The Granger Movement at Flood Tide
With these real or fancied grievances crying for redress, the farmers
soon turned to the Grange as the weapon ready at hand to combat the
forces which they believed were conspiring to crush them. In 1872 began
the real spread of the order. Where the Grange had previously reckoned
in terms of hundreds of new lodges, it now began to speak of thousands.
State Granges were established in States where the year before the
organization had obtained but a precarious foothold; pioneer local
Granges invaded regions which hitherto had been impenetrable. Although
the only States which were thoroughly organized were Iowa, Minnesota,
South Carolina, and Mississippi, the rapid spread of the order into
other States and its intensive growth in regions so far apart gave
promise of its ultimate development into a national movement.
This development was, to be sure, not without opposition. When the
Grangers began to speak of their function in terms of business and
political coöperation, the forces against which they were uniting took
alarm. The commission men and local merchants of the South were
especially apprehensive and, it is said, sometimes foreclosed the
mortgages of planters who were so independent as to join the order. But
here, as elsewhere, persecution defeated its own end; the opposition of
their enemies convinced the farmers of the merits of the Grange.
In the East, several circumstances retarded the movement. In the first
place, the Eastern farmer had for some time felt the Western farmer to
be his serious rival. The Westerner had larger acreage and larger yields
from his virgin soil than the Easterner from his smaller tracts of
well-nigh exhausted land. What crops the latter did produce he must sell
in competition with the Western crops, and he was not eager to lower
freight charges for his competitor. A second deterrent to the growth of
the order in the East was the organization of two Granges among the
commission men and the grain dealers of Boston and New York, under the
ægis of that clause of the constitution which declared any person
interested in agriculture to be eligible to membership in the order.
Though the storm of protest which arose all over the country against
this betrayal to the enemy resulted in the revoking of the charters for
these Granges, the Eastern farmer did not soon forget the incident.
The year 1873 is important in the annals of the Grange because it marks
the retirement of the "founders" from power. In January of that year, at
the sixth session of the National Grange, the temporary organization of
government clerks was replaced by a permanent corporation, officered by
farmers. Kelley was reëlected Secretary; Dudley W. Adams of Iowa was
made Master; and William Saunders, erstwhile Master of the National
Grange, D. Wyatt Aiken of South Carolina, and E. R. Shankland of Iowa
were elected to the executive committee. The substitution of alert and
eager workers, already experienced in organizing Granges, for the dead
wood of the Washington bureaucrats gave the order a fresh impetus to
growth. From the spring of 1873 to the following spring the number of
granges more than quadrupled, and the increase again centered mainly in
the Middle West.
By the end of 1873 the Grange had penetrated all but four
States--Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Nevada--and there were
thirty-two state Granges in existence. The movement was now well defined
and national in scope, so that the seventh annual session of the
National Grange, which took place in St. Louis in February, 1874,
attracted much interest and comment. Thirty-three men and twelve women
attended the meetings, representing thirty-two state and territorial
Granges and about half a million members. Their most important act was
the adoption of the "Declaration of Purposes of the National Grange,"
subscribed to then and now as the platform of the Patrons and copied
with minor modifications by many later agricultural organizations in the
United States. The general purpose of the Patrons was "to labor for the
good of our Order, our Country, and Mankind." This altruistic ideal was
to find practical application in efforts to enhance the comfort and
attractions of homes, to maintain the laws, to advance agricultural and
industrial education, to diversify crops, to systematize farm work, to
establish coöperative buying and selling, to suppress personal, local,
sectional, and national prejudices, and to discountenance "the credit
system, the fashion system, and every other system tending to
prodigality and bankruptcy." As to business, the Patrons declared
themselves enemies not of capital but of the tyranny of monopolies, not
of railroads but of their high freight tariffs and monopoly of
transportation. In politics, too, they maintained a rather nice balance:
the Grange was not to be a political or party organization, but its
members were to perform their political duties as individual citizens.
It could hardly be expected that the program of the Grange would satisfy
all farmers. For the agricultural discontent, as for any other
dissatisfaction, numerous panaceas were proposed, the advocates of each
of which scorned all the others and insisted on their particular remedy.
Some farmers objected to the Grange because it was a secret
organization; others, because it was nonpartisan. For some the
organization was too conservative; for others, too radical. Yet all
these objectors felt the need of some sort of organization among the
farmers, very much as the trade-unionist and the socialist, though
widely divergent in program, agree that the workers must unite in order
to better their condition. Hence during these years of activity on the
part of the Grange many other agricultural societies were formed,
differing from the Patrons of Husbandry in specific program rather than
in general purpose.
The most important of these societies were the farmers' clubs, at first
more or less independent of each other but later banded together in
state associations. The most striking differences of these clubs from
the Granges were their lack of secrecy and their avowed political
purposes. Their establishment marks the definite entrance of the farmers
as a class into politics. During the years 1872 to 1875 the independent
farmers' organizations multiplied much as the Granges did and for the
same reasons. The Middle West again was the scene of their greatest
power. In Illinois this movement began even before the Grange appeared
in the State, and its growth during the early seventies paralleled that
of the secret order. In other States also, notably in Kansas, there
sprang up at this time agricultural clubs of political complexion, and
where they existed in considerable numbers they generally took the lead
in the political activities of the farmers' movement. Where the Grange
had the field practically to itself, as in Iowa and Minnesota, the
restriction in the constitution of the order as to political or partisan
activity was evaded by the simple expedient of holding meetings "outside
the gate," at which platforms were adopted, candidates nominated, and
plans made for county, district, and state conventions.
In some cases the farmers hoped, by a show of strength, to achieve the
desired results through one or both of the old parties, but they soon
decided that they could enter politics effectively only by way of a
third party. The professional politicians were not inclined to espouse
new and radical issues which might lead to the disruption of party
lines. The outcome, therefore, was the establishment of new parties in
eleven of the Western States during 1873 and 1874. Known variously as
Independent, Reform, Anti-Monopoly, or Farmers' parties, these
organizations were all parts of the same general movement, and their
platforms were quite similar. The paramount demands were: first, the
subjection of corporations, and especially of railroad corporations, to
the control of the State; and second, reform and economy in government.
After the new parties were well under way, the Democrats in most of the
States, being in a hopeless minority, made common cause with them in the
hope of thus compassing the defeat of their hereditary rivals, the
old-line Republicans. In Missouri, however, where the Democracy had been
restored to power by the Liberal-Republican movement, the new party
received the support of the Republicans.
Illinois, where the farmers were first thoroughly organized into clubs
and Granges, was naturally the first State in which they took effective
political action. The agitation for railroad regulation, which began in
Illinois in the sixties, had caused the new state constitution of 1870
to include mandatory provisions directing the legislature to pass laws
to prevent extortion and unjust discrimination in railway charges. One
of the acts passed by the Legislature of 1871 in an attempt to carry out
these instructions was declared unconstitutional by the state supreme
court in January, 1873. This was the spark to the tinder. In the
following April the farmers flocked to a convention at the state capital
and so impressed the legislators that they passed more stringent and
effective laws for the regulation of railroads. But the politicians had
a still greater surprise in store for them. In the elections of judges
in June, the farmers retired from office the judge who had declared
their railroad law unconstitutional and elected their own candidates for
the two vacancies in the supreme court and for many of the vacancies in
the circuit courts.
Now began a vigorous campaign for the election of farmers' candidates in
the county elections in the fall. So many political meetings were held
on Independence Day in 1873 that it was referred to as the "Farmers'
Fourth of July." This had always been the greatest day of the farmer's
year, for it meant opportunity for social and intellectual enjoyment in
the picnics and celebrations which brought neighbors together in
hilarious good-fellowship. In 1873, however, the gatherings took on
unwonted seriousness. The accustomed spread-eagle oratory gave place to
impassioned denunciation of corporations and to the solemn reading of a
Farmers' Declaration of Independence. "When, in the course of human
events," this document begins in words familiar to every schoolboy
orator, "it becomes necessary for a class of the people, suffering from
long continued systems of oppression and abuse, to rouse themselves from
an apathetic indifference to their own interests, which has become
habitual ... a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that
they should declare the causes that impel them to a course so necessary
to their own protection." Then comes a statement of "self-evident
truths," a catalogue of the sins of the railroads, a denunciation of
railroads and Congress for not having redressed these wrongs, and
finally the conclusion:
We, therefore, the producers of the state in our several counties
assembled ... do solemnly declare that we will use all lawful and
peaceable means to free ourselves from the tyranny of monopoly, and that
we will never cease our efforts for reform until every department of our
Government gives token that the reign of licentious extravagance is
over, and something of the purity, honesty, and frugality with which our
fathers inaugurated it, has taken its place.
That to this end we hereby declare ourselves absolutely free and
independent of all past political connections, and that we will give our
suffrage only to such men for office, as we have good reason to believe
will use their best endeavors to the promotion of these ends; and for
the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on divine
Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes,
and our sacred honor.
This fall campaign of 1873 in Illinois broke up old party lines in
remarkable fashion. In some counties the Republicans and in other
counties the Democrats either openly joined the "Reformers" or refrained
from making separate nominations. Of the sixty-six counties which the
new party contested, it was victorious in fifty-three. This first
election resulted in the best showing which the Reformers made in
Illinois. In state elections, the new party was less successful; the
farmers who voted for their neighbors running on an Anti-Monopoly ticket
for lesser offices hesitated to vote for strangers for state office.
Other Middle Western States at this time also felt the uneasy stirring
of radical political thought and saw the birth of third parties,
short-lived, most of them, but throughout their brief existence crying
loudly and persistently for reforms of all description. The tariff, the
civil service system, and the currency, all came in for their share of
criticism and of suggestions for revision, but the dominant note was a
strident demand for railroad regulation. Heirs of the Liberal
Republicans and precursors of the Greenbackers and Populists, these
independent parties were as voices crying in the wilderness, preparing
the way for national parties of reform. The notable achievement of the
independent parties in the domain of legislation was the enactment of
laws to regulate railroads in five States of the upper Mississippi
Valley. ¹ When these laws were passed, the parties had done their work.
By 1876 they had disappeared or, in a few instances, had merged with the
Greenbackers. Their temporary successes had demonstrated, however, to
both farmers and professional politicians that if once solidarity could
be obtained among the agricultural class, that class would become the
controlling element in the politics of the Middle Western States. It is
not surprising, therefore, that wave after wave of reform swept over the
West in the succeeding decades.
¹ See Chapter IV.
The independent parties of the middle seventies were distinctly
spontaneous uprisings of the people and especially of the farmers,
rather than movements instigated by politicians for personal ends or by
professional reformers. This circumstance was a source both of strength
and weakness. As the movements began to develop unexpected power,
politicians often attempted to take control but, where they succeeded,
the movement was checked by the farmers' distrust of these
self-appointed leaders. On the other hand, the new parties suffered from
the lack of skillful and experienced leaders. The men who managed their
campaigns and headed their tickets were usually well-to-do farmers
drafted from the ranks, with no more political experience than perhaps a
term or two in the state legislature. Such were Willard C. Flagg,
president of the Illinois State Farmers' Association, Jacob G. Vale,
candidate for governor in Iowa, and William R. Taylor, the Granger
governor of Wisconsin.
Taylor is typical of the picturesque and forceful figures which frontier
life so often developed. He was born in Connecticut, of parents recently
emigrated from Scotland. Three weeks after his birth his mother died,
and six years later his father, a sea captain, was drowned. The orphan
boy, brought up by strangers in Jefferson County, New York, experienced
the hardships of frontier life and developed that passion for knowledge
which so frequently is found in those to whom education is denied. When
he was sixteen, he had, enough of the rudiments to take charge of a
country school, and by teaching in the winter and working in the summer
he earned enough to enter Union College. He was unable to complete the
course, however, and turned to teaching in Ohio, where he restored to
decent order a school notorious for bullying its luckless teachers. But
teaching was not to be his career; indeed, Taylor's versatility for a
time threatened to make him the proverbial Jack-of-all-trades: he was
employed successively in a grist mill, a saw mill, and an iron foundry;
he dabbled in the study of medicine; and finally, in the year which saw
Wisconsin admitted to the Union, he bought a farm in that State.
Ownership of property steadied his interests and at the same time
afforded an adequate outlet for his energies. He soon made his farm a
model for the neighborhood and managed it so efficiently that he had
time to interest himself in farmers' organizations and to hold positions
of trust in his township and county.
By 1873 Taylor had acquired considerable local political experience and
had even held a seat in the state senate. As president of the State
Agricultural Society, he was quite naturally chosen to head the ticket
of the new Liberal Reform party. The brewing interests of the State,
angered at a drastic temperance law enacted by the preceding
legislature, swung their support to Taylor. Thus reënforced, he won the
election. As governor he made vigorous and tireless attempts to enforce
the Granger railroad laws, and on one occasion he scandalized the
conventional citizens of the State by celebrating a favorable court
decision in one of the Granger cases with a salvo of artillery from the
capitol.
Yet in spite of this prominence, Taylor, after his defeat for reëlection
in 1875, retired to his farm and to obscurity. His vivid personality was
not again to assert itself in public affairs. It is difficult to account
for the fact that so few of the farmers during the Granger period played
prominent parts in later phases of the agrarian crusade. The rank and
file of the successive parties must have been much the same, but each
wave of the movement swept new leaders to the surface.
The one outstanding exception among the leaders of the Anti-Monopolists
was Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota--"the sage of Nininger"--who remained
a captain of the radical cohorts in every agrarian movement until his
death in 1901. A red-headed aggressive Irishman, with a magnetic
personality and a remarkable intellect, Donnelly went to Minnesota from
Pennsylvania in 1856 and speculated in town sites on a large scale. When
he was left stranded by the panic of 1857, acting upon his own principle
that "to hide one's light under a bushel is to extinguish it," he
entered the political arena. In Pennsylvania Donnelly had been a
Democrat, but his genuine sympathy for the oppressed made him an
opponent of slavery and consequently a Republican. In 1857 and 1858 he
ran for the state senate in Minnesota on the Republican ticket in a
hopelessly Democratic county. In 1859 he was nominated for lieutenant
governor on the ticket headed by Alexander Ramsey; and his caustic wit,
his keenness in debate, and his eloquence made him a valuable asset in
the battle-royal between Republicans and Democrats for the possession of
Minnesota. As lieutenant governor, Donnelly early showed his sympathy
with the farmers by championing laws which lowered the legal rate of
interest and which made more humane the process of foreclosure on
mortgages. The outbreak of the Civil War gave him an opportunity to
demonstrate his executive ability as acting governor during Ramsey's
frequent trips to Washington. In this capacity he issued the first
proclamation for the raising of Minnesota troops in response to the call
of President Lincoln. Elected to Congress in 1862, he served three terms
and usually supported progressive legislation.
Donnelly's growing popularity and his ambition for promotion to the
Senate soon became a matter of alarm to the friends of Senator Ramsey,
who controlled the Republican party in the State. They determined to
prevent Donnelly's renomination in 1868 and selected William D. Washburn
of Minneapolis to make the race against him. In the spring of this year
Donnelly engaged in a controversy with Representative E. B. Washburn of
Illinois, a brother of W. D. Washburn, in the course of which the
Illinois congressman published a letter in a St. Paul paper attacking
Donnelly's personal character. Believing this to be part of the campaign
against him, the choleric Minnesotan replied in the house with a
remarkable rhetorical display which greatly entertained the members but
did not increase their respect for him. His opponents at home made
effective use of this affair, and the outcome of the contest was a
divided convention, the nomination of two Republicans, each claiming to
be the regular candidate of the party, and the ultimate election of a
Democrat.
Donnelly was soon ready to break with the old guard of the Republican
party in national as well as in state politics. In 1870 he ran for
Congress as an independent Republican on a low tariff platform but was
defeated in spite of the fact that he received the endorsement of the
Democratic convention. Two years later he joined the Liberal Republicans
in supporting Greeley against Grant. When the farmers' Granges began to
spring up like mushrooms in 1873, Donnelly was quick to see the
political possibilities of the movement. He conducted an extensive
correspondence with farmers, editors, and politicians of radical
tendencies all over the State and played a leading part in the
organization of the Anti-Monopoly party. He was elected to the state
senate in 1873, and in the following year he started a newspaper, the
Anti-Monopolist, to serve as the organ of the movement.
Although Donnelly was technically still a farmer, he was quite content
to leave the management of his farm to his capable wife, while he made
politics his profession, with literature and lecturing as avocations.
His frequent and brilliant lectures no less than his voluminous writings
¹ attest his amazing industry. Democrat, Republican, Liberal-Republican,
and Anti-Monopolist; speculator, lawyer, farmer, lecturer,
stump-speaker, editor, and author; preacher of morals and practicer of
shrewd political evasions; and always a radical--he was for many years a
force to be reckoned with in the politics of his State and of the
nation.
¹ The Great Cryptogram, for instance, devotes a thousand pages to
proving a Bacon cipher in the plays of Shakespeare!