Penguin History of the United States of America (79 page)

Their difficulties were very great. Once the Indians and the buffalo had been cleared away there had been a rush to occupy the High Plains: the Missouri Plateau, the Dakota Territory, central and western Kansas and Nebraska, western Texas. Settlers (some of old American stock, some immigrants fresh from Europe – Scandinavians, Germans, Hungarians, Poles) had been energetically encouraged by the transcontinental railroads.
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Others, white and black, fled from Southern tenancy as it closed round them: they scrawled ‘Gone to Texas’ (or just ‘GTT’) on their cabin doors and left for the still largely empty vastness of that state. During the seventies the great railroad land grants were rapidly distributed, at minimal prices, to eager pioneers, and the remaining public lands were also gobbled up, under the Homestead Act, with amazing speed. Times looked good. The Great American Desert had, it seemed, been finally proved mythical: rainfall was abundant, harvests were good and were easily marketed, credit was easy. Everywhere between the Canadian border and the Rio Grande, between the Rockies and the valley of the Missouri, towns mushroomed, farms blossomed. What did it matter if, in order to survive your first year, you not only had to live in a hut made out of turf cut from the prairie (a sod cabin), but had to borrow freely in order to pay for your stock, your seed, your fencing (barbed wire, made in Chicago, was just coming in), your farm machinery? Here in his buggy came the friendly agent of the friendly mortgage company, eager to lend you all you required at a very moderate rate of interest. What did it matter if the only cash crops you had a chance to sell profitably were wheat and corn? The point was, they would most certainly be profitable. Next year’s harvests would pay all debts – no doubt about it, for the golden future of the Far West was clear – so clear that Eastern capital was hurrying to invest. Savings were abundant in places like Boston, New York and Philadelphia in those years, and in their hinterlands, too, and mortgages on Western lands were favourite investments.
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This was also the time when the cattle kings and beef barons were at their height. They imported good English stock, to improve the American breed. The railroads carried the cows to the stockyards at Kansas City and Chicago, where the animals were slaughtered and then put into tins by the Philip D. Armour company or its rivals. Many Easterners preferred cows even to farms, and eagerly invested in the range.

Then came the winter of 1886–7, and the first disaster struck. The cattle died in their hundreds of thousands. Thoroughbred English strains lacked the toughness of the little longhorns; they perished in the vast snowdrifts that piled up against the barbed wire. A late spring found the range a desert again. The cattle kings were ruined.

Worse was to come. The plains were entering a cycle of dry years. In 1887 came a summer of drought: the harvest failed in Kansas. In the next ten years it failed most of the time over most of the Western states. It suddenly dawned on the Easterners that the West was not such a golden investment after all. The supply of credit dried up. The high hopes of the recent past were dead. Pioneers who, a few years back, had set out with the proud motto, ‘Kansas or Bust!’ now turned back, their wagons scrawled with the sad announcement, ‘In God We Trusted, in Kansas We Busted.’ Some of them could not even move back, for their wagons, like their oxen, their furniture and all their other movables, like their land itself, were mortgaged. Foreclosures became devastatingly common. Nor were the farmers weighed down by personal debts only. In happier times it had seemed merely sensible to give the new towns in the new states every modern convenience – street lighting, trams, handsome public buildings. In the good times the pioneers had blithely voted the taxes to pay for these toys. Now the times were bad, but the taxes had to be paid just the same. To cap it all the price of wheat was falling with every year that passed. The crop’s value went down by 30 per cent between 1880 and 1890, and fell further thereafter; in 1894, after the panic of the previous year, it hit its lowest point in American history – 49 cents the bushel (in 1870 it had been $1.05). Down with wheat went the farmers’ income.

It is not in human nature, or at least not in American human nature, to accept the blame for such calamities or to shrug them off as the work of inscrutable Fate. The farmers’ wounds were in large part self-inflicted, and they ought to have known better. There had been flush times on many an earlier frontier (in Alabama, for example, after the Battle of New Orleans) and they had always ended disastrously. The optimism of the American farmer, which had made him a hero, had also made him something of a sucker, who believed his own boosting as well as the promises of the speculators who had real estate to dispose of. He was engaged in an extremely risky business, struggling with the ever-unsteady and uncontrollable variables of the weather, technology and the market, on a basis of inadequate capital, insufficient knowledge and poor communications: it was not Eastern capitalists, after all, who put 4,000 miles of land and sea between the Plains farmer and his ultimate consumers in Europe. But no such admissions, even had they been of a mind to make them, would have been of any help or comfort to the farmers of the West. Instead they looked round for something to blame against which they could take action; and they fixed, inevitably, on the railroads, and, less inevitably, on the new social, economic and political system which the railroads represented.

The problems of American agriculture were beyond the powers of American railways to cause or cure; but angry men and women could not see that, and besides it was notorious that the railroads were ill-run and had grave problems of their own. The battle of half a dozen men for control of the Western routes – Harriman, Huntington, Stanford, Villard and the
inevitable Gould – was scarcely over, while at the same time the roads further east were engaged in a ceaseless, ruthless competition with each other. They used every means at their disposal to achieve a victory, however small. No one of importance was neglected. If he was a Congressman, businessman, state official, newspaper editor or anything else influential, he was given a free pass to travel where he liked: this practice got so out of hand that in the end it was said that everyone could travel free on the railroads except those who could not afford the fares. Big shippers were given special terms – ‘rebates’ – to encourage them to use particular lines; as time went on they got into the way (Standard Oil was particularly firm about this) of insisting on rebates as a condition of using a line at all. Shippers from East to West were given better terms than shippers from West to East. Secret rates were charged to favoured customers. And meantime the railroad network was not even rationally planned. Thousands of miles of roads were built every year, but more with an eye to the war between the giants than to the economic needs of the United States. The war was so widespread and so devastating that the roads, in spite of their enormous capital assets and colossal turnover, tottered constantly on the brink of ruin: in 1880 20 per cent of the mileage in America was controlled by bankrupt roads, and in the next six years foreign investors lost $600,000,000 through the general mismanagement.

The Western farmers had little sympathy for foreign capitalists, whom they regarded as no less villainous than American ones. The real burden of this appalling operation fell, they argued, on their shoulders. It was not merely that they were discriminated against, paying unduly high rates so that the railroads could recoup their losses on free passes and rebates.
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It was not even that they felt that middlemen were absorbing too much of the profit that was earned by the sale of wheat: the grower could not earn enough to pay his way, let alone pay his debts, but the railroads, the bankers, the processors and merchants of America’s farm products, these all grew rich on the traffic. It was not that the farmer was frequently cheated, high-grade grain being classified as inferior and paid for as such; or even that there were seasonal fluctuations in the value of the dollar, so that it was worth less when the farmer had to sell his harvest, more when he had to buy his supplies. All these were real grievances, sharpened by the persistent drought. To the farmer they amounted to proof of a last grievance, greater than all the others of which it was, nevertheless, only the sum. Clearly there was a conspiracy against American agriculture. A monster was arising in the East, a monster of industry, high finance, commerce, urbanization; it threatened everything the traditional American farmer believed in, from the old-time religion to the equality of all citizens in a democracy – ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ – a phrase their spokesmen were never tired of quoting. As the hard times deepened in the late eighties they roused themselves for battle.

Their initial instrument was the so-called Farmers’ Alliance. This was not so much an organization as a loose confederation of organizations (‘suballiances’), each in its way concerned with bettering the farmers’ lot. Originating in Texas, the Alliance grew very rapidly in the later eighties and undertook many useful tasks, such as organizing co-operative purchasing and marketing, lobbying Congress, sending round lecturers to advise on better husbandry and modern farm machinery, and laying on such entertainments as picnics, barbecues and conventions in the wicked towns which the virtuous farmers and their wives had a natural desire to visit. The chief importance of the Alliance, however, lay in its ability to draw the farmers of all America together. In particular it was important as a means of developing contacts between the West and the South.

Conditions in the South were rather worse than they were in Kansas, but they were also very similar. The South and the Plains were given over to monoculture (cotton and wheat); the South had been thrust back to something like the frontier stage by the Civil War and the collapse of slavery, the West was still largely at that stage; family farms had become the standard economic institution in both regions; and, above all, the farmers in both were burdened by debts and interest charges in a period when money was getting dearer and dearer. Wheat and cotton prices alike nearly halved between 1860 and 1890.
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About the only thing which separated South and West was that they had fought on different sides in the Civil War; and even that came to matter less and less, in large part because conditions in western Texas (which had been part of the Confederacy) were so similar, in climate, crops and social structure, to those in the rest of the High Plains. It is not surprising that the sections came together in the Farmers’ Alliance.

Nor is it surprising that the members of the Alliance began to seek redress in politics. Disgruntled Americans had never been content, when feeling unduly poor, to rely on sweet reason and mere social or economic action. Sam Adams’s father had fought for paper money and a land bank in colonial Massachusetts; a debtor party had swept Kentucky in 1819;
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not to mention that there had been a strong element of debtor resentment behind the American Revolution, the rise of two-party politics and the great Southern rebellion. Thanks to Appomattox, the precedent of Jefferson Davis was now as obsolete as those of Daniel Shays and the Whisky Rebellion, but more recent examples could be found. When the federal government returned to the gold standard there had sprung up the Greenback party, as we have seen, to agitate for the return of non-convertible paper dollars. The Greenback movement had coincided with the beginnings of a widespread agitation for alcoholic prohibition: in 1880, when the Greenbackers fought a Presidential election for the last time, the Prohibition party fought one for the first time (and is at it still). Eight years later the great national parties seemed as much out of touch as before: Democrats and Republicans battling over the tariff and competing to get their hands on the spoils. To the members of the Farmers’ Alliance it seemed only sense to start a new movement, which should bring their case forcefully before the American people. All over the West and South in 1888 farmer parties (calling themselves Independents, or People’s parties) contested the state elections and in many places did surprisingly well, though at the Presidential level everything went on as usual: a Republican, Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901), grandson of William Henry Harrison, replaced a Democrat, Grover Cleveland, in the White House. In the years that followed irresistible pressure built up among the discontented to repeat the experiment on a national scale, in the hope of founding a great new political party which should sweep either the Democrats or the Republicans or both into the oblivion which had earlier swallowed the Federalists and the Whigs.

Not all the farmers agreed that this was the sensible thing to do. For one thing, not all the farmers were unsuccessful: for example, dairy farming in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana was highly profitable, and the dairy farmers were too strong and well-organized to be victims of the monopolists. In the South, where the Democratic party enjoyed a virtual monopoly of power, office and electoral success, Ben Tillman of South Carolina argued that the proper course was to take over the Democratic party from within. He demonstrated his case by capturing his own state in this fashion and holding its Governorship for four years, after which he was elected US Senator – an office he held until his death in 1918. But Tillman did not do very much with the power that he wrested from the ‘Redeemer’ oligarchy;
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and anyway the problems that obsessed the farmers could not be solved within the borders of one state alone, or even within the borders of both sections. They would have to be tackled nationally, and the national leadership of both the old parties was quite unresponsive to the new movement. So conferences and conventions were held during 1891 and 1892, culminating in the great convention at Omaha, Nebraska, in July 1892, when the newly formed People’s party nominated General James Weaver, late of the Army of the Potomac, for President of the United States. His running mate was Major James Field, late of the Army of Northern Virginia. Weaver was a good candidate: an able speaker, an upright and diligent man who had served three terms in Congress as a Greenbacker and had been the Greenback Presidential candidate in 1880. The ticket received 1,029,846 votes, as compared with 5,555,426 for the successful Democrats and 5,182,690 for the Republicans: a good beginning. But the real strength of the People’s party lay in its platform and in the enthusiasm of its supporters; these were the forces which were to make a deep mark on American history.