Farmers Alliance

10 Key excerpts on "Farmers Alliance"

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  (Re-)Mobilizing Voters in Britain and the United States

  Political Strategies from Parties and Grassroots Organisations (1867–2020)

  • Gregory Benedetti, Veronique Molinari, Gregory Benedetti, Veronique Molinari, Grégory Benedetti, Véronique Molinari(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Oldenbourg

    (Publisher)

  Part 2:  Mobilising Women: Grassroots Action and Political Discourse

  4  Mobilising Agrarian Men and Women in the Late Nineteenth Century

  The Case of Farmers' Alliances and the Populist Movement

  Jean-Louis Marin-Lamellet

  Introduction

  In the 1880s and 1890s, Farmers’ Alliances in the American South and Midwest mobilised “periphery agrarians” – farmers, storekeepers, miners, railroad workers and nonconformist intellectuals – in a progressive farmer-labour movement advocating an antimonopoly and democratisation agenda. They were determined to give voice to all those economically and socially marginalised by Gilded Age finance capitalism: farmers at the mercy of monopolistic railroads in the Midwest, black and white sharecroppers ensnared by crop-lien system in the South but also workers exploited by corporate greed.1 The Farmers’ Alliances set up in rural Texas in the 1870s organised into a network of alliances. After Charles Macune became President of the Texas Alliance in 1886, it grew exponentially from 38,000 to 225,000 members in 1889. The Southern Alliance spread rapidly across the cotton South, merged with other organisations and then reached into the Wheat Belt, especially Kansas, and in California and the Rocky Mountain States. By 1890, the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union (NFAIU) claimed 1.2 million members in 27 states, the “largest democratic mass movement in American history” according to historian Lawrence Goodwyn. Besides the NFAIU, several other organisations had similar objectives: the Chicago-based Northern Famers’ Alliance and in Illinois the Farmers’ Mutual Benefit Association. In the South, African Americans organised the Colored Farmers’ Alliance.2

  All these alliances mobilised agrarians who were left behind in the march of progress, overpowered by corporations and financial institutions and geographically and historically marginalised by prospering urban centres in the northeast. The different alliances pushed for radical reforms (progressive income tax and government ownership of transport and communications to name but a few) in an attempt to curb the threat wealth concentration posed for economic and political freedom. The movement also attracted all sorts of middle-class reformers and radicals. At the beginning of the 1890s, Farmers’ Alliances entered politics and created the People’s Party, also known as the Populist Party. This study focuses on Farmers’ Alliances. However, since there is no clear-cut separation between the two movements, it also deals with the beginning of Populism.3 As the movement was in full swing in the 1890s, the 14 founders of the original Texas Alliance posed in front of the cabin where their first formal meeting was held in 1877 in Pleasant Valley, Lampasas County, Texas.4 How did a movement that started with a dozen farmers eventually mobilise millions of Americans? The article will examine the strategies, tools and institutions Alliances used to mobilise their constituency and study one militant group that was particularly galvanised into action – women. The political and intellectual history questions raised by the “agrarian uprising” – discussed most notably in Charles Postel’s recent re-evaluation of Populism – will be considered from a double perspective: the sociology of social movements and book and periodical studies.5

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  Radical Protest and Social Structure

  The Southern Farmers' Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890

  • Michael Schwartz(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Barhart, The Fanners' Alliance, North Carolina Historical Revievi/ 6 (July 1929), pp. 264 f; Robert Lee Hunt, A History of Farmers' Movements in the Southwest, 1873-1925 (College Station, Tex., 1935), pp. 3 1 -3 3 ; Smith, op. dt., pp. 355-357; National Economist, December 14, 1889. Preamble to the Oeboume Demands, in Durming, op. dt., pp. 4 1 -4 3 . centered around reforming or reconstmcting supply a n d sales systems of Southern cotton farming.^ Since activities were generally centered around a county seat, w h e r e the farmers of a community bought supplies and sold crops, expansion w i t h i n county limits was a natural outgrowth of any activity. But further growth w a s unwieldy and unnatural, a n d at first cross-county expansion w a s haphazard at best, depending on the m o r e or less problematical communication of the activities of small local clubs. Rapid statewide a n d interstate growth began only w h e n the farmers' groups deliberately pursued it through the estabhshment of a statewide organizing ap-paratus capable of entering n e w areas a n d mobilizing potential members. In the case of the Alliance, this took place in 1882^ and resulted in the expansion from 2000 to 38,000 members. The 1000-member Arkansas Agricultural Wheel formed a statewide organizing committee in 1883 and increased its m e m b e r s h i p to 25,000 in 2 | years.^ The Louisiana Farmers' Union a n d the Brothers of Freedom ex-perienced similar g r o w t h for similar reasons, entering the m i d d l e of the decade with 10,000 a n d 15,000 members, respectively. As these groups expanded, they began to run into each other. The Wheel a n d the Brothers of Freedom w e r e the first to m a k e contact, and their m e r g e r — v o t e d in October 1885 a n d c o n s u m m a t e d in July 1 8 8 6 — w a s the first important merger among the groups that ultimately formed the Farmers' Alliance.^ The second such merger united the Texas Alliance and the Louisiana Farmers' Union.

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  Studies In The Transformation Of U.S. Agriculture

  • A. Eugene Havens, Gregory Hooks, Patrick H Mooney, Max Pfeffer(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Throughout the summer of 1880 charters for local Farmers’ Alliances were granted to farmers’ groups across the Midwest. On October 14 a “Farmers’ Transportation Convention” was called and about 500 farmers—many of them representing local alliances, farmers’ groups, or Granges—attended the meeting in Farwell Hall in Chicago (Taylor, 1951:215). A national organization was formed, composed of local, state, and the national alliance, with the national body having little more than a coordination function. A constitution was passed which stated the following objectives:

  To unite the farmers of the United States for their protection against class legislation, the encroachments of concentrated capital, and the tyranny of monopoly; to provide against being imposed upon by swindlers, and swindling advertisements in the public prints; to oppose, in our respective political parties, the election of any candidate to office, state or national, who is not thoroughly in sympathy with the farmers’ interests; to demand that the existing political parties shall nominate farmers, or those who are in sympathy with them, for all offices within the gift of the people; and to do anything, in a legitimate manner, that may serve to benefit the producer (Taylor, 1953:215).

  The railroads were singled out as the chief enemy of both producers and consumers, and resolutions were passed calling them oppressive, defiant of the law, corrupting to politics, “a hindrance to free and impartial legislation, and a menace to the safety of our republican institutions” (Hicks, 1961:99).

  Within a year of its founding, the National Farmers’ Alliance claimed to have 1,000 locals. By its second convention it claimed a total membership of 24,500. At the third convention, in October 1882, the organization claimed 2,000 locals and a membership of 100,000. By 1887, the membership was four times as large (Taylor, 1953:216). Between 1883 and early 1885, however, the Alliance went into a period of decline, due in part to improved economic conditions resulting from good crops and a rise in prices. By the winter of 1884–1885, wheat prices dropped and hard times set in for farmers. By 1887 a new constitution was passed, dues were collected for the first time, state leaders became more active in the national affairs, and new demands were made including government ownership of the railroads and the unlimited and free coinage of silver. The growth of the Alliance following the 1887 convention has been attributed to the “complete and thoroughgoing awakening of class consciousness among the farmers …” (Hicks, 1961:104). The Southern Alliance was at the same time making more political demands, including higher taxation on lands held for speculation, prohibition of alien landownership, more taxation of railways, and new issues of paper money (Goodwyn, 1978; Hicks, 1961:106). Both Northern and Southern Alliances made conscious statements proclaiming their alliance with working people, and both Alliances had friendly exchanges with the Knights of Labor. Throughout the 1880s, the Knights of Labor expressed their solidarity with the demands of farmers for regulation and government ownership of the railroads and for new monetary policies; farmers, in turn, gave food to striking workers. The Knights of Labor reached its membership peak in 1886, following a successful strike against railroad baron Jay Gould. Farmers’ Alliance locals and members contributed money and food to the strikers, insisting that labor’s fight against Gould was their own fight (Foner, 1975:301).

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  This Mighty Dream

  Social Protest Movements in the United States

  • Madeleine Adamson, Seth Borgos(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There are ninety and nine who live and die In want and hunger and cold That one may live in luxury And be wrapped in a silken fold. The ninety and nine live in hovels bare The one is a palace with riches rare And the one owns cities and houses and lands And the ninety and nine have empty hands. The Farmer’s Alliance emerged in the 1870s during a period of innovative organizing activity in the rural Midwest and South. Below, a farmer’s political rally in Illinois. 6 A charter issued in 1881 to a sub-alliance in Haven Township, Kansas. were willing to desert the Democrats, “party of their fathers,” just as few Northerners were willing to desert the Grand Old Party, which had defended the Union. Only in the frontier states of the Great Plains, particularly Kansas and Texas, did Greenback candidates garner a substantial proportion of the vote. It was in this atmosphere of agrarian discontent and political experimentation that in 1877 a group of neigh- bors in Lampasas County, Texas, formed a self-help or- ganization they called the Farmers Alliance. The organi- zation expanded rapidly, forming local chapters known as “sub-alliances” in a dozen nearby counties. But the Al- liance, tom by Greenback controversies and uncertain about its goals, was nearly moribund six years after its founding. In January 1884, the Alliance hired S.O. Daws as its first “travelling lecturer,” or professional organizer. Within months, Daws had revived inactive sub-alliances and founded many new ones. At the same time, the or- ganization renewed and deepened its commitment to cooperative marketing and purchasing. County alliances and sub-alliances pursued an array of cooperative strate- gies, including cooperative cotton warehouses, bulk mar- keting, Alliance trade stores, and direct purchasing ar- rangements with manufacturers. In tandem with Daws’ aggressive organizing methods, the cooperative message—join the Alliance and get free of the furnish merchant—produced extraordinary results.

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  Class and the Color Line

  Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the Populist Movement

  • Joseph Gerteis, Julia Adams, George Steinmetz, Julia Adams, George Steinmetz(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  After some negotiating, a new amal-gamation occurred in late 1889, at which point the o≈cial name of the organi-zation changed again—first to the Farmers and Laborers’ Union of America, and finally to the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union. ∞≥ Eventually, the organization made a deep impression in every southern state. By July 1888, the Alliance announced that it had 9,629 sub-alliances organized in 419 counties, with a reported membership of about 360,000. ∞∂ The next year, it claimed 12,000 sub-alliances and 700,000 members. Mem-bership figures after this point are suspect, in part because the movement was beginning to shift into electoral politics (Saloutos 1960: 77). ∞∑ The success of Republican Radicalism 23 Alliance candidates in the 1890 election led to a more sustained third party e√ort under the banner of the People’s Party. Electoral Populism seriously challenged Democratic control in many places for the first time since the end of Reconstruction. In 1892, the fledgling party won the South Carolina guber-natorial race and narrowly lost in several other states, despite a bitterly fought campaign and massive vote fraud that persisted over the next several years. class formation and republican radicalism Thus far the story of the Knights and the Populists is a familiar one—wide-spread structural changes led to new levels and forms of social protest, and these movements were at the center of this contentious era. The movements did not simply react to the new conditions, however. New economic, political, and social realities were read through existing languages of class. In particular, the language and imagery of the republican tradition were crucial in shaping the cultural expressions of identity and interest in the movements by juxta-posing the independence of the artisan and yeoman with the dependence of wage workers and tenants.

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  The Farmer's Last Frontier

  Agriculture, 1860-97

  • Fred A. Shannon(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Though the Grange dropped out of sight as a political force after the late 1870’s, farmers’ clubs continued their activities and tended to coalesce into alliances. In 1874 or 1875, Lampasas, Texas, had an alliance for catching horse thieves, recovering estrays, and buying supplies. It was a secret society which also fought land monopolists and the big cattlemen who were inclined to ignore the rights of small competitors. This idea soon spread to other counties and, in 1878, a Grand State Alliance was organized, only to be all but killed by dissensions over greenbackism. Revival was rapid, and in 1880 a new Grand State Alliance was incorporated by the state, as a benevolent society of a secret nature. By 1885, it claimed 1,200 lodges and 50,000 members. It fought against low prices, crop liens, and the oppression of the country merchants. By 1886, it was beginning to demand higher taxes on speculative landholdings, a ban on alien landowning, laws against dealing in futures, higher taxes on railroads, more paper money, and other issues later absorbed by the Populist party. These demands caused threats of further schism; whereupon C. W. Macune stepped forward, saved the Alliance, and started a movement for combination with other groups throughout the South.

  The largest of all these rivals started in Arkansas, in 1882, as a debating society, and in 1883 took the name of the Agricultural Wheel. By the processes of absorption and expansion, the Wheel extended into eight states by 1887, and claimed half a million members. The merger of the Alliance and the Wheel was effected in 1889, under the temporary compromise name of the Farmers’ and Laborers’ Union. Lawyers, merchants and their clerks, and stockholders in banks or stores of other than the cooperative variety were denied membership. By 1890, the enlarged society had a membership of over a million.38 Working in close sympathy with this alliance were the Fanners’ Clubs fostered by Benjamin R. Tillman in South Carolina.39

  During these same years, the farmers of the Northwest were also active in organization. The National Farmers’ Alliance, commonly called the Northwestern Alliance, may have had some generic connection with an alliance of Grangers in New York, uniting for political purposes, in 1877. The latter may have got the idea from a Settlers’ Protective Association started in Kansas in 1874, to help squatters in their fight against the railroad land monopolies. Such are the claims, though slightly overwrought. But it was Milton George of Chicago, editor of the Western Rural, who in 1880 established the alliance that, within two years, was to claim 2,000 local groups with 100,000 members. This organization followed on the heels of two or three years of hard times in the Prairie states. As conditions improved, in 1883 and 1884, interest lagged. Then, following low wheat prices in 1884-1885, membership picked up in all the wheat states of the Northwest, and by 1887 the Northwestern Alliance was beginning to demand such things as federal competition with railroads and the revival of free coinage of silver. In the Minneapolis convention of that year, there was some tendency to cooperate with the Knights of Labor. By 1890, the Midwest farmers were thoroughly class conscious. Kansas claimed 130,000 alliance members, while Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota were close rivals. The organization had already spread through fifteen states, and was reaching out for more.40

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  Up from the Mudsills of Hell

  The Farmers' Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee, 1870-1915

  • Connie Lester(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Georgia Press

    (Publisher)

  With prices determined by international supply and demand, farmers believed they needed new laws to protect their interests. 1 With the merger of the Wheel and Alliance in 1888 – 1889, the agrarian politi-cal agenda assumed a more central role as farmers looked beyond locally directed cooperativism to government intervention at both the state and federal levels and regulation as the mechanism for stabilizing the agricultural economy. Rural voters gradually shifted from an antiparty rhetoric to more a sophisticated and more defined articulation of the agrarian political position. Initially operating as nonpartisan voters, farmers limited their support to candidates who measured up to the Alliance yardstick of demands, and they exercised increasing control over the selection of candidates and the election of legislators. A careful assessment of antiparty rhetoric, a delineation of the demands championed by Tennessee’s farmers, and an outline of the political context in which agrarian insurgency 126 Chapter Four operated provides a basis for analyzing the strength of rural activism and its political limits. 2 Wheel and Alliance activities in the 1880s developed within an existing climate of antiparty protest that culminated in what Robert McMath called a new political culture. As we have already seen, the growth of the agrarian cooperative organizations educated the state’s farmers in the political economy of their day and provided the momentum for political insurgency. The rallies, parades, and barbeques brought together men and women suffering from the constraints imposed by an industrializing and deflationary economy.

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  Feminist Struggles for Sex Equality

  • Nancy F. Cott(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Saur

    (Publisher)

  FEMINIST STRUGGLES FOR SEX EQUALITY 81 Populism and Feminism in a Newspaper by and for Women of the Kansas Farmers' Alliance, 1891-1894 by Marilyn Dell Brady HE EMERGENCE of the Farmers' Alliance movement in the 1880s brought new hope and a new sense of power to many farmers throughout the West and the South. Appearing first in Texas in the 1870s, the Alliance created cooperatives for buying and selling farm products. Its members published newspapers and held meetings to teach oth-ers the organization's new and potentially radical mes-sage that farmers could unite and gain control over forces they viewed as oppressive. Initially the Alliance avoided political involvement, but as the cooperatives and the mass meetings grew they laid the groundwork for effective political power. By 1890, the Populist party developed as the political arm of the movement, gradually overshadowing its other concerns. 1 Kansas farmers began to flock to the banner of the Farmers' Alliance after land prices collapsed in 1887 and drought struck in 1888. Plagued with large mort-gages and falling prices for their goods, they were ready to listen to the innovative solutions being put 1. Lawrence GoocUvvn, Democratic Promise: The ΡιψιιΙπΙ Movement m America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES forth by the Farmers' Alliance. As in other states, at f irst efforts of the Kansas Alliance went into organiz-ing cooperatives, publishing newspapers, and holding mass meetings. By 1890, the Kansas Alliance claimed to have 100,000 members, and it had laid the founda-tion for a successful challenge of the traditional Re-publican monopoly of state government. Like the suc-cesses of the cooperatives that had preceded them, the victories won by the Kansas Populist party in 1890 of-fered Kansas farmers new avenues of power.' For women as well as men the Farmers' Alliance promised hope and e x p a n d e d opportunities for ex-pression.

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  A Companion to American Agricultural History

  • R. Douglas Hurt(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In 1886, C.W. Macune, the president of the Texas Alliance, had proposed a two-part initiative that would resolve divisions in the Texas organization and address the issues that bedeviled agriculture: the creation of a statewide cooperative in Texas and expansion of the Alliance to other states. The Texas Alliance became the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union. The cooperative was the lifeblood of the organization, a physical manifestation of the work of the Alliance movement, and a practical response to the problems of credit and commodity prices experienced by every farmer. The well-endowed Texas Alliance state cooperative stood as a model of what was possible. But particularly in the South, it was in many ways a false promise. While Georgia followed Texas in the creation of a strong state cooperative agency other state cooperatives encountered roadblocks to success and foundered on the rocks of inadequate funding and outright opposition. Poor farmers encountered significant barriers to membership in the Alliance cooperative. Participation in the cooperative required mem- bership in the Alliance plus the payment of $1–2 to underwrite the state cooperative and facilitate the bulk purchase of farm needs for distribution to local cooperatives. In addition, purchases through the cooperative store required cash. Poorer farmers simply opted out; the risk of even a few dollars in the expectation of savings was often too much for those who counted every penny. Theoretically, cooperativism marshalled the purchasing and marketing power of organized membership to reduce the costs for farm inputs and raise the price of farm commodities.

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  Jazz Age

  People and Perspectives

  • Mitchell Newton-Matza(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  While embracing more culturally conservative attitudes than those of city dwellers, farmers increasingly accommodated themselves to the interest-group politics of the 1920s. The shift that took place during the 1920s set the seal on a transformation that had been under way since the failure of the Populist movement during the 1890s. The Country Life Movement and World War I, 1907–1919 At the beginning of the 20th century, the world of the typical American farmer was characterized by physically demanding labor and comparative social isolation. Standing apart from industrial society and cultivated using agricultural methods not vastly different from those of the mid-19th cen- tury, the typical American farm was a largely self-sufficient social organism, promoting an ethic of hard work that extended to all family members (including children) and disdained the preoccupation with leisure of the wider society. Although rural health, diet, and sanitation did not decline, social reformers helped bring about dramatic advances in the quality of urban life that further widened the economic gap between the two worlds. Farmers’ preoccupation with self-reliance led them to disdain forms of orga- nization that went beyond the county level. They were strong defenders of the country school, which was less well equipped than its urban counter- part, boasted a much shorter school year, and yet provided the rudimentary form of education that corresponded closely with what most farmers desired for their children. Their preference for local oversight applied equally to ru- ral government, where the prevailing concern was not with the impact of federal or state legislation, but with justice, education, and roads, all of which were handled at the township or community level. ‘‘The idea that government should carry out broad functions of amelioration was repug- nant to farm people,’’ writes David Danbom.

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