Populism and the Farmers’ Revolt

Falling prices. Farmers produced more every year, in the United States and around the world, and crop prices fell for much of the period from the 1870s to the mid-1890s. Wheat that sold for more than a dollar a bushel just after the Civil War often brought far less by the 1890s (prices varied by year and place).

Debt. Many farmers borrowed to buy land, machines and seed. Because prices were falling, the same debt took more and more bushels to repay. Farmers in the West often paid high interest on mortgages.

Crop liens and sharecropping. In the South, many farmers, Black and white, had no land or cash. They rented land as tenants or sharecroppers, and bought supplies on credit from a local merchant, who took a lien on their next crop. Prices on credit were high, and many families ended each year still in debt.

Railroads. In much of the West, a farmer had only one railroad to ship by, and one grain elevator to store in. Farmers complained of high rates, and of railroads that charged more for a short haul than for a long one between cities where lines competed. Railroad owners answered that they faced heavy costs and fierce competition, and that low rates on long routes kept them in business.

Money. Prices across the whole economy fell, a trend called deflation. The United States moved toward a gold standard, and the supply of money grew more slowly than the economy. Farmers believed that more money, from paper currency or silver, would raise prices and ease their debts. Bankers and many business owners argued that only gold kept the dollar sound. Economists today generally agree that a tight money supply helped cause the deflation, though they disagree about how much it hurt farmers compared with other causes such as world competition.

In 1867, Oliver H. Kelley, a clerk in the federal Department of Agriculture, helped found the Patrons of Husbandry, known as the Grange. It began as a social and educational club for farm families, including women. In the 1870s, Grangers set up cooperative stores and elevators and pressed state legislatures in the Midwest to regulate railroad and elevator rates. These state rules were called the Granger laws.

In Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois law setting grain elevator rates, saying that businesses “clothed with a public interest” could be regulated. But in the Wabash case (1886), the Court ruled that only Congress could regulate rates on railroads that crossed state lines. Congress responded with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which created the first federal regulatory agency. At first the agency had little power, and courts often sided with the railroads.

Starting in Texas around the late 1870s, the Farmers’ Alliance spread across the South and onto the Plains in the 1880s. Its lecturers traveled from town to town, and its members built cooperatives to buy supplies and sell cotton together. Many cooperatives failed for lack of credit, which pushed the Alliance toward politics. Its leader Charles Macune proposed the subtreasury plan: federal warehouses where farmers could store crops and borrow against them at low interest until prices improved. A separate Northern Alliance organized in the Midwest.

The white Southern Alliance did not admit Black members. In 1886, Black farmers in Houston County, Texas, founded the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union. It claimed more than a million members by 1891, a figure many historians consider inflated. Most of its members were tenants, sharecroppers and farm laborers. The Colored Alliance and the white Alliances cooperated at times, but their interests could clash. In 1891 the Colored Alliance called a strike of cotton pickers for higher wages, which white landowning Alliance members opposed; the strike failed.

Alliance candidates did well in the 1890 elections, especially in Kansas and the South. In 1892, Alliance members, Knights of Labor and other reformers founded the People’s Party, whose members were called Populists. At their convention in Omaha on July 4, 1892, they adopted the Omaha Platform. Its main demands were:

• Free silver: the unlimited coining of silver at 16 to 1 with gold, and more paper money.
• A graduated income tax.
• Government ownership of the railroads and the telegraph and telephone lines.
• The subtreasury plan, or a similar system of low-cost federal credit.
• In resolutions attached to the platform, direct election of senators, the secret ballot, a single term for the president, and an eight-hour day for government workers.

The party nominated James B. Weaver of Iowa for president. He won about 1.03 million popular votes, roughly 8.5 percent (rounded figures), and 22 electoral votes by carrying Kansas, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada, plus one elector each in North Dakota and Oregon. It was a strong showing for a new party, though it won few votes in the industrial Northeast or among city workers. One of the party’s best-known speakers was Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas. She is often quoted as telling farmers to “raise less corn and more hell,” but the line was probably made up by a newspaper; she later said she had not said it, though she called it good advice.

In 1893 a wave of railroad and bank failures set off the worst depression the country had yet seen. Unemployment may have reached around 15 to 20 percent of industrial workers (an estimate; no official count existed). President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, believed the government’s silver purchases had shaken confidence in the dollar, and he persuaded Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. That split his party.

In the spring of 1894, Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey led a march of unemployed men to Washington, D.C., to ask Congress to create jobs building roads, paid for with new paper money. Newspapers called it Coxey’s Army. Several hundred men arrived (estimates vary), and on May 1 Coxey was arrested for walking on the Capitol grounds. The march achieved nothing at the time, but the idea of government jobs in hard times returned in later decades.

By 1896, “free silver” had become the leading issue in the South and West. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, William Jennings Bryan, a 36-year-old former congressman from Nebraska, gave the speech that ended with the words “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” (July 9, 1896). It won him the nomination.

The Democrats had taken the Populists’ best-known issue. The People’s Party faced a hard choice: run its own candidate and split the silver vote, or fuse with the Democrats. It chose fusion and nominated Bryan, but named Tom Watson of Georgia as its vice presidential candidate instead of the Democrats’ choice. Some Populists, especially in the South, opposed fusion, warning that the party would lose its identity and its wider program.

Bryan traveled thousands of miles and gave hundreds of speeches. The Republican, William McKinley of Ohio, campaigned from his front porch, backed by a large campaign fund raised by Mark Hanna from business leaders. McKinley promised a sound dollar and a protective tariff that would bring back factory jobs. He won with about 7.1 million popular votes to Bryan’s 6.5 million (rounded), and 271 electoral votes to 176. Bryan swept the South and much of the West, but McKinley carried the Northeast and the industrial Midwest, including many city workers. After 1896, the People’s Party faded quickly.

In the South, Populists faced the question of race directly. Tom Watson, a Georgia congressman, argued in the early 1890s that Black and white farmers shared the same economic interests and were being kept apart by racial appeals. Some Southern Populists sought Black votes and defended Black voters against intimidation. These efforts were limited: few Populists supported social equality, and the alliance was often more a matter of votes than of shared power.

Democrats in the South fought back with fraud, violence and appeals to white unity. After the Populist challenge, Southern states moved to take away the vote from Black citizens and many poor white citizens through poll taxes, literacy tests and white-only primaries. Mississippi began in 1890, and in Williams v. Mississippi (1898) the Supreme Court let its rules stand. Other states followed. Watson himself later turned to bitter attacks on Black Americans, Catholics and Jews, and he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1920.

The People’s Party never won the presidency, but many of its ideas later became law, often promoted by Progressives in both major parties. The 16th Amendment (1913) allowed a federal income tax, and the 17th Amendment (1913) provided for the direct election of senators. Many states adopted the secret ballot, the initiative and the referendum. The Federal Reserve (1913) and later farm credit programs gave the government a larger role in money and credit. Government ownership of the railroads and free silver did not come to pass.

A famous later idea is that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was a hidden allegory about Populism, with a yellow brick road for gold and silver shoes for silver. This was suggested in 1964 by Henry Littlefield, a high school teacher, in an essay in the journal American Quarterly. Baum never said the book had such a meaning, and many historians doubt it. Treat it as a later interpretation, not a fact.