The Populists
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Life on the Frontier in late 19th Century
Frontier had closed
- Sodbusting days over. The sodbusting pattern in which each generation
had moved West to break the soil on the frontier had no more great land
area to claim.
- The farm dominated two major regions:
- The Great Plains. The grain growing area from Illinois to the
Rockies and from Minnesota to Texas.
- The South. After the Civil War sharecropping had become common.
Plantations were either converted to sharecropping, or broken up by being
taken over for failure to pay taxes and sold at auction. Southern farming
dominated by cotton and tobacco.
- The farm regions were ethnically diverse. Groups of immigrants
had been recruited to the plains by the railroads. Typically, the first
generation retained their ethnic identity in churches, but the second generation
moved into the dominant culture.
The Farmers were moving from farming to agriculture
- Farming was less subsistence. The farms still had gardens and
grew most of their own food, but focus now is on producing cash crops for
markets. Farms are laid out through surveying rather than being along watercourses
and there was more land than needed for subsistence. The land you had determined
your crop.
- Farmers are commercially involved. Jefferson's yeoman farmer,
free because he worked his land in solitude was now gone. Farmers bought
land from the railroad on credit. They purchased seed on loans based on
expectation of their crops. The industrial revolution brought machinery
that required money that needed to be borrowed, and the size of cash crop
farms demanded that the farmer have such machinery. Marketing the cash
crop depended on the railroads hauling their crop to Eastern markets. The
result was a farmer integrated thoroughly into the commercial economy.
Such farmers were susceptible to the growth and crash of economy as well
as the vagaries of weather, pests, and disease of their crops.
The new relationships required that farmers develop community
- Now tied to a location, they turned to building bonds with neighbors
- They saw there problems with the commerical economy as a characteristic
shared with other farmers
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Three movements to build public life
The Grange
- Initially a movement to improve agriculture. Travelling speakers
would speak about the latest scientific agricultural techniques, and the
operations of the commercial economy. An offshoot of the Morrill Act which
established land grant universities (like the University of Maryland) to
advance agriculture.
- The speakers were the knowledgable who educated the farmers.
The Grange Hall provided a successor to the lyceum and chatauqua where
farmers came to hear lectures. They heard about crop rotation, hybridized
seed, and other scientific advancements. They also learned the language
of commercial activity: markets, supply and demand, borrowing capital,
investment strategies, and so on. Thus, science, business, and education
(training) were brought to agriculture.
- Had good and bad effects. The Grange provided a rhetoric which commercialized
agriculture. Commercialization left the farmers at the mercy of the bankers
and railroads they so detested. The Grange also introduced the rhetoric of
"success" that had come to dominate the rhetoric of entrepreurialism.
In the process, farming was transformed into a public activity.
- By mid-1870s, the Grange was breaking apart over the question of whether
it should become involved in politics. One side of this split believed
that the Grange should remain an educational organization transforming farming
into agriculture. The other side believed that only political action could
address the farmer's grievences. The government provided farmers a political
identity apart from the dominant government controlled by the railroads. By
1876, the Grange had evolved the Greenback Party.
- The style of its political rhetoric:
- knowledgable. The fact-based rhetoric had its roots in the early
Grange rhetoric of educating the farmers. It stressed that "simple
farmers" actually possessed a "sophisticated knowledge"
of their situation.
- depicted the farmer within an economic system. It embraced the
new rhetoric of statistics, the market, and economic sophistication. The
rhetoric depicted a life within a system rather than being transcendant.
- accusatory. Rhetoric featured a blame of business and the railroad
for the farmers problems. The polemic rhetoric was the direct descendant
of the ungenteel rhetoric of the earlier frontier. In its name-calling
and devilment of its enemies it expressed an extreme opposition. Its logical
extension was violence, but this movement spawned little violence.
Some Grange rhetoric
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Farmer's Alliance
- Its decade was the 1880s. As the economy again went sour in the 1880s,
the Farmer's Alliance grew. It was the successor to the Grange, but emphasized
the Grange's activism rather than its educational function.
- Farmer's Alliance invented the lecturer system. Each local chapter
chose a lecturer -- someone in the chapter who had an ability to move its
membership. In the local meetings, these speakers gave speeches, learning
what moved their neighbors and polishing their way to capture the situation
that they and their neighbors found themselves in as a public problem.
These local speakers gave speeches at the district conventions and developed
their speaking to a broader range of farmers. In turn, the district's best
speakers learned their craft at the state conventions. The result was a
rich tradition of speaking that spawned a rich public sphere constructing
the farmer's problems as public concerns. Travelling lecturers developed,
but the system always tied these lecturers with a local chapter where they
kept their immersion in their local community.
- The style of Farmer's Alliance discourse was a natural outgrowth
of the Grange's political rhetoric. It was polemic and extremely accusatory,
yet had the sophistication of understanding.
- Farmer's Alliance established organizations of farmers to confront
economic problems. Cooperatives established banks and constructed elevators
to allow farmers more power over the economy. They viewed this move as
a counter-force to the control of their financial lives by those who exploited
them.
Some Alliance rhetoric
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The Populist Party
- Union of the Farmer's Alliance and the Knights of Labor. This was an
organized political party. It took control of state governments in several
Plains states. The alliance was to create a national party since it combined
the Knights' power in the Northeast and Midwest with the Farmer's Alliance
strength in the Plains and South. The Knights brought very little to the union,
however, and the farmers were always the strength of the Populist Party.
- Populism was an oral movement. It used the lecturer system of the
Farmer's Alliance. The place for public life was the old Granger Hall where
farmers talked about their situation and organized to elect populist candidates,
and the outdoor fairgrounds where large gatherings of populists came and listened
to speakers explain the farmer's problems. The major public events of Populism
were huge parties, the direct descendent of the camp meetin' of the frontier.
These often drew tens of thousands of people and featured the speakers of
the movement.
- Populism was also a descendant of the reform movements of the earlier
period. It had an openness of voice. Many of the speakers were women
chosen by the locals as excellent speakers. Mary Elizabeth ("Ellen")
Lease was an example, but there were many others who travelled the Plains
even after the Party was swallowed by the Democratic Party. Prohibition
was another cause of the movement.
- Populist rhetoric was:
- a rhetoric of class. It depicted the farmers as oppressed by
the wealthy class of bankers, railroad magnates, and the other wealthy
class.
- a rhetoric of system. It saw the farmers as caught in an economic
system controlled by the wealthy and targetted the end or modification
of that system. It motivated not in terms of God or history or culture
but in terms of the reality of their place in the system and the need to
address it.
- a rhetoric of conspiracy. Identified power being actively exercised
by the wealthy class to oppress the less powerful. It drew vivid images
of that power.
- envisioned government as a counterforce to the wealthy. Proposed
regulation of the economic system and other measures to control abuses.
- The Populists returned the farmers to the political system as an
expression of their public life. The established parties were viewed
as the parties of wealth and power. The Populists believed they could displace
those parties and use the power of government to counter the oppressiveness
of wealth.
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A Couple Populist Orators
Mary Elizabeth Lease
- She was called Mary Ellen by her family and was known and "Mary
Yellin'" on the stump.
- One of many women speakers of agrarian movement. Although many of these
speakers were socialist, Mary Ellen was more mainstream.
- A strident rhetoric with the invective style of the ungenteel. "Farmers
need to raise more hell and less corn" was one of her famous phrases.
- A favorite speaker at populist rallies.
- Some Mary Elizabeth Lease rhetoric
Sockless Jerry Simpson
- Got his name from his references to the silk stockings worn by the
wealthy. A newspaper reporter seeking to disparage him observed that he
probably wore no socks at all, and the name stuck with him. He wore it
as a badge of honor.
- His style was to draw a clear distinction between the farmers and the
wealthy class using a full-blown ungenteel "taking the skin off."
- Some Simpson rhetoric
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