THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE, A CHRONICLE OF THE FARMER IN POLITICS

CONTENTS

I. THE INCEPTION OF THE GRANGE

II. THE RISING SPIRIT OF UNREST

III. THE GRANGER MOVEMENT AT FLOOD TIDE

IV. CURBING THE RAILROADS

V. THE COLLAPSE OF THE GRANGER MOVEMENT

VI. THE GREENBACK INTERLUDE

VII. THE PLIGHT OF THE FARMER

VIII. THE FARMERS' ALLIANCE

IX. THE PEOPLE'S PARTY LAUNCHED

X. THE POPULIST BOMBSHELL OF 1892

XI. THE SILVER ISSUE

XII. THE BATTLE OF THE STANDARDS

XIII. THE LEAVEN OF RADICALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE




THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE



CHAPTER I. THE INCEPTION OF THE GRANGE

When President Johnson authorized the Commissioner of Agriculture,
in 1866, to send a clerk in his bureau on a trip through the Southern
States to procure "statistical and other information from those States,"
he could scarcely have foreseen that this trip would lead to a movement
among the farmers, which, in varying forms, would affect the political
and economic life of the nation for half a century. The clerk selected
for this mission, one Oliver Hudson Kelley, was something more than
a mere collector of data and compiler of statistics: he was a keen
observer and a thinker. Kelley was born in Boston of a good Yankee
family that could boast kinship with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Judge
Samuel Sewall. At the age of twenty-three he journeyed to Iowa, where
he married. Then with his wife he went on to Minnesota, settled in
Elk River Township, and acquired some first-hand familiarity with
agriculture. At the time of Kelley's service in the agricultural bureau
he was forty years old, a man of dignified presence, with a full beard
already turning white, the high broad forehead of a philosopher, and the
eager eyes of an enthusiast. "An engine with too much steam on all the
time"--so one of his friends characterized him; and the abnormal energy
which he displayed on the trip through the South justifies the figure.

Kelley had had enough practical experience in agriculture to be
sympathetically aware of the difficulties of farm life in the period
immediately following the Civil War. Looking at the Southern farmers
not as a hostile Northerner would but as a fellow agriculturist, he
was struck with the distressing conditions which prevailed. It was not
merely the farmers' economic difficulties which he noticed, for such
difficulties were to be expected in the South in the adjustment after
the great conflict; it was rather their blind disposition to do as their
grandfathers had done, their antiquated methods of agriculture, and,
most of all, their apathy. Pondering on this attitude, Kelley decided
that it was fostered if not caused by the lack of social opportunities
which made the existence of the farmer such a drear monotony that he
became practically incapable of changing his outlook on life or his
attitude toward his work.

Being essentially a man of action, Kelley did not stop with the mere
observation of these evils but cast about to find a remedy. In doing
so, he came to the conclusion that a national secret order of farmers
resembling the Masonic order, of which he was a member, might serve
to bind the farmers together for purposes of social and intellectual
advancement. After he returned from the South, Kelley discussed the plan
in Boston with his niece, Miss Carrie Hall, who argued quite sensibly
that women should be admitted to full membership in the order, if it was
to accomplish the desired ends. Kelley accepted her suggestion and went
West to spend the summer in farming and dreaming of his project. The
next year found him again in Washington, but this time as a clerk in the
Post Office Department.