American Experiment (184 page)

Even that army of enthusiasts seemed astonished by the response. “The farmers seemed like unto ripe fruit,” one reported from North Carolina. “You can garner them by a gentle shake of the bush.” He had held twenty-seven meetings in one county and left twenty-seven suballiances in his wake. With cotton down to eight cents a pound, farmers were desperate for relief. Together they and the lecturers set up trade committees, cotton yards, and warehouses in hundreds of counties, along with state
exchanges. Georgia, with its big state exchange and its cooperative stores, gins, and warehouses, was the most successful. When manufacturers of the commonly used jute bagging organized a trust and doubled the price, the Georgia Alliance—and later other state groups—successfully boycotted the “jute trust,” using cotton or pine straw instead, while protesting farmers donned cotton bagging and even witnessed a double wedding in which both brides and both grooms were decked out in that finery.

The idea of farm cooperation swept into the Midwest. The Alliance came to be most deeply rooted in the corn and wheat fields of Kansas, where a great boom had busted in 1887 amid mounting debts and foreclosures. When political efforts failed the next year, farm leaders visited Texas and returned full of missionary zeal. The formation of suballiances and the building of cooperatives proceeded feverishly until the entire state boasted of over 3,000 local units. When the “twine trust” hiked by 50 percent the price of the twine used to bind wheat, Alliance staged a boycott. The trust lowered its price.

As early as 1889, however, Alliance leaders in Kansas were concluding that education and cooperation were not enough, that electoral political action was necessary too. The question was not whether to engage in politics but how—independent political action versus third-party efforts versus working through a major party; lobbying and pressuring established parties versus direct action to take power. The existing political landscape was barren. The Republican and Democratic parties both were sectional entities, appealing to lingering Civil War hatreds to win elections. Farmers who actually shared common conditions and needs were polarized by politicians who waved the bloody shirt. Though most farm leaders in Kansas spurned “partisan politics” at every turn, what they actually rejected was the familiar brand of party politics animated by sectionalism and penetrated by railroad and other monopolies. Many envisioned not just an alternative party, but an alternative
kind
of party that would overcome racial and sectional hatred and respond to grass-roots needs.

A county “people’s convention” that nominated—and elected—a “people’s ticket” for county offices against the trusts inspired Alliance leaders in Kansas to raise their sights to state action. A convention of industrial organizations in Topeka, with delegates from the Knights of Labor and the “single tax” movement as well as from Alliance groups, assembled in Representative Hall in the statehouse, formally set up the People’s Party of Kansas, and called a state convention to choose statewide candidates and adopt the first People’s Party platform.

Once again new leaders emerged out of this agitation and conflict. In the “Big Seventh” congressional district in southwest Kansas, a Medicine
Lodge rancher and town marshal named Jerry Simpson quickly emerged as the most noted Kansas Populist. A sailor on the Great Lakes and later an Illinois soldier in the Civil War, Simpson had run a farm and sawmill in northeastern Kansas before turning to cattle-raising. After the harsh winter of 1887 killed his cattle and destroyed his life’s savings, he turned to the Alliance and the new political insurgency.

Simpson won his imperishable title as “Sockless Jerry” during his campaign in 1890 against Colonel James Hallowell. “I tried to get hold of the crowd,” Simpson recalled. “I referred to the fact that my opponent was known as a ‘Prince.’ Princes, I said, wear silk socks. I don’t wear any.” Hallowell, he went on, boasted that he had been to Topeka and had made laws. Picking up a book, Simpson recalled, he tapped on a page with his finger. “I said, here is one of Hal’s laws. I find that it is a law to tax dogs, but I see that Hal proposes to charge two dollars for a bitch and only one dollar for a son of a bitch. Now the party I belong to believes in equal and exact justice to all.”

Women leaders in Kansas attracted even more attention than the men. “Women who never dreamed of becoming public speakers,” wrote Annie Diggs, “grew eloquent in their zeal and fervor. Josh Billings’ saying that ‘wimmin is everywhere,’ was literally true in that wonderful picknicking, speech-making Alliance summer of 1890.” While most Alliance women did rather mundane tasks, a good number of them emerged as compelling leaders and stump speakers. Diggs herself had worked actively in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Kansas and as a lay preacher in the Unitarian Church when, in the mid-eighties, she journeyed east to become Boston correspondent for several Kansas papers. She returned to Kansas, worked with the Alliance, wrote on suffrage and temperance and Alliance issues despite a public disavowal by her Republican editor, and then joined Stephen McLallin, a leading Populist editor, as associate editor of the Topeka
Advocate.
Together they shaped it into the leading reform paper in the state.

There were other noted women leaders: Fanny McCormick, assistant state lecturer who ran for state superintendent of public instruction; Sarah Emery, author of the widely read
Seven Financial Conspiracies
and a spellbinding orator; Kansas-born Fanny Vickrey, another gifted orator. But attracting most attention of all was the indomitable Mary Lease.

Lease was born in Pennsylvania of parents who were Irish political exiles and grew up in a family devastated by the Civil War; her two brothers died in the fighting, her father in Andersonville prison. She moved to Kansas in the early 1870s, taught parochial school, raised a family, tried and failed at farming, studied law—“pinning sheets of notes above her wash
tub”—became one of the first woman lawyers of Kansas, and began a tempestuous career as a speaker for Irish nationalism, temperance, woman’s suffrage, union labor, and the Alliance. A tall, stately woman, she had “a golden voice,” in William Allen White’s recollection, “a deep, rich contralto, a singing voice that had hypnotic qualities.” But she could also hurl “sentences like Jove hurled thunderbolts,” Diggs said, as she gave scores of speeches, some over two hours long, throughout Kansas. Pointing to the starving families of Chicago and the wasted corn piled along the railroad tracks or burned for heat, she exclaimed, “What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more Hell!”

Led by such women and men champions, propelled by acute needs and high hopes, the Kansas Populists roared to a sensational victory in 1890. They carried 96 of the 125 seats in the state’s lower house and swept five out of seven congressional districts, sending Sockless Jerry along with the four others to Washington.

“THE PEOPLE ON TOP!”
headlined the
Nonconformist.
But were they? The Populists elected only one statewide official, their candidate for attorney general. The Republicans still controlled the state administration, the holdover Senate, and the judiciary. The House passed a woman’s suffrage bill but the Senate axed it. The Populists’ one victory was to oust a conservative United States senator and send Populist editor William Peffer to Washington in his place. And now they had a crucial issue—Republican subversion of the will of the people. The Kansas Populists conducted a repeat crusade in 1892 with massive parades and encampments. This time they elected the entire state ticket and most of their congressional candidates again, including Simpson, and gained control of the Senate—but lost their majority in the House, amid accusations of wholesale Republican fraud.

The “first People’s party government on earth” was inaugurated in Topeka at the start of 1893. After a spectacular parade through downtown Topeka the new governor, Lorenzo Lewelling, gave a stirring address—his “incendiary Haymarket inaugural,” a GOP editor called it—followed by Lease and Simpson. But the gala was shortlived. When the new legislature convened, the Populists organized the state Senate, but they and the Republicans each claimed a majority in the House. There followed a tug-of-war that would have been comic opera if the stakes had not been so high: each “majority” organized its own “House” with speaker and officers; neither side would vacate the hall, so they stayed put all night, with the two speakers sleeping, gavels in hand, facing each other behind the podium; finally Lewelling called up the militia—including a Gatling gun minus its firing pin—while the Republicans mobilized an army of deputy sheriffs,
college students, and railroad workers. The GOP legislators smashed their way into the hall with a sledgehammer; and the militia commander, a loyal Republican like most of his troops, refused the governor’s order to expel the invaders.

Bloodshed was narrowly averted when the Populists agreed to let the Republican-dominated Kansas Supreme Court rule on the issue, and predictably the court ruled against them. The Populists then paid the price. Their legislators fared worse than in 1891, passing two election reform measures and putting suffrage on the ballot, but not accomplishing much else. Their chief priority, railroad regulation with teeth, was a direct casualty of the conflict. Clearly, under the American and Kansan systems of checks and balances, a movement could win elections but still not win power.

Alliance cooperation and Populist politics spread through other Northern states, moving west into the mountain states toward the Pacific, north into Minnesota and the Dakotas, east into the big corn spreads. Everywhere the new movement mobilized people and encountered Republican party power and entrenched elites. Thus “in sundry ways, at different speeds, at varied levels of intensity, and at diverse stages of political consciousness, the farmers brought the People’s Party of the United States into being,” in Goodwyn’s summarization. “In so doing, they placed on the nation’s political stage the first multi-sectional democratic mass movement since the American Revolution.”

It was in the South, however, that the Alliance continued to expand most dramatically and yet to encounter the biggest obstacles. The first of these obstacles was the Southern Democracy, which continued to live off its role as defender of the Lost Cause. The second, closely connected, was race— not
simply
race, as C. Vann Woodward has explained, but “the complexities of the class economy growing out of race, the heritage of manumitted slave psychology, and the demagogic uses to which the politician was able to put race prejudice.” Southern Populists reluctantly concluded that they could not achieve the subtreasury plan for credit and currency and other reforms unless they forged a biracial coalition of small landowners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. This meant war with the Southern Democracy and potential division within Populism.

Georgia was an even more tumultuous battleground than Kansas. There one man, backed by the mass of poor farmers, personified the entire movement: Tom Watson. Descended from prosperous slaveholders, he had seen his father lose his forty-five slaves and 1,400 acres after
Appomattox and end up as a tavern owner in Augusta. Young Watson managed to spend two years at Mercer University before running out of money. After years of poverty he turned to law, prospered, and won election to the Georgia lower house at twenty-six, but quit before his term ended.

“I did not lead the Alliance,” Watson recalled. “I followed the Alliance, and I am proud that I did.” After taking leadership in the “jute fight,” he decided to run for Congress as a Democrat with Alliance backing. The white Georgia Alliance sought to field its own candidates within the Democratic party and back non-Alliance candidates only if they endorsed the Alliance program—the “Alliance yardstick,” they called it. Alliance leaders took over the Democratic party state convention, wrote the party platform, won control of both houses of the “farmers’ legislature,” elected the governor and six of ten members of Congress. Watson trounced his Republican opponent almost ten to one in a fight as “hot as Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.”

Coalitions embody conflicts. The lines were now drawn between Alliance members who were mainly Democrats and Democrats who were mainly Alliancers. The national Alliance had urged that its members of Congress not join any party caucus that did not endorse the Alliance platform. The whole Southern delegation but one stayed with the majority Democratic caucus and elected a Georgian, Charles Crisp, to the speakership. The exception was Watson. He and Sockless Jerry Simpson introduced the Alliance platform into Congress, fighting especially hard for the subtreasury proposal. Virtually none of the platform was even reported out of committee except the subtreasury item, which finally came to the floor after Watson used every maneuver to pry it out of committee; by then it was too late for action.

Beaten in Washington, Watson flourished politically at home. This was a time when many black tenants and sharecroppers were becoming alienated from the GOP and were turning to the new party. Watson called on blacks as well as whites to overthrow the plutocracy that had used race hatred to bolster its rule. “You are kept apart,” he told black and white Georgians, “that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.” Campaigning for reelection in 1892, now as leader of the Georgia People’s Party, Watson championed political equality for blacks, economic equality to a lesser extent—and social equality or “mixing” not at all. But despite both white and black Populist support, Watson was beaten for reelection in a campaign marked by massive election fraud and the killing of a score of Populists, most of them black.

Texas was having its own problems with the entrenched white Democracy and entrenched capital. The Texas Alliance Exchange, the linchpin of
cooperative efforts, had gotten off to a flying start by selling vast amounts of cotton to eastern mills and abroad and buying supplies and equipment. Still, it could not break the enslavement of tenants and sharecroppers to the crop lien system, and increasingly it suffered from lack of capital. Banks in Dallas and elsewhere turned a cold face to requests for loans. Desperately the leadership turned to the suballiances themselves for money. In a remarkable popular mobilization, thousands of farmers marched to county courthouses to pledge help. It was not enough; a year later the Texas Exchange closed its doors for good.