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.
Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railroad v. Illinois [1887]: //historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5746/
The Supreme Court reversed its position initially put forth in Munn v. Illinois, by holding that Illinois legislation enacted to regulate railroad rates interfered with the Congress's ability to exercise its authority over interstate commerce. This decision ended the brief era of state railroad regulation. Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887.
As farmers pushed westward into Texas, Kansas, and other western states and territories after the Civil War, they experienced some difficult times. To meet these problems they began to form organizations such as the Farmers' Alliance. Besides facing such neutral problems as drought, farmers experienced low commodity prices, high freight rates, high interest rates, and other difficulties. They were very critical of the larger corporations, especially the railroads. These conditions and complaints were familiar to farmers in Indian Territory and to those who rushed into Oklahoma Territory in 1889 and later.
The Farmers' Alliance was first organized in Texas in the mid-1870s and soon spread to other states and territories in the South and Midwest. One of the group's main goals was to form cooperatives. Farmers set up cooperatively owned retail stores and marketing organizations. The idea was to give producers more influence in buying their supplies and marketing their products.
The Farmers' Alliance was very strong in Texas and Kansas. Lying between these two states, Oklahoma and Indian territories, not surprisingly, offered alliance organizers an opportunity. In 1889 the alliance was organized by "outlanders," or non–American Indian farmers who had moved into the territory. The organization established a number of cooperatively owned businesses and published its own newspaper, the Alliance Courier, in Ardmore. However, the cooperative enterprises soon failed because of lack of capital, poor management, and insufficient patron support. With the failure of the cooperatives and the rise of the Populist Party most of the Alliance members shifted their emphasis to politics.
The settlement of Oklahoma Territory came too late for the Farmers' Alliance to have much impact among farmers. By 1890, when the territorial government was organized, the main political issues were free homes and statehood. However, farmers were strongly interested in the growing demands of the Populists. The farmers' movement in both territories gradually blended into the larger farmer-protest activities that coalesced into Populism at the national level. Farmers demanded free and unlimited coinage of silver to inflate the currency and raise farm prices, government ownership of the railroads, taxation of income, abolition of national banks, prohibition of alien land ownership, and other reforms.
Although the Farmers' Alliance in the Twin Territories served as a background for the Populist movement, its more important influence may have been on the subsequent organization of the Farmers' Educational and Cooperative Union in 1902, which, among other objectives, strongly supported the formation of farmer cooperatives. Overall, however, the Farmers' Alliance did not play a significant role in Oklahoma's protest history.
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.
Farmers Alliance: An American political and social movement in agricultural and rural regions during the late 1800s that looked to better farmers' economic and social conditions through the creation of cooperatives and eventual political involvement
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.
Granges served chiefly as social organizations, sponsoring meetings and educational programs to help relieve the loneliness of farm life, especially in the Great Plains. Local Granges made explicit provisions for women’s participation and are family-oriented and open to all.
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 1878Motivated 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.
The Subtreasury Plan
Fig. 3- Charles W. Macune, a Farmer Alliance leader, championed the Subtreasury PlanBeyond urging democratic cooperation, the alliance movement proposed a scheme to alleviate the most severe rural problems: lack of cash and credit. The subtreasury plan called for the federal government to construct warehouses in every significant agricultural county. Farmers could store their crops in these sub-treasuries at harvest time while waiting for higher prices, and the government would loan them treasury notes amounting to a percentage of the market price of the stored produce. Farmers could use the subtreasury notes currency to pay debts and buy goods. Once the stored crops were sold, farmers would pay back the loans plus a slight interest in storage fees.
The Subtreasury scheme was meant to replace the crop-lien system and give farmers more significant control over their finances. No longer would merchants be able to take advantage of farmers at harvest time when the increase of crops in the market depressed prices. No longer would farmers have to mortgage crops - through crop liens- at high-interest rates. And no longer would they lack the cash to buy supplies. Moreover, by issuing subtreasury notes, the government would inject more money into the economy and encourage inflation that benefitted farmers: inflation that raised the prices of crops but not the cost of supplies and rent.
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.
Why did the Grange and farmers alliances form?
The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, was founded in 1867 to advance methods of agriculture, as well as to promote the social and economic needs of farmers in the United States.What is the Farmers Alliance and Grangers?
Granger movement, coalition of U.S. farmers, particularly in the Middle West, that fought monopolistic grain transport practices during the decade following the American Civil War. Granger movement. Date: 1867 - present Location: United States Context: Farmers' Alliance Key People: Mary Anne Bryant Mayo.What movement came from the Grange and Farmers Alliance?
In reaction to these trends, farmers began to take political action--first with the Grange Movement, then the Farmers' Alliance and finally the emergence of the national Populist movement in the 1890s. The populist movement was the most important and radical third party ever established in this country.Why did farmers of the Alliance movement of the 1880s feel they needed to form their own political party?
Mississippi farmers blamed the Bourbon leaders for their economic problems, and in the 1880s they believed that in order to improve their economic plight, they needed to gain control of the Democratic Party by electing candidates who reflected their interests rather than attempting to create a third party.