Farmers Alliance Essay Research Paper Farmers AllianceIn

Farmers Alliance Essay, Research Paper

Farmers Alliance

In the 1880s, as drought hit the wheat-growing areas of the Great Plains and

prices for Southern cotton sunk to new lows, many tenant farmers fell into deep

debt. This exacerbated long-held grievances against railroads, lenders,

grain-elevator owners, and others with whom farmers did business. By the early

1890s, as the depression worsened, some industrial workers shared these farm

families’ views on labor and the trusts.

By the end of the 1880s, farmers had formed two major organizations: the

National Farmer.s Alliance, located on the Plains west of the Mississippi and

know as the Northwestern Alliance, and the Farmers. Alliance and Industrial

Union, based in the South and known as the Southern Alliance.

The southern alliance began in Texas in 1875 but did not assume major

proportions until Dr. Charles W. Macune took over the leadership in 1886. Its

agents spread across the South, where farmers were fed up with crop liens,

depleted lands, and sharecropping. By 1890, the Southern Alliance claimed more

than a million members. Like the Grange, the Alliance distributed educational

materials, and it also established cooperative grain elevators, marketing

associations, and retail stores.

Loosely affiliated with the South en Alliance, the separate Colored Farmers.

National Alliance and Cooperative Union enlisted black farmers in the South.

Claiming over a million members, it probably had closer to 250, 000. Blacks

organized at considerable peril. In 1891, when black cotton pickers struck for

higher wages near Memphis, the strike was violently put down; fifteen strikers

were lynched. The abortive strike ended the Colored Farmers. Alliance.

On the Plains, the Northwestern Alliance, a smaller organization, was formed

in 1880. But it lacked the centralized organization of the southern alliance. In

1889, the Southern Alliance changed its name to the national Farmers Alliance

and Industrial Union and persuaded the three strongest state alliance in the

Plains to join. Thereafter, the new organization dominated the Alliance

movement.

The Alliance turned early to politics. In the West, its leader rejected both

the Republicans and the Democrats and organized their own party. The Southern

Alliance resisted the idea of a new party for fear it might divide the white

votes, thus undercutting white supremacy. Instead, the Southerners wanted to

capture control of the dominant Democratic Party. But regardless of their

political positions, such figures and Leonidas Polk, president of the National

Farmers. Alliance, Jeremiah Simpson of Kansas, and Mary E. Lease provided the

movement with forceful leadership.

Meeting in Ocala, Florida, in 1890, the Alliance adopted the Ocala Demands,

the platform it pushed for as long as it existed. First and foremost, the

demands called for the creation of a sub-treasury system, which would allow

farmers to store their crops in government warehouses. In return, they could

claim Treasury notes for up to 80 percent of the local market value of the crop,

a loan to be repaid when the crops were sold. Farmers could thus hold their

crops for the best price. The Ocala Demands also urged the free coinage of

silver, an end to protective tariffs, and national banks, and federal income

tax, the direct election of senators, and stricter regulation of the railroad

companies.

The Alliance strategy worked well in the election of 1890. Alliance leaders

claimed thirty-eight Alliance supporters elected to Congress, with at least a

dozen more pledged to Alliance principles. In 1890, Populists won control of the

Kansas state legislature, and Kansan William Peffer became the party’s first

U.S. Senator. Peffer, with his long white beard, was a humorous figure to many

Eastern journalists and politicians, who saw little evidence of Populism in

their states and often treated the party as a joke. Nonetheless, Western and

Southern Populists gained support rapidly. In 1892 the national party was

officially founded through a merger of the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of

Labor. In that year the Populist presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, won

over one million votes. Between 1892 and 1896, however, the party failed to make

further gains, in part because of fraud, intimidation, and violence by Southern

Democrats.

By 1896 the Populist organization was in even more turmoil than that of

Democrats. Two main factions had appeared. One, the fusion Populists, sought to

merge with the Democrats, using the threat of independent organization to force

changes in the major party’s platform. The Populist organization in Kansas had

already "fused"–over the bitter protest of those who considered this

a sell-out. Fusionists argued that the regionally based third party could never

hold nation

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