Crops and Complaints 541Many substantial citizens shared at least indi-
rectly in the corruption. The owners of tenements
were interested in crowding as many rent payers as
possible into their buildings. Utility companies seek-
ing franchises preferred a system that enabled them
to buy favors. Honest citizens who had no selfish
stake in the system and who were repelled by the sor-
didness of city government were seldom sufficiently
concerned to do anything about it. When young
Theodore Roosevelt decided to seek a political career
in 1880, his New York socialite friends laughed in his
face. They told him, Roosevelt wrote in his autobiog-
raphy, “that politics were ‘low’; that the organiza-
tions were not controlled by ‘gentlemen’; that I
would find them run by saloonkeepers, horse-car
conductors, and the like.”
Many so-called urban reformers resented the
boss system mainly because it gave political power
to people who were not “gentlemen” or, as one
reformer put it, to a “proletarian mob” of “illiterate
peasants, freshly raked from Irish bogs, or
Bohemian mines, or Italian robber nests.” A British
visitor in Chicago struck at the root of the urban
problem of the era. “Everybody is fighting to be
rich,” he said, “and nobody can attend to making
the city fit to live in.”Crops and Complaints
The vacuity of American politics may well have
stemmed from the complacency of the middle-class
majority. The country was growing; no foreign enemy
threatened it; the poor were mostly recent immi-
grants, blacks, and others with little influence, who
were easily ignored by those in comfortable circum-
stances. However, one important group in society
suffered increasingly as the years rolled by: the farm-
ers. Out of their travail came the force that finally, in
the 1890s, brought American politics face to face
with the problems of the age.
After the Civil War, however, farmers did well.
Harvests were bountiful and wheat prices high at over a
dollar a bushel in the early 1870s. Well into the 1880s
farmers on the plains experienced boom conditions. In
that decade the population of Kansas increased by
43 percent, that of Nebraska by 134 percent, and that
of the Dakotas by 278 percent. Land prices rose and
farmers borrowed money to expand their farms.A farm family in Custer, Nebraska, in 1888, a region where Populist sentiment was strong.