CHAPTER 10
How the West was supposed to be won was an American dream. How it was won became a myth. The tales of free and fertile soil, handsome harvests and plentiful profits on the farms that circulated in the East, obscured part of the truth. Scores of settlers were far from successful. They were isolated pioneers eking out an existence in discomfort and disillusion. They were cheated of prosperity, not only by unreliable nature, but also their own limitations and inabilities as farmers. Yet the drudgery and disappointments, the hardships and hard knocks of life out West remained hidden behind the facade of the frontier myth. And the myth was as much a means of self-justification for the settlers as it was a celebration of the land. After all, their own flight from Europe or eastern cities was an irreversible fact. The myth attracted more and more settlers. It also hid the truth from those already there. As English historian Andrew Sinclair suggests in his Prohibition (1963), “Their hatred of the past only grew. For the settlers were the disinherited of the cities . . . those displaced by industry. They fled to an agricultural myth which told them that their exclusion was a successful repudiation of wealth and aristocracy and luxury.”
The Golden West had already begun to lose some of its glamor before the official closing of the frontier. The severe winters of 1886 and 1887 and the harsh summer of 1887 ended the ideal, fertile climatic conditions prevailing since the mid-1870s. In some parts of the West and South the soil had been exhausted by wasteful, exploitive methods of farming. In Marcus Lee Hansen’s striking phrase, “The land was mined, not farmed.” Farms failed, mortgages were foreclosed, and farmers were put out of house and home. In the four years from 1888 to 1892 half of the population of western Kansas moved on, as did 30,000 people from South Dakota. Wagons carried the ominous legend, “In God We Trusted, in Kansas We Busted.” In the course of the nineteenth century Iowa had more than 2,000 abandoned settlements.
Because American farmers had committed themselves to servicing the industrial market, they became vulnerable to its economic oscillations. The depressions of 1873 and 1893 were as devastating to them as to industrial artisans. After 1885 American wheat could no longer enter overseas markets on such advantageous terms as in the twenty years after the Civil War. European countries built tariff walls to protect their own agriculture. Other countries, such as Argentina and Russia, expanded their wheat crop and began to compete with the United States for sales. The average price of American wheat fell from $1.05 per bushel in the period from 1866 to 1875, to 92 cents between 1876 and 1885, and then to 67 cents between 1886 and 1895. Although the American yield per acre increased more than 250 percent in this period, the actual value of the crop was less than 50 percent higher in 1895 than it had been in 1870.
In their fight for survival farmers declined from owners to tenants as they accepted the harsh terms of loan sharks and corporations. By 1890, 25 percent of farmers in Kansas were tenants or sharecroppers; in Nebraska, 17 percent; in South Dakota 11 percent. Farm tenantry in the country as a whole increased as the century drew to a close from 25 percent in 1880 to 28 percent in 1890 and 36 percent in 1900. The high cost of credit weighed heavily on a class composed largely of debtors. Farmers who had been encouraged to borrow during a boom required additional money to withstand a depression. When they were refused they turned on their creditors, accusing them of betrayal.
In the past, pioneers had been isolated and bore their hardships and poverty in secret. But once farmers were far more numerous, and better informed by improved communications, they united in common protest at the wearisome round and gross injustices of their hard lot. Eastern voices told them that the world was suffering from an agricultural surplus. Western voices said that the cause of the problem was not overproduction in the West but underconsumption in the East. They reasoned that consumption was low because retail prices were too high. “Thieves in the night,” among whom were numbered bankers, railroads, and grain elevators, exploited farmers and stole their profits.
A Kansas farmer and his family with steam plow in the early 1900s. Conscious of their historic role in taming a wilderness, these settlers recognized the potential of their implements but not the dangers. As the plows cut deep into the sod and reached arable soil suitable for profitable crops grown until the land was exhausted, they were also eradicating the ecology. When drought came, the soil simply blew away in the giant dust storms of the 1930s. (Library of Congress.)
Of all its grievances, the West was most scandalized by the costs of transportation. It considered railroads the principal villains because of their discriminatory rates. In 1877 it cost 95 cents to ship a ton of farm produce east of Chicago on the Pennsylvania Railroad; but it cost $3.20 to ship a ton of produce west of the Missouri on the Burlington Railroad. Railroads’ replies that traffic in the West was more expensive to run did not satisfy western farmers, who understood the predatory nature of monopolies and were convinced that the true beneficiaries of an unfair system were eastern capitalists.
A second target of farmers’ complaints were grain elevators. Grain elevators were giant storage bins located in railway sidings to distribute grain to the freight cars in the adjacent station. Western railroads forbade farmers from loading their grain on cars directly themselves and laid sidings for only one grain elevator in each station. Consequently, farmers either had to sell their grain to local elevator operators or use their services for a fee. In either case, the operators had a monopoly of the business. The operators were supposed to pay for the grain according to standard rates established in Chicago with different prices for grain of different qualities. However, in the remote West, unscrupulous operators took advantage of farmers’ isolation by misgrading or mixing grain and paying less for it than the standard price.
Farmers resolved to retaliate against the creeping power of the trusts by launching new political parties to redress their economic grievances. In 1867 Oliver Hudson Kelley, a clerk in the Department of Agriculture, founded the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry. At first his aims were social and cultural, and the Grange grew slowly. But the agricultural depression of the 1870s led to sudden expansion as discontented farmers recognized the Grange as a forum for political debate. In 1872, 1,105 lodges were founded; in the panic of 1873, 8,400 more; and in January and February 1874, another 4,700. The Grange comprised 1.5 million members, a potent political force. In 1873 and 1874 it succeeded in electing representatives throughout the South and West and held the balance of power in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
By pooling their economic resources, farmers in local lodges could afford the newest and most efficient equipment. They also appointed agents to barter directly with manufacturers and get prices reduced. For example, they acquired reapers for $175 instead of $275 and wagons for $90 instead of $150. The system of cooperative buying not only reduced manufacturers’ prices to farmers but also compelled local merchants to lower their prices. The Grange also encouraged farmers’ cooperatives in production. They founded or acquired mills, elevators, and plants for production, and insurance companies and banks for finance. In Iowa they even entered industry in 1874 to manufacture reapers and plows. When cooperatives failed, it was usually because of mismanagement. Inexperienced farmers expanded them too quickly and ran into bitter price-cutting competition from traditional wholesalers and retailers whose resources could outlast theirs.
The Granger movement conferred dignity on discontented farmers of the West, emphasizing that their contribution to the American economy—providing food—was the most valuable of all, as this chromolithograph of 1875 suggests. Later posters paid tribute to the real grievances of the farmers by altering the central caption to “And I pay for all!” (Library of Congress.)
When it came to the gross abuses practiced by the railroads that, more than anything else, had united western farmers in the Grange, the lodges realized that they could not go into open competition with the great railroads and lay rival lines. The West was so sparsely settled that the only economic form of transportation was an efficient railroad with a monopoly of business. They therefore focused on state regulation–cseeking laws to establish the maximum rates that railroads and grain elevators could charge. These laws were eventually upheld by the Supreme Court in the Granger cases of 1876–77, notably Munn v. Illinois, Peik v. Chicago and Northwestern R.R.; Chicago, Burlington and Quincy R.R. v. Iowa; and Winona and St. Peter R.R. v. Blake.
Both its successes and failures contributed to the decline of the Grange. In Illinois farmers thought the battle with monopolies was over after they had won in the Supreme Court. In Iowa those who lost financially when the cooperatives failed became disillusioned. In Wisconsin railroads intimidated farmers by discriminating against them. Thus, for a variety of reasons, members abandoned the Grange, which survived only as a social club for farmers. Some discontented farmers then entered the Greenback party that, despite massive support in the Midwest in the elections of 1878, remained a tool of eastern interests committed to a policy of inflation. Its success was short-lived, and in 1880 its enlightened presidential candidate, James Baird Weaver, received only 308,578 votes.
Populism
However, the agrarian revolt continued and culminated in Populism. A recent historian of the movement, Lawrence Goodwyn, has challenged the dismissive analyses of earlier historians in two remarkable accounts, Democratic Promise (1976), and a shorter version, The Populist Moment (1978). It is his contention that it was the crop-lien system in the South, rather than general agricultural depression, that first generated the movement. Perhaps the most succinct description of the crop-lien system is that of the historian of the South, C. Vann Woodward, in one of his contributory chapters to the general survey history, The National Experience (1981):
The farmer pledged an unplanted crop for a loan of an unstipulated amount at an undesignated but enormous rate of interest averaging about 60 percent a year. Trapped by the system, a farmer might continue year after oppressive year as a sort of peon, under debt to the same merchant and under constant oversight. The lien system imposed the one-crop system for the merchant would advance credit only against cash crops such as cotton or tobacco. . . . The system not only impoverished farmers but stifled their hopes and depleted their incentive.
With masterful use of statistics on agrarian debts in the South, Lawrence Goodwyn explains that it was the crop-lien system and the merchants* manipulative use of it for their own advantage that first led to keen agrarian discontent in the region. It spread rapidly elsewhere when displaced southern farmers moved west in the 1870s.
The immediate predecessor of Populism was the Farmers’ Alliance. The Farmers’ Alliance, originally founded by Texas cattlemen in 1874 against horse thieves, superseded the Grange as the forum for discontented farmers in the Southwest in the 1880s. The pivotal leader was S. O. Daws of Mississippi, a compelling lecturer who exhorted his audiences to join the Alliance and form trade stores. Among his converts was William Lamb of Tennessee, who had organized more than a hundred suballiances by October 1885. The Alliance had then 50,000 members.
At this crucial moment the Great Southwest Strike of militants among the Knights of Labor erupted against Jay Gould. It divided the Alliance between those who wanted to become more involved on behalf of the strikers and those who wanted to withdraw from labor disputes altogether. Among those who deplored the Alliance’s hesitation was William Lamb. In January 1886 he dared Alliance president Andrew Dunlap to acknowledge that farmers were not middle-class yeomen independent of the commercial system but ordinary workers like industrial artisans. He wanted intervention on behalf of the Knights and against Gould to take the form of a secondary boycott. S. O. Daws was unable to moderate between Lamb and Dunlap but he succeeded in persuading the Texas Alliance to accept an aggressive program of seventeen political objectives in May 1886. They included radical ideas on agriculture, labor, railroads, and finance. A special convention of members meeting in Cle-burne, near Dallas, in August 1886 accepted the proposals by the rather narrow vote of 92 to 75.
At a special meeting in Waco, Texas, in January 1887, a new leader, Dr. Charles W. Macune from Wisconsin, proposed and had accepted two ideas that transformed the Alliance: the creation of the Farmers’ Alliance Exchange, a statewide cooperative for the marketing of cotton crops; and a merger of the large Texas Alliance and the much smaller Farmers’ Alliance of Louisiana into a new organization, the National Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union, of which he became president. It was, moreover, part of Macune’s strategy to divert potentially dissident members into a massive recruitment campaign. Between 1887 and 1891 it sent lecturers into forty-three states and territories. Thus, by 1889 the Alliance had established branches as far apart as Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma Territory, Colorado, and Maryland and claimed a total of 3 million members.
The Farmers’ State Alliance of Kansas, organized in December 1888, was particularly vital—including among its members Henry Vincent, editor of the American Nonconformist, and Ben Clover, who became its president. The pivot of their activities was the Winfield Co-operative Mercantile and Manufacturing Association in Cowley County.
However, the cooperative venture encountered considerable difficulties. The hostility of the commercial establishment to anything that threatened its own profits drove Alliance leaders to political action. Charles Macune and the Texas Alliance sought alternative means of support for cooperatives to those provided by ordinary banks. Accordingly, Macune devised the joint-note plan for the Southern Alliance in late 1887 and, when it failed in mid-summer 1888, the subtreasury plan. This would have allowed farmers to borrow money from the state government for up to 80 percent of the value of their crops stored as collateral in special government warehouses. The idea was to provide the farmer with an easy source of credit at a low rate of interest (1 percent), while allowing him to withhold his crop from the market for a year if prices were depressed. Thus could he escape the crop-lien system.
Macune’s search for sound financial backing for farmers’ cooperatives independent of regular banks and his solutions had already led to intense discussion at the Alliance’s second national convention in Meridian, Mississippi, in late 1888. Radical lecturer H. S. P. (“Stump”) Ashby had previously called a meeting of farmers and laborers to Waco in May 1888 which adopted a six-point platform, including the abolition of the existing banking system. It led to the formation of a Texas Union Labor Party at Fort Worth on July 4, 1888. This was the embryo of a new third party.
Meanwhile, in the upper plains, Milton George, editor of the Western Rural of Chicago, had launched a Northwestern Farmers* Alliance in 1880. It grew steadily until the winter of 1886 and, during the prolonged agricultural depression that followed, it was, perhaps, most active in Illinois, Dakota, and Minnesota. By 1887 the Farmers’ Mutual Benefit Association in Illinois had 2,000 members. In Dakota farmers Henry Loucks and Alonzo Wardall organized a territory-wide cooperative marketing exchange that included the distinctive feature of crop insurance at a premium of between 21 and 25 cents an acre. With the assistance of novelist and critic Ignatius Donnelly they also revived the defunct Minnesota Farmers’ Alliance in 1889. African-American farmers united in the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union, founded by a white Baptist minister, R. W. Humphrey, at Lovelady, Texas, in 1886. In 1890 he claimed 1.2 million members in sixteen states. This was a gross exaggeration. A more probable estimate is a quarter of a million.
A Mississippi riverboat, laden with a cargo of cotton, was a hulking symbol of the New South, its commercial and industrial muscle fed by northern capital. An undated photograph, taken outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana, probably at the turn of the century. (Wit-temann Collection; Library of Congress.)
Macune, living in Washington, had struck up a personal and professional friendship with Terence Powderly, grand master of the Knights of Labor, and was planning an amalgamation of the National Alliance (now called the Farmers’ and Laborers’ Union of America) with the Knights. He recognized that in one fatal particular the farmers were not united. There still remained a wide gulf between the West and the South because of the smoldering prejudices of the Civil War. The South was solidly Democratic; the West was Republican. Nevertheless, in December 1889 delegates of the Northern and Southern Alliances convened at St. Louis in an abortive attempt to merge. Macune’s emphasis on the subtreasury plan divided, rather than united, the delegates at St. Louis. However, they agreed that their fundamental platforms were similar. Both wanted a graduated income tax, federal ownership of railroads, laws against land speculation, greater economy in government, and the use of greenbacks as currency.
The cooperative movement had stirred new political sensibilities. From Washington Macune organized a National Reform Press Association to distribute material to over 1,000 newspapers across the country and launch official newspapers of the Alliance in small towns. In the early 1890s there were more than 1,000 Alliance (or Populist) journals, notably the People’s Party Paper, The Progressive Farmer, and the Southern Mercury. They were all members of the National Reform Press Association which included other papers sympathetic to their cause such as the Vincent family’s American Nonconformist and Julius Wayland’s Appeal to Reason.
By 1890 the Alliance was sufficiently confident in some states to field its own candidates in the congressional and state elections that year. In Kansas, the geographic center of the states and now the eye of the political storm, the Agrarian party elected five congressmen (Jerry Simpson, William Baker, John Otis, John Davis, and the Alliance state president, Ben Clover), and they gained a majority of 96 to 29 in the lower house of the state assembly. As the People’s Independent party in Nebraska they took both houses of the state assembly and elected Omar Kem to Congress. In addition they proved themselves a potent political force in Georgia, Tennessee, South Dakota, Indiana, Michigan, and Minnesota.
Nevertheless, close analysis of the 1890 election results suggests that traditional party machines remained intact and the control of crucial committees in the state assemblies, which included alliancemen, still rested with politicians serving business. The most outspoken supporters of the Cleburne Demands of 1886, such as Evan Jones and H. S. P. Ashby, were disillusioned. They believed the infant third party was failing nationally and in the states, and they now attributed its failure to the Alliance’s undue emphasis on the cooperative movement. They thought it had diverted farmers’ energies from far-reaching political goals to limited, short-term economic remedies. In Georgia, radical Allianceman and congressman Tom Watson challenged Alliance state president Lon Livingston to support the subtreasury plan and lead an exodus of members from the Democratic party. He propounded his ideas in the People’s Party Paper, a journal which first appeared on October i, 1891. It declared, “Georgia is ready for a third party and will sweep the state with the movement.”
Roused by Lamb, Watson, and other leaders, 1,400 delegates, mainly from the Southern Alliance, met first in Cincinnati in May 1891 and then again in St. Louis on February 22, 1892, to launch the People’s party, or Populists. The party chose Leonidas Lafayette Polk of North Carolina as its president. He was a forceful speaker and it was common opinion that he was the only Populist leader capable of enticing Southern Alliancemen away from the Democrats. But on June 11, 1892, he died in Washington after a short illness.
The center of agrarian discontent had moved westward from the states of the Mississippi Valley to the plains. Historian Wilfred E. Bink-ley has shown in American Political Parties (1943) how the price of wheat was a barometer of agrarian discontent. When wheat fell from $1.50 a bushel in 1865 to 67 cents in 1868, the Grange was founded. After climbing back above $1.00, it then fell to 87 cents in 1874 when the Anti-Monopoly, Independent, Reform, and National Greenback parties appeared. By the time the price of wheat rose again, to $1.05 in 1877, the Granger movement had run its course. Then a fall to 80 cents by 1878 produced the Alliance, which had 3,000 lodges or suballiances by 1887 when the average price of wheat was only 68 cents. It later climbed again. But it fell from 85 cents in 1891 to 49 cents in 1894, and it was during this period that the Populists nominated a presidential candidate.
The most important agrarian movements, the Granges of the early 1870s and the Populists of the early 1890s, were born in depression. Both movements amounted to revolts. They were most intense in the South and West where staple crops, respectively cotton and wheat, were grown for world markets and thus subject to fluctuating prices. Farm protest moved westward with the production of wheat, so that the focal point of the Granger movement was in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, the “older” wheat area. That of Populism was in Kansas, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota, the “newer” wheat area. By the 1890s the older area was becoming like the Northeast in its concentration on fruit, corn, hogs, and dairy farming. Rather than side with the Populists, they blamed the West, with its easy and cheap production of wheat, for their troubles. The Northwestern Alliance disintegrated by 1892.
The Populists’ convention of 1,300 delegates meeting at Omaha, Nebraska, on July 4, 1892, drafted a reform platform based on the premise “wealth belongs to him who creates it.” The Omaha platform, which had its origins in the Cleburne Demands of 1886 and successive Alliance planks, became the symbol of Populism. The preamble was a plaintive emotional appeal written by Ignatius Donnelly and first delivered at St. Louis in February that year. He reviewed the ills of America in the early 1890s.
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. The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated, our homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. . . . 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 Omaha platform specifically called for the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1, a currency of at least $50 per person in circulation, a graduated income tax, postal savings banks, federal ownership of telegraphs and railroads, and reclamation of lands held by railroads and other corporations for speculation. When Populists, furthermore, demanded immigration restriction, an eight-hour day on government works, an end to the use of injunctions against labor, and the outlawing of the Pinkerton mercenaries, they were simply including traditional labor demands. All these proposals had been made, at different times, by the National Labor Union, the Knights of Labor, and the American Federation of Labor. Populists certainly recognized the importance of urban labor. It was a catchment area they could not afford to ignore. Their platform of 1892 included a self-conscious appeal to artisans. “The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standard army, unrecognized by our law, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European conditions.”
Thomas Watson of Georgia met the vexed questions of race relations and civil rights in the South head on. Although he recognized that Populist alliances with African-American Republicans ran the risk of antagonizing white Democrats further, he grasped the nettle, telling both races they were the victims of institutionalized racism:
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 are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.
On the surface it seemed that a new third party had arisen with a massive base of support. But its hold was shallow and it could not sustain what Goodwyn calls “a culture of reform.” For example, the American labor movement was not ready for the sort of politics the Populists proposed. Organized labor was not truly cohesive. The Knights was in decline. Samuel Gompers, leader of the growing AFL, was hostile to any working class movement he thought would either distract his members from their immediate economic goals or discredit the working class as a whole. Furthermore, Catholic artisans in the urban ghettos tended to maintain solidarity with their ethnic machines and vote Democratic.
Deprived of their strongest candidate for president by the death of Leonidas Polk, the Populists nominated General James Baird Weaver of Iowa. Weaver’s radical credentials were impeccable. For that very reason, however, he was not likely to appeal to the public at large. Nevertheless, the campaign of 1892 was distinguished by the impact made on national politics by various charming and eloquent Populists leaders. Mary Ellen Lease, “the Kansas Pythoness,” was a lawyer and a vigorous orator who had spoken 160 times in the campaign of 1890. She was also a most plangent singer. She was a militant suffragist, a violent Anglo-phobe, and was resolutely opposed to big business. It was she who told Kansas farmers to raise less corn and more hell. She was but one of many energetic women who seized the political opportunity offered by Populism to urge an expanded political role for women. Ignatius Donnelly, the “Sage of Nininger,” was editor of the Anti-Monopolist, a radical Minnesota newspaper, and author of Caesar’s Column, a lurid revolutionary novel. Jeremiah or Jerry (“Sockless Socrates”) Simpson was the epitome of the bucolic radical who inveighed against the advocates of hard money as “pie-bellied hypocrites.” Senator William Peffer of Kansas was a committed prohibitionist whose extraordinarily long beard was a gift to cartoonists. These leaders were good copy and captured newspaper headlines but they could not persuade Americans to change their traditional political allegiances. Weaver took 1,029,846 votes, 8.5 percent of the total, and an absolute majority in three states. Of these he carried Kansas by only a narrow margin but gained more than 40 percent of the vote in Nebraska and North Dakota.
In the state contests the Populists were openly swindled. For instance, in the Alabama state elections of 1892, Reuben Kolb, candidate for governor of the “Jeffersonian Democrats,” took a plurality of votes and carried the state, but was deprived of his victory by the party machine of the incumbent governor, Thomas Jones, which invented a massive black vote to defeat him in the final tallies. In Georgia, eyes and ears were concentrated on the campaign of Representative Thomas Watson for reelection to the tenth congressional district. His attacks on Republicans and Democrats in Congress had made him known across the nation, and so his success or failure in an intense and bitter election campaign would be taken as a portent of the national fortunes of the People’s party. When it became clear that African-Americans would hold the balance of power in Georgia, conservative Democrats perpetrated a series of murders of African-Americans to terrify them. On election day, Democratic managers indulged in bribery, ballot box stuffing, and fraudulent counting to have Watson’s opponent, Major James Black, elected. The total vote returned by election judges was twice the number of qualified voters. Thus did the Democratic party hold Georgia intact.
But election to office was no guarantee of a change in government. Some successful Populists discovered the cards were stacked against reform. A joint Populist and Democratic candidate, Davis H. Waite, a radical editor from Aspen, Colorado, was elected governor of the state in 1892. The state assembly, however, remained in the hands of the Republicans, and refused to pass his bill to regulate the railroads. By 1893 he was thoroughly exasperated and declared, “It is better, infinitely better, that blood should flow to the horses’ bridles rather than our national liberties should be destroyed.” Thus he earned the nickname “Bloody Bridles” Waite.
Populist leaders expected to do better in the elections of 1894 and 1896 than they had in 1892. Their hopes fed on disasters: continuing agricultural depression; adverse weather on the plains; indisputable mismanagement of political and economic affairs by Congress and the administration before, during, and after the panic of 1893. They were well aware that the various crises of the mid-1890s gave them a special chance to break the traditional mold of American politics. But it was not to be. Four western states (Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota, and Idaho), in which the Populists had scored successes in 1892, went Republican in 1894. In Kansas the new party had fused with the Democrats in 1892. But when Populist candidates won that year it was on account of Democratic votes, and the Democratic party expected compensation in the way of patronage. Confirmed Populists could not countenance this compromise. In 1894 they chose to contest the elections alone and their candidates were defeated. The Republicans elected their entire state ticket, seven of eight congressmen, and 91 of 124 assemblymen.
It was not, however, a case of decline everywhere. Notwithstanding widespread intimidation, bribery, and ballot-rigging practiced by the Democrats in Texas, the Populist vote rose there from 23 percent in 1892 to almost 40 percent in 1894. The mixed results of the 1894 elections were difficult to interpret and lent respectability to support for the sort of coalition of Populists and Democrats that had existed in Nebraska since 1890, even though in certain parts of the South Populists and Democrats were at loggerheads.
In state after state cooperatives starved for lack of credit. In the three years from the election of 1892 to the end of 1895 the strongest constituencies of traditional Populism remained the three states of Texas, Kansas, and Georgia. In the western states the agrarian revolt was transformed by the emergence of silver as a political issue.
Bimetallism
The new movement on behalf of the mining interest was most striking in Nebraska where it was promoted not by independents but by a low tariff faction of the Democrats, whose most zealous spokesman was Congressman William Jennings Bryan. His understanding of the monetary system was rudimentary. In 1892 he cheerfully confessed, “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” Silver mine owners had launched the American Bimetallic League in 1889 but not until the depression of 1893 could they hope to make free silver a major issue in national politics. Their campaign was buttressed by editorial support in such diverse papers as the World Herald of Omaha, the Commercial-Appeal of Memphis, and the Evening Star of Washington. In the mining states of the West, Populism now attracted support solely on account of its proposals for monetary reform involving the coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1 from which the miners hoped to gain more work. Given its geographic origins, the silver movement was, perhaps, an inevitable, even a natural, successor to the ineffectual Northwestern Farmer’s Alliance. It had little in common with the enterprising National Farmers’ Alliance of the Southwest. Nevertheless, as prohibitionist Dr. D. Leigh Colvin, put it, “The silver movement represented far more than merely free coinage. It was a complex of pent-up feelings against the excessive power of great wealth.”
The dissent that culminated in the conflict between gold and silver was brought about by three specific elements: a decrease in the supply of gold, an increase in the supply of silver, and variations in the amount of currency in circulation. Underlying what became known as the Battle of the Standards was a need for a flexible currency that could grow with the population and the economy—specie that was specific and not specious.
World production of gold had decreased between 1865 and 1890 whereas the production of industry, mining, and agriculture had increased. Moreover, the population also increased: in the United States in 1890 it was almost twice that of 1865. The increase in the number of people and the decline in gold production was the root cause of third parties proposing an expansion of the currency. In the same period the production of silver in America had increased greatly—by about a thousand times between 1855 and 1890. In 1855 the value of production was $52,000; in 1865, $11.64 million; in 1890, $57.24 million. It was W. H. Harvey’s simplistic and misleading Coin’s Financial School (1894) that made the silver cause accessible to millions across the country.
William Allen White, then the young editor of the Emporia Gazette, compared the fervor of the silver movement to the fanaticism of the Crusades. “Indeed, the delusion that was working on the people took the form of religious frenzy. Sacred hymns were torn from their pious tunes to give place to words which deified the cause and made gold–and all its symbols, capital, wealth, plutocracy—diabolical.” Agrarian communities earnestly believed that when they had elected a silver legislature it would, by proclamation, produce the millennium of bimetallism. “It was a season of shibboleths and fetiches and slogans. Reason slept; and the passions—jealousy, covetousness, hatred—ran amuck; and whoever would check them was crucified in public contumely.”
To conservatives the proposed reform was abhorrent, threatening to undermine the economy, isolate the United States from Europe, and increase governmental interference in business. Reformer Henry Dema-rest Lloyd, who was sympathetic to the People’s party, described the free silver movement as the cowbird of reform. A cowbird took over the nests of other birds, threw out their eggs, and laid its own in their place.
Leading Populists also disapproved of the new emphasis on the silver issue in Populism. They considered it a superficial formula and thought it dangerous for the new party. However, a month after the 1894 federal elections the new party chairman, Herman Taubeneck of Illinois, declared the party should abandon the rest of the Omaha platform of 1892 in favor of a single platform of free silver for 1896. Thus, before the election of 1896 the People’s party was riven by faction between political trimmers who wanted to fuse with the Democrats, and mid-roaders who wanted to chart a separate course. Those intent on office and victory at all costs included Senators William Allen and Marion Butler and radicals James Weaver and Jerry Simpson. They reasoned that although the People’s party was supported by between 25 and 45 percent of the electorate in twenty states, this was not enough to elect congressmen. And only after election could the Populists enact their proposals. As far as they were concerned silver was popular with the public and represented a real chance of electoral victory.
Those who had been long identified with the Alliance and opposed political trimming included Tom Watson, Thomas Nugent, and E. M. Wardell. They were supported by most of the reform press. Committed Alliancemen concluded that free silver would destroy the essence of their movement. Concentration on this one plank precluded debate and promulgation of others. Free silver would not change the existing system of commerce and banking that supported the dominant plutocracy. Furthermore, free silver was a political irrelevance amid ever mounting public discussion about the accelerating trend toward industrial monopolies, the concentration of capital they represented, and the political corruption they sustained. The adoption of free silver would simply allow the railroad lobbies to corrupt legislatures with silver instead of gold. In the words of editor, diplomat, and poet James Russell Lowell, it was a case of
With gates of silver and bars of gold
Ye have fenced my sheep from their father’s fold.
And Judge Thomas Nugent of Texas declared that silver coinage would “leave undisturbed all the conditions which give rise to the undue concentration of wealth. The so-called silver party may prove a veritable trojan horse if we are not careful.”
When Taubeneck tried to convince a mass audience at St. Louis in December 1894 of the need to narrow the Omaha plank to the coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1, he was unsuccessful. It was the same when representatives of the National Press Association and the National Farmers’ Alliance convened at separate meetings in early 1895. Both groups denounced the idea of a one-plank platform. Taubeneck replied that their attitude was clear proof of socialist subversion within the party. This led to outright attack on Taubeneck and Weaver by editors like Thomas Byron of Iowa in the Farmer’s Tribune. Taubeneck had proved himself nothing better than a political broker. Ignatius Donnelly decided, “Narrow Populism to free silver alone and it will disappear in a rat hole.”
Nevertheless, the silver lobby managed to infiltrate the new party. Its eastern journal, the Silver Knight, was managed by J. H. Turner, who was also a member of the national executive committee of the People’s party. In 1893 Weaver was active in the American Bimetallic League and presided over its convention. Silver interests also penetrated the Democratic party. The American Bimetallic League sponsored conferences to promote free silver that were attended by Democratic politicians, such as one in June 1895 at Memphis at which Governor Ben Tillman of South Carolina, with his eye on personal gain, was present.
The Democratic party was shaken to the core by the depression of 1893, Cleveland’s inability to remedy it, and the agrarian revolt that had robbed the party of congressional seats in the elections of 1892 and 1894. Those concerned for the future of the party—not to mention their own careers—concluded that Cleveland’s adherence to the gold standard was undermining their electoral basis in the South and West. Unless the president’s policies could be reversed radical prophecies of a basic realignment of the parties might be fulfilled in 1896 at the Democrats’ expense. The stampede of Democratic congressmen from the West to the silver cause convinced Populist mid-roaders they were on the right track.
William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) of Nebraska, unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908 whose speeches were the most emotionally laden of the day. His campaign of 1896 gave the two principal parties their first genuine difference since the Civil War, as the “Battle of the Standards” between gold and silver unleashed a generation of pent-up feelings about the nature of American capitalism. (Library of Congress.)
Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901), inset, served as Republican congressman for Minnesota from 1863 to 1869 but abandoned the Republicans because of their indifference to the working class. Moving continuously to the left, he helped found the Populist party, giving its voice definition with the Omaha platform of 1892. Proponent of the view that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon, he was also author of a lurid, Utopian novel, Caesar’s Voice (1891), in which he predicted the inventions of radio, television, and poison gas, as well as an America of 1988 held quivering in the power of a ruthless oligarchy of plutocrats. (Library of Congress.)
The Election of 1896
In 1896 three candidates presented themselves for consideration by the Republicans: former President Benjamin Harrison, disgraced by his defeat in 1892; “Czar” Thomas B. Reed, whose appeal was limited to New England and Congress itself; and William McKinley, coauthor of the tariff of 1890 and governor of Ohio. McKinley had the advantage of an amiable personality, and he could put on a show of personal dignity. Although he was identified with a controversial subject, the tariff, his record on silver was sufficiently ambiguous to appeal to both gold and silver interests in the party.
McKinley owed his success at the Republican National Convention, meeting in St. Louis on June 16, 1896, to the skill of his ally and manager, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a prosperous businessman from Cleveland, anxious to play a decisive part in national politics. He was committed to a high tariff, but in other respects his attitudes to industrial problems were advanced. He held liberal views on the troubling subject of labor relations. It was widely known through the press that Hanna had urged Pullman to submit the labor dispute of 1894 to arbitration. Furthermore, McKinley, as governor of Ohio, had supported labor legislation and contributed to relief funds in the depression. Hanna’s strategy in gaining the nomination for McKinley was for them both to visit small towns in the South and West and court there the local celebrities who would become delegates to the nominating convention. In this way they planned to take the sting out of the Populists’ tail in these sectors. Hanna urged McKinley to remain silent in the West on the subject of silver in order not to antagonize silver interests there. At their convention the Republicans adopted an unequivocal platform in favor of gold by an overwhelming majority.
The Democratic response, at their convention meeting in Chicago on July 6, resulted in one of the few elections (those of 1964 and 1972 are among the others) when the two parties, instead of blurring the issues that separated them, actually took different sides. As late as July 10, 1896, the New York World prophesied that in the forthcoming election, “the Silverites will be invincible if united and harmonious; but they have neither machine nor boss. The opportunity is here; the man is lacking.” That very day William Jennings Bryan with a single speech made.himself the missing leader. He did so against considerable odds. Ben Tillman of South Carolina had made the opening speech of the convention in favor of silver and was jeered. He commented ruefully, “There are only three things in the world that can hiss—a goose, a serpent, and a man.”
Yet when it was his turn to speak all ears were fastened on Bryan who was, by now, widely known and well rehearsed. Everyone knew what he had to say, but he galvanized the convention with his ringing defense of agrarian discontent. His “Cross of Gold” speech became the most famous oration since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and second inaugural. It was not impromptu but a final revision of a speech Bryan had delivered scores of times in the Midwest. His first point was that the usual definition of a businessman was too limited. All who worked and contributed to the common wealth were engaged in business. His second point was that agriculture, rather than industry, was the true basis of civilization, without which industry itself could not survive. He concluded with ringing rhetoric. “Having behind us the producing masses of this country and of the world, supported by the commercial interests the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them, ‘You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’”
On July 10, 1896, the New York Sun, a paper hostile to Bryan, carried this account of his speech at the Democratic National Convention:
From all parts of the convention hall a great roar went up for Bryan, Bryan, Bryan. These cheers were continued and rolled on and on. . . . Mr. Bryan is a smooth-faced man of early middle life and his dark hair is long and wavy. . . . His rhetoric and English and his oratorical gestures were almost superb. . . . His voice is clear and resonant, and his bearing graceful. He is the idol of the silver camp, and if a vote could have been taken immediately after he had finished, he would, without the slightest doubt, have been nominated for President by acclamation.
Hearing Bryan’s voice in a convention hall was an emotional experience for many delegates, comparable to audiences hearing opera singers like Adelina Patti in the theater. Bryan won the nomination on the fifth ballot and ousted the other leading contender, Congressman Richard (“Silver Dick”) Bland of Missouri. Outraged conservatives seceded and formed their own National Democratic party pledged to uphold the gold standard.
Bryan had taken the wind out of the Populists’ sails. They could respond only by submerging their identity, and at their convention in St. Louis, they nominated Bryan as their presidential candidate. Besides, Taubeneck was determined the convention would support a platform built around the demand for free silver. He had ensured a system of apportionment of delegates to the convention which overrepresented the silver interests. The mid-roaders made a last sustained attempt to make their voice heard. As their price for accepting Bryan, they persuaded the convention, after pandemonium on the floor of the hall, to nominate Tom Watson of Georgia for vice president against the wishes of fusionists and, probably, of Bryan himself.
With the nomination of Bryan by the People’s party, the agrarian revolt was over before the election campaign had begun in earnest. Not only were the most charming and attractive political characters for several decades dismissed in the orthodox press as cranks, but their ideology was also roundly denounced by those who thought it subversive of American morals and politics. On August 15, 1896, William Allen White wrote in the Emporia Gazette a series of editorials to be used by printers during his absence on vacation. One carried the striking title, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and was brought to the attention of Herman Kohlsaat, publisher of the Chicago Times-Herald, who arranged for it to be syndicated across the country. It was immediately recognized as a pithy and pungent repudiation of Populism. White assailed malcontents as professional failures who condemned the American system of government and finance simply because they could not cope with it.
What’s the matter with Kansas? We all know; yet here we are at it again. 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, so that capital will come tumbling over itself to get into the State. We have raked the ash-heap of failure in the State and found an old human hoop-skirt who has failed as a business man, who has failed as an editor, who has failed as a preacher, and we are going to run him for congressman-at-large. . . . Then we have discovered a kid without a law practice and have decided to run him for attorney-general. 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 weeds.
There was, however, much more to the Populist movement than White was ready to admit. It had awakened American politics from slumber and transformed the election of 1896 into a high tide of radical dissent and a final flow of the controversy over the currency. Thus were the forces arrayed for the election of 1896, the political climax of the Gilded Age. On one side were the forces of reform representing mass discontent with two-party politics based on the sectionalism of North and South and plutocratic management of the Industrial Revolution. They were led by stump orators and the radical press. On the other side were the poloticos and plutocrats hostile to any innovative economic theories that threatened their supremacy, and supported by party bosses and their machines, and by banking and the orthodox press.
The actual campaign was unusual in many respects. For the first time ever a candidate toured the country. Bryan spoke to millions in twenty-one states. Some considered his campaign an act of vulgar barnstorming unworthy of a presidential candidate. In the first part of the campaign Bryan, whose financial support was limited, was obliged to travel on scheduled commercial trains. Rather than arrive at meetings dusty and sweating, he used alcohol to rub himself down. Thus, although he never drank liquor, he would meet his audiences reeking of gin.
For his part, McKinley remained at his home in Canton where he received delegates on his front porch. However, he was neither lazy nor complacent. His receptions were planned down to the last detail. The visitors submitted speeches in advance, which McKinley scrutinized, and sometimes revised, before they were read aloud and replied to in public for the benefit of the press. He offered generally compromising, moderate answers to all and sundry while displaying his double-barreled shotgun—the protective tariff and the gold standard—to any who wanted to see if their man was really hard.
Mark Hanna quite exceeded the lavish expenditure of Matthew Quay for Harrison in 1892. He openly urged banks to donate a quarter of one percent of their assets to the campaign and spent money like water on Republican literature in English and other languages. He had 120 million campaign documents distributed and circulated 275 different pamphlets to provide the press with copy to promote the cause. McKinley was the “Advance Agent of Prosperity” who would “Fill the Dinner Pail.” When the campaign was over the Republican National Committee admitted to having spent $3 million; the Democrats spent only a tenth of that. Hanna’s imaginative techniques and style of campaigning were unprecedented. They set a standard of penetration of the electorate for all presidential campaigns in future.
The morale of the Populists expired and the movement almost collapsed. The cooperatives were defunct and the party was practically penniless. Ironically, Bryan, who had acquiesced in the destruction of the people’s movement before the election, was actually taken as a symbol of it.
The election results reaffirmed the Republicans’ recently won position as the majority party. Sensing the hostility of the cities to silver, Hanna remarked of Bryan, “He’s talking silver all the time, and that’s where we’ve got him.” Of the eighty-two cities with a population of at least 45,000, only a dozen supported Bryan, and seven of these were in the solid South and two in the silver states. McKinley received 7,102,246 popular votes to Bryan’s 6,492,559, the first undisputed majority since 1872 but only 51.1 percent of the vote. In the electoral college McKinley had 271 votes to Bryan’s 176. Bryan, who carried twenty-one states, did not take any outside the South or east of the Mississippi. The twenty-two great industrial states of the North and East plus Oregon voted decisively for McKinley. Bryan lost his own state, his own city, even his own precinct.
The conflict over the currency had been more dangerous politically than economically. It represented a challenge by the agrarian West and South against political control by the industrial Northeast. But neither the single nor the bimetallic policy would have led to economic disruption. Some of the Populists’ demands of 1896 were realized later, such as the establishment of postal savings banks, the direct election of senators, statehood for remaining territories, ballot reform, and a graduated income tax. Yet the idea of structural reform of government was defeated with Bryan.
Bryan’s emphasis on one issue had made the campaign simple enough for ordinary people to understand. But his argument rested on the known scarcity of gold. However, during the 1890s, gold production was increasing throughout the world, rising from $118.84 million in 1890 to $202.25 million in 1896. In 1896 India, which sold wheat in exchange for silver, had a poor harvest, whereas the United States produced wheat in abundance. The price of wheat rose. The price of silver fell. Gold production continued to rise. In 1898 it was $286.87 million, more than twice the amount of 1890. The increase was accelerated by new discoveries in Australia, South Africa, and the Klondike and by the invention of the cyanide process by MacArthur and Forrest, which extracted more gold from the same amount of ore. At the same time, production of silver increased only slightly from $163.03 million in 1890 to $218.57 million in 1898. Moreover, in 1897 the flagging fortunes of farmers began to revive and the prices of corn and wheat rose. On March 14, 1900, Congress passed an act making gold the single standard of currency. Silver was a dead issue.
Bryan was at the height of his powers in 1896, when he was thirty-six. He became a professional speaker on the Chautauqua circuit and was called the Great Commoner, the Peerless One, and the Boy Orator of the Platte. His daughter collected his anecdotes and one may suffice as an example of his wit.
A minister was delivering a sermon upon perfection and, illustrating the fact that no human being was perfect, said: “If there is a perfect person in this audience please rise.” A dead silence ensued. . . . Having reached his climax, he thundered, “Now, if anybody in this church has ever heard of a perfect person, please rise.” To the amazement of both minister and congregation a timid little woman in the back of the sanctuary arose. . . . “And who may this perfect person be,” inquired the minister. “My husband’s first wife.”
The story was not new. Lincoln had used it forty years earlier. But it makes its own ironic comment on Bryan, a man whose steady decline from youthful perfection was to become increasingly obvious to his public as his fixed convictions led him to bigotry. As Thomas B. Reed remarked at the turn of the century, “Bryan would rather be wrong than president.”