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A Reappraisal of the Causes of Farm Protest in the United States, 1870–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Anne Mayhew
Anne Mayhew
Affiliation:
The University of Tennessee
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Extract

Between 1870 and 1900 American farmers organized in the Grange, the Alliances, and the Peoples (Populist) Party and protested against a variety of economic ills. Economic historians have generally explained the farm organizations and the protests in the same way that the farmers themselves explained them—in terms of low agricultural prices and high costs of inputs resulting in part from the monopolistic organization of the suppliers of those inputs. However, there now exists considerable evidence indicating that the economic conditions of the time were not: as the farmers depicted them, thus raising two questions: (1) if the farmers' statements about their economic state cannot be accepted as historical fact, then why were the farmers so angry? and (2) why did they choose to protest the issues which they did?

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 1972 , pp. 464 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1972

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References

1 The two most frequently cited and most detailed accounts of the farmers' organization of this period are Hicks, John D.The Populist Revolt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961Google Scholar; first published by The University of Minnesota Press in 1931), and Buck, Solon JustusThe Granger Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913)Google Scholar. Both of these works explain the protests in the farmers' terms, although Buck does note in the first paragraph of his book that “… it would be untrue to say that the condition of the American farmers was retrograding in the decade following the Civil War.” (p. 3). He does not, however, pursue this argument in the rest of the book. Fred A. Shannon, in his authoritative book on agriculture during this period, The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968)Google Scholar explains the protests in the farmers' terms, as do most textbooks.

2 Most of this evidence is presented in Bogue, Allan G.Money at Interest (New York: Russell & Russell, 1955)Google Scholarpassim, and North, DouglassGrowth and Welfare in the American Past (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), ch. iiGoogle Scholar.

3 Although it is frequently emphasized that Southern farmers faced a different set of problems in the post-Civil War period from the set faced by their counterparts in the Middle West, the protests of the two groups are usually explained in the same terms, perhaps because in an effort to forge a broader alliance the leaders of farm groups emphasized the common plight of all American farmers (and occasionally of workers, too). Ignoring basic differences in problems faced and solutions desired may be good politics, but it is not necessarily good history.

4 Cf. Buck, The Granger Movement; Hicks, The Populist Revolt; and Pollack, NormanThe Populist Mind (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1967)Google Scholar.

5 This, with variations, is the standard explanation found in textbooks; e.g., Robertson, Ross M.History of the American Economy (2nd ed.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), pp. 260–64Google Scholar.

6 North, Growth and Welfare in the American Past, pp. 137–48.

7 Ibid., pp. 137–42.

8 Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier, p. 300.

9 Ibid., p. 292.

10 North, Growth and Welfare in the American Past, p. 146.

11 Using Strauss, Frederick and H., Louis Bean's estimates of gross farm income as given in Gross Farm Income and Indices of Farm Production and Prices in the United States, 1869–1937 (Washington: G.P.O., 1940), p. 23Google Scholar, and the increase in the number of farms as reported by the Censuses for 1870, 1880, and 1890, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945 (Washington: G.P.O., 1949)Google Scholar, Series E 1–5, it is easy to determine that gross per farm income declined during the period. This fact, combined with Schultz's, Theodore W. estimates in Agriculture in an Unstable Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1945), p. 68Google Scholar, of low income elasticity of demand for agricultural products have seemed to be strong evidence that farmers must have suffered declining incomes. However, total output of the major Midwestern crops grew steadily, exports of those crops increased rapidly, and the Midwest provided an increasing share of the total U.S. production of wheat, corn, and meat. Thus, it is not clear that Midwestern farm incomes were failing during this period. It remains possible that gross per farm income declined in the U.S. as a whole but did not decline in the Midwest. Of course it is possible that with improving terms of trade for agriculture, real incomes of Midwestern farmers were rising even if their money income was falling.

12 Bogue, Money at Interest, pp. 1–6, 262–76.

13 See, for example, Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier, pp. 3–4; Taylor, Carl C.The Farmers’ Movement, 1620–1920 (New York: American Book Company, 1953), pp. 1–12;Google Scholar and Davis, Lance E., Hughes, Jonathan R. T., and McDougall, Duncan M., American Economic History: The Development of a National Economy (3rd ed.; Homewood: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1969), pp. 367–68Google Scholar.

14 Taylor, The Farmers’ Movement, p. 71.

15 North, Growth and Welfare in the American Fast, p. 142.

16 Ibid., p. 145.

17 We all know that many of the American voters who are excited by the campaign slogan “Law and Order” are not concerned with the preservation of domestic tranquility by protecting or extending formal or substantive due process. A statement that these voters are reacting to “a complex economic-sociological phenomenon” would strike most of us as correct—but not a sufficient explanation of how residents of Cicero came to associate “Law and Order” with keeping Cicero white, nor even an explanation of why they are concerned at all. North's comments do not tell us why the farmers were up in arms nor why “Destroy Monopoly Power” was the “Law and Order” cry of the late nineteenth century.

18 A willingness to adopt new techniques and a desire for economic improvement are not characteristics found only in commercial systems, as the histories of Africa, Asia, and the American Indians illustrate. The rapid spread of cassava in Africa after its introduction from South America, maize in India, and the horse among the Plains Indians of the U.S. all took place in non-commercial societies.

19 In Hays, Samuel P.The Response to Industrialization (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 27Google Scholar and in Taylor, The Farmers’ Movement, p. 492, commercialization is cited as a cause of the agrarian unrest. Although some economic historians such as Kirkland, Edward C. in A History of American Economic Life (4th ed.; New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969)Google Scholar, ch. xv, do mention adjustment to commercialized agriculture as a problem for late nineteenth century farmers in the U.S., they do not use this adjustment as a major part of their explanation of the protests.

20 That this was the case is shown in Berry, Thomas S., Western Prices Before 1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943)Google Scholar, and North, Douglass C., The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1961)Google Scholar.

21 One of the major themes of Norman Pollack in The Populist Response to Industrial America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962)Google Scholar is that neither Grangerism nor Populism were “Luddite” responses to technology. There can be little doubt that he is correct and that historians have been correct in their insistence that the U.S. did not have a “peasant sector” which was resistent to new technology and new and profitable opportunities for disposal of produce. But absence of a “peasant problem” is not proof of commercialization.

22 Gates, Paul W., The Farmer's Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 413Google Scholar.

23 Bogue, Allan G., From Prairie to Corn Belt, Farming in Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 123Google Scholar.

24 Gates, The Farmer's Age, p. 403.

25 Idem.

26 Bogue, Money at Interest, Cf. pp. 262–76.

27 Ibid., pp. 274–75.

28 Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (3rd ed.; New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1950), p. 74Google Scholar.

29 Bogue, Money at Interest, p. 275.

30 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 100.