Farmers Alliance

The inequities of the southern agricultural system gave rise to the first rumblings of a mass democratic movement that was to shake American society in the late nineteenth century. The agrarian movement spread across the Cotton Belt and the Great Plains in the 1880s. The trend caught on in areas where farm tenancy, crop liens, merchants, railroads, banks, weather, and nature threatened the ambitions of hopeful farmers. Once underway, it inspired visions of a truly cooperative, democratic society.

Farmers Alliance: History

Agricultural expansion in the West and South exposed millions of people to the hardships of rural life. Uncertainties might have been more bearable if the rewards had been more promising, but that was hardly the case. As farmers put more land under cultivation, mechanization boosted productivity, and foreign competition increased, supplies exceeded national and international demand for agricultural products.

Consequently, prices for staple crops dropped steadily between the end of the Civil War and 1900. Meanwhile, transportation, storage, and commission fees rose. Costly seed, fertilizer, manufactured goods, taxes, and mortgage rates increased, combined with the social isolation to trap many farm families in disadvantageous and sometimes desperate conditions. To buy essential goods and pay their rents and mortgages, farmers had to grow more. But the cycle wound more tightly since the more farmers produced, the lower the prices dropped.

The Grange Movement

Even before the full impact of these developments was felt, farmers had begun to organize to relieve their mounting distress. With aid from government officials, farmers founded a network of local organizations called Granges in almost every state during the late 1860s and 1870s. By 1875, the Grange had nearly twenty thousand local branches and over one million members.

Fig. 1 - A U.S. Stamp from 1967 celebrates the Grange Movement's centennial from 1867.

With their peak in the 1870s, Granges enacted programs to help rural life, such as:

• Forming local cooperatives to buy equipment and supplies directly from the manufacturer to avoid high prices

• They encouraged the formation of sales cooperatives, whereby farmers pool their grain and dairy products and divide the profits.

• Some Granges established small equipment factories and insurance companies.

• In politics, Granges used their numbers to elect sympathetic legislators and press for regulatory laws on transportation and storage rates.

By the end of the 1870s, Granges declined because their essentially conservative tactics did not fully meet the needs of their members. In addition, to function, the Granges needed cash from their members, who rarely had enough money, to begin with. Also, their political efforts towards regulation came up against powerful and well-funded special interests, which influenced the major political parties to position themselves against the Grange interests.

Farmers Alliance: Overview

Rural activism then shifted to Farmers Alliances, two networks of organizations - one in the Great Plains and one in the South - that by 1890 constituted a genuine movement. The first alliances sprang up in Texas, where hard-pressed farmers rallied against crop liens, furnishing merchants, railroads, and money power. Adopting an effective system of traveling lecturers to recruit members, alliance leaders extended the movement into other southern states, and by 1889 the Southern Alliance boasted over three million members. A similar movement flourished in the Great Plains, whereby the late 1880s, two million members were organized in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas.

Fig. 2 - A banner from the first Farmers Alliance in Texas from 1878

Motivated by outrage, alliance members pushed the Grange concept of cooperation to new limits by sponsoring organizational rallies, mass educational meetings, and cooperative buying and selling agreements. Seeing themselves as laborers battling capitalists in a new age rather than Jeffersonian farmers, some alliance members advocated uniting with other labor movements of the day, such as the Knights of Labor and other worker's groups.

Farmers Alliance: Significance

Implementation of their plans and programs confronted alliance members with questions of political participation. Could farmers work within the two established parties, or should they form a third party directly responsive to their interests? If all the various alliance groups had united under one banner, they would have made a formidable political force. But attempts at a merger in the 1880s were thwarted by sectional differences and personality clashes.

However, by the 1890s, growing membership and confidence drew the alliance groups more deeply into politics. Farmers had elected several politicians sympathetic to their programs- especially in the South, where alliance members controlled four governorships, eight state legislatures, forty-four seats in the House of Representatives, and three in the Senate. During the summer of 1890, the Kansas Farmers Alliance held a convention and nominated members for political office. The formation of this People’s Party, whose members called themselves Populists, gave a name to the American Populism movement that grew out of alliance political activism and would go on to influence the early years of the twentieth century.