A People's History of the United States
How many rebellions took place against this system we don't know. In Delhi, Louisiana, in 1889, a gathering of small farmers rode into town and demolished the stores of merchants "to cancel their indebtedness," they said.
In the height of the 1877 Depression, a group of white farmers gathered together on a farm in Texas and formed the first "Farmers Alliance." In a few years, it was across the state. By 1882, there were 120 suballiances in twelve counties. By 1886, 100,000 farmers had joined in two thousand suballiances. They began to offer alternatives to the old system: join the Alliance and form cooperatives; buy things together and get lower prices. They began putting their cotton together and selling it cooperatively—they called it "bulking."
In some states a Grange movement developed; it managed to get laws passed to help farmers. But the Grange, as one of its newspapers put it, "is essentially conservative and furnishes a stable, well-organized, rational and orderly opposition to encroachments upon the liberties of the people, in contrast to the lawless, desperate attempts of communism." It was a time of crisis, and the Grange was doing too little. It lost members, while the Farmers Alliance kept growing.
From the beginning, the Farmers Alliance showed sympathy with the growing labor movement. When Knights of Labor men went on strike against a steamship line in Galveston, Texas, one of the radical leaders of the Texas Alliance, William Lamb, spoke for many (but not all) Alliance members when he said in an open letter to Alliance people: "Knowing that the day is not far distant when the Farmers Alliance will have to use Boycott on manufacturers in order to get goods direct, we think it is a good time to help the Knights of Labor. . .." Goodwyn says: "Alliance radicalism—Populism—began with this letter."
The Texas Alliance president opposed joining the boycott, but a group of Alliance people in Texas passed a resolution:
Whereas we see the unjust encroachments that the capitalists are making upon all the different departments of labor ... we extend to the Knights of
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Labor our hearty sympathy in their manly struggle against monopolistic oppression and ... we propose to stand by the Knights.
In the summer of 1886, in the town of Clcburne, near Dallas, the Alliance gathered and drew up what came to be known as the "Cleburne Demands"—the first document of the Populist movement, asking "such legislation as shall secure to our people freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations." They called for a national conference of all labor organizations "to discuss such measures as may be of interest to the laboring classes," and proposed regulation of railroad rates, heavy taxation of land held only for speculative purposes, and an increase in the money supply.
The Alliance kept growing. By early 1887, it had 200,000 members in three thousand suballiances. By 1892 farmer lecturers had gone into forty-three states and reached 2 million farm families in what Goodwyn calls "the most massive organizing drive by any citizen institution of nineteenth century America," It was a drive based on the idea of cooperation, of farmers creating their own culture, their own political parties, gaining a respect not given them by the nation's powerful industrial and
political leaders.
Organizers from Texas came to Georgia to form alliances, and in three years Georgia had 100,000 members in 134 of the 137 counties. In Tennessee, there were soon 125,000 members and 3,600 suballiances in ninety-two of the state's ninety-six counties. The Alliance moved into Mississippi "like a cyclone," someone said, and into Louisiana and North Carolina. Then northward into Kansas and the Dakotas, where thirty-five cooperative warehouses were set up.
One of the leading figures in Kansas was Henry Vincent, who started a journal in 1886 called The American Nonconformist, and Kansas Industrial Liberator, saying in the first issue:
This journal will aim to publish such matter as will tend to the education of the laboring classes, the farmers and the producer, and in every struggle it will endeavor to take the side of the oppressed as against the oppressor.. ..
By 1889, the Kansas Alliance had fifty thousand members and was electing local candidates to office.
Now there were 400,000 members in the National Farmers Alliance. And the conditions spurring the Alliance onward got worse. Corn which had brought 45 cents a bushel in 1870 brought 10 cents a bushel in
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1889. Harvesting wheat required a machine to bind the wheat before it became too dry, and this cost several hundred dollars, which the farmer had to buy on credit, knowing the $200 would be twice as hard to get in a few years. Then he had pay a bushel of corn in freight costs for every bushel he shipped. He had to pay the high prices demanded by the grain elevators at the terminals. In the South the situation was worse than anywhere—90 percent of the farmers lived on credit.
To meet this situation, the Texas Alliance formed a statewide cooperative, a great 'lexas Exchange, which handled the selling of the farmers' cotton in one great transaction. But the Exchange itself needed loans to advance credit to its members; the banks refused. A call was issued to farmers to scrape together the needed capital for the Exchange to operate. Thousands came on June 9, 1888, to two hundred Texas courthouses and made their contributions, pledging $200,000. Ultimately, $80,000 was actually collected. It was not enough. The farmers' poverty prevented them from helping themselves. The banks won, and this persuaded the Alliances that monetary reform was crucial.
There was one victory along the way. Farmers were being charged too much for jute bags (to put cotton in), which were controlled by a trust. The Alliance farmers organized a boycott of jute, made their own bags out of cotton, and forced the jute manufacturers to start selling their bags at 5 cents a yard instead of 14 cents.
The complexity of Populist belief was shown in one of its important leaders in Texas, Charles Macune. He was a radical in economics (antitrust, ami capitalist), a conservative in politics (against a new party independent of the Democrats), and a racist. Macune carne forward with a plan that was to become central to the Populist platform—the sub-Treasury plan. The government would have its own warehouses where farmers would store produce and get certificates from this sub-Treasury. These would be greenbacks, and thus much more currency would be made available, not dependent on gold or silver, but based on the amount of farm produce.
There were more Alliance experiments. In the Dakotas, a great cooperative insurance plan for farmers insured them against loss of their crops. Where the big insurance companies had asked 50 cents an acre, the cooperative asked 25 cents or less. It issued thirty thousand policies, covering 2 million acres.
Macune's sub-Treasury plan depended on the government. And since it would not be taken up by the two major parties, it meant (against Macune's own beliefs) organizing a third party. The Alliances went to work. In 1890 thirty-eight Alliance people were elected to Congress. In
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
the South, the Alliance elected governors in Georgia and Texas. It took over the Democratic party in Georgia and won three-fourths of the seats in the Georgia legislature, six of Georgia's ten congressmen.
This was, however, Goodwyn says, "an elusive revolution, because the party machinery remained in the hands of the old crowd, and the crucial chairmanships of important committees, in Congress, in the state legislatures, remained in the hands of the conservatives, and corporate power, in the states, in the nation, could use its money to still get what it
wanted."
The Alliances were not getting real power, but they were spreading new ideas and a new spirit. Now, as a political party, they became the People's party (or Populist party), and met in convention in 1890 in Topeka, Kansas. The great Populist orator from that state, Mary Ellen Lease, told an enthusiastic crowd:
Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, a
nd for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.... Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. . .. the politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children . .. starve to death every year in the U.S. and over 100,000 shop girls in New York arc forced to sell their virtue for bread. ,..
There are thirty men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars. There are half a million looking for work.. .. We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out. . . . We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to tbe loan-shark companies until the Government
pays its debts to us.
Tbe people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged
us thus far beware.
At the People's party national convention in 1892 in St. Louis, a platform was drawn up. The preamble was written by, and read to the assemblage by, another of the great orators of the movement, Ignatius Donnelly:
We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. Trie people are
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demoralized. . .. The newspapers are subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrate, our homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in die hands of capitalists.
The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages; a hireling standing army . .. established to shoot them down... . The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes. . .. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes—paupers and millionaires... .
A People's party nominating convention in Omaha in July of 1892 nominated James Weaver, an Iowa Populist and former general in the Union army, for President. The Populist movement was now tied to the voting system. Their spokesman Polk had said they could "link their hands and hearts together and march to the ballot box and take possession of the government, restore it to the principles of our fathers, and run it in the interest of the people." Weaver got over a million votes, but lost.
A new political party had the job of uniting diverse groups—northern Republicans and southern Democrats, urban workers and country fanners, black and white. A Colored Farmers National Alliance grew in the South and had perhaps a million members, hut it was organized and led by whites. There were also black organizers, but it was not easy for them to persuade black farmers that, even if economic reforms were won, blacks would have equal access to them. Blacks had tied themselves to the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and civil rights laws. The Democrats were the party of slavery and segregation. As Goodwyn puts it, "in an era of transcendent white prejudice, the curbing of 'vicious corporate monopoly' did not carry for black farmers the ring of salvation it had for white agrarians."
There were whites who saw the need for racial unity. One Alabama newspaper wrote:
The white and colored Alliance are united in their war against trusts, and in the promotion of the doctrine that farmers should establish cooperative stores, and manufactures, and publish their own newspapers, conduct their own schools, and have a hand in everything else that concerns them as citizens or affects them personally or collectively.
The official newspaper of the Alabama Knights of Labor, the Alabama Sentinel, wrote: "The Bourbon Democracy are trying to down the Alliance with the old cry 'nigger'. It won't work though."
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY or THE UNITED STATES
Some Alliance blacks made similar calls for unity. A leader of the Florida Colored Alliance said: "We are aware of the fact that the laboring colored man's interests and the laboring white man's interest are one
and the same."
When the Texas People's party was founded in Dallas in the summer of 1891, it was interracial, and radical. There was blunt and vigorous debate among whites and blacks. A black delegate, active in the Knights of Labor, dissatisfied with vague statements about "equality," said:
Tf we are equal, why does not the sheriff summon Negroes on juries? And why hang up the sign "Negro", in passenger cars. 1 want to tell my people what the People's Party is going to do. T want to tell diem if it is going to work a black and white horse in the same field.
A white leader responded by urging there be a black delegate from every district in the state. "They are in the ditch just like we are." When someone suggested there be separate white and black Populist clubs which would "confer together," R. M. Humphrey, the white leader of the Colored Alliance, objected: "This will not do. The colored people arc part of the people and they must be recognized as such." 'Iwo blacks were then elected to the state executive committee of the party.
Blacks and whites were in different situations. The blacks were mostly field hands, hired laborers; most white Alliance people were farm owners. When the Colored Alliance declared a strike in the cotton fields in 1891 for a dollar a day wages for cotton pickers, Leonidas Polk, head of the white Alliance, denounced it as hurting the Alliance farmer who would have to pay that wage. In Arkansas, a thirty-year-old black cotton picker named Ben Patterson led the strike, traveling from plantation to plantation to get support, his band growing, engaging in gun battles with a white posse. A plantation manager was killed, a cotton gin burned. Patterson and his band were caught, and fifteen of them were
shot to death.
There was some black-white unity at the ballot box in the South— resulting in a few blacks elected in North Carolina local elections. An Alabama white fanner wrote to a newspaper in 1892: "I wish to God that Uncle Sam could put bayonets around the ballot box in the black belt on the first Monday in August so that the Negro could get a fair vote." There were black delegates to third-party conventions in Georgia: two in 1892, twenty-four in 1894, The Arkansas People's party platform spoke for the "downtrodden, regardless of race."
There were moments of racial unity. Lawrence Goodwyn found in
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east Texas an unusual coalition of black and white public officials: it had begun during Reconstruction and continued into the Populist period. The state government was in the control of white Democrats, but in Grimes County, blacks won local offices and sent legislators to the state capital. The district clerk was a black man; there were black deputy sheriffs and a black school principal. A night-riding White Man's Union used intimidation and murder to split the coalition, but Goodwyn points to "the long years of interracial cooperation in Grimes County" and wonders about missed opportunities.
Racism was strong, and the Democratic party played on this, winning many fanners from the Populist party. When white tenants, failing in the crop-lien system, were evicted from their land and replaced by blacks, race hatred intensified. Southern states were drawing up new constitutions, starting with Mississippi in 1890, to prevent blacks from voting by various devices, and to maintain ironclad segregation in every aspect of life.
The laws that took the vote away from blacks—poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications—also often ensured that poor whites would not vote. And the political leaders of the South knew this. At the constitutional convention in Alabama, one of the leaders said he wanted to take away the vote from "all those who arc unfit and unqualified, and if the rule strikes a white man as well as a negro let him go." In North Carolina, the Charlotte Observer saw disfranchisement as "the struggle of the white people of North Carolina to rid themselves of the dangers of the rule of negroes and the lower class of whites."
Tom Watson, the Populist leader of Georgia, pleaded for racial unity:
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sp; You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You arc deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.
According to the black scholar Robert Alien, taking a look at Populism (Reluctant Reformers), Watson wanted black support for a white man's party. No doubt, when Watson found this support embarrassing and no longer useful, he became as eloquent in affirming racism as he had been in opposing it.
Still, Watson must have addressed some genuine feelings in poor whites whose class oppression gave them some common interest with
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blacks. When H. S. Doyle, a young black preacher who supported Watson for Congress, was threatened by a lynch mob, he came to Watson for protection, and two thousand white farmers helped Doyle
escape.
It was a time that illustrated the complexities of class and race conflict. Fifteen blacks were lynched during Watson's election campaign. And in Georgia after 1891 the Alliance-controlled legislature, Alien points out, "passed the largest number of anti-black bills ever enacted in a single year in Georgia history." And yet, in 1896, the Georgia state platform of the People's party denounced lynch law and terrorism, and asked the abolition of the convict lease system.
C. Vann Woodward points to the uniqtie quality of the Populist experience in the South: "Never before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they did during the Populist strug-
gles."
The Populist movement also made a remarkable attempt to create a new and independent culture for the country's farmers. The Alliance Lecture Bureau reached all over the country; it had 35,000 lecturers. The Populists poured out books and pamphlets from their printing presses. Woodward says: