, the fight was on.
>>>
The period of 1888-1890 was a watershed for the Farmer’s
Alliance. The idea of “cooperative exchange”
exported not only a method, but the entire Alliance
platform. The fight was against monopoly, a battlecry
that galvanized the “mudsill” agrarians
throughout the commercial cotton and wheat producing
states. Macune’s idea was to “fight monopoly
with monopoly” . . . Yet the co-op in Dallas,
the very model, failed. Despite a last-ditch effort
on June 9, 1888 – “the day to save the
exchange,” farmers near and far pouring into
Dallas to offer what little cash they had to keep
the exchange doors open – the “implacable
hostility” (Goodwyn’s phrasing) of Gilded
Age economic powers had set the tone: strangle this
competitor in its infancy. And they’d succeeded,
for the moment. All banks had shut their doors and
drawn the blinds in the face of credit requests on
behalf of the exchange. In reality a great deal of
the co-op’s failure can be laid on its own impractical
funding plans, which were based mostly in cash –
something in short supply amongst the hard-pressed
agrarians. Still, to those within the Alliance
ranks the cause of the collapse was plainly seen as
yet another in a string of infinite transgressions
perpetrated by the merchants and bankers. It rallied
the “cause.” For what stands out is that
this failure seems to have had more impact than if
the cooperative had been successful. It energized
the movement, delineating the problem with an example:
even through mass cooperation, farmers could not induce
financial freedom. And whereas Macune still saw
the potential of working through existing Democratic
Party machinery to bring about “economic redistributive
revolution” – which the exchange’s
failure had proven as their only long-term solution
– it was clear to a majority that a radical
political agenda was now inevitable, something the
Democratic and New South leadership in the South (and
industry-backed Republicans in the West), would fight
tooth and nail.
The collapse of the Dallas exchange’s short-term
effects aside, 1888 was an optimistic year for the
Alliance – if in growth alone. Small
local chapters, the “suballiances,” were
chartered by the hundreds in every state of the Old
Confederacy (Hicks makes the case that the Alliance
itself actually grew out of the suballiances, the
parent organization’s prolific consolidation
a result of the pre-existing networks of local chapters,
or “lodges”). Henry Vincent oversaw the
creation of the Kansas Alliance in 1888.
The fervent support found in Kansas – a ligament
between North / South – can certainly be viewed
as leading the spread of “cooperation over war-era
sectionalism” that would at least initially
unite the West / Northwest / Midwest agrarians with
their Southern compatriots. In conjunction, as the
rates of merchants continued to inflate so did the
Alliance’s membership rolls. Hicks
summarized: “As the hard times of the late ‘80s
set in, the strength of the Alliance movement increased
correspondingly.” By 1888, there were well over
a million members. Using the 1890 census records as
a guide, it wouldn’t be a leap to say that by
the height of the Alliance in the early1890s
registered members as a percentage of the population
were near the relative percentages of registered Democrats
or Republicans today . . . In his 1947, History
of the South, Francis Simkins points to the importance
of the Alliance’s “alliances”
in helping to swell the movement’s ranks (in
fact, every Alliance / Populist
history I’ve read can’t stress the point
enough). In 1886, the infant Texas Alliance
backed a bold strike by southwest industrial workers
union: the Knights of Labor. The strike was
eventually overwhelmed by the cunning and powerful
industrialist Jay Gould; but this support would come
to define Populism’s desire to unite
all producing class organizations nationwide under
a single banner. Labor could not foster the underlying
foundations to organize nationally (labor was over
a decade removed from such widespread unions [emerging
in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle], both
Goodwyn and Pollack clearing the way for speculation
of the radical differences in our country today if
the two powerful sectors had been able to co-join
movements). But there was an abundance of independent
agricultural unions, mainly in what was then called
the Southwest. By 1890, the Agricultural Wheel
and Brothers of Freedom (a consolidation
of two Arkansan organizations) along with North Louisiana’s
Farmer’s Union (the geographic core
of Huey Long’s constituency in the 1930s) had
– after pragmatic demanding negotiation –
merged with the up-and-coming Farmer’s Alliance.
Along with securing a majority of the South’s
Grangers, the Alliance was –
through membership alone – rapidly spreading
beyond its regional roots.
As
mentioned both women and blacks were not only initially
welcomed into the movement, but actively recruited.
Mary Ellen Lease, a radical / fervent Kansan, rose
to be the most recognized woman Populist.
She was an agrarian Mother Jones. One of her famous
proclamations singled out a standard perceived enemy:
“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.”
Ed Ayers records women comprising a full quarter of
the Nat’l Alliance’s membership
at its height, adding this female Texan Populist’s
testimony: “The Alliance has come to redeem
woman from her enslaved condition” . . . Officially
segregated, the Colored Alliance claimed
membership equal to that of the white Alliance
by the late 1880s. Texans R. M. Humphrey, a white
Baptist minister, and John Rayner, a vocal black activist,
would guide their state’s Colored Alliance
– recorded as the most substantial chapter –
and prove mentors to this mostly Southern “movement
within the movement.” In attempting to ease
distrust and dislike of blacks prevalent among rural
whites at the time then emerging Populist
leader from Georgia, Tom Watson, urged his fellow
agrarians to discard their differences and focus on
the similarities. “They are in the ditch just
like we are,” he said. In the late 1890s, Watson
would completely regress into a virulent, dangerous
prejudice against blacks, Jews and seemingly anyone
not like himself (as would much of the white South
going into the new century). But during the heady
rise of Populism, most all of the Alliance
/ Populist leaders championed their colored
agrarian brethren . . . Many historians claim that
this embrace targeted more the black vote than true
equitable reform. But it is also true that African-American
farmers of the time – equally and often more
so shackled to economic inequity – took to the
“uprising” as their only hope for securing
their own independence: i.e. on their own initiative
black farmers used the movement as much as the movement
may have used them. Proof of their choice in the matter
lay with the ample reasons African-Americans
had to look to this movement as one that could deliver
true reform. By the 1880s, the Republican Party had
abandoned Southern blacks to socioeconomic conditions
that were slavery in all but name. One result of this
restoration of “home rule” had been the
institutionalization of the grotesque, corrupt and
inhumane “convict-lease system.” In short,
black men were often arrested on minor or trumped
up charges, én masse, and given long drawn
out sentences in labor camps. It was an institutionalized
slave-labor force rented to private contractors by
states, who acquired enormous disgusting profits on
the trade . . . Though the color line was clearly
defined throughout the life of the movement, agrarians
white and black had reason enough to rely on each
other. In A People’s History of the United
States, Howard Zinn documents an Alliance
editorial stating that Populism was not designed
to free African-American farmers, “but
to emancipate all men.”
The optimism that spread in the wake of the Dallas
cooperative’s failure was to a great extent
prodded by another economic fight then brewing. Cotton
bales were typically wrapped in a tough cloth made
from the fibrous jute plant. In 1888, jute-bag manufacturers
announced that they were raising prices – as
high as double the previous cost per yard of cloth.
The “jute-bag trust” sent an electric
pulse through the Southern Alliance. A convention
was called and held in Birmingham, Alabama, at which
all the state Alliance delegations in attendance
enthusiastically agreed that their constituencies
should substitute cotton bagging for jute. The jute-bag
manufacturers picked a poor time to act in trust,
for the agrarians were rife for a fight. Parades were
soon being staged across the Deep South, in which
Alliance members were seen marching down
streets wearing cotton bags. Ed Ayers documents wedding
parties in Atlanta decked out in the cotton bagging.
In his bio of the man, Woodward quotes Tom Watson
who urged on his agrarian supporters in the jute-bag
fight proclaiming: “The standard of revolt is
up. Let us keep it up and speed it on.” The
“fight” allowed the newborn movement something
to focus on; and more importantly, an instance of
economic manipulation it could potentially outlast
and win. And win it did. By 1890, the “jute-bag
trust” collapsed and prices were restored, even
lowered from their original rates. The victory proved
that cooperative action could work; and having crossed
state borders, it also solidified the movement on
a mass scale. It was a high point for the Populist
Moment.
All
signs pointed towards a nationalization of the movement.
Well-organized, full of doctrine and spreading like
wildfire, it still lacked a cohesive national front
and a definitive answer on whether this was an economic
revolution, a political revolution,
or both. These issues were given shape at the 1889
“national” convention in St. Louis . .
. “Fusion,” a tactic that would be utilized
by Populist politicians to their detriment
during the 1896 presidential campaign, was the hope
at St. Louis – in that the Northern
and Southern Alliance (almost triple the
size) would fully fuse. The Midwestern delegations
proved tempered in their views, which stood in contrast
to the more radical plans of the Southern delegates.
But the delegations representing Kansas and the Dakota
Territory were game. They threw in with the Southerners
and the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial
Union was formed (“industrial” replaced
the original “cooperative,” a tip to hopeful
mass organization and inclusion of labor unions such
as the Knights of Labor, who were on hand
at St. Louis). The convention created national figures
of many Alliancemen, such as the Dakotas’
Henry Loucks, and North Carolina’s L. L. Polk
– who as acting president of the Southern wing
was nominated president of the Nat’l Alliance.
Despite some obvious differences – the Northern
and Southern Alliance even met in different
halls – the general tenor of the convention’s
results was to work cooperatively. Hicks summarizes:
“. . . a unity of purpose, never so well expressed
before, was definitely asserted.” The “St.
Louis Platform” advanced the requisite Greenback-inspired
demands to abolish national banks and plot inflationary
circulation (which included the unlimited coinage
of silver, a tactic that would come to haunt Southern
Populists), along with standard planks for
government regulation – mainly of subsidized
railroads. But the big-ticket item was Charles Macune’s
economically radical “subtreasury” plan.
Macune used the South’s cotton crop as proof
for this necessity of redistribution (Macune could
very well have utilized the West / Northwest’s
yearly wheat harvest just as easily): when the crop
yields hit the market each harvest season, he argued,
the flood of product inventory dropped prices to abysmally
low levels due to the maladjusted availability of
national currency – which had not changed appreciably
since the Civil War. With the number of small farmers
increasing every year, so did crop prices continue
to decline: more farmers, higher yields, the same
amount of currency being spread ever more thin. In
addition, a major outrage was that after a lien was
settled (or a mortgage in the West), merchants then
held out for better prices on the stored yields. Farmers
had no control and no choice. The “subtreasury”
plan proposed building and maintaining federally-run
warehouses across the country, in which the farmers’
crops – from cotton to oats, wheat to sugar
– could be stored while waiting for more agreeable
market prices to emerge. Farmers would deal directly
with the government – eliminating the hated
merchant middlemen – and would be able to obtain
low-interest loans against their crop yields. Finally,
the volume of national currency would be adjusted
to the market levels of 1889 not 1865. Given the inevitable
failure of local / regional cooperatives due to the
“implacable hostility” of lenders, the
“subtreasury” plan simply elevated the
idea of cooperative exchange to the level of a federally-subsidized
institution (FDR’s Farm Security Administration
owed much to the groundwork of the Charles Macunes
of the late 19th century) . . . Reaction to the “subtreasury”
plan was predictable amongst Democratic / New South
leadership (and likewise the Republican / Industrial
interests in the North and West). In one of the first
cases of its widespread use as a political indictment,
the thunderous charge of “socialism” poured
into the public discourse. On its surface, the “subtreasury”
contained socialist features. But the plan was founded
so as to help producing class participants
in the market, not all comers. The movement was based
in equitable leveling, not equality (as the division
between black and white Alliances attests).
Still, socialist accusations leveled by the entrenched
powers was political gold; and public opinion could
be manipulated through the press . . . Yet what the
vitriolic representatives of the New Southerners and
Industrialists failed to realize was that the Nat’l
Alliance knew this. “Corporate” legislators
were now in the crosshairs of the movement’s
leaders; and winning the elections of 1890 became
the Populists’ overriding goal. Tom
Watson summed up the ardent resolve of the day when
he proclaimed of the agrarian movement:
“Not just a revolt; It is a Revolution.”
End > Part I
The
Rise & Fall of Populism in the South:
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part
I: "Not a Revolt, A Revolution"
Part II: "Fighting
It Straight"
Part III: "Sold
Out"
Sources / Afterword
and Credits
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