Persistent Progressives

The Rocky Mountain Farmers Union

John F. Freeman

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781607324331
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Persistent Progressives tells the story of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union's evolution from an early movement against monopolists and wholesalers to a regional trailblazer for agriculture ideologies built on social democracy, the family farmer, and cooperative enterprises. As a continuing advocate for saving the family farm, the Farmers Union legacy provides a unique window into the transformation of the agriculture and rural communities in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. Using data spanning decades, author John Freeman covers the founding of the RMFU in 1907 until the present, demonstrating how members continually sought to control the means of production and marketing by forming cooperatives, providing consumer services, and engaging in politics. Powering this evolution was a group of "practical idealists"—the Farmers Union leaders and titular persistent progressives who shaped the organization's growth and expansion. Initiated by Jim Patton, who brought the organization out of its oppositional roots and into its cooperative advocacy, the RMFU passed to John Stencel and then David Carter, joining hands with agricultural conservationists and small organic producers along the way to carry the torch for progressive agrarianism in today's urbanized world. Shaken but undeterred by some notable failures, its leadership remains convinced of the efficacy of cooperatives as a means to achieve justice for all. Discussing the broader social, economic, political, and environmental issues related to farming, ranching, and urbanization, Persistent Progressives seamlessly blends regional history with ongoing issues of agricultural and economic development.

1

The Setting

Ideological and Physical

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At first glimpse, Crystola seems an unlikely birthplace of the Farmers’ Cooperative and Educational Union of Colorado, later known as the Colorado Farmers Union and, more recently, as the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. In general, when we think of farmers, we envision men and women cultivating the soil, growing commodity crops such as wheat and corn or market produce such as carrots and lettuce. In that sense, Crystola was not a farming community. In the 1860s stock growers had settled the area, sometimes called Trout Park because it was intersected by a mountain stream and surrounded by forest, a few miles north of Pikes Peak and less than a day’s horseback ride from the Cripple Creek–Victor mining district.

Crystola attracted what might be described politely as religious and political eccentrics. Henry Clay Childs and his wife, Catherine, originally from Vermont, moved to the area in 1876 and established a small livestock and sawmill operation. Known locally as spiritualists, they consulted their own crystal ball and sponsored séances with like-minded clairvoyants said to be in touch with the spirits of the deceased. A visiting psychic and self-styled professor named “Wizard” Kimball claimed he had located a gold lode by using his witching stick; that likely encouraged Childs to organize the Brotherhood Gold Mining and Milling Company. The company began by selling psychic location services to prospectors and launched a successful nationwide campaign to attract stockholders, which enabled Childs and his fellow spiritualists to build an ore-processing mill, purchase and develop a town site, and add a general store, school, post office, railroad station, and communal water system. Reorganized in 1899 as the Crystola Brotherhood Town, Mine and Milling Company, the company town attracted about 150 inhabitants, mostly from Boston and the East Coast. It remains unclear whether these newcomers were drawn by the lure of gold, the prospect of joining some sort of utopian colony, or both.¹

Among those attracted to Crystola was George B. Lang, the future first president of the Farmers’ Cooperative and Educational Union of Colorado. He was born in 1864 on a farm in Greene County, Pennsylvania, a region known for its wool production; as a child he left with his family for Iowa well before the beginning of the boom in coal mining. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six, he taught school and worked as a newspaper reporter in Missouri and then returned to Iowa as state organizer for the National Farmers’ Alliance. How he learned about Crystola and what drew him there with his wife and son in 1906 is unknown. We can only speculate that, with the demise of the farmers’ alliance, he sought to continue his work as a farm or labor organizer and saw an opportunity in mining country. Presumably, his political and social outlook aligned with that of the Crystola brotherhood.

We also do not know the background of T. W. Woodrow. He is credited with inviting a small group of men to meet at Lang’s home on May 17, 1907, to form the first Colorado chapter of the Farmers’ Cooperative and Educational Union. We can assume that at least some of the invitees were farmers or ranchers, as they would hold offices in the new organization. During the eleven months leading up to the first state convention of the farmers’ union, Woodrow organized local chapters in the rural settlements of Calhan, Falcon, Fondis, Ramah, Surber, and Yoder in El Paso County, Keyser in Elbert County, and La Junta and Vroman in Otero County. His successes as an organizer suggests that both the farmers’ union’s message and its grassroots organizational structure appealed to Colorado farmers and ranchers, though to how many is unknown. Neither the message nor the structure, however, was original with the farmers’ union.²

Without going too far back in time, it is worth noting that, following the Civil War, the United States entered an era of vast and rapid economic expansion made possible in part by technological advances such as Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper and John Deere’s steel ploughshares. The federal government provided financial incentives for big corporations, most notably the railroads, as it did for individuals and families through various preemption acts. The intent of the Homestead Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, was laudable—to enable any citizen to obtain title to unappropriated public land by residing on or cultivating that land for a period of five years and paying modest filing fees—but its actual impact on the settlement of the West proved not entirely positive. Most immediately, land promoters argued unscrupulously that one could sustain a family and produce surplus food for the market on 160 acres of arid land. Loopholes in the act combined with the US Congress’s inaction led to wild land speculation.

In opposition to land speculators and corporate monopolists and distrusting the intermediaries between their produce and their customers, farmers had entered into associations for mutual benefit that went beyond the role of traditional social and religious confraternities. The first such general farm group was the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry (the Grange). Founded as a secret fraternal organization in upstate New York in 1867, the Grange sought improvements in farm life and fought the perceived evils of modernism. Organizers started the first Colorado branch in Boulder in 1874 and quickly established sixty-nine other branches throughout the South Platte valley. The Grange declined almost as rapidly as it had begun, in part because of competition from the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union.³

Similar to the Grange, the farmers’ alliance began as a fraternal organization. Founded by a group of farmers and ranchers in central Texas during the 1870s, the alliance spread through the South and the Midwest, all the while expanding its mission. It sought to establish member-owned cooperatives as practical vehicles for eliminating intermediaries, controlling prices received for farm produce and prices paid for farm supplies, and providing farmers with their own mutual fire insurance company. By the time of its national convention in Cleburne near Dallas in 1886, the farmers’ alliance had become the leading farm organization in the nation. The Cleburne convention issued a series of demands to the federal government, among them to regulate railroad rates, impose heavy taxes on land speculators, and increase the availability of farm credit.⁴

Using the Cleburne platform, alliance organizers recruited irrigators in southern Colorado in 1888 and then moved to organize eastern Colorado just as farmers were turning from conventional to dry-land farming.⁵ By advocating stringent federal regulation of the economy, the farmers’ alliance national organization soon alienated the very farmers who sought more control over their products by banding together in cooperatives. The alliance platform became an integral part of the 1892 platform of the People’s Party, also known as the populists. In Colorado, the farmers’ alliance helped elect David H. Waite governor; but his support from industrial workers, his promotion of their economic and social agenda, and his ineptitude in governing—a characteristic of those in perennial opposition—alienated both farm and business interests. Close association with the People’s Party would lead to the alliance’s eventual demise.⁶

Just as the farmers’ alliance overtook the Grange, the Farmers’ Cooperative and Educational Union succeeded the alliance. The farmers’ union ...