Along with the mechanical improvements which greatly increased
yield per hectare, the amount of land under cultivation grew
rapidly throughout the second half of the century, as the
railroads and the gradual displacement of the Plains Indians
opened up new areas for western settlement. A similar expansion
of agricultural lands in countries such as Canada, Argentina and
Australia compounded these problems in the international market,
where much of U.S. agricultural production was now sold.
The farther west the settlers went, the more dependent they
became on the railroads to move their goods to market. At the
same time, farmers paid high costs for manufactured goods as a
result of the protective tariffs that Congress, backed by Eastern
industrial interests, had long supported. Over time, the
Midwestern and Western farmer fell ever more deeply in debt to
the banks that held their mortgages.
In the South, the fall of the Confederacy brought major changes
in agricultural practices. The most significant of these was
sharecropping, where tenant farmers "shared" up to half of their
crop with the landowners in exchange for seed and essential
supplies. An estimated 80 percent of the South's black farmers
and 40 percent of its white ones lived under this debilitating
system following the Civil War.
Most sharecroppers were locked in a cycle of debt, from which the
only hope of escape was increased planting. This led to the
over-production of cotton and tobacco, and thus to declining
prices and the further exhaustion of the soil.
The first organized effort to address general agricultural
problems was the Granger movement. Launched in 1867 by employees
of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Granges focused
initially on social activities to counter the isolation most farm
families encountered. Women's participation was actively
encouraged. Spurred by the Panic of 1873, the Grange soon grew
to 20,000 chapters and one-and-a-half million members.
Although most of them ultimately failed, the Granges set up their
own marketing systems, stores, processing plants, factories and
cooperatives. The movement also enjoyed some political success
during the 1870s. A few states passed "Granger laws," limiting
railroad and warehouse fees.
By 1880 the movement began to decline, replaced by the Farmers'
Alliances. By 1890 the Alliance movements had members from New
York to California totaling about 1.5 million. A parallel
African-American organization, the Colored Farmers National
Alliance, numbered over a million members.
From the beginning, the Farmers' Alliances were political
organizations with elaborate economic programs. According to one
early platform, its purpose was to "unite the farmers of America
for their protection against class legislation and the
encroachments of concentrated capital." Their program also
called for the regulation -- if not the outright nationalization
-- of the railroads; currency inflation to provide debt relief;
the lowering of the tariff; and the establishment of
government-owned storehouses and low-interest lending facilities.
During the late 1880s a series of droughts devastated the western
Great Plains. Western Kansas lost half its population during a
four-year span. To make matters worse, the McKinley Tariff of
1890 was one of the highest the country had ever seen.
By 1890 the level of agrarian distress was at an all-time high.
Working with sympathetic Democrats in the South or small third
parties in the West, the Farmer's Alliance made a push for
political power. From these elements, a third political party,
known as the Populist Party, emerged. Never before in American
politics had there been anything like the Populist fervor that
swept the prairies and cotton lands. The elections of 1890
brought the new party into power in a dozen Southern and Western
states, and sent a score of Populist senators and representatives
to Congress.
Its first convention was in 1892, when delegates from farm, labor
and reform organizations met in Omaha, Nebraska, determined at
last to make their mark on a U.S. political system they viewed as
hopelessly corrupted by the monied interests of the industrial
and commercial trusts. Their platform stated:
We are met, 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 [courts].... From the same prolific womb of
governmental injustice we breed the two great classes -- tramps
and millionaires.
The pragmatic portion of their platform focused on issues of
land, transportation and finance, including the unlimited coinage
of silver.
The Populists showed impressive strength in the West and South in
the 1892 elections, and their candidate for president polled more
than a million votes. Yet it was the currency question, pitting
advocates of silver, against those who favored gold, which soon
overshadowed all other issues. Agrarian spokesmen in the West
and South -- supported by labor groups in the Eastern industrial
centers -- demanded a return to the unlimited coinage of silver.
Convinced that their troubles stemmed from a shortage of money in
circulation, they argued that increasing the volume of money
would indirectly raise prices for farm products and drive up
industrial wages, thus allowing debts to be paid with inflated
currency. Conservative groups and the financial classes, on the
other hand, believed that such a policy would be disastrous, and
insisted that inflation, once begun, could not be stopped. Only
the gold standard, they said, offered stability.
The financial panic of 1893 heightened the tension of this
debate. Bank failures abounded in the South and Midwest;
unemployment soared and crop prices fell badly. The crisis, and
President Grover Cleveland's inability to solve it, nearly broke
the Democratic Party. Democrats who were silver supporters went
over to the Populists as the presidential elections of 1896
neared.
The Democratic convention that year was witness to one of the
most famous speeches in U.S. political history. Pleading with
the convention not to "crucify mankind on a cross of gold,"
William Jennings Bryan, the young Nebraskan champion of silver,
won the Democrats' presidential nomination.
The Populists also endorsed Bryan. The moment was to prove their
high-water mark. Despite carrying the South and all of the West
except California and Oregon, Bryan lost the more populated,
industrial North and East -- and the election -- to the
Republican's William McKinley.
The following year the country's finances began to improve, in
part due to the discovery of gold in Alaska and the Yukon. In
1898 the Spanish-American War drew the nation's attention further
from Populist issues. If the movement was dead, however, its
ideas were not. Many of them passed into law within the next two
decades.
In spite of their remarkable progress, 19th-century American
farmers experienced recurring periods of hardship. Several basic
factors were involved -- soil exhaustion, the vagaries of nature,
a decline in self-sufficiency, and the lack of adequate
legislative protection and aid. Perhaps most important, however,
was over-production.
"A great democracy will be neither great nor a
democracy if it is not progressive."
-- Former President Theodore Roosevelt, circa 1910