The Agrarian Crusade | Page 5

Grange looked for advantages to
come to the farmer through intellectual and social intercourse, not
through political action. Their purpose was "the advancement of
agriculture," but they expected that advancement to be an educative
rather than a legislative process. It was to that end, for instance, that
they provided for a Grange "Lecturer, " a man whose business it was to
prepare for each meeting a program apart from the prescribed
ritual--perhaps a paper read by one of the members or an address by a
visiting speaker. With this plan for social and intellectual advancement,
then, the founders of the Grange set out to gain members.
During the first four years the order grew slowly, partly because of the
mistakes of the founders, partly because of the innate conservatism and
suspicion of the average farmer. The first local Grange was organized
in Washington. It was made up largely of government clerks and their
wives and served less to advance the cause of agriculture than to test
the ritual. In February, 1868, Kelley resigned his clerkship in the Post
Office Department and turned his whole attention to the organization of
the new order. His colleagues, in optimism or irony, voted him a salary
of two thousand dollars a year and traveling expenses, to be paid from
the receipts of any subordinate Granges he should establish. Thus
authorized, Kelley bought a ticket for Harrisburg, and with two dollars
and a half in his pocket, started out to work his way to Minnesota by

organizing Granges. On his way out he sold four dispensations for the
establishment of branch organizations--three for Granges in Harrisburg,
Columbus, and Chicago, which came to nothing, and one for a Grange
in Fredonia, New York, which was the first regular, active, and
permanent local organization. This, it is important to note, was
established as a result of correspondence with a farmer of that place,
and in by far the smallest town of the four. Kelley seems at first to have
made the mistake of attempting to establish the order in the large cities,
where it had no native soil in which to grow.
When Kelley revised his plan and began to work from his farm in
Minnesota and among neighbors whose main interest was in agriculture,
he was more successful. His progress was not, however, so marked as
to insure his salary and expenses; in fact, the whole history of these
early years represents the hardest kind of struggle against financial
difficulties. Later, Kelley wrote of this difficult period: "If all great
enterprises, to be permanent, must necessarily start from small
beginnings, our Order is all right. Its foundation was laid on SOLID
NOTHING--the rock of poverty--and there is no harder material." At
times the persistent secretary found himself unable even to buy postage
for his circular letters. His friends at Washington began to lose interest
in the work of an order with a treasury "so empty that a five-cent stamp
would need an introduction before it would feel at home in it." Their
only letters to Kelley during this trying time were written to remind
him of bills owed by the order. The total debt was not more than $150,
yet neither the Washington members nor Kelley could find funds to
liquidate it. "My dear brother," wrote Kelley to Ireland, "you must not
swear when the printer comes in . . . . When they come in to 'dun' ask
them to take a seat; light your pipe; lean back in a chair, and suggest to
them that some plan be adopted to bring in ten or twenty members, and
thus furnish funds to pay their bills." A note of $39, in the hands of one
Mr. Bean, caused the members in Washington further embarrassment at
this time and occasioned a gleam of humor in one of Kelley's letters.
Bean's calling on the men at Washington, he wrote, at least reminded
them of the absentee, and to be cursed by an old friend was better than
to be forgotten. "I suggest," he continued, "that Granges use black and
white BEANS for ballots."
In spite of all his difficulties, Kelley stubbornly continued his endeavor

and kept up the fiction of a powerful central order at the capital by
circulating photographs of the founders and letters which spoke in
glowing terms of the great national organization of the Patrons of
Husbandry. "It must be advertised as vigorously as if it were a patent
medicine," he said; and to that end he wrote articles for leading
agricultural papers, persuaded them to publish the constitution of the
Grange, and inserted from time to time press notices which kept the
organization before the public eye. In May, 1868, came the first fruits
of all this correspondence and advertisement--the establishment of a
Grange at Newton,