Farmers' Alliances

10 Key excerpts on "Farmers' Alliances"

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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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  A Companion to American Agricultural History

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

    (Publisher)

  Quick action by state and regional Alliance leaders suggested that farmers were better organized than political elites thought they were (or, in fact, than they actually were). It reinforced the ideology of coop- erative effort and renewed sagging spirits as lecturers spread out across the region to add to the Alliance membership. Organizing the Grassroots Cooperative purchasing and marketing offered farmers a potential means to cut costs and obtain higher prices for their farm commodities. But as important as cooperativism was to the agrarian movement, success depended on building a strong and sustainable grass- roots organization. As the Grange, the Alliance, and ultimately the People’s Party moved from regional identification to become a national phenomenon, long-term success required bridging the multitude of conflicts that roiled the countryside. Southern farmers voted Democratic, while Midwestern and Plains State farmers were solidly Republican. Racism divided black and white farmers. Lingering divisions between North and South, periodically inflamed by political rhetoric, threatened the long-term viability of national farm organiza- tions. As women’s clubs acquired national clout, the role of women in reform and the issue of woman suffrage agitated the Alliance as well. The agrarian grassroots organizing efforts demonstrated a step into modern interest group organizing techniques that operated to build strong local alliances and unified state organi- zations in the region in order to speak with a national voice in addressing the political and economic problems of farmers and workers (Clemens 1997). In the process, agrarian leaders papered over the cracks that would undermine unity as they called on the membership to “put their shoulders to the wheel” and move agrarian reform forward.

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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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  Radical Protest and Social Structure

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

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

    (Publisher)

  II AN ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY OF THE SOUTHERN FARMERS' ALLIANCE This page intentionally left blank Growth and Merger Rally, rally, gird on your armor, 0 ye tillers of the soil. Ye lahorers in the workshop. Ye homy-handed sons of toil. Rally around the banner. Of the great Alliance cause. And let the work go bravely on From Maine to the Rio Grande. [L J. S., Raleigh Progressive Farmer, October 15, 1889] The S o u t h e m Fanners' Alliance flowed through the 1880s like a river on its w a y to the ocean. The tributaries began as small fanners' clubs in the early part of the decade, a n d each small stream g r e w as it gathered strength from the misery w h i c h the tenancy system created. As the clubs grew, they flowed into each other a n d contributed to the g r o w t h of the movement. As the decade progressed, clubs that had merged then recombined into larger a n d larger organizations, each one of these large groups w a s the summation of its m a n y tributaries. Finally, in 1892, the Alliance, one million members strong,* lost itself in the Populist party, as a river into the sea. But u n h k e a river, the Alliance absorbed t w o different kinds of streams as it proceeded. The m a i n tributaries w e r e large organizations of small y e o m e n a n d tenants w h o sought to use boycotts, form cooperatives, a n d engage in other locally based mass activities to reverse the process of tenantization a n d overcome the immiseration brought about by the crop lien system. The other tributaries w e r e smaU organizations of large owners, w h i c h gathered together the leading farmers »Unless otherwise noted, all membership figures are taken from iviichael Schwartz The Southem Farmers' Alliance: The Organizational Forms of Radical Protest' (Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 1971). app. I. 91 6

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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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  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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  Shaped by the West, Volume 2

  A History of North America from 1850

  • William F. Deverell, Anne F. Hyde(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Grange members were interested in farm economics, in the hopes for cooperative arrangements that could tie them together and build col-lective clout, and in ways they might push back against the political and eco-nomic power coming at them from urban and industrializing America. The Grange, and its attendant Granger movement, lost ground in the 1880s, in part because of costly and largely failed attempts to manufacture farm equip-ment for members (and thus bypass the big companies). But in a way, the Grange succeeded even as it failed. Out of its dust came other farmer organizations: bet-ter organized, more focused, and driven by increasing anger at the way things were. By the early 1890s, the Alliance movement—a child of the Grange—was busy hustling third-party candidates toward political offi ce in state elections across the nation. That challenge to the conventional two-party allegiance of Republicans or Democrats grew into a national political party, the People’s Party, also known as the Populist Party. The leaders of that movement set their sights on nothing less than the White House and the presidency of the United States. One thing Populists had going for them, which also could work against them, was their sheer diversity of opinion. Populists could be conservative one moment, radical the next. They were open-minded, closed-minded; racially egalitarian, racially exclusive. Just as the Populists did among themselves, his-torians have disagreed about just what Populism meant, what its political pro-grams signified, and what legacies emerged from its experiments and its dreams. A few things are certain. Like the Grangers before them, Populists were angry, sometimes to the point of violence directed at other people or things, about what they perceived as the declining centrality of rural life in (and to) America, and they banded together to try to do something about it.

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  Civic Learning through Agricultural Improvement

  • Glenn P. Lauzon(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Town-dwellers’ suc- cess at “co-operative effort,” one aggrieved farmer thought, “should teach the farmer the lesson” (Chase, 1873, p. 159). It did. Declaring themselves “tired of calm submission to all kinds of ex- tortions and indignities,” farmers started organizing (Ratliff, 1873, p. 128). They sent letters to the agricultural press describing how they were band- ing together. Requests for information poured in from other farmers who were seeking tips on organizing strategies and ideas about what ought to be done (Doty, 1873, p. 109). Schoolhouse meetings grew into mass con- ventions and picnic rallies attended by thousands. Singing songs that cel- ebrated agriculture and called for justice, farmers waved flags and paraded with banners. Gathering in groves, fairgrounds, and halls they heard speak- ers decry monopolies, middlemen, and corrupt politicians (Harvey, 1873; “Mass Meeting,” 1873). July 4, 1873 was the Farmer’s Fourth in the Midwest. It was just the beginning. Through the next year, the discontent mounted as farmers and their office-seeking champions brought their grievances to bear on the political establishment in the election campaign of 1874. What was the farmers’ movement all about? At its heart were low farm profits and an old civic goal: bringing the producer and consumer closer together. But, it was not the home market (county seat) that captured farm- ers’ attention. When farmers spoke about bringing the producer and con- sumer closer together, they referred to the span between the rural West and urban East. As producers of grain and meat, farmers wanted railroad freight rates lowered and steps in handling eliminated so that they could earn higher profits. As consumers, farmers wanted the implements and household goods that were obtained most cheaply by importing them from distant manufacturers.

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  Missouri

  The Heart of the Nation

  • William E. Parrish, Lawrence O. Christensen, Brad D. Lookingbill(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In 1880 Thomas T. Crittenden of Warrensburg and his Democratic colleagues easily defeated their Greenback and Republican opponents. Governor Crittenden made no obvious overtures to agricultural demands, except for breaking up the James gang. Crittenden's Democratic successor, John Sappington Marmaduke of St. Louis, however, called a special session of the legislature to urge increased state supervision of railroads. Marmaduke had defeated Nicholas Ford of Andrew County, a Greenback–Republican fusion candidate, by about 10,000 votes and believed that legislative action was necessary. The General Assembly responded with a law that forbade unjust discrimination of freight charges, empowered the railroad commission to set maximum rates, and established substantial penalties for offenses. This reflected the general mood of the times, for five months earlier Congress had approved the Interstate Commerce Act in a federal effort to regulate railroads. Marmaduke died on December 28, 1887, and Lieutenant Governor Albert P. Morehouse of Maryville served out the remainder of his term in office.

  The Alliance Movement

  Farmers in Missouri turned to the National Farmers' Alliance and Cooperative Union of America and the National Agricultural Wheel in their efforts to improve their conditions. Formed in Texas during 1884 and later combined with a Louisiana organization, the Farmers' Alliance entered Missouri in 1887. By August 1888 it had organized 615 local or sub‐alliances in 38 southern counties. The Agricultural Wheel began in Arkansas in 1882 and entered Missouri in 1886, the same year that eight state groups formed the national organization. In 1889 the Alliance and Wheel united, forming the Farmers' and Laborers' Union of America.

  Still called the Farmers' Alliance, the new organization insisted that farmers form cooperatives, educate themselves about the issues of the day, and learn scientific farming techniques. Through the lecturer system whereby paid and unpaid individuals discussed farm problems and literature that advocated reform, farmers learned new approaches to agriculture and broadened their knowledge of society. Uriel S. Hall of Moberly served as state lecturer in Missouri during 1889. One contemporary Missourian called the alliance movement a national university that inspired and stimulated farmers to think critically. By 1889 Norman Colman, editor of Colman's Rural World, estimated membership of the movement at 200,000.

  Democratic Response

  Although Populism surfaced in many forms, Democratic candidates retained all of the statewide offices in 1888. Democrat David R. Francis, a grain dealer, the former president of the St. Louis Merchants' Exchange, and the former mayor of St. Louis, captured the governorship over Republican E. E. Kimball of Nevada by 13,233 votes. Democrats also won 10 of 14 congressional races and continued their control of both houses of the General Assembly. While losing nationally in his bid for reelection, Democratic President Grover Cleveland surpassed Republican Benjamin Harrison in Missouri by 25,691 votes.

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  Jazz Age

  People and Perspectives

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

    (Publisher)

  econ- omy and increasingly vulnerable to economic shocks, given their inability to break into foreign markets as the United States moved from the status of debtor to creditor to the nations of Europe. C H A P T E R 2 FA R M E R S 19 Farmers’ Associations Two possible solutions to this dilemma presented themselves. One was the creation of marketing institutions for farmers that would reduce the need for government intervention. The greatest success was achieved by groups like the California Fruit Growers’ Association and Land O’Lakes Creamery in the Midwest, which used standardized grading and inspections, estab- lished storage and processing systems, and coordinated sales. In the state of Washington, the Lewis-Pacific Dairymen’s Association was formed in 1919 to achieve precisely that degree of control of market share. Aiming at taking on the whole of the local market, the association limited member- ship to local farmers engaged in dairy farming who purchased a $10 share for each cow owned. Unlike the Grange cooperatives that already existed, the association saw its role as purely economic—not community build- ing—and on these terms it successfully defied the economic downturn of 1921 and even weathered the Great Depression. By way of contrast, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) advocated centralized marketing strategies, but, in doing so, lost the sup- port of many farmers’ elevators and many thousands of members. The AFBF’s inclusion of nonfarmers involved in agricultural marketing, even the bankers and merchants whom the Farmers’ Union had excluded, was a red flag to those who thought the organization favored big farmers and businesspeople. Despite successful recruitment campaigns by the AFBF in the early 1920s, it made little effort to establish itself at a community level.

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