The Agrarian Crusade | Page 9

the
market and on transportation facilities as was his competitor in the
East.
In the fall of 1873 came the greatest panic in the history of the nation,
and a period of financial depression began which lasted throughout the
decade, restricting industry, commerce, and even immigration. On the
farmers the blow fell with special severity. At the very time when they
found it most difficult to realize profit on their sales of produce,
creditors who had hitherto carried their debts from year to year became
insistent for payment. When mortgages fell due, it was well-nigh
impossible to renew them; and many a farmer saw years of labor go for
nothing in a heart-breaking foreclosure sale. It was difficult to get even
short-term loans, running from seed-time to harvest. This important
function of lending money to pay for labor and thus secure a larger crop,
which has only recently been assumed by the Government in its
establishment of farm loan banks, had been performed by private
capitalists who asked usurious rates of interest. The farmers' protests
against these rates had been loud; and now, when they found
themselves unable to get loans at any rate whatever, their complaints
naturally increased. Looking around for one cause to which to attribute
all their misfortunes, they pitched upon the corporations or monopolies,
as they chose to call them, and especially upon the railroads.
At first the farmers had looked upon the coming of the railroads as an
unmixed blessing. The railroad had meant the opening up of new

territory, the establishment of channels of transportation by which they
could send their crops to market. Without the railroad, the farmer who
did not live near a navigable stream must remain a backwoodsman; he
must make his own farm or his immediate community a self-sufficing
unit; he must get from his own land bread and meat and clothing for his
family; he must be stock-raiser, grain-grower, farrier, tinker,
soap-maker, tanner, chandler--Jack-of-all-trades and master of none.
With the railroad he gained access to markets and the opportunity to
specialize in one kind of farming; he could now sell his produce and
buy in exchange many of the articles he had previously made for
himself at the expense of much time and labor. Many farmers and
farming communities bought railroad bonds in the endeavor to increase
transportation facilities; all were heartily in sympathy with the policy of
the Government in granting to corporations land along the route of the
railways which they were to construct.
By 1878, however, the Government had actually given to the railroads
about thirty-five million acres, and was pledged to give to the Pacific
roads alone about one hundred and forty-five million acres more. Land
was now not so plentiful as it had been in 1850, when this policy had
been inaugurated, and the farmers were naturally aggrieved that the
railroads should own so much desirable land and should either hold it
for speculative purposes or demand for it prices much higher than the
Government had asked for land adjacent to it and no less valuable.
Moreover, when railroads were merged and reorganized or passed into
the hands of receivers the shares held by farmers were frequently wiped
out or were greatly decreased in value. Often railroad stock had been
"watered" to such an extent that high freight charges were necessary in
order to permit the payment of dividends. Thus the farmer might find
himself without his railroad stock, with a mortgage on his land which
he had incurred in order to buy the stock, with an increased burden of
taxation because his township had also been gullible enough to buy
stock, and with a railroad whose excessive rates allowed him but a
narrow margin of profit on his produce.
When the farmers sought political remedies for their economic ills,
they discovered that, as a class, they had little representation or
influence either in Congress or in the state legislatures. Before the Civil
War the Southern planter had represented agricultural interests in

Congress fairly well; after the War the dominance of Northern interests
left the Western farmer without his traditional ally in the South.
Political power was concentrated in the East and in the urban sections
of the West. Members of Congress were increasingly likely to be from
the manufacturing classes or from the legal profession, which
sympathized with these classes rather than with the agriculturists. Only
about seven per cent of the members of Congress were farmers; yet in
1870 forty-seven per cent of the population was engaged in agriculture.
The only remedy for the farmers was to organize themselves as a class
in order to promote their common welfare.

CHAPTER III.
THE GRANGER MOVEMENT AT FLOOD TIDE
With these real or fancied grievances crying for redress, the farmers
soon turned to the Grange