Farmers and Third-Party Politics 

in Late Nineteenth Century America

Worth Robert Miller

 Copyright 1996 by Scholarly Resources Inc. Reprinted by permission of Scholarly Resources Inc.
Originally a chapter in Charles W. Calhoun (ed), The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America

            In August, 1896, William Allen White, editor of the Emporia, Kansas Gazette, penned an editorial that made him an overnight celebrity with the nation's political and social elite.  The Sunflower State, he claimed, had "an old mossback Jacksonian who snorts and howls because there is a bathtub in the State House; we are running that old jay for Governor.  We have another shabby, wild-eyed, rattlebrained fanatic who has said openly in a dozen speeches that 'the rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner'; we are running him for Chief Justice, so that capital will come tumbling over itself to get into the state . . . .  Then, for fear some hint that the state had become respectable might percolate through the civilized portions of the nation, we have decided to send three or four harpies out lecturing, telling the people that Kansas is raising hell and letting the corn go to weed."  White caught the eye of the nation's movers and shakers with the venomous sarcasm of his editorial, which he titled "What's the Matter with Kansas."  His target was the upstart People's, or Populist, party, which they considered a major threat to respectability and order.

            The tone of White's remarks betrayed not only his exasperation at the heresies of the "ordinary clodhoppers . . . (who) know more in a minute about finance than (ex-treasury secretary) John Sherman," but also the fear that such rabble, might actually win the crucial election of 1896.  The Republican National Committee immediately reprinted White's tirade.  It became the most widely used circular in William McKinley's bid for the presidency against Democrat William Jennings Bryan, whom Populists had also nominated.  All of the forces of ridicule would be brought to bear against this threat to the business elite's right to set the nation's political, economic, and intellectual agenda.[1]

            By 1896, the equilibrium that characterized Gilded Age politics had dissolved into a fluid three-way struggle for survival.  The People's party had become a major contender for power throughout the South and West.  In turn, the Democratic party had collapsed in the West.  Its gubernatorial candidate in Kansas carried less than ten percent of the vote in 1894.  In the South, the GOP shared the same fate, garnering only thirteen percent of the vote for governor of Texas the same year.  Which of the three contenders would survive the 1890s was uncertain.  Angry voters had flocked to the new party which claimed to address the common people's real problems, while the old parties engaged in ritual battles over safe but ultimately meaningless issues.

            Populists were hardly the rabble that mainstream party spokesmen claimed.  Most were rural middle-class property owners with a moralistic bent to their politics.  They claimed to represent the America of the Founding Fathers as it had been refined through the democracy of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln.  It was the old parties, they claimed, that had adopted the alien ideologies that were subverting the promise of America, namely laissez-faire capitalism, social Darwinism, and the gospel of wealth.  The Populist Revolt was a major challenge to Gilded Age America's socioeconomic elite precisely because it was a thoroughly American response to the dislocations that Gilded Age development had thrust upon voters.

            Rapid economic growth brought forth a revolutionary new America during the late nineteenth century.  Industry expanded as never before.  Railroad mileage grew five-fold between 1860 and 1890, making commercial agriculture possible in the West and upland South.  Consequently, Americans brought 430 million new acres of land under cultivation between 1860 and 1900.  The machinery that allowed American farmers to become the most efficient producers of the age also became widely available in this era.  Agricultural production soared.  Despite the material advances, however, almost all historical accounts characterize the Gilded Age as a period in which farming went into decline.  Farmers' share of gross domestic product dropped from thirty-eight to twenty-four percent from the 1870s to the 1890s.  Millions lost their status as independent farmers and either became tenants or joined the urban working poor.  Many attempted to resist proletarianization by joining farm organizations or through political action.  Yet by the end of the century, a vocation championed by the nation's greatest public figures as the quintessence of Americanism was rapidly being swept away.[2]

            To millions of late nineteenth century Americans, farming was a way of life that was infused with honor and patriotism.  They remained loyal to an idealistic set of concepts inherited from the Founding Fathers that modern scholars have labeled republicanism.  Creating a republic when all the rest of the world adhered to some form of institutionalized privilege committed the nation to an egalitarian society.  The Founding Fathers also believed that history was a never-ending struggle between the forces of power and liberty.  They associated the forces of power with oppression and the ascendancy of liberty with social advance.  Because wealth brought power to its possessor, and poverty made men dependent upon others, liberty became contingent upon widespread equality.  The commitment to both equality and liberty led Americans to develop a freehold concept which held that all men had a natural right to the land.  Agricultural pursuits, they believed, encouraged frugality, industriousness, and community spiritedness.  Thus, they came to look upon those who had fallen subject to the powerful and wealthy with contempt, and even fear.  According to the Revolutionary Fathers, only an independent citizenry could defend their liberties, and thus be the bulwark of the Republic.

            Settlers flooded onto the Great Plains after the Civil War.  Eastern Kansas and Nebraska received enough rainfall to continue the corn-hog cycle that gave Midwestern farmers marketing options and required relatively little machinery.  But, as settlers moved westward, the climate grew drier.  To encourage rapid settlement, boosters propagandized the fallacious idea the "rain followed the plow."  Beyond the thirty inch rainfall line, however, new techniques would have to be developed.  Between 1865 and 1895 improved methods reduced the time to produce twenty-seven different crops by forty-eight percent.  By 1900, one man could to do the work that twenty had accomplished in 1860 by using machinery to harvest wheat.  Thus, farmers found it desirable to buy machinery, fertilizer, and more land--all on credit.[3]

            As the American farmer became a part of the world economy, the vagaries of feast or famine in Australia or the Ukraine also came to affect his life.  His agricultural production vastly outpaced the capacity of the nation, and even the world, to purchase.  Between 1870 and 1896, the wholesale price index for farm products declined by fifty percent.  But railroads and other middlemen took their profits despite the farmer's plight.  Soon, it cost Plains farmers a bushel of grain for every bushel they shipped to the East Coast.  Critics complained that farmers had overproduced.  Farmers, who lived in a world of underclothed and underfed people, considered this nonsense.  With an equitable distribution of wealth, everyone would have the purchasing power to buy their products.[4]

            Americans have long believed that the industrious should get ahead.  As the plight of western farmers grew, many began a determined inquiry into the causes of their victimization.  Middle men such as commission agents, futures speculators, and wholesalers appeared to make a profit without laboring.  Railroad freight charges seemed to be the product of monopoly situations rather than the value their services added to farm products.  For instance, railroads usually had reasonable rates in markets served by more than one line.  But, where only a single line existed, freight rates could be enormous.  Thus, carrying crops on longer routes between major terminals frequently cost less than shorter routes to or from a minor depot.  This long-short haul differential would become a major complaint when farmers turned toward politics.

            The social life of nineteenth century rural America has long been misunderstood.  Complaints of loneliness usually referred to loved ones left behind, not physical isolation.  Many settlers migrated in groups seeking to replicate familiar communities.  Farmers met neighbors at church, camp meetings, fraternal orders, and literary societies.  They also spent much of their spare time visiting one another's homes.  They likewise engaged in swap-work, and came together at barn raisings and to shuck corn.  The resulting social connections would greatly facilitate the creation of farmer cooperatives and political organizations.[5]

            The Patrons of Husbandry, or Grange, was the first major farmer organization of late nineteenth century America.  Founded in 1867, the order grew slowly until the Panic of 1873.  To circumvent middle men, the Grange founded cooperatives for buying and selling, mills for grinding grain, manufacturing establishments, and even banks.  To enhance members' social lives, it also sponsored fairs, picnics, dances, and lectures.  Politically, the Grange was non-partisan, but it promoted railroad and grain elevator regulation with significant effect in the Midwest.  The Supreme Court, however, ruled such "Granger Laws" unconstitutional in 1886.  After the Depression of the 1870s, the Patrons of Husbandry went into decline.  Still, Grangers provided an organizational model that later farm orders would adopt.[6]

            Plains farmers found credit harder to obtain and more expensive than back east.  Harsher conditions made the chances for profitable agriculture uncertain, and the general deflation of the period raised interest rates.  When the speculative land boom of the 1880s busted, numerous bankruptcies caused credit to dry up completely.  Between 1889 and 1893, creditors foreclosed on more than 11,000 Kansas farms.  As crop prices dropped below the cost of production, farmers used their crops as firewood.  By 1890, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas had more farm mortgages than families.  Western farming, thus, was in desperate straits by the last decade of the nineteenth century.[7]

            While the major problem western farmers faced was holding on to the land, most cotton-belt farmers of the South did not even own the land they tilled by 1900.  With emancipation, freedmen usually refused to work in gangs under the supervision of overseers.  It was too reminiscent of slavery.  Also, they wished to remove their women and children from the fields.  Because ex-slaves associated commercial agriculture with slavery, most hoped to obtain the "forty acres and a mule" that Radical Republicans had advocated and become yeomen farmers.  Despite the failure of land reform, necessity quickly broke up most plantations.  Ownership of the resulting small plots, however, usually did not pass to the operators.  Emancipation had liquidated substantial capital, making money scarce.  Thus, planters agreed to take a share of the crop as rent.  They also frequently became merchants and provided their tenants with seed, tools, and other necessities on credit.  As collateral, the tenant signed a lien, or mortgage, on his crop.  Merchants usually required the farmer to grow cotton only.  It was the most profitable crop grown in the region, and farmers could not eat it, which made them dependent upon the local store for food.  At settling-up time in the Fall, farmer and merchant met at the local gin to sell the crop.  Because cotton prices plummeted after 1870, the farmer usually did not earn enough to pay his debt.  The merchant then forced him to sign a lien on the next year's crop.  African-American tenant farmers found themselves engulfed in a web of planter controls almost as exploitative as slavery.  By 1900, debt peonage in the form of the crop-lien system was a way of life in the cotton-belt South.[8]

            Southern merchants purchased their goods from northern wholesalers, also on credit.  To pay their own debts, they tried to squeeze every nickel they could out of tenants.  Thus, the price of goods sold on credit was considerably higher than the cash price.  Interest rates on such debts also reached astronomical proportions.  Because the farmer's mortgaged crop was his only asset, no other merchant would allow him credit.  By 1900, merchant-planters dominated credit, land use, and the marketing of crops in the South, and only twenty-five percent of blacks had risen to the status of landowner.[9]

            White yeomen farmers of the upland South increasingly found themselves in the situation of tenants, too.  In antebellum days yeomen engaged in semi-subsistence agriculture, mostly raising corn and hogs.  Their animals usually ran wild in the woods, and sometimes through planter's fields.  It was the farmer's responsibility to fence in his crops rather than his animals in the South.  This "open range" system made all unfenced areas common pasture.  As in the West, other habits of mutuality, such as swap-work, had also developed.  Yeomen grew only enough cotton to pay taxes and buy a few minor luxuries, like sugar and tobacco.  During the Civil War, however, the Union army devastated the yeomen's herds.  Railroad expansion after the war made commercial agriculture seem a quick method of recouping their losses.  Thus, many expanded their commitment to cotton without any intention of remaining in the commercial world.  This required credit, which merchants extended, taking farm mortgages as security.  The rapid decline in cotton prices usually kept farmers in debt until they lost their land and became tenants, frequently on the land they formerly owned.  In the meantime, planter control of state governments resulted in the closing of the open range.  By 1900, cotton acreage had doubled, but thirty-six percent of white farmers had joined blacks in tenancy.[10]

            Falling into tenancy was doubly catastrophic to the psyche of southern white farmers.  It was a status popularly associated with African-Americans at a particularly racist period of history, and it signified the loss of liberty that accompanied the degeneration from republicanism to autocracy.  Many would attempt to start over farther west.  When they left, they wrote "GTT," meaning "Gone to Texas," on their front doors to notify friends of their migration.  The Southern Farmers Alliance, the immediate precursor to the Populist party, originated on the Texas frontier when tenancy appeared in the region.

            Southern farmers also suffered from problems common to the West.  Credit was nearly impossible to obtain, except through the crop-lien system.  The South had few skilled laborers and declining prices impeded capital accumulation.  Both hindered industrialization.  Poor consumer purchasing power drove transportation costs up because railroads passed the cost of moving empty cars into the region at harvest time on to the farmer.  Both South and West would retain vestiges of colonial-debtor economies well into the twentieth century.[11]

            Although farmers in the Midwest and Northeast suffered from some of the same problems as those in the South and West, such as declining crop prices, their lot was significantly different.  The inflation of the Civil War era allowed many northern farmers to pay off their mortgages.  Their more intensive railroad network discouraged long-short haul differentials.  Lower transportation costs made less productive land profitable for grain.  Likewise, proximity to burgeoning urban growth made the supplying of perishables profitable.  Dairy farming, for instance, became especially attractive where intensive cultivation had worn out the land.  Longtime residency and familiarity with local agricultural conditions also made credit easier to obtain. 

            Federal monetary policy played a major role in the farmer's credit problems during the Gilded Age.  Before the Civil War, Americans relied on a metal standard of currency.  The government set the legal ratio between silver and gold at 16 to 1 in 1834.  To finance the Civil War, however, the federal government suspended the redemption of paper currency with metal and printed $450 million in fiat money, called greenbacks.  The result was inflation, commercial liquidity, and general prosperity.

            Creditors, and orthodox financial circles, demanded the redemption of greenbacks with gold and silver after the Civil War.  The Public Credit Act of 1869 pledged the federal government to such a policy.  It would cause deflation, which raised interest rates and made the money that creditors owned more valuable.  Naturally, they wrapped their self-interest in a blanket of moralistic slogans.  Honest money, they claimed, was necessary to convince capitalists of the long-term stability of the dollar.  Otherwise, investors would be timid and stunt the nation's growth.  Debtors, especially in the cash‑poor South and West, complained that deflation would force them to sell more products to make the same dollar they had borrowed, in addition to paying higher interest rates because money was scarce. 

            When federal authorities revised the coinage list in 1873, they eliminated silver from the schedule of metals to be coined.  Because the intrinsic value of sixteen ounces of silver was greater than one ounce of gold at the time, people had generally used gold and hoarded silver anyway.  But, large-scale silver strikes in the mid-1870s lowered its value.  If silver had remained on the coinage list, deflation would not have been as severe.  Debtors and silver interests labeled it the "Crime of '73."  The free (untaxed) coinage of silver and gold at 16 to 1 would have expanded the currency while overcoming the fears many had about fiat money.  This refocused the currency issue from greenbacks to silver.  Bipartisan interests authorized the limited coinage of silver with the Bland‑Allison Act of 1878.  Then, in 1890, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act committed federal authorities to buying the entire domestic output of silver.  The Treasury Department, however, continued to redeem all certificates with gold until the Panic of 1893.

            The proto-Populist Greenback and Union Labor parties of the 1870s and 1880s made monetary policy one of their premier issues.  Supporters considered labor to be the only legitimate source of value.  Thus, money was simply a means of keeping count of one's labor.  It needed only government fiat, not intrinsic value.  Greenbackers argued that the federal government should maintain stable values by adjusting the money supply to match changes in population and production.  During the deflationary Gilded Age this would mean expanding the money supply.  The federal government could easily do this with greenbacks.  But, the supply of gold and silver could not be controlled.  Commitment to intrinsic money caused deflation which automatically increased the purchasing power of the wealthy.  Greenbackers considered this illegitimate because it allowed the rich to amass wealth without labor.  Leo Vincent, a prominent Populist of the 1890s, claimed that a government‑owned banking system which circulated the greenbacks "that freed the chattel slave" during the Civil War, would some day "free the wage slave" as well.  His father, an abolitionist in both England and America, labeled the labor conflict of the 1880s his "third anti-slavery struggle," but prophetically noted that it was "the most hopeless of all."[12]

            Granger political activities spawned a number of state-level third parties in the Midwest in the 1870s.  In November, 1874, Indiana Independents founded the National Independent, or Greenback, Party.  Greenbackers nominated Peter Cooper of New York for president in 1876.  Their platform called for repeal of the Resumption Act of 1875 and the issuance of legal tender notes.  Drawing voters away from the mainstream parties, however, proved difficult in this era of highly partisan politics.  For many, political affiliation was almost akin to church membership.  Thus, Cooper polled a minuscule vote, mostly from the Midwest, in 1876.[13]

            The wave of labor unrest that struck the nation in 1877 gave Greenbackers a badly needed boost.  Wage reductions provoked numerous railroad strikes.  State legislation outlawing strikes, plus the use of militia and federal troops against laborers, mobilized workers politically.  Greenbackers absorbed the National Labor Reform Party in 1878, creating the Greenback-Labor Party.  Its platform called for greenbacks, free silver, a graduated income tax, reduced working hours, abolishing convict labor, and land reform.  The party received more than a million votes in the 1878 congressional races, and sent fifteen men to Congress.  Again, their vote was strongest in the Midwest, although the party gained substantially in the Northeast and Southwest.[14]

            The Greenback-Labor Party's western agrarian wing advocated fusion (coalition) with mainstream parties.  In 1880, they were successful in nominating James B.  Weaver of Iowa for president.  When Weaver forced fusion in some eastern state races, many laborers withdrew from the party, and its vote dropped by two-thirds.  The results were even worse in 1882 and 1884.  But as its legacy, the Greenback-Labor Party developed a cadre of leaders and a list of platform issues that Populists would later inherit.[15] 

            Egalitarian third parties of the Gilded Age grew out of nominally non-partisan producer groups, such as the Grange.  The growth of the Knights of Labor in the mid-1880s led to the next major third-party effort.  Knights refused to accept the permanency of their wage status, or the capitalist system.  Instead, they applied Jeffersonian values to the industrial setting by looking to a cooperative industrial system in which each producer would remain independent by becoming his own employer.  In 1884, the Knights of Labor began lobbying Congress for an end to the importation of foreign contract laborers.  Many had been used as strikebreakers.  The order grew from 100,000 members in 1885 to 700,000 in 1886, and soon became the nerve center of numerous boycotts and strikes.  In 1886, local labor parties polled 68,000 votes in New York City and 25,000 in Chicago.  Their most spectacular showing, however, was in Milwaukee where they outpolled the Democratic and Republican parties combined.[16]

             The Knights of Labor accepted all producers as members, even farmers.  They founded the National Union Labor Party in February, 1887.  Knights president Terence Powderly had been a Greenbacker.  The Union Labor platform called for reform in land, transportation, and money, a trinity of issues that Populists would later adopt.  Events connected with the Knights of Labor, however, limited the new party's growth.  The Railroads crushed the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, leaving the union with an aura of defeat.  Knights also received blame for a bomb thrown at Chicago policemen when they attempted to break up a labor rally at Haymarket Square the same year.  Both events caused a severe decline in Knights membership.  Thus, the Union Labor Party did poorly in the election of 1888.  Thirty-one percent of its national vote, however, came from Kansas, where farmers made up a majority of the party's supporters.  Western agrarians obviously were ripe for third-party action.

            Historians have long debated why Gilded Age farmers adopted third party politics.  In 1931, John D. Hicks identified hard times as the cause.  But, the vast majority of all who have ever lived have been poor.  Most have simply accepted their fate, or worked within the established political parties.  In the wake of the McCarthy scare of the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter claimed that Populists exhibited an irrational, conspiracy-minded scapegoatism motivated by their declining status in America instead of economic pragmatism.  Most historians, however, have maintained that farmer's complaints in this era were valid, and the evidence for irrational scapegoatism probably was stronger for Populism's enemies.  With the civil rights, antipoverty, and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, scholars began to focus on the third party's justice orientation.  Hard times alone could not explain the Populist Revolt.  But, the presence of widespread poverty among virtuous and hard-working producers, while unethical manipulators amassed fortunes, convinced those who would become Populists of the unfairness of their situation, and the danger that contemporary trends posed for the republic.[17]

            During the year before the Great Southwest Strike, the Knights of Labor formed a warm friendship with the Texas-based Southern Farmers Alliance.  The order's major purpose, one of its founders later stated, was to "educate ourselves in the science of free government" to resist the day that "is rapidly approaching when the balance of labor's products become concentrated into the hands of a few, there to constitute a power that would enslave posterity."  The Alliance and Knights held joint meetings, picnics, and barbecues.  Alliancemen also supported Knight's boycotts and provided aid during the Great Southwest strike.[18]

            The Southern Farmers Alliance had been founded in 1877, although it had struggled along without much consequence until 1884 when S.O.  Daws became traveling Lecturer.  Armed with a cooperative message and the power to appoint organizers and establish suballiances, Daws and his subordinates spread the Alliance throughout Texas in the next two years.  In their wake came trade agreements with local merchants, cooperative stores where merchants proved intransigent, and Alliance yards for the bulk sale of cotton.  The Alliance appealed mostly to small landowners.  Middlemen, creditors, and the business community proved hostile.  The Alliance message educated farmers as to their interests as an oppressed economic group, which resulted in a growing class consciousness among farmers.  Pivotal to farmer radicalism was the belief that non-producers had rigged the economic system in order to amass wealth into their own hands.  Only the mobilization of independent producers could counter this threat to American traditions.[19] 

            Although Alliance economic efforts were successful for a while, most eventually went bankrupt.  Many Alliancemen were ready for political action when they met in Cleburne, Texas in August, 1886.  The meeting produced a list of demands calling for the incorporation of unions and cooperative stores, fair taxation of railroads, railroad regulation, outlawing trade in agricultural futures, greenbacks, and several pro-labor items.  Conservative Alliancemen, however, could not abide such government intervention and immediately formed a rival Alliance.  Dr.  Charles W.  Macune eventually averted a potentially fratricidal war with a proposal to establish a state Alliance Exchange.  He claimed that centralizing cooperative efforts would improve the Alliance's buying and selling power.  The Texas Alliance Exchange handled cotton, implements, dry goods, groceries, and general supplies at a savings to farmers in middlemen fees.  But, it was severely undercapitalized and extended credit too freely.  Bankruptcy came in the summer of 1889.  Similar exchanges in other states also eventually failed.  Alliance leaders publicly ascribed the failures to banker and merchant hostility.[20]

            The Alliance committed itself to organizing the rest of the South at Cleburne.  Lecturers from Texas blanketed Dixie in 1886, leaving thousands of suballiances in their wake.  Their success can be attributed to the policy of sending organizers to areas of their former residence.  This gained them easy access to already existing social networks.  When the producers of jute bagging (which farmers used to bale cotton) raised prices sixty percent in 1888, the Alliance was strong enough to sponsor a successful boycott.  Texan Richard M.  Humphries, who had been active in the Union Labor Party, led a separate Colored Farmers Alliance, which also spread throughout the South at this time.[21]

            In 1889, the Southern, Northern, and Colored Farmers Alliances met with the Farmers Mutual Benefit Association and Knights of Labor in St.  Louis with an eye toward unification.  The race issue and secret ritual of the Southern Alliance eventually caused the Northern Alliance to decline formal affiliation.  Still, the platforms produced by both orders were stridently antimonopoly.  The Kansas and Dakota delegations of the Northern Alliance, however, subsequently defected to the more radical Southern Alliance, which immediately began organizing the Plains and West.  

            At the St.  Louis conference, Charles Macune unveiled a plan to solve the problem of under-financed cooperatives.  It called for the federal government to establish warehouses (called subtreasuries) to store farmer's crops.  Instead of dumping their crops on the market at harvest time when it was glutted, farmers could store their crops in a subtreasury and use them as collateral for government loans of up to eighty percent of the market value of their crop.  The resulting warehouse receipts could be used to pay debts.  This would expand the money supply at harvest time when more money was needed, and contract it as receipt holders sold their crops.  The subtreasury plan rapidly became something of an article of faith with Alliancemen.  Historian Lawrence Goodwyn has contended that the cooperative-subtreasury efforts of the Alliance created a distinctive culture of protest that led to Populism.  But, farmer dissidence had been grounded in the protest culture of republicanism long before the 1880s.[22]

            Although the Alliance was formally non-partisan, many of its demands could be realized only through political action.  Republican leaders in the Plains states responded in an antagonistic and demeaning fashion.  Kansas Senator John J.  Ingalls, for instance, proclaimed "the purification of politics is an irredescent dream."  Kansas Alliance president Ben Clover, however, called upon farmers to "close up ranks . . . (to save) the America given into our keeping by the Revolutionary Fathers with the admonition that 'eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.'" Alliance leaders told farmers that "it its just as essential for you to send men of your own kind to represent you as it is for you to go out and cultivate your own crops."  No farmer expected lawyers or merchants to help him in his fields.  Why should he expect them to represent the farmer's interest in government? Replacing the political elite with true representatives of the people is a theme common to all so-called populistic movements.[23]  

            In response to GOP intransigence, third parties appeared in the Plains states in 1890.  In Kansas, they swept the House of representatives, carried five of seven Congressional seats, and named farm editor William A.  Peffer to replace Ingalls in the U.S. Senate.  The holdover Kansas Senate, however, remained Republican and sabotaged Populist efforts at reform.  Third parties also won both houses in Nebraska and elected another U.S. Senator, James H. Kyle, in South Dakota.  In the South, Democrats proved decidedly more conciliatory toward Alliancemen.  Thus, Alliancemen attempted to work within Dixie's dominant party, and claimed to have elected four governors, nineteen U.S. Congressmen, and majorities in eight state legislatures in 1890.[24]

            When the Southern and Colored Alliances met in Ocala, Florida, in December, 1890, westerners advocated immediate third party action.  Southerners, however, wanted to give reform within the Democratic Party a chance.  President Leonidas L.  Polk declared "education" to be the Alliance's most immediate need.  As Robert C.  McMath recently noted, the textbook trust presented "a politically correct version of history and economics . . . that celebrated the rise of industrial capitalism."  Alliancemen would have to overcome this dogma in the classrooms of the suballiances before a third party could be successful.  Thus, the Ocala meeting founded the National Reform Press Association to provide an alternative source of news and information to sympathizers.  It would dispense ready-print literature on economics, history, and politics along with original cartoons and classroom lessons to hundreds of newspapers nationwide.  It took only $150 to establish a weekly newspaper in the 1890s.  Macune successfully proposed that the decision on forming a third party be put off until 1892.[25]

            The Ocala convention produced a platform that Populists would draw from liberally in later documents.  It called for abolition of national banks, greenbacks, free silver, the subtreasury plan, ending alien land ownership, a graduated income tax, and government supervision of railroads.  Anxious westerners called a May, 1891, conference in Cincinnati.  With few southerners in attendance, however, they decided to wait until the Alliance-called St.  Louis convention of February, 1892 to form a national party.  Although southerners also proved reticent at St.  Louis, westerners went ahead with founding the People's Party and adopted a platform similar to the Ocala document.  Afterward they scheduled a national nominating convention for July in Omaha.  By this date, the do-nothing 1891 southern legislatures were only a bitter memory for Alliancemen.  Having given up on reform within the Democratic Party, they were ready to join the third-party movement.[26]

            More than 1300 delegates met in Omaha, Nebraska, in July, 1892, to nominate a national ticket and write a platform for the People's Party of America.  Leonidas L.  Polk, president of the Southern Farmer's Alliance, was expected to receive the convention's highest honor.  Unfortunately, he died just before the convention.  Federal Judge Walter Q.  Gresham, who had flirted with Populist doctrines, seemed to be the next best choice, but declined.  In the end, the presidential nomination devolved upon General James B.  Weaver of Iowa, the 1880 presidential candidate of the Greenback-Labor Party.  As his running mate the convention chose ex‑Confederate General James G.  Field, of Virginia.  The blue‑gray ticket of Civil War veterans symbolized the party's attempt to transcend the old issues inherited from the Civil War and Reconstruction and face the problems that Gilded Age development had produced.

            Party leaders scheduled the presentation of the platform for the Fourth of July.  It quickly became the Bible of Populism.  The preamble, written by novelist Ignatius Donnelly, charged that the nation was "rapidly degenerating into European conditions."  "Governmental injustice," it claimed, "bred two great classes‑‑tramps and millionaires."  This degeneration was attributed to "a vast conspiracy against mankind . . . if not met and overthrown at once it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism."  The great issue, the preamble charged, was "whether we are to have a republic to administer."[27] 

            The Omaha platform called for reform in land, transportation, and monetary policy.  Populists demanded that public land be set aside for actual settlers rather than speculators.  They called for government ownership of railroads, telephones, and telegraphs.  As the platform explained, "the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads."  Concentration of such power into the hands of a few was a threat to American liberties.  On finance, Populists demanded that the northeastern-dominated National Banking System be replaced by postal savings banks directly responsible to elected officials.  They also demanded a flexible currency that could be maintained at $50 per capita.  This meant greenbacks, although the platform also called for "free silver."  The platform likewise endorsed the subtreasury plan, and contained an expression of sentiments sympathetic to labor, favoring the democratization of politics, and endorsing a graduated income tax.  Except for the subtreasury plan, reformers had agitated all of these issues for decades.  Where Adam Smith feared the power of government, Populists feared the power of the wealthy and looked to popular control of an active government as their savior.[28] 

            James B.  Weaver spread the Populist message with a cross-country speaking tour in 1892.  He spoke before enthusiastic crowds, and on election day received 1,029,846 popular votes and 22 electoral votes.  It was the first time a third party had broken into the electoral college since 1860.  Populism was strongest in the western states that had joined the Union after 1860, where the party drew mostly from farmers and miners.  Other reformers supplemented their ranks in urban areas.  Antimonopoly provided the unifying theme.  In many western states, Democrats supported Populists to keep their state's electoral votes out of the GOP column.  The People's Party elected a governor and state senate in Kansas.  But, Republicans disputed returns that would have given them the House.  Populist Governor Lorenzo D. Lewelling, a Quaker and pacifist, eventually backed down in the potentially violent "Kansas Legislative War" of 1893.[29]

            In the South, Populists arranged fusion tickets with Republicans in Alabama and Louisiana.  But, formal association with the party of Reconstruction was too much for Populists in most southern states.  Serious efforts, however, were made to wean blacks from the GOP.  In Texas, third party leaders named two blacks to their state executive committee.  Democrats consequently attempted to blunt the third party appeal by endorsing some Populist issues in Georgia, Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas.  In South Carolina, Democratic Governor Ben Tillman even endorsed the subtreasury plan, which left the third party stillborn in his state.  Populists did best in Alabama, where fraud probably carried the day for Democrats.  Fraud also accounted for the defeat of Alliance-Democrat-turned-Populist Congressman Tom Watson's reelection bid in Georgia.  He had made a public appeal for African-American support for the People's Party in The Arena, a reform journal with a national readership, in mid-1892.[30]

            Only one-half of the Alliance's southern membership voted the Populist ticket in 1892.  Deserting the white man's party less than a generation after Reconstruction was too high a price for many, despite the educational efforts of the Alliance.  Democratic demagoguery, fraud, and violence also took their toll.  Southern Populists did better among white voters than among African-Americans.  Blacks were hesitant to relinquish their power base in the GOP, and the Populist economic program spoke primarily to the interests of landowners, not tenants.  Still, where white Populists provided physical protection to blacks (which was their primary concern in this era), biracial coalitions frequently proved successful.[31]

            Populists fared badly in the Midwest and Northeast, where close rivalries between mainstream parties provided alternatives within the traditional two-party system.  Likewise, the Populist appeal failed to attract large numbers of Northeastern and Midwestern laborers.  Alliance-Knights of Labor solidarity in the South and West translated into farmer-labor unity partly because both generally came from the same ethnic group.  But, recent immigrants in the Midwest and Northeast frequently were not unionized, and viewed evangelical WASP reform movements with suspicion.  Fatefully, many suballiances, which had provided a politically neutral setting for educating prospective Populists, transformed themselves into Populist clubs in 1892.  This meant that they would no longer provide a seemingly non-partisan educational way-station from old party to new.[32]

            In 1892, Grover Cleveland and the Democrats captured the presidency and both houses of Congress for the first time since the Civil War.  Soon afterward, however, disaster struck.  The Panic of 1893, and the depression that followed, clearly was the worst of America's early industrial period.  At its nadir, economic activity declined about twenty-five percent.  By the end of 1893, five hundred banks and fifteen thousand business firms had closed.  Eventually, between fifteen and twenty percent of the work force was unemployed, and the prices for most farm products dropped below the cost of production.[33]

            The economy of Gilded Age America suffered from several flaws.  Railroads had expanded during the 1880s in order to secure regional markets from penetration by competitors.  Track laid where future traffic never materialized, however, brought debt‑ridden lines to their knees in the 1890s.  Industries closely linked to rail expansion, such as steel, consequently found their operations overextended as well.  In addition, there was the ripple effect of a European depression that had begun in 1890.  The collapse of the London banking house of Baring Brothers in that year brought a substantial call on collateral in the United States that could not be met by 1893.

            Northeastern fiscal conservatives attributed the panic to uncertainty about the currency resulting from the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890.  Between 1890 and 1893, the redemption of treasury certificates caused federal gold reserves to decline by nearly $132 million.  As reserves neared $100 million, entrepreneurs questioned the soundness of the currency and became timid in their investments.  So, Cleveland called a special session of Congress, and after an acrimonious debate, secured repeal of the law in 1893. 

            Men of all parties in the South and West denounced Cleveland's repeal of the Sherman Act.  Since the Civil War, the nation's volume of business had tripled, while money in circulation had increased less than fifty percent.  The resulting deflation caused economic hardship in their cash‑poor outlying regions of the nation long before 1893.  They argued that the American economy had run out of money.  Reducing the volume of money further by repeal of the Sherman Act would only aggravate an already desperate situation.           Repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act provided Populists with an dramatic issue to promote.  Because easterners dominated both mainstream parties, only the People's Party had endorsed free silver in its national platform.  Populists labeled the repeal of the Sherman Act a Wall Street plot to make bankers rich.  Federal expenditures, they claimed, would force deficit spending.  Banks would purchase bonds with their reserves and place them with the Treasury as security for bank‑issued paper money.  The only difference between a government bond and a greenback, Populists argued, was the interest payments bankers secured.  For Populists, however, labor, not slick deals, was the true source of wealth.  Thus, government bond issues illegitimately concentrated money into the hands of the wealthy.  Certainly, the syndicate headed by banker J.P.  Morgan that handled the bond sales made a healthy profit.[34]

            With the Panic of 1893, millions came to know genuine privation.  This appeared to create a greater empathy for the underdog and broader currency for the humane ideals of Populism.  Establishment authorities, however, acted on the principle that Americans should support the government, not vice-versa.  In December, 1893, Populist Governor Lorenzo D. Lewelling of Kansas requested that men "guilty of no crime but that of seeking employment" not be sent to the rock pile for vagrancy.  This, of course, outraged the Republican Party establishment, who quickly labeled Lewelling's plea "The Tramp Circular."  Lewelling had already offended mainstream spokesmen by stating in his inaugural address that "survival of the fittest is the government of brutes and reptiles."[35]

            In 1892, Populist Jacob S.  Coxey of Ohio proposed that the federal government issue $500 million in non-interest bearing government bonds (greenbacks) to state and local governments, upon the same terms that it loaned to national bankers, for the construction of roads.  With no progress on his proposal by mid-1894, Coxey decided to "send a petition to Washington with boots on."  Western farmers and silver miners proved to be his strongest supporters.  The obvious sympathy that the armies of Coxey supporters inspired frightened respectable society.  Borrowed trains and pilfered chicken coops, however, proved to be their most egregious offenses.  When Coxey attempted to deliver his petition to the president, police arrested him for walking on the White House lawn.  Authorities expeditiously dispersed other "armies" as well.[36]

            As the excitement over Coxey began to subside, new storm clouds appeared.  George M.  Pullman operated a railroad sleeping car factory outside Chicago.  In late 1893 and early 1894, he laid off forty percent of his work force and cut the wages of those remaining by twenty-five percent.  In May, 1894, Pullman's employees went on strike.  When Pullman brought in strikebreakers, they turned to the American Railway Union for help.  Union president Eugene V.  Debs asked Pullman to arbitrate.  When he declined, the class-conscious American Railway Union voted a sympathy boycott.  Union members sidetracked all Pullman cars.  Railroad companies countered by proclaiming their contracts with Pullman inviolate and refused to let their trains move without Pullman cars.  This stalled most rail traffic west of Chicago, including the U.S. Mail.

            Attorney General Richard Olney quickly obtained an injunction against the strikers, and President Cleveland ordered federal troops into Chicago to break the strike.  The violence, which had been slight up to that point, then became spectacular.  Mobs destroyed railroad cars, razed the roundhouse at the switching yard, and put part of the nearby Columbian Exposition to the torch.  Although men not associated with the union did most of the damage, the strikers got the blame.  The strike was quickly broken, the participants blacklisted, and Debs was packed away to prison.[37] 

            Coxey's movement and the Pullman Strike provided Populists with a dramatic opportunity to assess what ailed the nation.  Many believed they were witnessing the triumph of the liberty-killing autocracy that the Founding Fathers had warned about.  Visions of catastrophe if contemporary trends persisted, and of utopia if citizens only took hold of their own destinies, did not remain uncharted territories of the mind during this period.  Between 1888 and 1900, a flood of cataclysmic and utopian political novels flooded the American market.  They represented a tidal wave of speculation about the future of the republic.  The vast majority of the authors were Populists.[38] 

            Populists hoped that the events of 1894 would bring a massive influx of urban laborers to their ranks.  They firmly believed that a union of interests existed between farmers, Coxeyites, and laborers.  Debs became a major third‑party spokesman overnight.  Embracing Populist rhetoric, he charged that the old parties "are controlled by the money power and both are equally debauched by its influence."  Along with Jacob Coxey and Lyman Trumbull, one of the founders of the Republican Party, Eugene V.  Debs came to symbolize the rapidly growing fortunes of the People's Party. [39]

            In the Congressional races of 1894, the Populists increased their vote forty-one percent over their 1892 poll, despite the lower voter turnout of an off-year election.  But, the third party lost a large number of offices in the West where Democrats and Populists frequently failed to fuse.  In the South, Democrats again won through fraud in Alabama and Georgia.  A Populist-Republican fusion, however, carried North Carolina.  Democrats defeated Tom Watson's bid for Congress this time by methods so outrageous that even prominent Democrats publicly denounced them.  In Washington, Republicans gained control of the House, while Populists held the balance of power in the Senate.  With the election of 1894, the People's Party became one of the two largest parties throughout the South and West.  This gave it major-party status in about one-half of the states of the Union.[40]

            In the wake of the 1894 election, Democrats and Republicans in the South and West began a crusade to bring their national parties into line with popular sentiment in their regions.  The American Bimetallic League, which silver mine owners had founded in 1889, generously financed their campaign.  It sponsored several conferences in 1895 and 1896, as well as the publication of William H.  (Coin) Harvey's Coin's Financial School, which quickly became the Uncle Tom's Cabin of free silver.  Reformers from all parties promoted it, and many other tracts on the money issue during the mid-1890s[xli] Despite their increased ballot in 1894, the third party's loss of offices appeared to make the chances for corrective legislation even more remote.  At this point, the apocalyptic times seemed to transform the evangelical justice orientation of early Populism into the expedient calculations of an established political party.  In January, 1895, national chairman Herman Taubeneck announced that the People's Party would henceforth downplay the more radical planks in the Omaha platform and concentrate on the financial question.  Party leaders subsequently promoted free silver as an entering wedge to gain control of government.  The decision brought a chorus of howls from those committed to the entire Omaha platform.  They feared that focusing on silver would divert the movement from issues that they considered more important.  The arguments of both sides, however, also revealed a pragmatic manifestation.  Democrats in the South and West had been going over to silver in droves since 1894.  Fusion with Democrats meant power in the West.  Emphasizing an issue that the local elite embraced, however, would destroy the third party's rationale for existence in the South.[41]

            In January, 1896, the Populist national committee set the date for their party's national convention after that of the Democrats and Republicans.  They believed that neither old party would nominate a free silver candidate--particularly the Democrats, who had a two-thirds rule for nominations.  Populists thus could expect to pick up a number of bolting mainstream party silverites.  Republicans obliged by nominating William McKinley for president on a pro-gold platform.  But, the Democratic national convention proved to be a debacle for Populists.  President Cleveland had offended so many elements of his party that reformers overcame the two-thirds rule and nominated William Jennings Bryan on a free silver platform.  Bryan was a dynamic speaker and close to Populists in his native Nebraska.  Thus, the Populist Party, which had boldly agitated the issues and constructed the organization that had brought forth the greatest electoral participation by poor people in American history, suddenly lost its position as the leader of reform to a representative of one of the old parties. 

            Western Populists went to the 1896 Populist National Convention committed to giving Bryan and his Democratic running mate, Maine banker and capitalist Arthur M.  Sewall, their party's nominations.  Many had already agreed to fusion deals at home.  Southern Populists, however, did not trust the Democrats and advocated a straight Populist ticket.  A compromise group proposed nominating Bryan, but replacing Sewall with a southern Populist.  Eventually, Bryan's opponents got the order of nominations reversed with the help of the compromise group, and named Tom Watson for vice president.  They hoped that saddling Bryan with an unacceptable running mate would force him to withdraw.  But Bryan needed Populist votes and remained silent.  Pro-Bryan delegates then claimed that the Democrats promised that they would withdraw Sewall in favor of Watson.  So, the compromise group joined them in giving Bryan the third-party nomination for president.  Democrats, however, did not withdraw Sewall (and may have never promised to do so).  The whole affair seriously divided the People's Party.  Southern Populists had been the victims of the worst imaginable outrages by the very same Democrats that their western brethren now embraced.  Texas delegates had even drawn their guns to prevent their state standard from being included in a Bryan celebration at the national convention.  Although party officials later worked out fusion deals for presidential electors where they mattered, the trust between western and southern Populists that was necessary to sustain a national party evaporated in the wake of the convention.[43]

            Bryan stumped the nation in the cause of free silver in 1896.  Reformers of many schools rallied to his cause.  But, his campaign scared business interests, who poured millions into the McKinley campaign.  On election day, McKinley, the Republican Party, and the gold standard triumphed.  Bryan carried the South and West, but was unable to crack the Northeast or Midwest.  Free silver had little appeal to industrial workers who feared inflation would increase the price of necessities.  Bryan's candidacy, however, did save the Democratic Party from going the way of the Whigs.  Had easterners controlled the Democratic Party and committed it to gold in 1896, the massive defections of silverites would have given the People's Party a serious chance of eclipsing it as the major rival to the GOP nationally.

            The People's Party sent its largest contingent, thirty-one men, to Congress in 1897.  But, they accomplished little.  Republicans controlled the presidency and both Houses of Congress.  In Kansas, Populists finally took control of the state government and passed a number of reform measures.  Republicans, however, regained power two years later.  In the South, Democrats probably stole statewide elections this time in Louisiana and Texas.  Although a GOP-Populist fusion carried North Carolina again, Democrats redeemed the state with a reign of terror in 1898.

            Populism as an organized political movement met its demise quickly after 1896.  As Tom Watson put it, "the sentiment is still there, the votes are still there, but confidence is gone, and the party organization is almost gone."   The People's Party split into acrimonious pro and anti-fusion factions that spent more effort on recriminations than evangelizing.  Massive gold strikes in the late 1890s caused the increased supply of currency that Populists had demanded without legislation.  The nationalistic fervor of the Spanish-American War of 1898 likewise diverted attention from what was wrong with America to what was right.  Many historians also credit Populism's demise to an overdose of prosperity as the depression of the 1890s waned.  But, cotton prices did not improve until after the 1898 elections, when the third party met universal disaster in the South.  Fusion with Democrats masked the third party's dissolution in the West for a few years.  But it was every bit as real.  Diehard Populists nominated national tickets in 1900, 1904, and 1908.  But, electoral support for the once powerful People's Party was minuscule; Congress contained no Populists after 1903. [44]

            Populism was the last stand of freeholders and independent workers before being proletarianized.  They accepted industrialization, but demanded that it be made humane.  Unfortunately for the movement, many laborers had already been trapped in wage slavery by the 1890s.  As the People's Party died, many of the disillusioned dropped out of politics.  This is part of the reason the percent of eligible voters to cast ballots in presidential races dropped thirty percent between 1896 and 1924.  Others continued the egalitarian struggle by joining Eugene V.  Debs in the Socialist Party.  Many, however, returned to the reform wings of their old parties.  Several farmer demands became law during the Progressive era, namely monopoly regulation, banking/currency reform, and the graduated income tax.  Populists had also advocated direct democracy with reforms such as the initiative and referendum.  Reduced voter participation, however, made a mockery of these reforms.  There are even similarities between the Warehousing Act of 1916 and the Alliance's subtreasury plan.  America, however, adopted Populist reforms selectively and piecemeal.  The result was hardly the egalitarian vision of Populism in its heyday.[45] 

            Three major parties vied for the allegiance of the American electorate in the 1890s.  Had the People's Party survived as a major force in national politics, the American electorate would have been presented with a continuing debate over its commitment to capitalism.  Instead, the great political debate of twentieth century America has been over how best to save capitalism. 

            In 1906, William Allen White wrote an apology to the nearly forgotten Populists of Kansas.  He stated, "ten years ago this great organ of reform wrote a piece entitled 'What's the Matter with Kansas.' In it great sport was made of a perfectly honest gentleman of unusual legal ability (Populist Frank Doster) . . . because he said in effect that 'the rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner.' Those were paleozoic times," White admitted.  "Judge Doster was right.  But he was out too early in the season and his views got frost bitten."[46]