The Path to Power (9 page)

Sam had lost none of the Johnson temper. Once, when his son George “belittled the scriptures, his father … knocked him across the room.” And he had lost none of the Johnson interest in topics beyond the state of the weather. The Austin paper was still delivered every other day; every other day he would spur his horse, Old Reb, into the Pedernales to ford it to the mailbox on the far side; he would sit in Weinheimer’s Store in Stonewall all evening discussing politics and government. In later years, it is recalled, he would often sit on his front porch, reading his Bible or his newspaper, chatting with passersby—or just sitting, an aging man with a snowy beard and a thick mane of white hair, gazing in the evening out over the Pedernales landscape that was dotted here and there with a few lonely cows wandering through hills that had once been covered with great herds.

D
URING
S
AM JOHNSON’S
thirty years back on the Pedernales, there was one brief interruption in this round of life. During a two- or three-week campaign in 1892, he talked about his theories of government not just at Weinheimer’s Store but at barbecues and public “speakings”—as the Populist Party candidate for the State Legislature. Although he lost, by almost a two-to-one margin, Populist candidates for statewide office carried the district, and the Hill Country as a whole.

This was fitting. All through the South and West, a belief had been rising among men who felt themselves trapped by forces beyond their control, a belief that, faced by forces too big for them to fight, they needed help in fighting them. This feeling had been rising—slowly but steadily—since the Civil War. Farmers would sweat and slave over their land, and sow and plow and pick a crop, and then, when they brought the crop to market, they would find that because of prices in the East, or prices in Europe, or railroad freighting charges, or grain-elevator storage charges, their crop wasn’t worth what they had thought it was worth—they would find, often, that what they might receive for the old crop wasn’t enough even to buy seed for a new one, and that, when they tried to borrow money to buy the seed, interest rates were so high that they knew even before they began to plant the new crop that it couldn’t possibly pay out. If the 1870’s and ’80’s and ’90’s were a desperate time for farmers, nowhere were times more desperate than in the Hill Country. In other areas, farmers might believe that railroads were fleecing them; the Hill Country didn’t have railroads—because laying tracks through hills was too expensive in a sparsely populated district—and the cost of getting crops to market by wagon (crops that often spoiled because of the length of the trip) ate up farmers’ profits. In other areas, farmers might groan under interest rates; in the Hill Country, rates were a moot point; its banks, as poor as their depositors (cash on hand in the Johnson City Bank in 1890: $1,945), had little money to lend at
any
rate. In other areas, farmers felt the price for their crops was too low; in the Hill
Country, the problem was trying to get crops to grow at all. And it was in the Hill Country that America’s great agrarian revolt began. In 1877, a handful of impoverished farmers gathered at a tiny cabin in Lampasas County, Texas, about fifty miles north of Johnson City, and founded the Farmers Alliance, which became the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, and then the People’s Party (the “Populists”)—the party which was the greatest mass popular movement in America’s history.

Out of the letters mailed to the Alliance journal, the
Southern Mercury
, from those scattered farmhouses along the Pedernales River glares bitterness and resentment.

“Our lot is cast here in a rough portion of the land where but a small per cent of the land is tillable, hence farmers are thinly settled,” wrote J. D. Cady of Blanco County’s New Chapel Alliance. “We number only about eight male members in good standing. But if we do live away up here on the Pedernales River, amid rocks, cliffs and waterfalls, cedars and wild oaks, we are not varments, but have hearts just like men.”

The letters were written by men and women who seldom wrote letters. “I will try to scratch a few lines to the brethern,” said sixty-year-old Larkin Landrum of Blanco. “If I could spell good enough so I could interest them I would like to write, but I never got to go to school in my life, nor learned my letters till I was 35 years old. If I knew that I could do the Alliance cause any good I would like to try. … If this is printed and I can read it, I will write once more; for if I can read it I know other people can, who have been to school and worn shoes.” They wrote out of a sense of injustice at the way farmers were fleeced by merchants (“Now, Mister Laboring Man, don’t buy anything you can do without till you get out of debt, and then not buy till you have the money to pay for it, for when you buy on time you pay from forty to 100% more than you should”)—by, it sometimes seemed, everyone who wasn’t a farmer: “I see someone put in a piece about professional men. Let me have a say about him. … The lawyer, for instance, will pay you $1 for a load of wood and charge you from $5 to $20 for a little writing. Study about this and see if there is any justice in it. I don’t speak of the lawyer alone, but all who do not work. I am an Alliance man. Yes, and I am not ashamed to own it.” They wrote out of desperation. “I see so many letters from the brotherhood in different parts of the state all aglow with the good news of prosperous condition of the Alliance that it grieves me to chronicle the sad condition of this section,” said James Blevin of Dripping Springs. “We are worse than lukewarm, we are cold, almost to heart, and unless we can get a remedy soon, we are gone. … Without a remedy, all is lost that we hoped for.” And they wrote because the Alliance gave them hope, because it was a hand—the only hand—held out to help the people of the Hill Country. In their isolation, its newspaper gave them a sense of brotherhood. “I consider myself related to all who correspond to the generous old
Mercury
. … Remember the
Mercury
,” wrote Minnie M. Crider. “If we help
the
Mercury
, it will help us to throw off this yoke of bondage and be free people,” wrote Minnie’s sister Sarah. The famed Alliance lecturers, who crisscrossed the South and West, spreading the word, brought them hope. The farmers pleaded with the Alliance to send more of them to the Hill Country: “Brethern, in sending out lecturers, please remember our isolated corner, and send us in time of need.” When none arrived, they were all too ready to feel the slight. “As we live way down here, we are in the dark a good deal in regard to the business of our noble order. … We are afraid you have never learned that we have a real cute alliance here. … We had an ‘encampment’ and honestly expected the presence of a ‘Big Gun’ with it, but, no we were sadly left, as usual. …” But when a lecturer did make the journey, hope was rekindled and these poorest of farmers scraped together their dues, or as much of them as they could. “We are in a drouth-stricken district and find it hard work to keep the wolf from our doors,” wrote Mrs. Emma Eppes of Blanco County. “But we have a prospect for good crops this season. … some have paid up while others have been found wanting the means, but all will pay just as soon as possible.”

At first, the hope was embodied in cooperatives: Alliance warehouses to which all the farmers of a district would bring their bales and pool them in a single lot on which bids would be taken not only from the local buyers who previously had been able to bid without competition but from cotton buyers all over the South; Alliance purchasing agents who could deal directly with manufacturers of plows and other farm implements and sell them directly to individual farmers, thereby eliminating not only the middleman’s profits but also the enormously high interest the manufacturers charged for selling on credit. Although it proved impossible, even after warehouses and purchasing centers had been established throughout the rest of Texas, to establish them in the Hill Country—one mass sale that was held at Fredericksburg proved a disaster; without a railroad, the buyers said, the cotton could be shipped out only at prohibitive cost—the Hill Country farmers brought their cotton in long caravans of wagons sixty, seventy, a hundred, miles to Austin, and when their bales brought at the Alliance warehouse there prices a dollar or two above what they had expected, they rode home with their empty wagons flying the blue flags that had became the symbol of victory in the Texas Alliance. (In Fort Worth and Dallas, too, the blue flags were flying. By 1885, the Texas Alliance had 50,000 members; by 1886, 100,000; by 1890, 200,000. A spokesman exulted that the Alliance had become “a power in the land.” Alliance lecturers began to fan out from Texas to farm counties in other states with a simple message: Join the Alliance, build a county cooperative, a county general store if need be, and get free of the credit merchant. Observers in a dozen farm states echoed the words of one in Mississippi, who said the Alliance has “swept across” that state “like a cyclone.”)

Outside forces broke the cooperatives. The big Eastern manufacturing
houses refused to sell to them, insisting on retaining their middlemen. Not only Eastern manufacturers and banks but local merchants and banks refused credit to members of cooperatives. Railroads and grain-elevator companies used all their power against the farmers—and won, because farmers could not escape the simple fact that they could not sell their crop if they did not own it; and it was the furnishing merchant who owned it. The Alliance then attempted to free the farmer from the merchant by establishing a central state exchange in Texas to market the state’s entire cotton crop from one central point while giving the farmers the money they needed for the next year at bearable rates. (The Southern Exchange planned to get the money from banks, using notes given by the farmers as collateral.) The Exchange opened in Dallas in September, 1887, and the bankers tried to break it by refusing to accept the notes as collateral—by refusing, in fact, to give the Exchange money “upon any terms or any security.” And when the Alliance, in desperation, was forced to turn to its own members for money, the Hill Country gave all it could—the thirty-four members of the New Chapel Alliance of Blanco County assessed each of its members a dollar; the assessment would be paid, the secretary wrote Alliance headquarters, “as soon as the cotton comes in.” The Hill Country Alliance men stood firm behind their leaders. The banks, and the press they dominated in Texas, tried to smear the head of the Exchange, Charles W. Macune, by blaming its financial crisis on him; the farmers of Hays County in the Hill Country chipped in their pennies for a telegram which said their Alliance “loves Dr. Macune for the enemies he has made.” Bankers in other states, determined to break the Exchange, joined the Texas bankers in cutting off credit. Alliance leaders proclaimed June 9, 1888, as “the day to save the Exchange,” and asked the farmers to demonstrate their solidarity. Early on that Saturday morning, long caravans of farm wagons—including some from the Hill Country—began to clatter into almost two hundred county seats throughout Texas. The farmers stood for hours in the blazing summer heat. They stood silently. They held banners—lettered by their wives—which said: THE SOUTHERN EXCHANGE SHALL STAND.

The Southern Exchange fell; its members pledged enough for it to survive, but couldn’t pay their pledges. The Alliancemen had tried—through cooperatives and boycotts, and endless wagon treks to distant markets, and contributions that came out of their wives’ butter-and-egg pennies—to help themselves, and had failed, and the lesson they had learned was that they
couldn’t
help themselves. The forces they were fighting were too big for them to fight. They turned to a force that was big enough to fight—and win—on their behalf, if only it could be motivated to do so: their government.

It was only right, the farmers believed, that their government do so. Government was a basic cause of their troubles, they felt, and government must be the means to redress those troubles. Government, through its vast subsidies of land and money and its biased laws, had made it possible for
railroads to become powerful, and now railroads were strangling the farmers; should not government, on their behalf, now regulate railroads? Government had protected manufacturers at their expense by high tariffs; should not government now lower tariffs? Government had, by abrogating much of its effective control over the currency, allowed bankers to regulate it, forcing farmers to pay off their liens and mortgages in dollars worth more than the dollars they had borrowed; should not government now take back control of currency and make repayment easier, not harder, for debtors? Government had, by forcing the country onto the gold standard, caused the constant, unending fall in the price of cotton and all the farmers’ other crops; should not the gold standard be ended in favor of silver? Government had acted against their interests in so many ways (the first platform of the Populist Party seemingly laid
all
wrong to government: “Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislatures, the Congress. … From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice, we breed two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”). Should not there be now a broad-scale enactment of laws redressing this imbalance? Government had acted to oppress the farmers in a thousand ways; shouldn’t it now stretch forth its hand to help them—in a thousand ways? (Some of the ways being suggested were new to America: the march of Jacob S. Coxey’s pitiful little “army” of unemployed on Washington in 1894 was an attempt to dramatize his theory that the government should help the unemployed with a system of federal public-works relief.) “The powers of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded,” said the 1892 platform of the People’s Party, “… to the end that oppression, unjustice and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.”

For a while, their hopes were very high. The Alliance lecturers who had brought the word out of Texas had fanned agrarian revolt into flames. In 1890, taking command of the Democratic Party in a dozen states, the Alliancemen won control of their legislatures, elected six Governors and sent to Washington four Senators and more than fifty Congressmen (including Davis H. Waite of Colorado, known as “Bloody Bridles” Waite because he had declared that it was better “that blood flow to the horses’ bridles rather than our national liberties should be destroyed”). In Kansas, the third party was known as the People’s Party, and in 1892 that name was adopted by the new national party—and its candidate polled more than a million votes, and twenty-two electoral votes (because in the South the Populists, as they were becoming known, refused in general to play white-supremacist politics, all twenty-two were in the mountain states, where they not only elected two Governors but captured twice as many counties as both major parties combined and in a single election established themselves as the majority party). Except for the Republicans, no new party had ever done so well in its first bid for national power. In the Congressional elections of 1894, the Populists rolled up more than a million and a half votes, making heavy inroads into the Democratic vote in the South and West, and it appeared likely that the
increasing number of Democrats who saw silver as the crucial issue would desert the Democratic Party in 1896 and make the Populists a major party in America—after all, an analogous situation in the 1850’s had resulted in the demise of the Whigs and the creation of the Republican Party.