Chapter 17
During the early 1890s, a problem even older in American history than the race question, and equally intractable, if that were possible, came to a dismal resolution. For centuries the native peoples of North America had turned to prophets when the pressure from whites became irresistible; the most successful—though ultimately futile—campaign of Indian resistance, led by Tecumseh during the War of 1812, had been inspired by Tecumseh’s brother, known as the Prophet, who preached that the bullets of the white soldiers couldn’t penetrate the faith of his followers.
Black Elk remembered the first stirrings of a similar dispensation in 1889. “Strange news had come from the West,” the Sioux seer recalled. “It was hard to believe, and when I first heard of it, I thought it was only foolish talk that somebody had started somewhere. This news said that out yonder in the West at a place near where the great mountains”—the Sierra Nevada—“stand before you come to the big water”—the Pacific—“there was a sacred man among the Paiutes who had talked to the Great Spirit in a vision, and the Great Spirit had told him how to save the Indian peoples and make the Wasichus disappear and bring back all the bison and the people who were dead and how there would be a new earth.” The report prompted some Sioux to travel west to see the holy man for themselves. He had lived among whites long enough to acquire the name Jack Wilson and a basic knowledge of Christianity, but now he employed his Paiute name, Wovoka, and called himself the Messiah. A new world was coming, he said, in which all the dead Indians and dead animals would be restored to life and from which all the living would be excluded, except for those Indians who performed a dance he taught them.
The Sioux returned to Dakota with the news, and all that winter Black Elk’s neighbors could speak of nothing else. In the summer of 1890 several other Sioux made the pilgrimage to Nevada’s Walker Lake, where Wovoka resided. Either the revelation had changed over the winter or it was transmitted more clearly now, for it appeared that Wovoka was the son of the Great Spirit and that he had come to earth long ago and been killed by the Wasichus, who had rejected his teaching. This time he came to the Indians. And the new world would arrive the next spring.
In the autumn of 1890 Wovoka’s dance—the Ghost Dance—caught on among Indians throughout the West. Black Elk had lost his vision lately, having spent, by his reckoning, too much time among the whites. But the Ghost Dance brought it back. “I remembered how the spirits had taken me to the center of the earth and shown me the good things, and how my people should prosper. I remembered how the Six Grandfathers had told me that through their power I should make my people live and the holy tree should bloom. I believed my vision was coming true at last, and happiness overcame me.”1
Other Ghost Dancers interpreted their visions differently, and the whites who observed the Ghost Dance from the outside differently still. The federal agents and soldiers posted to the Pine Ridge reservation grew nervous as the cult took hold, not least since some dancers claimed that the special “ghost shirts” they wore rendered them impervious to the white men’s bullets. Among the Sioux, with their record of resistance, battle magic appeared particularly ominous.
General Nelson Miles, commanding U.S. army forces in the West, ordered reinforcements to the Pine Ridge reservation. The troop deployment increased the tension and drew criticism from some of the older hands in the region. Valentine McGillycuddy, a former Indian agent, thought Miles was overreacting. “I should let the dance continue,” McGillycuddy said. “If the Seventh Day Adventists prepare their ascension robes for the second coming of the Savior, the United States Army is not put in motion to prevent them. Why should not the Indians have the same privilege? If the troops remain, trouble is sure to come.” But Miles ignored the advice, preferring to take still stronger action. Sitting Bull lived at Pine Ridge and even yet commanded a following. Lest he become a nucleus of armed resistance, Miles ordered him arrested.
On December 15, a large force of Indian police surrounded Sitting Bull’s cabin on the Grand River. They seized Sitting Bull, only to discover that they were surrounded in turn by a much larger group of Ghost Dancers. The Indian police tried to bluster their way past the Ghost Dancers, but one of the latter opened fire. By accident or design, the return fire of the police struck Sitting Bull, killing him instantly. At this point, according to eyewitnesses, something very strange happened. Sitting Bull had received a gift horse from Buffalo Bill Cody, a pony that had performed tricks in Cody’s Wild West show. One of the cues was a pistol shot, and when the animal now heard the gunfire, it started its routine of raising its hooves and shaking its head. The Ghost Dancers interpreted this as a version of the Ghost Dance and held their fire to watch. By the time the pony trotted away, a cavalry company had arrived to rescue the Indian police.2
This chance event simply deferred the reckoning, and perhaps made it worse. Fearing retaliation from the soldiers, the Sioux scattered; a band led by a chief named Big Foot started for the Pine Ridge agency, where they hoped to find protection with Red Cloud, the most faithful of the Sioux allies of the whites. Big Foot’s band was mostly women and children, but it contained enough warriors to worry the local army commander, who diverted the band to a camp on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. Big Foot acquiesced, though the exposed campsite put his ill-equipped people at risk of death from exposure. He himself had caught pneumonia and could barely ride.
In the last week of December, Colonel James Forsyth, George Custer’s successor as commander of the Seventh Cavalry, received orders to disarm Big Foot’s band. Black Elk happened to be at the Pine Ridge agency as the cavalry moved out. “When I saw them starting, I felt that something terrible was going to happen,” he recalled. “That night I could hardly sleep at all. I walked around most of the night.”3
The next morning—December 29—Forsyth distributed rations of hardtack to Big Foot’s hungry band. Then he demanded that they turn over their weapons. Some did; others resisted, although whether from defiance or confusion as to what qualified as weapons was unclear. Someone—perhaps an Indian, perhaps a soldier—fired a shot, triggering a general melee of gunfire and desperate hand-to-hand fighting. Several Indians and soldiers fell on the spot; other Indians broke away, only to be mowed down by the Hotchkiss machine guns the cavalry had mounted above the camp. The fire from the guns raked the camp, ripping through tepees and cutting down men, women, and children indiscriminately.
Black Elk heard the big guns from a distance. “I knew from the sound that it must be wagon guns”—the Hotchkiss guns—“going off. The sounds went right through my body.” He donned his sacred shirt (not a Ghost Shirt but one of his own), painted his face red, put an eagle feather in his hair, mounted his buckskin, and galloped in the direction of Wounded Knee Creek. He carried no gun, only a sacred bow that he had seen in his great vision and crafted later. On the road he joined up with several other Sioux, till they numbered about twenty. In time they mounted a rise that looked down upon Big Foot’s camp. “Wagon guns were still going off,” he remembered. “There was much shooting.… There were many cries, and we could see cavalrymen scattered over the hills ahead of us. Cavalrymen were riding along the gulch and shooting into it, where women and children were running away and trying to hide in the gullies and the stunted pines.”
Black Elk spotted a group of women and children huddled under the bank of the gulch. Several soldiers had rifles trained on them. Black Elk shouted over the din to his comrades: “Take courage! These are our relatives. We will try to get them back.” As they prepared to charge, they shouted to one another: “Take courage! It is time to fight!” They galloped headlong toward the gulch. The soldiers fired at them. “I had no gun, and when we were charging I just held the sacred bow out in front of me with my right hand,” Black Elk said. “The bullets did not hit us at all.” Black Elk found a baby lying on the ground crying for her mother. He stopped long enough to wrap her tightly in the shawl that had fallen loose around her. Then he set her down, out of the line of fire. “It was a safe place, and I had other work to do.”
By this time many more Sioux had raced up from Pine Ridge to join the fight. “We all charged on the soldiers. They ran eastward toward where the trouble began.” The soldiers retreated to the creek and there dug themselves in. The Indians couldn’t dislodge them. Eventually the soldiers marched away up the creek.
The carnage was all too evident by then. Black Elk rode slowly along the dry gulch. “Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the wagon guns hit them. I saw a little baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead.”
The official statistics registered 146 Indians dead, including 44 women and 18 children, and 51 wounded. The Indian death toll almost certainly was higher, perhaps much higher, as many uncounted wounded ran or crawled away to die unmolested further by the soldiers. The soldiers suffered 25 dead and 39 wounded. Several, perhaps many, of the casualties among the soldiers were inflicted by their own fire.
“It was a good winter day when all this happened,” Black Elk remembered. “The sun was shining. But after the soldiers marched away from their dirty work, a heavy snow began to fall. The wind came up in the night. There was a big blizzard, and it grew very cold. The snow drifted deep in the crooked gulch, and it was one long grave of butchered women and children and babies, who had never done any harm and were only trying to run away.”4
WOUNDED KNEE, as matters proved, marked the end of an era, the last armed resistance to white control of the territory claimed by the government of the United States. For three hundred years Indians had fought the Anglo-Americans; the struggle had stained every state and nearly every county with the Indians’ blood or the whites’. Now the struggle was finally over. The Indians could no longer resist; the invaders had won.
A less sanguinary sign of the white victory was being registered even as the Seventh Cavalry rolled its Hotchkiss guns away from Wounded Knee. During 1890 the federal government conducted its constitutionally mandated decennial census; the tally—the first census to employ mechanical tabulating machines—revealed a population of 63 million living in the forty-two states. This aggregate population represented an increase of 25 percent over 1880, resulting from both heavy immigration and healthy natural increase. Nine million of those 63 million were foreign born. Most Americans, 64 percent, still lived in rural districts, although the cities were growing rapidly. The largest cities were New York, with 1.5 million inhabitants; Chicago, with 1.1 million; Philadelphia, 1 million; and Brooklyn (still separate from New York), 800,000.
The most intriguing part of the report was a statement inserted near the end of the summary on the population and its distribution:
Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent and its western movement it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.5
Politicians read the census report for guidance on redrawing legislative districts; merchants studied its tables in search of business opportunities; speculators scanned the maps for clues to future movements of population. Frederick Jackson Turner read it for insight into America’s past. A young historian at the University of Wisconsin, Turner judged existing interpretations of American history inadequate. The graybeards of the history profession, preeminently Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins, had adapted the evolutionary thinking of Charles Darwin to the study of history and concluded that American institutions had evolved from English precursors, which in turn reflected Germanic practices. The roots of American history lay in Europe; to understand America, one must examine Europe.
Turner had studied with Adams and mastered the conventional wisdom sufficiently to earn his doctorate in 1890. But he thought Adams and the Teutonists fundamentally wrong. No doubt the germ of American democracy could be discovered in Europe, but its distinctiveness reflected the New World soil in which the seed had sprouted and blossomed. Turner didn’t reject Darwin, but he was a Lamarckian at heart, believing acquired characteristics could be passed from one generation to the next.
He was also a Westerner. Born in Portage, Wisconsin, at a time when Indians still roamed the forests among the lakes, Turner believed the West—in particular, the moving frontier of settlement—had made America what it became. Turner deemed history inseparable from geography, as he explained to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association held in Chicago in 1893. “The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society,” he said.
Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system.
In his thirty-two years Turner had observed the frontier passing across Wisconsin; now he asked his audience to imagine its motion in their mind’s eye.
Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader’s frontier, the rancher’s frontier, or the miner’s frontier, and the farmer’s frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line the traders’ pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghenies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader’s birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri.
The moving frontier had shaped American history in distinctive ways. It attracted the disparate nationalities that differentiated the United States from the European countries. The Atlantic Coast was predominantly English, but Germans and Scotch Irish quickly filled in behind the coast. The frontier diminished the dependence of the Americans on Europe; the individual self-reliance evoked by the frontier extrapolated into a national self-reliance that led to separation from Britain. The frontier promoted egalitarianism; the gentry didn’t leave the coast, and those persons who did leave were judged on their accomplishments, not on their breeding. Most important, the frontier fostered democracy. Those independent Westerners wouldn’t tolerate the restrictions on the franchise practiced in the East; as the numbers of Westerners increased and their influence in national politics grew—manifested most clearly by their election of Andrew Jackson as president—the Easterners had to lower their restrictions out of self-defense.
All this mattered to historians, but not to historians alone. The statement by the census director that the frontier had disappeared suggested that American society had reached a turning point in its evolution.
Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.
But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.
What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.6
AMERICAN FARMERS READ the 1890 census, too, and it confirmed a decades-old belief that history was tilting against them. As America industrialized, as corporate capitalism became the dominant mode of economic enterprise, farmers felt their autonomy diminish, and, against the inclinations of many of them, they grew increasingly radical. Industrial workers squeezed by wage cuts might complain about particular capitalists—their bosses, most obviously—without rejecting capitalism per se. And in fact this was what most American workers did. But farmers, typically being their own bosses, could hardly damn falling crop prices and rising interest rates without condemning capitalism as a whole. In the 1890s farmers were still the largest occupational group in America, although they no longer constituted an absolute majority of workers; and they still considered themselves the repository of the nation’s core values. But their numbers continued to slip compared with industrial workers and with the emerging white-collar class of office personnel, and their incomes eroded relative to workers and big capitalists both. Like other petty capitalists—the victims of John Rockefeller’s conquest of oil, the merchants left stranded by J. P. Morgan’s reorganization of railroads—the farmers could easily believe that capitalism was failing them. Or perhaps they were failing capitalism. Either way, capitalism had to be radically transformed. The obvious means was democracy.
Farmers didn’t reach this conclusion all together or all at once. Many, viewing their problems as chiefly economic, at first sought to tackle them by economic means. With capitalists consolidating into trusts, and workers into trade unions, many farmers sought to consolidate into organizations of their own. In 1867 Minnesota’s Oliver Kelley founded the Patrons of Husbandry, commonly called the Grange. An erstwhile employee of the federal Department of Agriculture, Kelley worked the contacts he had made among farmers to advocate a brotherhood (and sisterhood: the Grange admitted women) of children of the soil. His program emphasized cooperation in purchasing supplies and marketing crops, and a united front against railroads and other shippers. Kelley’s concept caught on; the Grange grew to nineteen thousand chapters and 750,000 members by 1875.7
The Grange self-consciously eschewed politics and avoided endorsing candidates. Yet members gravitated to politics nonetheless. The Panic of 1873 revealed the limits of private-sector activism; though Grange cooperatives increased farmers’ leverage with suppliers and customers, they couldn’t cope with the general destabilization of American finance. Farmers took to the hustings in the mid-1870s, running independent candidates who promised to curb the railroads and pressure the federal government to loosen the money supply or backing Republicans and Democrats who promised the same thing. In several midwestern states they won approval of “Granger laws” regulating railroad and warehouse rates. The railroads and their allies challenged the laws in court, contending that they violated the commerce clause of the Constitution and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. At this point in American constitutional history, however, the concept of “substantive” due process remained undeveloped, and the Supreme Court, in the 1877 case of Munn v. Illinois, upheld the Granger laws. Chief Justice Morrison Waite, writing for the 7-to-2 majority, asserted that the popular prerogatives of democracy trumped the property rights of capitalism, at least in the area of commerce. “For protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts,” he said. Yet Associate Justice Stephen J. Field sounded a warning in dissent: “If this be sound law, if there be no protection, either in the principles upon which our republican government is founded, or in the prohibitions of the Constitution against such invasion of private rights, all property and all business in the State are held at the mercy of a majority of its legislature.”8
The Granger laws didn’t address the currency issue, which began to emerge as the crucial one for farmers. In the industrial era farmers typically carried a heavy load of debt: for land, equipment, seed, fertilizer, and living expenses till their crops were sold. Falling crop prices in the decades after the Civil War increased the real cost of repayment—a thousand-dollar loan incurred when wheat fetched a dollar a bushel represented a thousand bushels; when wheat fell to fifty cents, two thousand. Had farmers been able to organize among themselves and reduce their output (in much the way the trusts restrained their output, and labor unions attempted to reduce the supply of labor), they might have boosted prices through the marketplace. But the farmers faced two daunting handicaps. In the first place, there were millions of farmers, in contrast to the scores, perhaps, or fewer of corporations potentially competing in a given industry. Organizing all those farmers, and enforcing any agreement, was nearly impossible within the confines of the private sector. (Workers faced similar problems, which was a principal reason the larger unions—conspicuously the Knights of Labor—didn’t last.) Second, even if American farmers organized, they would still face foreign competition. Basic farm commodities were fungible: wheat was wheat, whether grown in North Dakota or the northern Ukraine, and cotton was cotton, whether from the vicinity of Alexandria, Louisiana, or Alexandria, Egypt.
For such reasons farmers looked beyond the marketplace to solve their price problem. During the 1870s and early 1880s many joined the Greenback party, which agitated to extend the life of the paper currency introduced during the Civil War. Since the war’s end the Republican-controlled Treasury had gradually retired greenbacks in favor of gold, steadily shrinking the supply of currency, which fell from thirty dollars per capita in 1865 to less than twenty dollars in 1880. The Greenbackers loudly resisted this trend, not illogically equating more money with higher prices. Yet paper currency wasn’t the whole of the Greenback financial platform. Party theorists fully understood that currency constituted but part of the money question; increasingly money consisted of bank deposits and the checks drawn on them. For this reason the Greenbackers included strict regulation of banks among their political demands. Democracy must rescue what capitalism threatened. “Corporate control of the volume of money has been the means of dividing society into hostile classes, of the unjust distribution of the products of labor, and of building up monopolies of associated capital,” the party’s 1880 platform asserted. “It has kept money scarce, and scarcity of money enforces debt.… The right to make and issue money is a sovereign power to be maintained by the people for the common benefit. The delegation of this right to corporations is a surrender of the central attribute of sovereignty.”9
But the message didn’t catch on. After failing to prevent passage of the 1875 Specie Resumption Act, which accelerated the return to a hard-money standard, the Greenbackers fared dismally in the 1876 presidential election, in which candidate Peter Cooper polled but 80,000 votes nationwide. The labor troubles of 1877 gave the Greenbackers a momentary boost by attracting urban workers to the movement, and in 1878 they elected more than a dozen candidates to Congress and many more to state offices. But the farmer-labor coalition proved unstable, and with the return of prosperity the two groups gradually parted. James B. Weaver, the Greenback nominee for president in 1880, improved on Cooper’s dismal showing by mounting the first nationwide personal campaign. But the modest results didn’t repay the heroic effort, and the party disintegrated.
Many of the farmers took refuge in the Farmers’ Alliance. The roots of the alliance ran in various directions. In 1877 small farmers and ranchers in Texas gathered at Lampasas, northwest of Austin, to complain of the high cost of credit and transport, the low price of corn and beef, and the arrogance of corporate speculators and big cattlemen. They devised measures for catching rustlers, branding strays, and purchasing barbed wire and other necessities. And they agreed they’d have better luck if more like-minded people joined them. They talked up their program and persuaded their neighbors, till by 1885 the Texas alliance claimed fifty thousand members, enough to start thinking of itself as a political movement. Farmers in neighboring states, and then across the South, signed on; in 1890 the Southern alliance numbered a million.
During the same period, on the prairies west of Chicago, farmers mobilized similarly. The moving spirit of what became the Northern (or Northwestern) alliance was a Chicago editor named Milton George, who calculated that whatever else a farmers’ organization might accomplish, it ought to boost circulation of his paper, the Western Rural. George and the Rural got the alliance started and held it together through the good times of the early 1880s, which were bad for this protest movement, as good times are generally bad for protests. Brutal weather in 1886 and 1887—summer drought followed by winter blizzards—punished the Plains, killing crops by the section and livestock by the herd. The suffering farmers might not have blamed the political system but for a veto by President Cleveland of a bill to buy seed for destitute Texas wheat growers. Cleveland sympathized with the Texans but contended that the ten-thousand-dollar appropriation would promote an enervating dependency. “Though the people support the Government,” Cleveland asserted, “the Government should not support the people.”10
Cleveland’s words summarized the thinking of many, perhaps most, Americans in the 1880s, and in fact his pithy formulation would be quoted by small-government conservatives down to Herbert Hoover and beyond. Yet a countervailing philosophy—the one motivating the congressional supporters of the Texas-seed bill—contended that government should support the people, at any rate during emergencies. Abraham Lincoln went so far as to say that “the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but can not do at all or can not so well do for themselves.” Yet Lincoln added, “In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.”11
The trick was knowing where to draw the line. Cleveland and the conservatives drew it tightly around the Constitution and the prerogatives of capital; the farmers who joined the Southern and Northern alliances sketched a more generous role for government, at any rate regarding themselves and their troubles. The Texas-seed appropriation was small even by the modest standards of government in that era, but the bill became a symbol of what the farmers felt they were up against. Cleveland’s veto, combined with newly falling prices, reenergized the alliance movement. A Minneapolis convention in 1887 wrote a constitution for the Northern group, elected officers, and forecast a bright future for the organization, not least on account of the clouds over the farm economy. State after state and county after county in the upper Mississippi Valley sprouted alliance chapters like spring wheat after April rains. By 1890 the Northern alliance listed 130,000 members in Kansas and only somewhat fewer in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska. The secretary’s office reported new members enrolling at the rate of a thousand per week.12
“THIS SEASON IS without a parallel in this part of the country,” a farmer wrote to the editor of a Nebraska farm journal in 1891.
The hot winds burned up the entire crop, leaving thousands of families wholly destitute, many of whom might have been able to run through the crisis had it not been for the galling yoke put upon them by the money loaners and sharks—not by charging 7 per cent per annum, which is the lawful rate of interest, or even 10 per cent, but the unlawful and inhuman country-destroying rate of 3 per cent a month, some going still farther and charging 50 per cent per annum. We are cursed, many of us financially beyond redemption, not by the hot winds so much as by the swindling games of the bankers and money loaners, who have taken the money and now are after the property, leaving the farmer moneyless and homeless.
This writer explained farm finance from the perspective of the debtor.
I have borrowed, for example, $1,000. I pay $25 to the commission man. I give my note and second mortgage of 3 per cent of the $1,000, which is $30 more. Then I pay 7 per cent on the $1,000 to the actual loaner. Then besides all this I pay for appraising the land, abstract, recording, etc., so when I have secured my loan I am out the first year $150.… This is on the farm, but now comes the chattel loan. I must have $50 to save myself. I get the money; my note is made payable in thirty or sixty days for $35, secured by chattel of two horses, harness and wagon, about five times the value of the note. The time comes to pay. I ask for a few days. No, I can’t wait; must have the money [says the lender]. If I can’t get the money, I have the extreme pleasure of seeing my property taken.13
The editor of the Nebraska journal, receiving many such letters, responded with a grim summary of the average farmer’s plight. “Take a man, for instance, who labors hard from fourteen to sixteen hours a day to obtain the bare necessaries of life. He eats his bacon and potatoes in a place which might rather be called a den than a home; and then, worn out, lies down and sleeps. He is brutalized both morally and physically.” The horizons of this man were incomparably narrower than the horizons of the land on which he struggled. “He has no ideas, only propensities. He has no beliefs, only instincts. He does not, often cannot, read. His contact with other people is only the relation of servant to master, of a machine to its director.… This man’s name is Million. He is all about us.” And he would shake the world, or at least the capitalist system, with the editor’s full approval. “The tendency of the competitive system is to antagonize and disassociate men. The survival of the fittest is a satanic creed.… Deny it if you can; competition is only another name for war. It means slavery to millions; it means the sale of virtue for bread; it means for thousands upon thousands starvation, misery, and death. After four thousand years of life, is this the best that we can achieve? If so, who cares how soon the end may come?”14
A North Carolina editor, after reading the laments of farmers in his own state, indicted the status quo in a voice that was less apocalyptic but more poignant.
There is something radically wrong in our industrial system. There is a screw loose. The wheels have dropped out of balance. The railroads have never been so prosperous, and yet agriculture languishes. The banks have never done a better or more profitable business, and yet agriculture languishes. Manufacturing enterprises never made more money or were in a more flourishing condition, and yet agriculture languishes. Towns and cities flourish and “boom” and grow and “boom,” and yet agriculture languishes. Salaries and fees were never so temptingly high and desirable, and yet agriculture languishes.15
The most obvious manifestation of the languishing was what it had been for two decades: the inexorable decline in the prices farmers received for their produce. From 1870 to the mid-1890s corn prices slumped by a third, wheat by more than half, cotton by two-thirds. Most farmers initially responded to the falling prices by working harder. But they didn’t take long to realize they were digging their hole deeper. “We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop; that was all we needed,” one farmer bitterly declared. “We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight cent corn, ten cent oats, two cent beef, and no price at all for butter and eggs—that’s what came of it. Then the politicians said that we suffered from over-production.”16
The politicians were partly right. Overproduction was one cause of the farmers’ distress. But overproduction wasn’t simply an American problem. Farmers in Canada and Argentina and Egypt and India responded to the low prices much as the American farmers did; the resulting glut in the major commodities wasn’t simply regional or national but global. Even if American farmers could solve their own overproduction problem, they’d still have to deal with the foreigners.
Closer to home but no more susceptible to the farmers’ control were the prices they had to pay to sustain their operations—prices that were rising either absolutely or relative to the prices farmers received for their crops. Cotton farmers, even in the best Black Belt districts, had to fertilize their fields or watch their harvests decline; the Southerners paid up to a third of the value of their crop for guano and other fertilizers. Wheat farmers had to mechanize lest their labor costs kill them; the machinery cut through profits faster than it cut through the standing wheat.
More painful than the costs for fertilizer and equipment were the charges the farmers paid to transport their crops to market. Nearly every farmer fell hostage to the railroads at harvest time—in particular, to the single railroad that typically held a local monopoly in the farmer’s district. By the 1880s barely a bushel of wheat or corn or a bale of cotton moved to market without riding the rails, and the railroads exploited their strategic advantage. This wasn’t to say they didn’t provide an essential service at an unprecedentedly low price. “What would it cost for a man to carry a ton of wheat one mile?” the president of the Union Pacific asked. “What would it cost for a horse to do the same? The railway does it at a cost of less than a cent.” Nor did the railroads rake in profits so egregiously as their critics alleged. Viewed nationally, the railroad industry was quite competitive, which was why roads kept sliding into receivership and why they cut wages even at the risk of crippling strikes.17
But what they lost on their trunk lines, where they faced direct competition, the railroads tried to recoup on the routes they monopolized. Farmers continually complained that it cost more to ship a bushel of wheat a hundred miles across Dakota than it did to ship the same bushel the seven hundred miles from Chicago to New York. Railroad operators acknowledged the differential and shrugged; this was simply how capitalism worked. Farmers responded that however capitalism worked for the railroads, it didn’t work for them. Northern farmers noted that rail rates rose in the winter, when lakes and rivers froze and barge traffic ceased; the railroaders shrugged again, citing the basic rule of pricing: whatever the traffic would bear. And when the farmers attacked the railroads for failing to serve the public, the more forthright of the railroad men quoted their colleague William Vanderbilt: “The public be damned.”
FINALLY THE FARMERS became overtly political. Against the money power of the capitalists they proposed to array their voting power. But to maximize their voting power they needed to organize more effectively than ever. An initial attempt to merge the Northern and Southern alliances took place in St. Louis in late 1889, when the two groups held simultaneous conventions. A general coincidence of views was obvious, but certain policies and practices caused friction. The Southern alliance admitted women but not blacks (the ostensible reason for excluding the blacks was to preserve the virtue of the white women); Southern black farmers had established a separate Colored Farmers’ Alliance (which suited many of its members, who distrusted their white neighbors). The Northern alliance included black members (albeit not many, as there were few black farmers in the North). The Southern alliance shrouded some of its activities in secrecy, which put off the Northerners. Personal considerations also inhibited a merger. The opposite sides included veterans of the Civil War whose wounds still smarted; even after twenty-five years Johnny Reb and Billy Yank found cause for anger. And at least some of the Northern alliance men felt intimidated by their Southern counterparts, who outnumbered them considerably and came to St. Louis more experienced and better organized.
The differences between the Northerners and Southerners trumped their desire for unity, and the proposed merger failed. Yet the two groups agreed to work together, and they endorsed similar platforms, which included demands for government ownership of the railroads, expansion of the currency, and preference for small farmers over corporations and speculators in the distribution of land.18
Each group went home eager to elect friendly candidates in the 1890 elections. Southern alliance members worked within the two-party system—which meant, in their case, within the Democratic party. Northerners often created or joined independent parties, which varied in name and composition by state. The overall success of the movement amazed even the most optimistic members. More than forty alliance-sponsored candidates were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where they dominated the delegations of Georgia and the Carolinas; several alliance candidates were elected to the Senate. Alliance members and allies controlled legislatures in seven Southern states and the lower house of the Kansas legislature.19
The strong showing confirmed the democratic faith of many alliance-men, who hoped to sustain the momentum. At the December 1890 convention of the Southern alliance, a substantial faction agitated for the creation of a new political party. Some alliance leaders demurred, in part for fear of losing control of such a party, in part from hope of capturing the Democratic party. The Northern alliance met a short while later and expressed greater enthusiasm for a third party, pulling many of the Southerners along. A preliminary meeting for the new party took place in the spring of 1891 and laid the groundwork for a major convention at Omaha in July 1892.
A thousand farmers traveled to Omaha, where they were joined by hundreds of other reforming types: workers, temperance advocates, Bellamyite socialists, Henry Georgian single-taxers. The talk was earnest and the optimism palpable. The world needed changing and they would do it. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin,” the preamble to the charter platform of the People’s party declared. “Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.… The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” The existing parties had entrenched themselves but failed the people; hence the need for a new party “to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people.’ ”
The representatives of these plain people declared, therefore:
First: That the union of the labor forces of the United States this day consummated shall be permanent and perpetual; may its spirit enter all hearts for the salvation of the republic and the uplifting of mankind.
Second: Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The interests of rural and civic labor are identical; their enemies are identical.
Third: We believe that the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads.… The government should own and operate the railroads in the interest of the people.
Other platform planks and supporting resolutions called for a national currency “safe, sound, and flexible, issued by the government only” and restored to its earlier magnitude by the “free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the present legal ratio of 16 to 1”; a federal “subtreasury plan” allowing farmers to borrow against crops stored in government warehouses, thus releasing them from dependence on banks and adding flexibility to the money supply; a graduated income tax; public ownership of telephone and telegraph companies; confiscation by the government of land held by railroads and other corporations “in excess of their actual needs,” which land would be made available to “actual settlers”; shorter hours of labor for industrial workers; abolition of the “large standing army of mercenaries known as the Pinkerton system”; a single term for the president and vice president; the secret ballot; popular election of senators; and such techniques of direct democracy as the initiative and referendum. The platform went on to condemn the current policy of essentially unlimited immigration, “which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world,” and to demand the rigid enforcement of the existing eight-hour law for government labor.20
To carry the message to the country and make the fight on the people’s behalf, the convention nominated James Weaver, the erstwhile Iowa Greenbacker. “Serene while others are in tumult; clear while others are confused; secure in his orbit while others are erratic—these characteristics make him a man of value second to none in a great epoch like the present,” one of Weaver’s supporters said of the nominee. “A person of such symmetrical, harmonious development that each excellent trait is balanced by all others.” But just to balance the ticket further, the convention nominated former Confederate general James G. Field of Virginia for vice president.21
SERENITY AND BALANCE at the top of the ticket appealed to the Populists—as the members of the new party were christened by one who remembered his Latin—not least because serenity and sometimes balance were wanting among others who spoke for the movement. Mary Elizabeth Lease was the daughter of Irish refugees from the great famine; her parents settled in Pennsylvania, and her father and brother died in the Civil War. The circumstances of her father’s death—at the prison camp at Andersonville—made her, like James Blaine, an inveterate foe of Democrats. After the war she moved to Kansas and married a pharmacist, whose practice failed in the depression of the 1870s. The family relocated to Texas, where two children died in infancy. As the other children (including the youngest, Ben Hur Lease, named for the protagonist of the best-selling novel of the same name by Lew Wallace) matured, Mary grew active in the woman suffrage and prohibition movements. After a return to Kansas she studied law, was admitted to the bar, and joined the labor wing of the Farmers’ Alliance. When the alliance spawned the People’s party, she became a charter member.
Her passion for popular democracy, against the plutocracy of big capital, made her a Populist favorite. “Wall Street owns the country,” she declared.
It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are prostrate before the manufacturing East. Money rules.… Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.… 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 national banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out. Land equal to a tract thirty miles wide and ninety miles long has been foreclosed and bought in by loan companies of Kansas in a year. We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.
Her opponents called her shrill and corrupted her middle name to Ellen, so they could dub her “Mary Yellin’.” She may never actually have said “What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more hell,” but she didn’t disavow it when it was attributed to her.22
Jeremiah Simpson was another Easterner radicalized by hard times in Kansas. A New Brunswick, Canada, native, Simpson moved to upstate New York with his parents as a child. He became a Great Lakes sailor and eventually a lake boat captain, and then a partner in a Chicago sawmill. After the Panic of 1873 he moved to Kansas to raise cattle, with scant success. He blamed railroads, banks, and speculators in land and commodities. “Man must have access to the land, or he is a slave,” he said. “The man who owns the earth owns the people, for they must buy the privilege of living on his earth.” Government must guarantee access to land, and it must protect those who worked the land from those who gambled on the product of the farmers’ labor. “If the government had protected the farmer as it protects the gambler, this would not have happened,” he said after one speculative raid that left his Kansas neighbors empty-handed while the brokers grew rich. In an 1890 race for Congress, Simpson branded his Republican opponent, James Hallowell, “Prince Hal” and accused him of wearing silk stockings. A Simpson opponent stabbed back, saying that Simpson wore no stockings at all. Simpson became “Sockless Jerry,” an image he played to full political effect. “Jerry Simpson was not a sockless clown,” fellow Kansan William Allen White later observed. “He accepted the portrait which the Republicans made of him as an ignorant fool because it helped him to talk to the crowds.… The real Jerry Simpson profited by his own effigy.”23
Ignatius Donnelly profited by an alter ego, too. Irish like Mary Lease and likewise from Pennsylvania, Donnelly traveled northwest to Minnesota before the Civil War and became, in sequence, a Republican, a Liberal Republican, a Granger, a Greenbacker, and a Union Laborite. A Minnesota reform meeting without Donnelly, Charles Dana’s New York Sun remarked, would have been “like catfish without waffles in Philadelphia.” Donnelly held audiences rapt by his oratory, but his fame spread far beyond his voice on account of the novels and essays he wrote. Some of the essays were abstruse and literary; he devoted two volumes to demonstrating that Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon. His novels were filled with blood and polemic. The most popular, the dystopian Caesar’s Column, grimly recounted a despotism that emerged upon the ruins of democracy (the column of the title was a giant tomb containing the bones of a quarter million of the victims). Readers presumably recognized the literary license Donnelly employed in telling his dark tale; more directly applicable to the politics of the present were certain images he conjured of current government policies. “Take a child a few years old; let a blacksmith weld around his waist an iron band,” Donnelly wrote, with reference to the hard-money policies of Benjamin Harrison’s administration.
At first it causes him little inconvenience. He plays. As he grows older it becomes tighter; it causes him pain; he scarcely knows what ails him. He still grows. All his internal organs are cramped and displaced. He grows still larger; he has the head, shoulders and limbs of a man and the waist of a child. He is a monstrosity. He dies. This is a picture of the world of to-day, bound in the silly superstition of some prehistoric nation. But this is not all. Every decrease in the quantity, actual or relative, of gold and silver increases the purchasing power of the dollars made out of them; and the dollar becomes the equivalent for a larger amount of the labor of man and his productions. This makes the rich man richer and the poor man poorer. The iron band is displacing the organs of life. As the dollar rises in value, man sinks. Hence the decrease in wages; the increase in the power of wealth; the luxury of the few; the misery of the many.
Donnelly drafted the preamble to the Omaha platform of the People’s party and won the support of some of the delegates for the party’s presidential nomination. But a skeptic pricked the balloon by circulating a likely epitaph for Populism should the idiosyncratic author become the party’s standard-bearer:
Forbear, good friend, to touch these bones,
For underneath these piled stones
Lies party third, ne’er to awaken,
Killed by Ignatius Donnelly Bacon.24
Tom Watson would become more controversial than any of the other Populists, largely because he outlived nearly all of them and much of what they—and he—had stood for. But as he campaigned for the party in Georgia and across the South in the early 1890s, he drew attention chiefly for his belief that poor whites and poor blacks should make common cause against the capitalists and gentry who oppressed them. This view wasn’t unheard of in the South, even in the wake of Redemption, but it was sufficiently unusual that Watson took pains to justify it. Watson contended that the wealthy and well placed in the South had for years employed the race issue to keep the lower classes divided. “Both the old parties have done this thing until they have constructed as perfect a ‘slot machine’ as the world ever saw,” he said.
Drop the old, worn nickel of the “party slogan” into the slot, and the machine does the rest. You might beseech a Southern white tenant to listen to you upon questions of finance, taxation, and transportation; you might demonstrate with mathematical precision that herein lay his way out of poverty into comfort; you might have him almost persuaded to the truth. But if the merchant who furnished his farm supplies (at tremendous usury) or the town politician (who never spoke to him except at election times) came along and cried “Negro rule!” the entire fabric of reason and common sense which you had patiently constructed would fall, and the poor tenant would joyously hug the chains of an actual wretchedness rather than do any experimenting on a question of mere sentiment.
Watson didn’t rely on the generosity of whites, or for that matter of blacks; instead he appealed to their self-interest. “Suppose two tenants on my farm; one of them white, the other black. They cultivate their crops under precisely the same conditions. Their labors, discouragements, burdens, grievances, are the same.” The white tenant decided the Democratic party was ignoring him and decided to join the People’s party. Why? Because its principles and policies seemed more likely to remedy the ills that afflicted him. “Now go back to the colored tenant. His surroundings being the same and his interest the same, why is it impossible for him to reach the same conclusions?” In fact it was not impossible, Watson said, or even remarkable. It just took some getting used to. “Cannot these two men act together in peace when the ballot of one is a vital benefit to the other? Will not political friendship be born of the necessity and the hope which is common to both? Will not race bitterness disappear before this common suffering and this mutual desire to escape it?”25
THE ISSUES the Populists pushed ran the gamut of comprehensibility from the transparent to the mystical. Government ownership of the railroads was self-explanatory, if socialistic. A graduated income tax meant the wealthy would pay at a higher rate than the poor (who ideally wouldn’t pay at all). Popular, or direct, election of senators would take control of the upper house of Congress away from the state legislatures and confer it upon the people.
The Populists’ so-called subtreasury plan was more complicated, not least because it attempted to achieve multiple goals. Farmers hated having to borrow operating funds when interest rates were highest—that is, when everyone else was borrowing—and having to sell their crops when prices were lowest, when everyone else was selling. Moreover, they despised the bankers from whom they had to borrow and the brokers to whom they had to sell. The subtreasury scheme would allow them at once to circumvent the bankers and the brokers and get lower rates on loans and higher prices for crops. The farmers would store their crops in government warehouses and receive Treasury notes for up to 80 percent of the current market value of the crops. The farmers would decide individually when to sell their stored crops, based on their needs and their expectations regarding prices. In this way the gluts that accompanied each harvest and depressed farmers’ incomes would be diminished. Meanwhile the Treasury notes would circulate essentially as money, freeing farmers further from the grip of the banks.
If the subtreasury scheme took paragraphs to explain—the practical details added layers of complexity—the Populists’ currency program required chapters. “Free coinage of silver at 16 to 1” was the standard shorthand; often this reduced to “free silver.” The words meant both more and less than they appeared to, and they required some history to comprehend. From the establishment of the federal government in 1789 the United States government had attempted to operate a bimetallic money standard of gold and silver. A single metal, preferably gold, would have been more manageable, but there wasn’t enough gold in the United States to keep the gears of commerce from seizing up. In fact there wasn’t enough gold and silver together, which was why various forms of paper—bank notes, letters of credit, and, during and after the Civil War, greenbacks—were summoned into service. But gold and silver were the currency of choice for those to whom money was owed, precisely because they were scarce (and therefore valuable). The difficulty of bimetallism, aside from the collective shortage of the two metals, was that the ratio of gold to silver varied over time, depending on discoveries of new mines and of new uses for the two metals. From the 1790s until the 1830s silver was comparatively plentiful and accordingly cheap, prompting debtors to hoard gold and pay their debts with silver. During much of this period ordinary people never saw gold; in effect the United States operated on a silver standard. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 and elsewhere during the following decades flooded the economy with gold, driving silver into hiding. The country shifted, in effect, to a gold standard (supplemented by the Civil War greenbacks). In 1873, as part of an effort to tidy up the currency, Congress passed a Coinage Act that dropped the silver dollar from the list of coins the U.S. mint would produce. At the time the measure seemed little more than prudent financial hygiene, an acknowledgment of an existing state of affairs.
Subsequent events cast a different light on the subject. The American money supply had always been part of the global money supply (until 1848 the United States was utterly dependent on foreign countries for its gold and silver), and the same influences that drove silver from circulation in America did so elsewhere. As a result, several European countries dropped silver from their currencies at about the same time the United States did, in favor of a formal or informal gold standard. Unwanted silver sloshed across the Atlantic, dismaying silver producers in the American West, who watched the demand for their favorite metal fall, and arousing the suspicion of American farmers, who suffered from slumping crop prices and reasoned, accurately enough, that if silver were still being minted their prices would recover. These strange bedfellows—the silver capitalists and the farmers—looked back and detected conspiracy in the Coinage Act, which they dubbed the “Crime of ’73.” They demanded the fell deed be undone and silver restored to the currency.
They succeeded partially. The Bland-Allison Act of 1878, passed over Rutherford Hayes’s veto, mandated the minting of between $2 million and $4 million of silver monthly. This amount was considerably less than the ardent silverites wanted but more than suited the goldbugs. In practice the measure did little to stem the long-term slide in prices that underlay the demands of the farmers, whose complaints continued through the 1880s. The silver chorus added voices at the end of the decade with the admission of the new states of North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Washington, all of which produced silver or angry farmers or both. “I wish this free coinage of senators would stop,” President Benjamin Harrison lamented. Under the influence of the enlarged silver caucus, Congress approved the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which roughly doubled the amount of silver the federal government committed to purchase and coin.26
The silverites cheered but the goldbugs shuddered. “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver,” Treasury secretary William Windom warned the New York Board of Trade, and collapsed on the spot of a fatal heart attack. The omen spooked the financial markets and inspired Republicans to seek an early opportunity to repeal the Sherman Act. Not even John Sherman himself stood by it. The Ohio senator and former Treasury secretary explained that the measure had been a prophylactic against full-blown silver mania. “I voted for it, but the day it became law I was ready to repeal it, if repeal could be had without substituting in its place absolute free coinage.” The opportunity appeared in 1893, when a new financial panic seized international markets and caused a massive loss of confidence in the dollar. Amid a political panic of their own, American legislators repealed the Sherman Act, thereby terminating Treasury purchases of silver.27
SUCH WAS THE situation when William Harvey broke a story that astonished the millions who read it in the months after its 1894 publication. Harvey, a self-trained economist of Populist persuasion, recounted a series of speeches—lectures, actually—given by a mere slip of a man in the auditorium of the Art Institute of Chicago during May of that year. The young fellow—he seemed scarcely more than a boy—went by the single name of Coin, which suited his topic well enough. “My object,” he told his audience in the first lecture, “will be to teach you the A, B, C of the questions about money that are now a matter of everyday conversation.” Coin’s background was blurry, but his command of the subject soon quieted most doubts regarding his expertise. He traced the history of American currency to the early years of the republic—“the days of Washington and Jefferson and our revolutionary forefathers, who had a hatred of England and an intimate knowledge of her designs on this country,” he said significantly. He reminded his listeners that in 1792 Congress had defined the dollar as consisting of 371¼ grains of pure silver. Silver, he stressed, not gold, had been the basis for the dollar. Silver, he said, had remained the basis of the dollar, and hence of the American currency, until 1873. During that time the people had come to embrace silver as the money of the common man. The rich dealt in gold, the rest in silver.
In a city like Chicago, with its large population of capitalists and creditors, Coin’s audience inevitably included individuals who favored gold. One such person, a novice reporter for the financial press, interrupted the speaker with a question evidently designed to throw him off balance. Coin answered it easily. William Harvey remarked, “The young journalist turned red in the face and hung his head.” A second challenger rose, putting to Coin a more esoteric question requiring specific mastery of the laws relating to the currency. This man was sure he had caught Coin out. “He sat down looking as proud as a cannoneer who has just fired a shot that has had deadly effect in the enemy’s ranks,” Harvey wrote. But Coin stood his ground. Reciting the statutes as though the law books lay open to his mind’s eye, he rebuffed the challenge masterfully. The questioner slunk away.
Coin returned to the Coinage Act of 1873. Though “purporting to be a revision of the coinage laws,” he said, the new law soon proved to be far more. It accomplished a revolution in the American money system, overthrowing silver and replacing it with gold. Quoting a senator who had been present, Coin said the revision had slipped through Congress with “the silent tread of a cat.” Coin conceded that most of the lawmakers didn’t know what they were doing; confusion was precisely the aim of the sponsors, who didknow what the law was about. “An army of a half million of men invading our shores, the warships of the world bombarding our coasts, could not have made us surrender the money of the people and substitute in its place the money of the rich,” Coin declared. “A few words embraced in fifteen pages of statutes put through Congress in the rush of bills did it. The pen was mightier than the sword.”
A new challenger leaped up. The act of 1873, he said, had simply formalized an existing state of affairs. Silver had long been out of circulation. No conspiracy was required to remove it.
Coin rejected this assertion as precisely what the conspirators wanted people to believe. Such arguments were “all the bastard children of the crime of 1873,” he said. The cabal against silver was undeniable. “It was demonetized secretly, and since then a powerful money trust has used deception and misrepresentations that have led tens of thousands of honest minds astray.”
This exchange concluded the initial lecture, which piqued the interest and affronted the interests of Chicago’s bankers and other big capitalists, who crowded the next day’s session. William Harvey suspected a plot to embarrass the wunderkind. “Knotty questions would be hurled at him—perplexing queries and abstruse propositions,” Harvey wrote. “They would harass him, worry him, and tangle him, laugh at his dilemma and then say: ‘We told you so.’ This was the programme.”
The leader of the plot, Lyman Gage, the chairman of Chicago’s First National Bank, commenced the assault almost as soon as Coin began speaking. “All eyes were on him,” Harvey said. “He had been watching for an opening, and now he thought he had it, where he could deliver a telling, and follow it up with a knock-out, blow.” Gage went right to the heart of the issue of bimetallism; noting the vagaries of supply and demand, he queried how the government could maintain a fixed ratio of value between gold and silver.
Coin nodded knowingly. This was the question, he granted. And for ordinary commodities, supply and demand could create imbalances. But gold and silver were not simply commodities: they were money, the measure of commodities. And because the government was—or should be—the purchaser of last resort for gold and silver, a condition of essentially unlimited demand developed.
Coin illustrated with pictures. On a blackboard he drew a board suspended by two ropes. One rope represented gold, the other silver. So long as both ropes held steady, the board—signifying the national economy—remained in balance. But should one rope be severed, as the silver rope had been severed in 1873, the economy must swing dangerously awry, as the economy had swung awry since then. Coin drew another picture, this time of two tanks of water. The two tanks were connected by a pipe beneath them, and separate spigots poured water into the top of each tank. So long as the connecting pipe remained open and unclogged, the water levels in the two tanks remained the same, regardless of the inflows into the separate tanks. But should the connection be broken—as the connection between gold and silver had been broken in 1873—one tank might overflow while the other drained to empty.
“A pin could almost have been heard to drop at any moment,” Harvey related. Coin had answered the hardest question the big capitalists could hurl at him—had answered the fundamental question of money—in a way that made sense to the simplest man or woman. “They had listened critically, expecting to detect errors in his facts or reasoning,” Harvey said of the capitalists in the crowd. “There were none. They were amazed.”
In subsequent sessions Coin continued to amaze. He illustrated the confining effects of gold as single specie by having assistants measure off on the floor and walls of the auditorium an imaginary cube twenty-two feet in length, width, and height. This cube, he said, could encompass all the gold ever dug from the ground and made available as money. The audience murmured in disbelief. Coin compared a one-metal currency to a one-legged man or a one-winged bird. The man could walk, but only with difficulty; the bird couldn’t fly at all. So the economy hobbled and crashed. He depicted the earnings and savings of ordinary Americans as a maiden about to be ravished by big capital in the form of a banker wearing a silk hat labeled “England.” Employing a favorite image of the Populists, he showed the American economy as a giant cow straddling the Appalachians. Hardworking Western farmers fed the cow; parasitic Eastern bankers milked the cow. Another Populist image appeared as a monster octopus with tentacles that reached from London across the oceans and continents. The octopus was named “Rothschild,” and the caption declared, “The English Octopus: It Feeds on Nothing but Gold!”
Coin created a sensation in Chicago with his financial school. By the end of the week the city could speak of nothing else. Erstwhile skeptics converted to silver by the thousands. But something troubled even the most devoted of the silverites. The American economy existed as a part of the world economy. The capitalists of the other great trading powers had embraced gold and shunned silver; how could the United States resist their power? How could America remonetize silver unilaterally?
Coin reserved this final, implementation question till the last day of the seminar. He reminded his audience what was at stake. “In the midst of plenty, we are in want,” he said. “Helpless children and the best womanhood and manhood in America appeal to us for release from a bondage that is destructive of life and liberty.” Nor were ordinary Americans alone in their distress. “All the nations of the Western Hemisphere turn to their great sister republic for assistance in the emancipation of the people of at least one-half the world. The Orient, with its teeming millions of people, and France, the cradle of science and liberty, look to the United States to lead in the struggle to roll back the accumulated disasters of the last twenty-one years.” Humanity cried for relief. “What shall our answer be?”
The audience strained to hear.
“If it is claimed we must adopt for our money the metal England selects, and can have no choice in the matter,” Coin declared in a rising voice, “let us make the test and find out if it is true. It is not American to give up without trying.” What if England resisted? “Let us attach England to the United States and blot her name out among the nations of the earth!”
The audience burst into patriotic hurrahs.
“A war with England would be the most popular war ever waged on the face of the earth!”
The audience cheered louder.
“If it is true that she can dictate the money of the world and thereby create world-wide misery, it would be the most just war ever waged by man!”
The blood lust of the audience was up, and Coin let them roar their defiance at perfidious Albion.
“Fortunately, this is not necessary,” he said, now calm again. Britain might be the banker to the world, but America was the breadbasket and the workshop. London might stick with gold, but if America added silver to its money supply, the resulting surge of economic growth would leave England far behind. “The bimetallic standard will make the United States the most prosperous nation on earth.” England would crawl to America, willing to do whatever was necessary to obtain America’s business.
This bounteous future would be lost if Americans preemptively surrendered. The independence Americans had won from England in the eighteenth century by arms might be lost at the end of the nineteenth century by gold. And just as the Tories, those minions of King George, had tried to sap Americans’ will to fight in the war for American political independence, so today’s Tories, the big capitalists and their allies, strove to undermine the American spirit in the war for economic independence. “The business men of New York City passed strong resolutions against the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and they are passing strong resolutions against an American policy now,” Coin said. American liberty was in peril; Americans must spring to action.
The integrity of the government has been violated. A Financial Trust has control of your money, and with it, is robbing you of your property. Vampires feed upon your commercial blood.… This is a struggle for humanity. For our homes and firesides. For the purity and integrity of our government.… Go among the people and awake them to the situation of peril in which they are placed. Awake them as you would with startling cries at the coming of flood and fires. Arouse them as did Paul Revere as he rode through the streets shouting: “The British are on our shores!”
Coin’s audience stamped their feet and yelled themselves hoarse. Those near the front surged onto the stage to clap the young man on the back. Even one banker, well known about the city for his strong support for gold, was swept up in the enthusiasm. “Three cheers for Coin!” he shouted. The audience shouted back, “Hip! Hip! Hurrah!” and poured into Michigan Avenue.
“Thus ended the school,” William Harvey wrote. “Chicago has had its lesson on bimetallism.” Harvey was one of those cheering for Coin, and he hoped silver would triumph. But he understood that truth and virtue were no guarantee of success. “In the struggle of might against right, the former has generally triumphed. Will it win in the United States?”28
DURING THE MID-1890S William Harvey’s account of the Coin Financial School, as the lecture series was called, was the best-selling, most influential book in America. A million copies were sold between its 1894 publication and the elections of 1896, and the average copy certainly found multiple readers. Doubtless a large portion of those millions caught on that Coin wasn’t real and that the Chicago seminar never took place. But many others believed—or certainly wanted to believe—that the boy genius actually existed and that he had truly bearded the lions of capitalism in their lakefront den.
Harvey’s book, which made the author wealthy, inspired imitations. Ignatius Donnelly wrote a tale of a banker and a farmer thrown together on a long train ride. The banker tries to instruct the farmer regarding the intricacies of the currency question and the multiple advantages of the gold standard, but the farmer, with the naïve wisdom of the earth, refutes every argument and converts the banker to silver.29
Harvey’s book spawned an even larger counterliterature. The Mistakes of Coin, Coin’s Financial Fool, Coin’s Financial School Exposed and Closed, and similar titles rebutted the lessons of Coin. The gold authors attacked Harvey on the law (the 1792 coinage act had defined only the dollar coin exclusively in terms of silver; the dollar as a unit of money had been defined in both silver and gold), on history (the currency system had operated far less smoothly before 1873 than Coin suggested; the pipe connecting his two tanks was constantly getting clogged), and on the feasibility of a unilateral American adoption of silver (the American economy, whether the silverites liked it or not, was fully enmeshed in the world economy; those most damaged by a loss of international faith in the dollar, which remonetization of silver was bound to provoke, would be the poor).
Yet the critics missed much of the point. Coin’s Financial School was about the money question, but it was also about the relationship of ordinary people to the wealthy and powerful—that is, about the relationship of democracy to capitalism. Readers might or might not have followed Coin’s—Harvey’s—reasoning, and they might or might not have been persuaded by his analogies. But most of those millions of readers presumably endorsed Coin’s claims that the money power had gutted America’s traditional values. When the silverites called silver the “dollar of our daddies,” they summoned an entire constellation of values, real and imagined. For obvious reasons they avoided the phrase “golden age” in referring to the time when everything had been better, but that was what they meant.
To explain the demise of that blessed era, in a country nominally democratic, Harvey and the Populists turned to conspiracy theories. The demonetization of silver in 1873 couldn’t have been an accident, for that would have indicted democracy. Instead it must have been the work of self-conscious, self-interested elites—and hence a “crime.” Every reform movement requires enemies, the more specific and identifiable the better. Many Populists realized that the farmers’ predicament involved industrialization and related trends over which they had no control, but industrialization didn’t make a satisfactory villain. Industrialists, on the other hand, and especially their collaborators in finance, made perfect villains. Railroad magnates and bankers really did pursue policies inimical to farmers. And their foreign connection—the specter of London’s Lombard Street—made the bankers especially tempting targets. That some of the most prominent foreign bankers, notably the Rothschilds, were Jews lent an implicit—and occasionally explicit—anti-Semitism to the Populist conspiracy theories. Harvey and other Populists could cast their movement as an exercise in patriotism and traditional values, a revival of the American Revolution, and hope for a patriotic and traditionalist response. The Populists were probably no more xenophobic or anti-Semitic than most other Americans of their day, but they couldn’t resist an opportunity to march into political battle under the flag of all things dear to the historic heart of the American people.30
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE had a different bone to pick with the Populists. The Emporia editor considered them whiners who couldn’t get ahead and were determined to see that others didn’t either. “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” he demanded in an editorial that became one of the most reprinted pieces in the history of American journalism. White noted a report from the Kansas Department of Agriculture that the population of the state was stagnating. The country overall was growing rapidly, but Kansas was barely holding its own. “In five years ten million people have been added to the national population, yet instead of gaining a share of this—say, half a million—Kansas has apparently been a plague spot and, in the very garden of the world, has lost population by ten thousands every year.” To make matters worse, the leavers were just the ones Kansas couldn’t spare. “Every moneyed man in the state who could get out without loss has gone. Every month in every community sees someone who has a little money pack up and leave the state. This has been going on for eight years. Money has been drained out all the time. In towns where ten years ago there were three or four or half a dozen money-lending concerns, stimulating industry by furnishing capital, there is now none, or one or two that are looking after the interests and principal already outstanding.” Any Kansan could describe the result. “What community knows over one or two men who have moved in with more than $5,000 in the past three years? And what community cannot count half a score of men in that time who have left, taking all the money they could scrape together?”
It wasn’t simply the hardship of life at midcontinent. White noted that Missouri to the east had gained two million in population; Nebraska to the north and Colorado to the west were likewise growing. (The Indian Territory—Oklahoma—to the south was growing, too, but White didn’t mention it.) “What’s the matter with Kansas?” he demanded again.
The matter was the politics of the state, he said. In particular, the matter was the Populists, who preached against progress and railed at success.
We have an old mossback Jacksonian who snorts and howls because there is a bathtub in the State House; we are running that old jay for Governor. We have another shabby, wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatic who has said openly in a dozen speeches that “the rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner”; we are running him for Chief Justice.… Then, for fear some hint that the state had become respectable might percolate through the civilized portions of the nation, we have decided to send three or four harpies out lecturing, telling the people that Kansas is raising hell and letting the corn go to weed.
White gave his sarcasm free rein.
Oh, this is a state to be proud of! We are a people who can hold up our heads! What we need is not more money, but less capital, fewer white shirts and brains, fewer men with business judgment, and more of those fellows who boast that they are “just ordinary clodhoppers but they know more in a minute about finance than John Sherman.” … We don’t need population, we don’t need wealth, we don’t need well-dressed men on the streets, we don’t need standing in the nation, we don’t need cities on the fertile prairies; you bet we don’t! What we are after is the money power. Because we have become poorer and ornerier and meaner than a spavined, distempered mule, we, the people of Kansas, propose to kick; we don’t care to build up, we wish to tear down.
The Populists and their allies had declared class war against the rich. They hobbled the successful in the belief, as one of their spokesmen put it, “that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.” White couldn’t contain himself:
Oh, yes, Kansas is a great state. Here are people fleeing from it by the score every day, capital going out of the state by the hundreds of dollars; and every industry but farming paralyzed, and that crippled, because its products have to go across the ocean before they can find a laboring man at work who can afford to buy them. Let’s don’t stop this year. Let’s drive all the decent, self-respecting men out of the state. Let’s keep the old clodhoppers who know it all.…
What’s the matter with Kansas? Nothing under the shining sun. She is losing wealth, population and standing. She has got her statesmen, and the money power is afraid of her. Kansas is all right. She has started in to raise hell, as Mrs. Lease advised, and she seems to have an over-production. But that doesn’t matter. Kansas never did believe in diversified crops.31