The Agrarian Crusade
By Solon J. Buck
A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics
Volume 45 of the
Chronicles of America Series
∴
Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys
Textbook Edition
New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1920
Copyright, 1920
by Yale University Press
PREFACE.
Rapid growth accompanied by a somewhat painful readjustment has been one
of the leading characteristics of the history of the United States
during the last half century. In the West the change has been so swift
and spectacular as to approach a complete metamorphosis. With the
passing of the frontier has gone something of the old freedom and the
old opportunity; and the inevitable change has brought forth inevitable
protest, particularly from the agricultural class. Simple farming
communities have wakened to find themselves complex industrial regions
in which the farmers have frequently lost their former preferred
position. The result has been a series of radical agitations on the part
of farmers determined to better their lot. These movements have
manifested different degrees of coherence and intelligence, but all have
had something of the same purpose and spirit, and all may justly be
considered as stages of the still unfinished agrarian crusade. This book
is an attempt to sketch the course and to reproduce the spirit of that
crusade from its inception with the Granger movement, through the
Greenback and Populist phases, to a climax in the battle for free
silver.
In the preparation of the chapters dealing with Populism I received
invaluable assistance from my colleague, Professor Lester B. Shippee of
the University of Minnesota; and I am indebted to my wife for aid at
every stage of the work, especially in the revision of the manuscript.
Solon J. Buck.
Minnesota Historical Society,
St. Paul.
Contents.
The Agrarian Crusade
Chapter Chapter Title Page
Preface vii
I. The Inception of the Grange 1
II. The Rising Spirit of Unrest 11
III. The Granger Movement at Flood Tide 25
IV. Curbing the Railroads 43
V. The Collapse of the Granger Movement 60
VI. The Greenback Interlude 77
VII. The Plight of the Farmer 99
VIII. The Farmers' Alliance 111
IX. The People's Party Launched 125
X. The Populist Bombshell of 1892 142
XI. The Silver Issue 154
XII. The Battle of the Standards 172
XIII. The Leaven of Radicalism 194
Bibliographical Note 203
Index 207
THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE
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CHAPTER I.
The Inception of the Grange
When President Johnson authorized the Commissioner of Agriculture, in
1866, to send a clerk in his bureau on a trip through the Southern
States to procure "statistical and other information from those States,"
he could scarcely have foreseen that this trip would lead to a movement
among the farmers, which, in varying forms, would affect the political
and economic life of the nation for half a century. The clerk selected
for this mission, one Oliver Hudson Kelley, was something more than a
mere collector of data and compiler of statistics: he was a keen
observer and a thinker. Kelley was born in Boston of a good Yankee
family that could boast kinship with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Judge
Samuel Sewall. At the age of twenty-three he journeyed to Iowa, where he
married. Then with his wife he went on to Minnesota, settled in Elk
River Township, and acquired some first-hand familiarity with
agriculture. At the time of Kelley's service in the agricultural bureau
he was forty years old, a man of dignified presence, with a full beard
already turning white, the high broad forehead of a philosopher, and the
eager eyes of an enthusiast. "An engine with too much steam on all the
time"--so one of his friends characterized him; and the abnormal energy
which he displayed on the trip through the South justifies the figure.
Kelley had had enough practical experience in agriculture to be
sympathetically aware of the difficulties of farm life in the period
immediately following the Civil War. Looking at the Southern farmers not
as a hostile Northerner would but as a fellow agriculturist, he was
struck with the distressing conditions which prevailed. It was not
merely the farmers' economic difficulties which he noticed, for such
difficulties were to be expected in the South in the adjustment after
the great conflict; it was rather their blind disposition to do as their
grandfathers had done, their antiquated methods of agriculture, and,
most of all, their apathy. Pondering on this attitude, Kelley decided
that it was fostered if not caused by the lack of social opportunities
which made the existence of the farmer such a drear monotony that he
became practically incapable of changing his outlook on life or his
attitude toward his work.
Being essentially a man of action, Kelley did not stop with the mere
observation of these evils but cast about to find a remedy. In doing so,
he came to the conclusion that a national secret order of farmers
resembling the Masonic order, of which he was a member, might serve to
bind the farmers together for purposes of social and intellectual
advancement. After he returned from the South, Kelley discussed the plan
in Boston with his niece, Miss Carrie Hall, who argued quite sensibly
that women should be admitted to full membership in the order, if it was
to accomplish the desired ends. Kelley accepted her suggestion and went
West to spend the summer in farming and dreaming of his project. The
next year found him again in Washington, but this time as a clerk in the
Post Office Department.
During the summer and fall of 1867 Kelley interested some of his
associates in his scheme. As a result seven men--"one fruit grower and
six government clerks, equally distributed among the Post Office,
Treasury, and Agricultural Departments"--are usually recognized as the
founders of the Patrons of Husbandry, or, as the order is more commonly
called, the Grange. These men, all of whom but one had been born on
farms, were O. H. Kelley and W. M. Ireland of the Post Office
Department, William Saunders and the Reverend A. B. Grosh of the
Agricultural Bureau, the Reverend John Trimble and J. R. Thompson of the
Treasury Department, and F. M. McDowell, a pomologist of Wayne, New
York. Kelley and Ireland planned a ritual for the society; Saunders
interested a few farmers at a meeting of the United States Pomological
Society in St. Louis in August, and secured the coöperation of McDowell;
the other men helped these four in corresponding with interested farmers
and in perfecting the ritual. On December 4, 1867, having framed a
constitution and adopted the motto Esto perpetua, they met and
constituted themselves the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry.
Saunders was to be Master; Thompson, Lecturer; Ireland, Treasurer; and
Kelley, Secretary.
It is interesting to note, in view of the subsequent political activity
in which the movement for agricultural organization became inevitably
involved, that the founders of the Grange looked for advantages to come
to the farmer through intellectual and social intercourse, not through
political action. Their purpose was "the advancement of agriculture,"
but they expected that advancement to be an educative rather than a
legislative process. It was to that end, for instance, that they
provided for a Grange "Lecturer," a man whose business it was to prepare
for each meeting a program apart from the prescribed ritual--perhaps a
paper read by one of the members or an address by a visiting speaker.
With this plan for social and intellectual advancement, then, the
founders of the Grange set out to gain members.
During the first four years the order grew slowly, partly because of the
mistakes of the founders, partly because of the innate conservatism and
suspicion of the average farmer. The first local Grange was organized in
Washington. It was made up largely of government clerks and their wives
and served less to advance the cause of agriculture than to test the
ritual. In February, 1868, Kelley resigned his clerkship in the Post
Office Department and turned his whole attention to the organization of
the new order. His colleagues, in optimism or irony, voted him a salary
of two thousand dollars a year and traveling expenses, to be paid from
the receipts of any subordinate Granges he should establish. Thus
authorized, Kelley bought a ticket for Harrisburg, and with two dollars
and a half in his pocket, started out to work his way to Minnesota by
organizing Granges. On his way out he sold four dispensations for the
establishment of branch organizations--three for Granges in Harrisburg,
Columbus, and Chicago, which came to nothing, and one for a Grange in
Fredonia, New York, which was the first regular, active, and permanent
local organization. This, it is important to note, was established as a
result of correspondence with a farmer of that place, and in by far the
smallest town of the four. Kelley seems at first to have made the
mistake of attempting to establish the order in the large cities, where
it had no native soil in which to grow.
When Kelley revised his plan and began to work from his farm in
Minnesota and among neighbors whose main interest was in agriculture, he
was more successful. His progress was not, however, so marked as to
insure his salary and expenses; in fact, the whole history of these
early years represents the hardest kind of struggle against financial
difficulties. Later, Kelley wrote of this difficult period: "If all
great enterprises, to be permanent, must necessarily start from small
beginnings, our Order is all right. Its foundation was laid on solid
nothing--the rock of poverty--and there is no harder material." At times
the persistent secretary found himself unable even to buy postage for
his circular letters. His friends at Washington began to lose interest
in the work of an order with a treasury "so empty that a five-cent stamp
would need an introduction before it would feel at home in it." Their
only letters to Kelley during this trying time were written to remind
him of bills owed by the order. The total debt was not more than $150,
yet neither the Washington members nor Kelley could find funds to
liquidate it. "My dear brother," wrote Kelley to Ireland, "you must not
swear when the printer comes in.... When they come in to 'dun' ask them
to take a seat; light your pipe; lean back in a chair, and suggest to
them that some plan be adopted to bring in ten or twenty members, and
thus furnish funds to pay their bills." A note of $39, in the hands of
one Mr. Bean, caused the members in Washington further embarrassment at
this time and occasioned a gleam of humor in one of Kelley's letters.
Bean's calling on the men at Washington, he wrote, at least reminded
them of the absentee, and to be cursed by an old friend was better than
to be forgotten. "I suggest," he continued, "that Granges use black and
white Beans for ballots."
In spite of all his difficulties, Kelley stubbornly continued his
endeavor and kept up the fiction of a powerful central order at the
capital by circulating photographs of the founders and letters which
spoke in glowing terms of the great national organization of the Patrons
of Husbandry. "It must be advertised as vigorously as if it were a
patent medicine," he said; and to that end he wrote articles for leading
agricultural papers, persuaded them to publish the constitution of the
Grange, and inserted from time to time press notices which kept the
organization before the public eye. In May, 1868, came the first fruits
of all this correspondence and advertisement--the establishment of a
Grange at Newton, Iowa. In September, the first permanent Grange in
Minnesota, the North Star Grange, was established at St. Paul with the
assistance of Colonel D. A. Robertson. This gentleman and his associates
interested themselves in spreading the order. They revised the Grange
circulars to appeal to the farmer's pocketbook, emphasizing the fact
that the order offered a means of protection against corporations and
opportunities for coöperative buying and selling. This practical appeal
was more effective than the previous idealistic propaganda: two
additional Granges were established before the end of the year; a state
Grange was constituted early in the next year; and by the end of 1869
there were in Minnesota thirty-seven active Granges. In the spring of
1869 Kelley went East and, after visiting the thriving Grange in
Fredonia, he made his report at Washington to the members of the
National Grange, who listened perfunctorily, passed a few laws, and
relapsed into indifference after this first regular annual session.
But however indifferent the members of the National Grange might be as
to the fate of the organization they had so irresponsibly fathered,
Kelley was zealous and untiring in its behalf. That the founders did not
deny their parenthood was enough for him; he returned to his home with
high hopes for the future. With the aid of his niece he carried on an
indefatigable correspondence which soon brought tangible returns. In
October, 1870, Kelley moved his headquarters to Washington. By the end
of the year the Order had penetrated nine States of the Union, and
correspondence looking to its establishment in seven more States was
well under way. Though Granges had been planted as far east as Vermont
and New Jersey and as far south as Mississippi and South Carolina, the
life of the order as yet centered in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin,
Illinois, and Indiana. These were the only States in which, in its four
years of activity the Grange had really taken root; in other States only
sporadic local Granges sprang up. The method of organization, however,
had been found and tested. When a few active subordinate Granges had
been established in a State, they convened as a temporary state Grange,
the master of which appointed deputies to organize other subordinate
Granges throughout the State. The initiation fees, generally three
dollars for men and fifty cents for women, paid the expenses of
organization--fifteen dollars to the deputy, and not infrequently a
small sum to the state Grange. What was left went into the treasury of
the local Grange. Thus by the end of 1871 the ways and means of
spreading the Grange had been devised. All that was now needed was some
impelling motive which should urge the farmers to enter and support the
organization.