The Agrarian Crusade | Page 4

VI. THE GREENBACK INTERLUDE
VII. THE PLIGHT OF THE FARMER
VIII. THE FARMERS' ALLIANCE
IX. THE PEOPLE'S PARTY LAUNCHED
X. THE POPULIST BOMBSHELL OF 1892
XI. THE SILVER ISSUE
XII. THE BATTLE OF THE STANDARDS
XIII. THE LEAVEN OF RADICALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE

CHAPTER I.
THE INCEPTION OF THE GRANGE
When President Johnson authorized the Commissioner of Agriculture,
in 1866, to send a clerk in his bureau on a trip through the Southern
States to procure "statistical and other information from those States,"
he could scarcely have foreseen that this trip would lead to a movement
among the farmers, which, in varying forms, would affect the political
and economic life of the nation for half a century. The clerk selected
for this mission, one Oliver Hudson Kelley, was something more than a
mere collector of data and compiler of statistics: he was a keen
observer and a thinker. Kelley was born in Boston of a good Yankee
family that could boast kinship with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Judge
Samuel Sewall. At the age of twenty-three he journeyed to Iowa, where
he married. Then with his wife he went on to Minnesota, settled in Elk
River Township, and acquired some first-hand familiarity with
agriculture. At the time of Kelley's service in the agricultural bureau he

was forty years old, a man of dignified presence, with a full beard
already turning white, the high broad forehead of a philosopher, and the
eager eyes of an enthusiast. "An engine with too much steam on all the
time"--so one of his friends characterized him; and the abnormal energy
which he displayed on the trip through the South justifies the figure.
Kelley had had enough practical experience in agriculture to be
sympathetically aware of the difficulties of farm life in the period
immediately following the Civil War. Looking at the Southern farmers
not as a hostile Northerner would but as a fellow agriculturist, he was
struck with the distressing conditions which prevailed. It was not
merely the farmers' economic difficulties which he noticed, for such
difficulties were to be expected in the South in the adjustment after the
great conflict; it was rather their blind disposition to do as their
grandfathers had done, their antiquated methods of agriculture, and,
most of all, their apathy. Pondering on this attitude, Kelley decided that
it was fostered if not caused by the lack of social opportunities which
made the existence of the farmer such a drear monotony that he became
practically incapable of changing his outlook on life or his attitude
toward his work.
Being essentially a man of action, Kelley did not stop with the mere
observation of these evils but cast about to find a remedy. In doing so,
he came to the conclusion that a national secret order of farmers
resembling the Masonic order, of which he was a member, might serve
to bind the farmers together for purposes of social and intellectual
advancement. After he returned from the South, Kelley discussed the
plan in Boston with his niece, Miss Carrie Hall, who argued quite
sensibly that women should be admitted to full membership in the
order, if it was to accomplish the desired ends. Kelley accepted her
suggestion and went West to spend the summer in farming and
dreaming of his project. The next year found him again in Washington,
but this time as a clerk in the Post Office Department.
During the summer and fall of 1867 Kelley interested some of his
associates in his scheme. As a result seven men--"one fruit grower and
six government clerks, equally distributed among the Post Office,
Treasury, and Agricultural Departments"--are usually recognized as the
founders of the Patrons of Husbandry, or, as the order is more
commonly called, the Grange. These men, all of whom but one had

been born on farms, were O. H. Kelley and W. M. Ireland of the Post
Office Department, William Saunders and the Reverend A. B. Grosh of
the Agricultural Bureau, the Reverend John Trimble and J. R.
Thompson of the Treasury Department, and F. M. McDowell, a
pomologist of Wayne, New York. Kelley and Ireland planned a ritual
for the society; Saunders interested a few farmers at a meeting of the
United States Pomological Society in St. Louis in August, and secured
the cooperation of McDowell; the other men helped these four in
corresponding with interested farmers and in perfecting the ritual. On
December 4, 1867, having framed a constitution and adopted the motto
Esto perpetua, they met and constituted themselves the National
Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry. Saunders was to be Master;
Thompson, Lecturer; Ireland, Treasurer; and Kelley, Secretary.
It is interesting to note, in view of the subsequent political activity in
which the movement for agricultural organization became inevitably
involved, that the founders of the