THE FARMERS' CAUSE
The Republican protective policy had its strongest supporters among the
industrial communities of the East where the profits of manufacture were
distributed. In the West, where the agricultural staples had produced a
simplicity of interests somewhat resembling those of the Old South in
its cotton crop, the advantage of protection was questioned even in
Republican communities. The Granger States and the Prairie States were
normally Republican, but they had experienced falling prices for their
corn and wheat, as the South had for its cotton, in the eighties, and
had listened encouragingly to the advocates of tariff reform.
Cleveland's Message of 1887 had affected them strongly. Through 1888 and
1889 country papers shifted to the support of revision, while farmers'
clubs and agricultural journals began to denounce protection. The
Republican leaders felt the discontent, and brought forward the
agricultural schedules of the McKinley Bill to appease it, but
dissatisfaction increased in 1889 and 1890 through most of the farming
sections.
The farmer in the South was directly affected by the falling price of
cotton, and retained his hereditary aversion to the protective tariff.
He could not believe that either party was working in his interests. The
dominant issues of the eighties did not touch his problems. He was not
interested in civil service reform, which was a product of a
differentiated society, in which professional expertness was recognized
and valued. He knew and cared little about administration, and being
used to a multitude of different tasks himself saw no reason why the
offices should not be passed around. In this view American farmers
generally concurred.
The Southern farmer was without interest in the pension system and was
prone to criticize it. The Fourteenth Amendment had forced the
repudiation of the whole Confederate debt, leaving the Southern veterans
compelled to pay taxes that were disbursed for the benefit of Union
veterans and debarred from enjoying similar rewards. They could not turn
Republican, yet in their own party they saw men who failed to represent
them.
In the North agriculture was depressed and the farmers were
discontented. In many regions the farms were worn out. Scientific
farming was beginning to be talked about to some extent, but was little
practiced. The improvements in transportation had brought the younger
and more fertile lands of the West into competition with the East for
the city markets. Cattle, raised on the plains and slaughtered at Kansas
City or Chicago, were offered for sale in New York and Philadelphia.
Western fruits of superior quality were competing with the common
varieties of the Eastern orchards. Here, as in the South, the farmers
saw the parties quarreling over issues that touched the manufacturing
classes, but disregarding those of agriculture.
It was in the West, however, that agricultural discontent was keenest.
In no other region were uniform conditions to be found over so large an
area. The Granger States had shown how uniformity in discontent may
bring forth political readjustments. The new region of the late eighties
lay west of Missouri and Iowa, where the railroads had stimulated
settlement along the farther edge of the arable prairies. Texas, Kansas,
Colorado, and the Dakotas had passed into a boom period about 1885, and
had pushed new farms into regions that could not in ordinary years
produce a crop. Only blinded enthusiasts believed that the climate of
the sub-humid plains was changing. In good years crops will grow as far
west as the Rockies: in bad, they dry up in eastern Kansas.
It served the interest of the railroads to promote new settlements, and
speculation got the better of prudence. The rainfall cooperated for a
few years, enabling the newcomers to break the sod and set up their
dwellings and barns. The quality of the settlers increased the dangers
attendant upon the community.
Under earlier conditions in the westward migration each frontier had
been settled, chiefly, by occupants of the preceding frontier, who knew
the climate and understood the conditions of successful farming. The
greater distances in the farther West, and the ease of access which the
railroads gave, brought a less capable class of farmers into the plains
settlements. Some were amateurs; others knew a different type of
agriculture. The population which had to deal with this new region was
less likely to succeed than that of any previous frontier.
The frontier of the eighties presented new obstacles in its doubtful
rainfall and its experimental farmers. It contained as well the
conditions that had always prevailed along the edge of settlement.
Transportation was vital to its life,--as vital as it had been in the
Granger States,--yet was nearly as unregulated. The Interstate Commerce
Law of 1887 had little noticeable immediate effect. Discrimination,
unreasonable rates, and overcapitalization were still grievances that
affected the West. The new activity of organized labor, shown in the
Western strikes of 1885 and 1886, added another obstacle to the easy
prosperity of farmers who needed uninterrupted train service. The germs
of an anti-railroad movement were well distributed.
An anti-corporation movement, too, might reasonably be expected in this
new frontier. Producing only the raw products of agriculture, its
inhabitants bought most of the commodities in use from distant sections.
They were impressed with the cost of what they had to buy and the low
price of what they sold. They were ready listeners to agitators against
the trusts.
Like all frontiers, this one was financed on borrowed money. The pioneer
was dependent on credit, was hopeful and speculative in his borrowings,
built more towns and railroads than he needed, and loaded himself with a
mountain of debt that could be met only after a long series of
prosperous years.
By necessity he was readily converted by the arguments of inflation.
Greenback inflation had run its course, and after the resumption of
specie payments in 1879 had been only a political threat without
foundation or many followers. A Greenback party, affiliating with labor
and anti-monopoly interests, had nominated Weaver in 1880 and Butler in
1884, but even inflationists had not voted for the ticket in large
number. A new phase of inflation had become more interesting than the
greenbacks, and had led to the demand for the free coinage of silver.
Among the demands of the Western farmer, whose greatest problem was the
payment of his debts, none was more often heard than that for more and
cheaper money. The Eastern farmer, though less burdened with debt, knew
that more money would make higher prices, and believed it would bring
larger profits. The Southern farmer, heavily in debt, not so much for
purposes of development and permanent improvements, as because he
regularly mortgaged his crop in advance and allowed the rural
storekeeper to finance him, was also interested in inflation as a common
remedy. Together the farmers of all sections kept pressing on the
parties for free silver after the passage of the Bland-Allison Bill in
1878. As the price of silver declined the gain which silver inflation
would bring them increased, and they were joined by another class of
producers whose profits came from mining the silver bullion.
The silver mines furnished important industries in Montana, Idaho,
Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California, and were highly valued
in most of the Western communities. As their output declined in value
after 1873, their owners turned to the United States Government for aid
and protection, not differing much from the manufacturers of the East
in their hope for aid. The restoration of silver coinage was the method
by which they desired their protection, and they asserted that Congress
could coin all the silver and yet maintain it at a parity with gold.
They were allies with the farmer inflationists so far as means of relief
were concerned, and both failed to see how incompatible were their real
aims. The miners wanted free silver in order to increase the price of
silver and their profits; the farmers wanted it to increase the volume
of money and reduce its value. If either was correct in his prophecy as
to the result of free coinage, the other was doomed to disappointment.
But the combined demand was reiterated through the eighties. While times
were good it was not serious, but any shock to the prosperity or credit
of the West was likely to stimulate the one movement in which all the
discontented concurred.
The crisis which precipitated Western discontent into politics came in
1889 when rainfall declined and crops failed. In the Arkansas Valley,
with an average fall of eighteen inches, the total for this year was
only thirteen inches. General Miles, who had chased hostile Indians
across the plains for more than twenty years, and who had seen the new
villages push in, mile by mile, saw the terrible results of drought.
First suffering, then mortgage, then foreclosure and eviction, he
prophesied. "And should this impending evil continue for a series of
years," he wrote, "no one can anticipate what may follow." The glowing
promises of the early eighties were falsified, whole towns and counties
were deserted, and the farmers turned to the Government for aid.
The Western upheaval followed a period in which both great parties had
been attacked as misrepresentative. There was a widely spread belief
that politicians were dishonest and that the Government was conducted
for the favored classes. It was natural that the discontented should
take up one of the agricultural organizations already existing, as the
Grangers had done, and convert it to their political purpose.
Since the high day of the Granger movement there had always been
associations among the farmers and organizations striving to get their
votes. The Grange had itself continued as a social and economic bond
after its attack upon the railroads. There had been a Farmers' Union and
an Agricultural Wheel. The great success of the Knights of Labor and the
American Federation of Labor had had imitators who were less successful
because farming had been too profitable to give much room for organized
discontent, while in times of prosperity the farmer was an
individualist. A new activity among the farmers' papers was now an
evidence of a growing desire to get the advantage of cooperation.
The greatest farmer organization of the eighties was the Farmers'
Alliance, a loose federation of agricultural clubs that reflected local
conditions, West and South. In the South, it was noted in 1888 as
"growing rapidly," but "only incidentally of political importance." In
Dakota, it had been active since 1885, conducting for its members fire
and hail insurance, a purchasing department, and an elevator company.
In Texas it was building cotton and woolen mills. The machinery of this
organization was used by the farmers in stating their common cause, and
as their aims broadened it merged, during 1890, into a People's Party.
In Kansas, during the summer of this year, the movement broke over the
lines of both old parties and had such success that its promoters
thought a new political party had been born.
Agricultural discontent, growing with the hard times of 1889, had been
noticed, but there had been no means of measuring it until Congress
adjourned after the passage of the McKinley Bill and the members came
home to conduct the congressional campaign of 1890. They found that the
recent law had become the chief issue before them. The so-called popular
demand for protection, revealed in the election of 1888, had after all
been based upon a minority of the votes cast. The tariff and the way it
had been passed were used against them by the Democrats and the Farmers'
Alliance.
The act was passed so close to election day that its real influence
could not then be seen and its opponents could not be confuted when they
told of the evils it would do. Before the election of 1888, as again in
1892, Republican manufacturers frightened their workmen by threats of
closing down if free-traders won. This time the tables were turned
against them by the recital of prospective high prices.
Corrupt methods in framing the schedules furnished an influential
argument throughout the West. Even in the East the tariff reformers
asserted that undue favors had been done for greedy interests; that
manufacturers who had bought immunity by their contributions to Quay's
campaign fund had been rewarded with increased protection. The farmers
believed these charges, plausible though unprovable, for they were
disposed to believe that both the great parties were interested only in
selfish exploitation of the Government to the advantage of politicians.
In every State Republican candidates had to meet this fire as well as
the local issues. In Maine, Reed met it and was elected with enlarged
majority from a community that wanted protection. In Ohio, McKinley lost
his seat, partly from the revulsion of feeling, but more because the
Democrats, who controlled the State Legislature, had gerrymandered his
district against him. Cannon, of Illinois, who had already served nine
terms and was to serve ten more, lost his seat, and LaFollette, of
Wisconsin, whom the protectionists had made much of, was checked early
in a promising career because of an educational issue in his State.
Pennsylvania, protectionist at heart, elected the Democratic ex-governor
Pattison again in one of its revulsions against the Quay machine.
The Democrats defeated the Republicans in the East while the Farmers'
Alliance undermined them in the West. In Kansas and Nebraska the
Alliance controlled the result, sent their own men to Washington, and
secured the Kansas Legislature which returned the first Populist
Senator. In several States fusion tickets were successful with
Democratic and Alliance support. In the South, Democrats found it aided
them in winning nomination--for the real Southern election was within
this party and not at the polls--to assert that they were and had been
farmers.
When the votes were counted the extent of the reaction was realized. The
last Congress had contained a safe majority of Republicans in each
house. The new Congress, the Fifty-second, chosen in 1890, had lost the
high-tariff majority in the lower body. Only 88 Republicans were
elected, against 236 Democrats and 8 of the Alliance. The Republicans
retained the Senate partly because of the "rotten borough" States, Idaho
and Wyoming, which they had just admitted.
The greatest factor in the landslide was the tariff, but this was,
largely, only the occasion for an outburst of discontent that had been
piling up for a decade. The dominant party was punished because things
went wrong, because the trusts throve and labor was uneasy, because
prices declined, because there were scandals in the Public Lands and
Pension Bureaus, and because the rainfall had diminished on the plains.
The new House elected a Georgian, Crisp, as Speaker, and the second half
of Harrison's term passed quietly. Among the people, however, there was
much conjecture upon the future of the Farmers' Alliance. A convention
at Cincinnati, six months after the election, tried to unite the new
element and form a third party of importance.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Union between the Knights of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance for
political purposes was the aim of the promoters of the People's Party, a
party that was to right all the wrongs from which the plain people
suffered and restore the Government to their hands. Until the next
presidential election they had time to organize for the crusade.
The United States, by 1890, had begun to feel the influence of the
agencies of communication in breaking down sectionalism and letting in
the light of comparative experience. Men who survived from the
generation that flourished before the war found their cherished ideas
undermined or shattered. In public life, administration, literature, and
religion the old order was being swept away. The United States had
become a nation because it could not avoid it. Even the Congregational
churches, with whom parish autonomy was vital, had seen fit to erect a
National Council. Every important activity of trade had become national,
and the only agency that retained its old localism was the law, which
must cope with the new order. In many ways the trust problem was the
result of an inadequate legal system which left a wide "twilight zone"
between the local capacity of the State and the activity of the Nation.
Yet the Nation was unfolding and expanding its powers. Railroad control,
immigration and labor control, agricultural experiment, irrigation, and
reclamation were only samples of the new lines of activity that created
new administrative machinery and advanced abreast of the new idea of
appointment because of merit and tenure during good behavior. Men who
continued to see the center of political gravity in the State
Governments were behind the times.
An indigenous literature was rising in the United States. Dickens had
lived long enough to recognize the spirit of a new school in _The Luck
of Roaring Camp_, and _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, which appeared in
1868. Before 1890 the fame of their author, Bret Harte, was secure.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), too, had seen the native field
and had exploited it. The New England school, Emerson and Longfellow,
Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, lived into or through the eighties, but
were less robust in their American flavor than their younger
contemporaries who picked subjects from the border. _Tom Sawyer_,
_Huckleberry Finn_, and the _Connecticut Yankee_ were life as well as
art. Another writer of the generation, William Dean Howells, gave _The
Rise of Silas Lapham_ to the world in 1885, and revealed a different
stratum of the new society, while the vogue of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_
tells less of the life therein described than of the outlook of American
readers.
Pure literature was in 1890 turning more and more to American subjects;
applied literature was searching for causes and explanations. The
writings of Henry George, particularly his _Progress and Poverty_,
brought him from obscurity to prominence in six years, and by 1885 had
"formed a noteworthy epoch in the history of economic thought." The
success of Bellamy's utopian romance proved the avidity of the reading
public. Parkman and Bancroft, of the older generation, Henry Adams,
McMaster, and Rhodes, of the younger, led the way through history to an
understanding of American conditions. Economics, sociology, and
government were beginning to have a literature of their own, the last
receiving its strongest impulse from the thoughtful _American
Commonwealth_ of James Bryce.
In the field of periodical literature the rising American taste was
supporting a wider range of magazines. The old and dignified _North
American Review_ was still an arena for political discussion. During
1890 it printed an important interchange of views between William E.
Gladstone and James G. Blaine, on the merits of a protective tariff.
_Harper's Monthly_ and the _Atlantic_ had given employment to the
leading men of letters since before the Civil War. _Leslie's_ and
_Harper's Weeklies_ had added illustration to news, making their place
during the sixties, while the _Independent_ held its own as the leading
religious newspaper and the _Nation_ appeared as a journal of criticism.
_Scribner's_ and the _Century_ had been added more recently to the list
of monthlies, the latter running its great series of reminiscences of
the battles and leaders of the Civil War and its life of Lincoln by
Nicolay and Hay. Improvements in typography and illustration, combined
with greater ease in collecting the news and distributing the product,
made all the periodicals more nearly national.
The periodicals, in a measure, took the place as national leaders that
the newspapers had before. The newspaper as a personal expression was
passing away, as the great editors of Horace Greeley's generation died.
The younger editors were making investments rather than journalistic
tools out of their papers. Trade and advertisement used this vehicle to
approach their customers. News collecting became more prompt and
adequate, but the opinion of the papers dwindled. They bought their
news from syndicates or associations, as they bought paper or ink. The
counting-house was coming to outrank the editorial room in their
management.
Through the new literature the changing nature of American life was
portrayed, and as the life reshaped itself under nationalizing
influences theology lost much of its old narrowness. Among religious
novels _Robert Elsmere_ was perhaps most widely read. The struggle
between orthodoxy and the new criticism had got out of the control of
the professional theologians and had permeated the laity. A revised
version of the Old and New Testaments gave new basis for textual
discussion. The influence of the scientific generalizations of Darwin
and his school had reached the Church and forced upon it a rephrasing of
its views. It was becoming less dangerous for men to admit their belief
in scientific process. The orthodox churches lost nothing in popularity
as the struggle advanced, and outside them new teachers proclaimed new
religions as they had ever done in America.
The greatest of the new religions was that of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, in
whose teachings may be found a religious parallel to the political
revolt of the People's Party. Christian Science was a reaction from the
"vertebrate Jehovah" of the Puritans to a more comfortable and
responsive Deity. It was the outgrowth of a well-fed and prosperous
society, presenting itself to the ordinary mind as "primarily a religion
of healing."
Intellectual, spiritual, economic, and political revolt were common in
America in 1890, as they must have been after the industrial revolution
of the last ten years. The whole nation was once more acting as a unit,
for the South had outlived the worst results of war and reorganization
and was again developing on independent lines. The immediate problem was
the effect of the revolt upon political control.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The materials upon the unrest of the later eighties are yet uncollected,
and must be pursued through the files of the journals, many of which are
named above in the text. The new scientific periodicals: _Quarterly
Journal of Economics_, _Political Science Quarterly_, _Yale Review_,
_Journal of Political Economy_, etc., devoted much space to current
economic and social analysis. F.L. McVey, _The Populist Movement_ (in
American Economic Association, Economic Studies, vol. I), is useful but
only fragmentary. The materials on free silver are mentioned in the note
to chapter XIV, below. A.B. Paine, _Mark Twain_, gives many
cross-references to the literary life of the decade. J.F. Jameson
discusses the fertile field of American religious history in "The
American Acta Sanctorum" (in the _American Historical Review_, 1908).