542 Chapter 20 From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896
In the 1890s disaster struck. First came a succes-
sion of dry years and poor harvests. Then farmers in
Australia, Canada, Russia, and Argentina took advan-
tage of improvements in transportation to sell their
produce in European markets that had relied on
American foodstuffs. The price of wheat fell to about
sixty cents a bushel. Cotton, the great southern sta-
ple, which sold for more than thirty cents a pound in
1866 and fifteen cents in the early 1870s, at times in
the 1890s fell below six cents.
The tariff on manufactured goods appeared to
aggravate the farmers’ predicament, and so did the
domestic marketing system, which enabled a multi-
tude of middlemen to gobble up a large share of the
profits of agriculture. The shortage of credit, particu-
larly in the South, was an additional burden.
The downward swing of the business cycle in the
early 1890s completed the devastation. Settlers who
had paid more for their lands than they were worth and
borrowed money at high interest rates to do so found
themselves squeezed relentlessly. Thousands lost their
farms and returned eastward, penniless and dispirited.
The population of Nebraska increased by fewer than
4,000 persons in the entire decade of the 1890s.
The Populist Movement
The agricultural depression triggered a new outburst
of farm radicalism, the Alliance movement. Alliances
were organizations of farmers’ clubs, most of which
had sprung up during the bad times of the late 1870s.
The first Knights of Reliance group was founded in
1877 in Lampasas County, Texas. As the Farmers’
Alliance, this organization gradually expanded in
northeastern Texas, and after 1885 it spread rapidly
throughout the cotton states. Alliance leaders stressed
cooperation. Their co-ops bought fertilizer and other
supplies in bulk and sold them at fair prices to mem-
bers. They sought to market their crops cooperatively
but could not raise the necessary capital from banks,
with the result that some of them began to question
the workings of the American financial and monetary
system. They became economic and social radicals in
the process. A similar though less influential Alliance
movement developed in the North.
Although the state alliances of the Dakotas and
Kansas joined the Southern Alliance in 1889, for a time
local prejudices and conflicting interests prevented the
formation of a single national organization. But the farm
groups emerged as a potent force in the 1890 elections.
In the South, Alliance-sponsored gubernatorial
candidates won in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina,
and Texas; eight southern legislatures fell under
Alliance control, and forty-four representatives and
three senators committed to Alliance objectives were
sent to Washington. In the West, Alliance candidates
swept Kansas, captured a majority in the Nebraska leg-
islature, and accumulated enough seats in Minnesota
and South Dakota to hold the balance of power
between the major parties.
Such success, coupled with the reluctance of the
Republicans and Democrats to make concessions to
their demands, encouraged Alliance leaders to create a
new national party. By uniting southern and western
farmers, they succeeded in breaking the sectional bar-
rier erected by the Civil War. If they could recruit
industrial workers, perhaps a real political revolution
could be accomplished. In February 1892, farm lead-
ers, representatives of the Knights of Labor, and vari-
ous professional reformers, some 800 in all, met at
St. Louis. They organized the People’s (Populist)
party, and issued a call for a national convention to
meet at Omaha in July.In Kansas in 1893 a Populist governor and a Populist-controlled
Senate invalidated the election of some Republicans in the Kansas
House of Representatives, giving the Populists control of that body,
too. The displaced Republicans, denied seats, smashed their way
into the capitol building with this sledgehammer and ousted the
Populists, who decided to meet in a separate building. Each
proclaimed itself to be the true legislature and passed its own laws.
Eventually the Kansas Supreme Court decided in favor of the
Republican legislature and disbanded the Populist gathering.
Source: Kansas State Historical Society.