A political revolution is in progress and has attained such
proportions as to command attention and repay study. The magnitude of
the movement and the definiteness of its aims are not understood and
appreciated by those who live far from its field of operation. The
reader is asked to lay aside his preconceived notions of the subject,
and consider observations made, at short range, by one whose
information is gleaned not from partisan newspapers, but from the
field of action.
Before passing to an analysis of the platform demands of the new
party, let us adjust the perspective; consider the work already done,
and the method, motive, and _personnel_ of the party.
Scarcely twelve months have passed since the birth of the party,--one
political campaign. In that short period, an organization has been
perfected which carries upon its rolls 1,200,000 voters; and an
_esprit de corps_ has been created which is worthy of comparison with
the enthusiasm of the old parties. It has elected two United States
senators and a respectable body of congressmen. It has won its
victories in the strongholds of the hitherto dominant party,
overcoming in one instance an adverse State majority of 80,000. An
army of lecturers has been set at work, most of them well equipped.
About a thousand newspapers have been established in the interest of
the movement. A national bureau of information has been created which
keeps a large force of clerks constantly busy. A committee has been
appointed on organization. Under its direction, State after State is
being organized, and the prophecy is freely made that, before the snow
flies again, an efficient branch of the central body will have been
established in nearly every hamlet in the nation.
The surprising advance already made by the Independents would not need
to concern us, were it not that the national conditions which made it
possible, in the first instance, still exist to sustain and accelerate
it. If asked to explain this advance, most partisans would say, at
once, poor crops, extreme poverty and demagogism; or, as South Dakota
campaign speakers were known to say, hot winds and Mr. Loucks. But
these are mistaken ideas. Poverty of the people made many listeners
and voters who, under other circumstances, would not have deemed it
worth their while to leave the plow. An examination, however, of the
vote in the counties of one State, from which a United States senator
has been elected, shows that the heaviest majorities for the new party
were cast in counties where farming is most diversified, and where the
people have been blessed with a succession of good crops. In the
counties where the people were poorest, they were more effectually
under the thumb of money loaners and bankers, who held chattel
mortgages over their heads. In such counties a corruption fund had a
powerful influence toward keeping voters in line. Extreme poverty is
always a menace to the purity of the ballot. In the well to do
counties, or rather the counties where good crops had prevailed, and
in which the people were reputed well-to-do, and where the heaviest
vote was cast for the party, the writer has made a careful study of
conditions and finds none that do not exist in most agricultural
districts of the United States. The herds of cattle and bursting
granaries, years ago, would have been sure indications of competence
and contentment.
A little inquiry now, however, reveals discontent and a hand to hand
struggle with adversity and against odds. Market values leave no
margin for profit. Abundance at harvest time, disappointment on market
day. Men can understand the connection between short crops and lean
pocket-books, and are easily reconciled to such conditions. They may
grumble but they are sensible enough to understand that they must sow
again and wait for the heavens to smile. But when great heaps of corn
lie in their fields awaiting sale at twelve cents a bushel, when a
mighty crop of wheat brings its possessor but fifty cents a bushel,
when cows are worth but fifteen dollars apiece, and good butter sells
for eight cents a pound, while thousands in the land are known to be
suffering because of the lack of these things, a leanness of
pocket-book results which the farmer may understand, but to which he
is not easily reconciled.
His eyes are open. The over-production theory explains nothing to him
while the mouths of a multitude go unfed; while the beef that he sold
for one and a half and two cents a pound on foot, retails in the
eastern market, when dressed, for from ten to eighteen cents a pound;
and while his corn and his wheat, at the other end of the line of
transportation, brings twice the price he received for it here. He is
able to put two and two together. He knows that primarily all wealth
comes from the soil, in response to the toil of himself and his
fellows. His eyes rest upon the 31,000 millionnaires of the land who
roll in wealth. He says, "I helped produce that. How did they get it?"
He knows that the money could not be had last fall to handle his grain
and that, in consequence, a ridiculously low price was offered him in
order to keep it off the market. He knows that a few men take
advantage of his necessities and dictate prices just at the time when
he must sell. He knows that railroads absorb nearly fifty per cent. of
crop values for transportation charges, in order to pay dividends on a
capitalization, fifty per cent. of which is fictitious, and that when
the laws forbid it the courts of the land step in and declare it
"reasonable compensation."
In a word, it does not take a very sharp farmer to see that although
hot winds, or murrain, or hog cholera increase the leanness of his
pocket-book, these things do not explain that irresistible and
invariable current which bears such a large portion of what he does
earn into the plethoric pocket-books of the few rich. The farmer has
become, perforce, a student of economics; and, although we may laugh
at some of the vagaries in which he indulges, a close study of the
situation and of his demands will probably show him to be about as
reasonable as those are who champion the present order of things.
If the symptoms of an unnatural and unnecessary agricultural
depression were confined to the Dakotas, and Kansas, and Nebraska, the
farmer student might be nonplussed in his investigations. He might be
led to consider his inexperience and extravagance as the source of
the disease so deeply fixed upon him. But the farmer of to-day reads
and travels. A Dakota farmer, a few weeks since, visited the paternal
homestead in Ohio. He found, to his surprise, that his father's farm,
which fifteen years ago lay within three miles of a thriving town of
two thousand inhabitants, paying an annual tax of fifteen dollars, and
worth a hundred dollars an acre, now pays a tax of seventy-five
dollars, and is worth but forty-five dollars an acre, although the
neighboring town has increased its population to ten thousand, and is
noisy with shops and factories. He found that this was not an isolated
case, but a fair example of the depreciation of farm values. He was
not surprised to learn that the Ohio farmers were even then gathering
to organize a State alliance. A careful survey of the United States,
we are sure, will measurably confirm the conclusion of the western
farmer, that farming, except in those localities where it has taken on
the form of market gardening, or where it yet monopolizes some
specialty, is unprofitable and disappointing.
Most farmers are ready to admit that their surroundings are better and
their comforts more numerous than in ancestral days, when stoves were
unknown, and the women slaved over the hand-loom and spinning-wheel,
when medical men bungled and schools were luxuries; but they can see
with half an eye that the mighty material advances of the last half
century in this country have been made to serve the rich rather than
the poor, the strong instead of the weak. They do not object to
railroads, and the constantly increasing facilities for travel and
transportation; but they do object to laws and customs which make
railroads a means of transferring the hard earnings of the farm to the
coffers of money kings. The farmer has received comforts at the hands
of our civilization, but he has paid a good price for them, not to the
genius which created, but to the plutocrat who bought. It is not
because the farmer is facing starvation that he moves politically; but
because, in the midst of plenty, comparative poverty is his portion.
As a legitimate result of the civilization in the presence of which he
lives, his tastes have improved, and his desire for education and
comfortable living has increased, and with this improvement and
increase has come a widening of the distance betwixt his possessions
and his desires. In other words, the shadows of contrast in social
conditions in our country are hourly deepening, and it is at such
times that the canker of discontent eats closest. It will serve no
purpose for us to spend time in condemning this spirit, and making
light of it, because it is a natural result and a political fact that
can only be remedied by a removal of the immediate cause. It is not
possible or desirable to rid the people entirely of the spirit of
discontent, but it can be so minimized that it will be no longer a
menace to national life but an incentive to progress.
It is necessary to understand thoroughly the conditions under which
the work already described has been done. We have discussed the
general social and financial condition of the farmer. How about his
intellectual standing? We hear a great deal about the stupid, foolish
farmer, easily led by demagogues. It is well to remember in this
connection that those States where the Independent party has had
greatest influence are the States where the smallest per cent. of
illiteracy exists and, by parity of reasoning, the highest per cent.
of intelligence. The fact is that the farmer of the West is not the
clodhopper, at whose expense the funny man of the modern journal likes
to crack jokes. He reads more widely and thinks more deeply than
tradesmen or city people do, as a class. Tradesmen wear better
clothes, are more urbane, and obtain a certain polish and
self-possession which comes only from close contact with one's fellows
in the business and social world; all of which is very useful to them
in improving the "main chance" in a competitive struggle, and might be
labelled finish and sharpness. They live an intense life, within a
limited circle, and have little time and less inclination to weigh
questions from the larger world. To this fact may be attributed the
slight interest such people take in municipal government and the
dominance of slum and saloon influences. It is not so with the farmer.
He reads much and widely, and the solitary plow-furrow and the quiet
country road conduce to thought. A certain sturdy intelligence
follows, which again and again has proven the salt of the world, the
re-inforcing element of society, and is to-day the hope of our nation.
While the tradesman dwells much on commercial law, trade customs, and
the means of attracting trade, the farmer thinks more naturally of the
general law of the land, under which he is protected or robbed,
prospered or ruined. His sales are made at wholesale prices. His
eyes, therefore, seek out not so much the local factors in the make up
of prices as the world-wide influences which are supposed to determine
them. It is a large world in which he lives, and his vision, from
necessity, sweeps the whole of it.
The people of the East will never understand the merit and magnitude
of the present political movement, until they give the farmer credit
for intelligence of a superior order. Those who think of him as the
easy prey of demagogues are mistaken. He has been such in the past. We
have convincing proof that it is otherwise now. Those who are familiar
with the campaign plans of the dominant parties in these days, the
shameless misrepresentation of facts by party organs, the open use of
large sums of money to keep so-called leaders in line, and the
tremendous power of public patronage can understand how much of
demagogism in every community the farmers have had to meet and
overcome in order to conquer an eighty thousand majority. It has
required patriotism, common sense, and a Spartan-like heroism to face
their organized foes and come off victorious. To their honor be it
said that few Judases have been found among them at the ballot-box, or
in the halls of legislation.
The work of the Independent party, so far, has been educational in two
directions. It has increased the sum of information and developed a
much needed self-confidence among the farmers. The alliance meetings,
to which most of us object because of their secret and exclusive
nature, are schools of economics and parliamentary tactics. The
secrecy of the order, however, is not as objectionable as some of us
have been inclined to think. As the leaders say, the veil of secrecy
in this order is quite gauzy,--intended to keep out individuals rather
than to conceal deliberations and doings. It throws the farmer on his
own resources. He becomes a chairman, an investigator, a committee
man, and a debater. If it were otherwise, the aggressive members of
the professions would frequent the meetings, and naturally assume such
functions. We are confident the farmer will come to see that these
same ends may be attained by methods less objectionable to the thought
and spirit of our people. Justice requires us to say that the secret
order of the alliance and the Independent party have no necessary
connection, although they are natural allies, and the former is the
source of the latter. In fact, scores of men belong to the alliance
who have not yet committed themselves to the political movement, and
many who are bitter in their opposition to it. Political affiliation
has nothing to do with membership, and all actual farmers and their
families are entitled to it. Freedom in the expression of opinion is
courted and strong, ready men are being developed.
The writer has met old farmers, during the last twelve months, who are
as well posted in the history of finance as the Shermans and the
Allisons of the country, and who read the lessons of that history with
as clear a vision. They do not get their facts from demagogical
documents, as many suppose. We call to mind a laughable incident in
the last campaign. A joint discussion was progressing between a bright
member of the legal fraternity, who was advocating the present order
and extolling the Republican past, and an uncouth but clever old
farmer, who took up the cudgel in behalf of financial reform. The
lawyer vociferously declared the demand notes never sold at par with
gold. The farmer calmly insisted that they did, and read from an
authority. The lawyer demanded the authority. The farmer asked the
lawyer if he would read to the audience the name of the authority, if
it was shown him. The latter could only say yes. The pamphlet was
opened at its title page, and the lawyer read with best grace he
could, to an audience that fairly rolled in the chairs with merriment,
"Report of the Treasurer of the United States." The farmers are going
to a school where imagination is given small play, and facts are
studied, uncolored by party traditions. Shall we not expect from this
some good? Have we not reason to believe that the reading, intelligent
majorities of the western prairies are to bring us some light and
benefit?
It is useless to deny that these farmers have some intense prejudices.
What class has not? And these prejudices must necessarily color
opinion, and somewhat determine action. The farmer is bound to look at
things from the standpoint of the poor man rather than from that of
the corporation and the money loaner. The latter have had the thought
and service of our statesmen for years past. As a consequence, the
account between the rich and the poor is in an abnormal condition.
Perhaps it is only right that the selfishness of the laboring classes
should have its own way for a time, and even things up somewhat,
before a new start is made.
But the class prejudice and selfishness of the farmer has been greatly
over-estimated by his political enemies. His sub-treasury bill and
plan for loaning money on real estate, to be sure, are intended to
afford immediate relief to the farmer; but he believes, in his soul,
that they would result in great advantage to the whole business world.
He says, moreover, that condemnation of his plans comes with bad grace
from the men who are even now supporting a financial system which
delivers the money of the country over to the few and trusts them to
distribute it among the many. His plan may have the same selfish
ear-marks, but they are not so deep. We have been trusting a few men
to distribute the currency of the nation, and have made it extremely
profitable for them to do so. He asks now that this trust be
transferred to the many, and gives good assurances, in the nature of
things, that the many will touch the remotest needs of our people, and
so diffuse currency that competition, if such a principle ever can be
effective, will keep interest at a rate where labor can live and
prosper.
That the independent movement is not considered a class movement, in a
bad sense, but decidedly in the interest of all the middle classes, we
have some proof in the citizens' alliances and the labor unions, which
have united forces everywhere with the farmers, brought about by a
recognition of the simple fact that where the farmer has money, the
tradesmen of his market town have money and industries of all kinds
thrive. Here lies the strength of the movement. The farmers are,
perhaps, the largest distinctive class of citizens, and can exercise
great political influence by themselves; but they are not numerous
enough to work radical changes without aid from other classes. As it
is, however, in the strictly political movement among the farmers, all
who sympathize with their political views are welcomed. The best
evidence of this is the election of such men as Rev. J. H. Kyle and
editor Peffer to the United States Senate. While the farmer has a
great deal to say about the utter absence of farmers from the national
halls of legislation, he is not disposed to say that farmers alone
should be sent there. He is willing to send the men who are best
fitted to do the work that is to be done, but they must be
worshippers of the common people as distinguished from the bankers and
"financiers."
It is not possible to discuss the platform of the new party at any
length within the necessary limits of this article. We shall be
content to undeceive, if possible, those of our readers who have been
charging that the platform is indefinite.
One of the chief recommendations of the Independent platform, to the
voters of the West, was its brevity and definiteness, refreshing
qualities in the minds of a people who had been accustomed for years
to the platitudes and straddles of the old parties. Most of the
Independent county and State platforms could be summed up under three
heads, money, transportation, land. They declare in favor of a full
legal tender currency to come direct from the government to the
people, in volume sufficient to meet the demands of business; the
government ownership and control of railroads and homes for the
American millions. The main planks were summarized in the flaring
posters which announced the great rallies of the party last fall.
"Money at Cost! Transportation at Cost!" These were the headlines
which everywhere caught the public eye, and drew the crowds. Opponents
saw in these advertisements traces of a demagogue's hand. If it is
demagogism to awaken curiosity, arouse thought, and in a terse
sentence to express the party faith, then are the Independent leaders
guilty of it. But whether guilty or not, these two expressions have
awakened echoes that will not cease reverberating until our ideas and
systems of finance and transportation are quite revolutionized. As we
are not proposing here to discuss the wisdom of the farmer's demands,
we need waste no time on the land and transportation questions. So
much has been written on these questions, and the dividing line
between disputants is so clearly drawn, and farmers have settled down
so decidedly on one side of that line, that they are no longer open to
the charge of juggling with words when they declare in favor of
"homes" and "transportation at cost."
With the money question it is different. "Money at cost" is one of
those essences of thought which will bear analysis. We desire to show
that with the farmer's party it means but one thing,--that it is a
declaration of war with the piratical system of the present. "Money
at cost" is a sentiment and conviction which has grown up in the minds
of the producing and laboring classes of this country out of a deep
sense of the injury done them during the last quarter of a century,
and a pretty clear conception of the nature of money and the duty of
government.
Money, they say, is a medium of exchange necessary in the transaction
of business between citizens; that it is the first duty of government
to provide this medium for its citizens directly and at the minimum
expense; that it should not be considered property in any sense, and
that every incentive to the hoarding of it should be removed; that
there is no such thing as "cheap money" under a proper system, because
only commodities are cheap or dear according to the market price of
them, and money is not a commodity; that money can be issued by
government or by authority of government, safely and honestly, in but
two ways: in return for services rendered, or as a loan on adequate
security, and should always represent days of toil or material of
value; that the present bank systems by which money is farmed out for
private gain, furnishes a fairly reliable currency but an unreliable
means of distribution; that loans should be made on lands or
imperishable products to the many who have personal need of the money
with which to improve homes and develop enterprises, thus giving not
only a safe currency but providing also for a wide and safe
distribution of it; that government creates money out of anything it
chooses; that it should create only the best money, by which is meant
a stable, full, legal tender currency; that the curse of an unstable
currency is now upon us blighting our people; that an unstable
currency is one whose volume is regulated by the owners of private
banks, dependent upon the uncertain output of mines, and varying with
the caprice of the few who hold and control it; that a material scarce
by nature is not fit to receive the stamp of government, because it is
sure to vary in supply; that the medium of exchange should be of
material so plentiful that blind nature or designing men cannot reduce
the supply of it below the government demand for it; that the money so
created should be durable, easy of transportation, and difficult of
counterfeiting; that paper money is the easiest of transportation, the
most difficult to be counterfeited, and in a sense the most durable,
because so easily replaced when lost; that to base the medium of
exchange upon value is as effectual as to stamp it upon value; that
out of deference to foreign customs and the necessities of foreign
trade, our government should buy up the gold and silver bullion of the
country and hold for resale to those who have foreign balances to
settle; that the country to-day is suffering from a contracted and
contracting currency, on account of which the debtor class has had its
burden doubled, to the corresponding advantage of the creditor class;
that if contraction has been good for creditors, inflation must be
good for debtors; that any measure, therefore, which looks toward an
increase of the circulating medium is to be favored; that free silver
coinage is to be favored; that instead of flying to the relief of the
stall-fed speculators of Wall Street in times of financial stringency,
it is time that the government was coming to the relief of the common
people; that loans from the government should be made at a merely
nominal rate of interest, not to exceed two per cent., because any
higher rate is a congestor of wealth and gives capital a leverage over
labor; that money-loaning as a business, except on such a basis from
the government to its subjects, should go out of fashion, and might be
expected to disappear under a proper financial system; that the
unemployed capital of the country would then seek investment, labor
would then be employed, factories would hum and the credit system
might go to the dogs; that rates of interest cannot be satisfactorily
regulated by law until we have banks that are national in fact as well
as in name, managed by salaried officials of the nation whose duty it
shall be to make loans at cost, under wise and conservative rules, to
those needing them who can bring themselves within the rules; that the
proposed sub-treasury and land loan plans are suggestions in the right
direction and calculated, when perfected, to bring the government into
touch with the needy citizen, and make of it a distributor as well as
a creator of money; that paper in the shape of checks and drafts
already transacts ninety-one per cent. of the business of the country,
and might be trusted to properly supplement our currency and make
supply equal demand, were it not that the great bulk of our people are
not known beyond the communities in which they live, and therefore are
debarred from using checks to any extent in the outside world; and
that each piece of national currency, issued as a full legal tender,
in the hands of the people, would be in the nature of a certified
check, enabling the citizen to do business with despatch anywhere.
Running through the above statement of the independent doctrine of
finance, we see that three ideas are most prominent. First, a desire
that the government supersede avaricious man and blind nature in the
creation and distribution of money, in order that money may be a
stable purchasing power. Second, a determination that money shall no
longer be a commodity to be bought, and sold, and manipulated, a leech
upon labor in the hands of a few, but a convenience of trade,
accessible to the many at first cost. Third, a demand that the
misnamed national bank system of the present shall have its spirit of
greediness exorcised, so that it may hereafter serve the people
instead of its management. Are these ideas indefinite? Do they not
mean "money at cost"?
We would now call attention to those facts which the western farmer
says have opened his eyes, made him indifferent to the sneers of the
banking class and its servitors, and fixed him in his purpose to
effect a permanent change in the financial system of the country.
He says that the average profits of business enterprises in this
country do not exceed three per cent.; that money loaning at six and
seven per cent. of necessity congests the wealth of the nation; that
eighty cents' worth of silver, stamped by government as a dollar, or a
cent's worth of paper, bearing the same stamp, buys as much for him in
the markets of the country as a gold dollar; that it is easier for him
to pay his debts when money is plentiful; that the paper demand notes
of '62, a full legal tender, stood at par with gold while the
greenbacks, repudiated in terms by the very bill which created them,
went skyward; that a contraction of currency has preceded every
serious financial panic in the history of the country; that prosperity
for the laborer, the producer, and the debt-payer has always
accompanied currency expansion; that money loaners are strangely
interested in keeping money scarce, and for that purpose fought gold
in '50 when California and Australia threatened to flood us, the
greenback in Lincoln's administration, and silver in '73, '78, and
'91; that the farmer's products have been refused a market within a
year past because there was not money to handle them; that present
rates of interest consume him; and that, with good security to offer,
he is obliged to pay exorbitant rates for money and in many cases is
refused it altogether.
Let us remember that the last word has not yet been spoken upon the
financial question; that the world, even the financial world, has not
seen all of truth and wisdom yet; that reason is better than
authority, especially if the authority is open to a suspicion of
prejudice; and that there may be a financial bigotry as hateful and
unprogressive, and as much out of sympathy with this growing age, as
is the dry-as-dust ecclesiasticism of the day. Every citizen should
give courteous attention to the new voices that come to us from the
West, and be careful that his decision, on the whole matter, is not
influenced by his position as one of the creditors of the land.