Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Street, that was strangling him--a power that controlled the government
at Washington, that manipulated the currency system, and that was
engaged in a scheme to augment its holdings by forcing up the value of
the dollar and automatically increasing the value of the indebtedness
it had gathered in its vaults. Clearly it was high time for the
deflated farmer to get into politics on his own account if he were to
save himself from beggary, and so during the Gilded Age began a great
agrarian revolt against capitalism that was to turmoil the next quarter
of a century--a revolt that was to mark the last effective organization
of the farmers to combat the new order, the last flare-up of an
old-fashioned agrarian America before it was submerged by the middle
class.
II • The Farmer Considers Politics
By the early seventies it was becoming clear to the Middle Border
that the policy of Whiggery took no account of the needs of the
farmer. Government was indifferent to him, whether at the capital of
his state or at Washington, and governmental programs--whether in
the matter of protective tariffs and land-grants, in its unconcern
at monopoly extortion, or in the contraction of the currency with
a view to the resumption of specie payments--ran so counter to his
interests that the dullest began to question the fairness of the
state. It had ceased to concern itself with the welfare of the whole.
The combination of paternalism and _laissez faire_ that marked the
Whiggery of the times could be interpreted by the suspicious farmer,
indeed, only as a surrender of government to capitalism. It had lost
all pretense of fairness in the distribution of governmental favors,
and withheld or granted aid with the single objective of furthering
the interests of powerful groups. It sanctioned the use of the state
by business interests for purposes of exploitation, and declined to
exercise its power in the interests of the consumer. It granted tariffs
and subsidies, yet refused to regulate the monopoly power it had
created. It was no longer a government of the people but a government
of business, concerned for the interests of exploitation, and if the
farmer were to gain a hearing he must first make himself feared.
Of necessity, therefore, the agrarian program entailed a political
struggle of great bitterness. There would be no adequate relief granted
until the farmers had wrested control of government from the class that
was exploiting them. The battle between agrarianism and capitalism,
in consequence, from the outset was a struggle for control of the
political state, that beginning in single commonwealths was eventually
carried to the federal government. Hope of effective aid from state
governments quickly proved illusory, for when the Illinois farmers
passed a law to curb the railways the federal courts set aside their
enactment and bade the farmers--to use a later phrase--go home and slop
the hogs. They must not meddle with matters beyond their comprehension.
In consequence of such slaps in the face the farmers fell to perfecting
their organizations and arousing class consciousness until there issued
from the long debates of the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance the great
movement of Populism that proposed to reach as far as Washington,
install there the representatives of the producing classes, and
refashion the political state in accordance with the democratic needs
of the plain people.
So ambitious a program needed time, not only for the farmers to
organize but to clarify their policy. They were ill equipped for a
serious struggle. With the rise of capitalism agriculture had been
steadily falling in social prestige. As a result of the decline of the
landed squirearchy in the North and the overthrow of the plantation
economy in the South, agriculture had lost its traditional leaders
who had furnished the brains and supplied the spokesmen in earlier
political struggles. In the seventies agriculture was no longer
reckoned a pursuit peculiarly suitable to gentlemen. The business
man had risen in social prestige as the farmer declined, and instead
of being recruited from the natural leaders of society agriculture
suffered a draining-off of the more energetic and capable to the
cities, leaving the farms in the hands of the less ambitious, who were
supplemented in the seventies and eighties by European peasants who
settled great portions of the Middle Border. With this loss of social
prestige came a new urban contempt for farm life that expressed itself
in “Hayseed” cartoons, and in the heedlessness of politicians who were
quick to transfer allegiance from a decaying to a rising order.
The farmers of the Middle Border, drawn from many commonwealths
and with a high percentage of aliens, were far from a homogeneous
class-conscious group like the southern planters. Race, language,
and cultural antecedents held them apart, intensifying the aloofness
that was a common characteristic of the frontier. Week-days they
stuck to their plows and Sundays, unlike the New England farmer, they
were little given to churchgoing. The landholdings were commonly a
homestead of a hundred and sixty acres, often running to an entire
section of six hundred and forty acres. Much land was held idle by
speculators, with the result that the isolation of the farmer--dwelling
convenient to his fields rather than to neighbors--deepened the
suspicious individualism that was an obsession of the agrarian mind,
and unfitted him for effective coöperative effort. No political or
social philosophy answerable to his needs was at hand, no intellectual
leaders like Jefferson or John Taylor to adapt old-world theory to
the conditions of the Middle Border, no commanding figure like Old
Hickory to marshal the scattered hosts. The Physiocratic theory with
its prestige of distinguished advocates and its elaborate social
economics had never taken root in the Middle Border; although certain
of its prejudices--that the farmer is the sole producer and the sterile
middleman must somehow be got rid of--had taken possession of the
western mind and largely influenced the ultimate program. But if the
western farmer inherited no ready-made philosophy he was daily prodded
by harsh reality. He got up and went to bed under the prick of economic
necessity, and this made of him a realist and an opportunist, eager
to apply homely remedies to homely ills. With the discipline got from
hard times he was not easily gulled by bright young city lawyers with
their handbooks of capitalistic economics. The new agrarianism of the
prairies, in consequence, was a hard-headed, homespun theory, fashioned
on the farms, intended to serve the producer rather than the middleman.
It had behind it none of the high authority of the schools, and
naturally it was mocked and scoffed at by all the spokesmen--editors,
lawyers, bankers, scholars, intellectuals--of the prosperous middle
class. The farmer had to make his way against the embattled prejudices
and contempt of the rest of America.
But before he could become a power in political councils he must
organize and use his voting strength as a unit; and as early as the
late sixties the work of organization was got under way. It began
as a social movement with the Grange that spread widely through the
South and Middle West and even gained foothold in the East, bringing
together in social groups the farmer families of the neighborhood. It
professed to stand outside politics and strove to awaken an interest
in coöperative buying and selling, but the community gatherings were
certain to find politics waiting for them at the schoolhouse door,
and after the program of coöperation had been discussed the talk ran
easily into political debate. From the Grange issued in the eighties
the Farmers’ Alliance, more consciously political in its objective,
active in arousing the farmers to political action; and with the hard
times that came with the turn of the decade the different groups merged
in the broad movement of Populism--a militant political uprising with
a definite party program and organization. The flare-up came swiftly
and in the first years of the nineties the prairies were aflame and
even the cotton-fields of the South were fired. Populism swept from
township to township, a militant agrarian movement, providing its
own leaders--Tom Watson in Georgia, General Weaver in Iowa, Ignatius
Donnelly in Minnesota, sockless Jerry Simpson in Kansas, with Hamlin
Garland, and B. O. Flower, and other intellectuals rallying to the
farmers’ standard. It set up the banner of agrarian democracy, summoned
its followers and drilled them for the battles that lay ahead. Huge
meetings gathered of the farmers of a county and day-long they listened
to speeches that came straight from the hay-fields and the corn-rows,
speeches that were an echo of the daily experience of the farmer and
the farmer’s wife.
It was Mary Ellen Lease of Kansas who struck from the common bitterness
a phrase that embodied the militant spirit of Populism. Week after week
she traveled the prairie country urging the farmers to “raise less corn
and more hell,” and at her call the sunburned faces settled into grim
purpose. The farmers had become class-conscious. They were enlisted in
a class struggle. They used the vocabulary of realism, and the unctuous
political platitudes and sophistries of county-seat politicians rolled
off their minds like water from a duck’s back. They were fighting
a great battle--they believed--against Wall Street and the eastern
money-power; they were bent on saving America from the plutocracy;
and they swept over the county-seat towns, burying the old machine
politicians under an avalanche of votes, capturing state legislatures,
electing Congressmen and Senators, and looking forward to greater
power. In 1896 Populism gained control of the Democratic party and
entered on its great campaign to establish the principle of democracy
at Washington. It was the last mortal struggle between agrarianism
and capitalism, and to understand it one must turn back to the long
agitation over the money question.
III • The Greenback Movement
If in the early nineties the currency question had come to overshadow
the questions of the tariff and railway regulation, it was because that
problem lay at the heart of the struggle between the rival agrarian and
capitalistic economies. The control of the national monetary system
by the bankers was vital to the smooth functioning of a capitalistic
order, and to assure such control it was desirable that monetary
standards and emissions of currency be removed from the sphere of
political action and lodged in the hands of business. The problem was
difficult, for the right to “coin money and to regulate the value
thereof” were functions of sovereignty specifically recognized in the
Constitution; and it was a series of moves designed to transfer such
functions to private groups that brought on a long political debate
over systems of currency.
The intellectual background against which the struggle was set may be
sketched briefly. Despite the long battle over the Bank in Jackson’s
time, little serious thinking on the principles of money and currency
had been done in America. Financiers and economists alike followed the
current English school, and since the appearance of the famous Bullion
Report of 1811 that school had adhered to the intrinsic-value theory
of money. While accepting banknotes as a useful medium of exchange,
the English classical economists held that only coin is real money,
and that the issue of notes must bear a definite ratio to the amount
of coin and bullion in the vaults. Money is not a creature of the law.
Government cannot create it. Rather it is a convenient token of labor