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Farmers’ Protest: From Local Clubs to Third-Party Politics, 1830–1900

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Bygone Utopias and Farm Protest in the Rural Midwest

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Abstract

This chapter highlights how farmers’ protests and collective actions changed form over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses specifically on the transformation of Midwestern farmers’ collective actions from local claim clubs to more organized movements, including the Grange and the nationally networked Farmers’ Alliance, the latter of which helped support the famous Populist campaign, one of the most successful third-party movements in U.S. history. These changes illustrate not only how farmers altered their actions based on the success and failures of creating social change, but also reflected the changing patterns of their everyday lives and their own self-understandings as a community and economic group.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Charles Tilly’s Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) for a much more detailed discussion regarding about the modernization of the repertoire of contention in relation to the modernizing state and economy.

  2. 2.

    These themes have been repeatedly echoes among prominent scholars. For example, see: Patrick Mooney and Theo J. Majka, Farmers and Farm Workers’ Movements: Social Protest in American Agriculture (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), xix–xxi, 3–119; Theodor Saloutos and John D. Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900–1939 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951); James H. Stock, “Real Estate Mortgages, Foreclosures, and Midwestern Agrarian Unrest, 1865–1920,” The Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (1984): 89–105; Carl C. Taylor, The Farmers’ Movement, 1620–1920 (New York: American Book Company, 1953); Luther Tweeten, Terrorism, Radicalism, and Populism in Agriculture (Ames, IA: Iowa State Press, 2003). This view has implicit, though sometimes explicit, connections to Marx’s argument that farmers’ are like potatoes when they protest: threats to landholding hold them together like a sack; remove the threat, and you cut the sack open, sending them tumbling back into their solitary existence (see Marx, “The Eighteen Brumaire,” 608). This perspective has been used to understand a wide variety of agrarian movements, including global peasant movements. Some more well-known examples this approach include: Scott G. McNall, The Road to Rebellion: Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1865–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Jeffrey M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1975); Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

  3. 3.

    Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movements: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 24–26.

  4. 4.

    Tweeten, Terrorism, 111–125; Patrick H. Mooney and Scott A. Hunt, “A Repertoire of Interpretations: Master Frames and Ideological Continuity in U.S. Agrarian Mobilization,” The Sociological Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1996): 177–197; Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1996), 10, 15–86.

  5. 5.

    Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 31; Paul W. Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas land policy, 1854–1890 (New York: Atherton Press, 1966[1954]), 53–54; Ilia Murtazashvili, The Political Economy of the American Frontier (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 6.

  6. 6.

    See, for example, Gates, Fifty, 41–44.

  7. 7.

    Murtazashvili, Political Economy, 62–64.

  8. 8.

    Murtazashvili, Political Economy, 73–79; Theodore C. Blegen, Minnesota: A History of the State (St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), 174–175; Jesse Macy, “Institutional Beginnings in a Western State,” In Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Volume II, No. 7, ed. B. F. Shambaugh (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1884).

  9. 9.

    Gates, Fifty, 54–58.

  10. 10.

    Allan G. Bogue, “The Iowa Claim Clubs: Symbol and Substance,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45, no. 2 (1958): 231–253; Gates 1966[1954], Fifty, 52–70; Charles J. Ritchey, “Claim Associations and Pioneer Democracy in Early Minnesota,” Minnesota History 9, no. 2 (1928): 85–95; Leland L. Sage, A History of Iowa (Ames, IA: The Iowa State University Press, 1974), 68–69.

  11. 11.

    Bogue, From Prairie, 32–38.

  12. 12.

    J. M. Dixon, Centennial History of Polk County, Iowa (Des Moines, IA: State register, Print, 1876), 39; James W. Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 4; Macy, “Institutional Beginnings;” Murtazashvili, Political Economy, 62.

  13. 13.

    Alfred Sorenson, History of Omaha from the Pioneer Days to the Present Time (Omaha, NE: Gibson, Miller, & Richardson, Printers, 1889), 108–110.

  14. 14.

    Bogue, “Iowa Claim,” 233, esp. note 9.

  15. 15.

    Murtazashvili, Political Economy, 62.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 68.

  17. 17.

    Richard A. Bartlett, The New Country: A Social History of the American Frontier, 1776–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 75–78; Bogue, From Prairie, 30–31; Clarence H. Danhof, Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 105–107; Paul W. Gates, The Farmers’ Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 66–80; Gates, Fifty, 74.

  18. 18.

    Murtazashvili, Political Economy, 69.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 69–79.

  20. 20.

    Sorenson, History, 113; see also Sean Kammer, “Public Opinion is More Than Law: Popular Sovereignty and Vigilantism in the Nebraska Territory,” Great Plains Quarterly 31, (2011): 309–324.

  21. 21.

    Dennis Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867–1900 (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1974), 13.

  22. 22.

    Thomas A. Woods, Knights of the Plow: Oliver H. Kelley and the Origins of the Grange Republican Ideology (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1991), 26–59.

  23. 23.

    Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization and Its Political, Economic, and Social Manifestations, 1870–1880 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1969[1913]), 41; see also Lowell K. Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 234; Mooney and Majka, Farmers’, 32.

  24. 24.

    Woods, Knights, 85–87.

  25. 25.

    Buck 1969[1913], The Granger, 42.

  26. 26.

    Buck, The Granger, 41; Woods, Knights, 94–95, 172.

  27. 27.

    Buck. The Granger, 46; Woods, Knights, 102–118.

  28. 28.

    Woods, Knights, 132–146.

  29. 29.

    Buck, The Granger, 62.

  30. 30.

    Buck, The Granger, 48, 281; Nordin, Rich, 22, 31–33; Woods, Knights, 167–171.

  31. 31.

    Buck, The Granger, 280; Nordin, Rich, 122–126; Woods, Knights, 136–137, 176–177.

  32. 32.

    Buck, The Granger, 283–285; Nordin, Rich, 128–129; Woods, Knights, 100.

  33. 33.

    Nordin, Rich, 49–104.

  34. 34.

    Buck, The Granger, 240–270; Woods, Knights, 161.

  35. 35.

    Buck, The Granger, 87–237; Nordin, Rich, 168–182, 215–226.

  36. 36.

    Buck, The Granger, 63–73; Nordin, Rich, 35–38; Woods, Knights, 164, 178–205.

  37. 37.

    Readers more interested in the topic are encouraged to read: John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931); Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Robert C. McMath, Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); as well as William F. Holmes, “Populism: In Search of Context,” Agricultural History 64, no. 4 (1990): 26–58. Each of these broad general histories offer unique views of these movements.

  38. 38.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 187–190; Hicks, Populist Revolt, 98–103.

  39. 39.

    Robert C. McMath, Jr., “Sandy Land and Hogs in the Timber: (Agri)Cultural Origins of the Farmers’ Alliance in Texas,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation, ed. S. Hahn and J. Prude (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 208.

  40. 40.

    Hicks, Populist Revolt, 104; McMath, “Sandy,” 111.

  41. 41.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 195.

  42. 42.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 192–197; Hicks, Populist Revolt, 104–113.

  43. 43.

    Lewis Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 322–329; David B. Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames, IA: The Iowa State University Press, 1979), 16; Gates, Farmers’ Age, 312; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 135; Thomas J. Morain, Prairie Grass Roots: An Iowa Small Town in the Early Twentieth Century (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1988), 170–171.

  44. 44.

    Goodwyn, Populist Moment, xix–xx, 293–310.

  45. 45.

    Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 64–65, 135–136; McMath, American, 92, 151; McNall, Road, 189–198, 204–208.

  46. 46.

    Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 107–109.

  47. 47.

    McMath, “Sandy,” 207; McMath, Road, 41–42.

  48. 48.

    Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 66; Schwartz, Radical Protest, 217–234.

  49. 49.

    Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 61–65; McNall, Road, 262.

  50. 50.

    Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 74–90; Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15–17, 47–56, 104–106.

  51. 51.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organization, 192–202; Hicks, Populist Revolt, 113–121.

  52. 52.

    Schwartz, Radical Protest, 235–246.

  53. 53.

    Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 74–90.

  54. 54.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 200; Hicks, Populist Revolt, 144–152; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 125–173.

  55. 55.

    Jeffrey Ostler, Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agrarian Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, 1880–1892 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993).

  56. 56.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 200–201; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 293–310; McNall, Road, 307–310; Schwartz, Radical Protest, 281–287.

  57. 57.

    Prime examples of each of these views, respectively, are: Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, from Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Random House, 1955) and Postel’s The Populist Vision.

  58. 58.

    Morton Rothstein, “Farmer Movements and Organizations: Numbers, Gains, Losses,” Agricultural History 62, no. 3 (1988): 167.

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    Daniel Jaster

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Jaster, D. (2021). Farmers’ Protest: From Local Clubs to Third-Party Politics, 1830–1900. In: Bygone Utopias and Farm Protest in the Rural Midwest. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71013-2_3

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