Chapter 26: Rumbles of Discontent – Populists & Labor Unrest

Welcome to Last Minute Lecture.

This free chapter overview is designed to help students review and understand key concepts.

These summaries supplement not replaced the original textbook and may not be redistributed or resold.

For complete coverage, always consult the official text.

Welcome back to the Deep Dive.

You know, when we think Gilded Age, it's usually industrialists, big cities, railroads crossing the continent.

Right, the sort of images of progress and wealth.

Exactly.

But today we're looking at a different story, maybe the real story of discontent from that time.

And it's not happening in the factories, it's out on the farms.

Yeah, we're digging into the sources for roughly 1865 to 1900.

It's a period our sources call rumbles of discontent, and it really captures the mood.

So our mission for you, the listener, is to sort of walk through this chronologically.

We want to unpack this huge crisis hitting American agriculture, look at the political movements that grew out of it, and that big economic clash at the end of the century.

And the central tension really is this dramatic shift.

The sources paint a picture of the farmer changing from, you know, the self -reliant yeoman ideal.

Growing their own food, making their own way.

To becoming more like a country businessman, completely entangled in global markets and often deep in debt.

It's strange, isn't it?

Because technology mechanization was improving farming dramatically.

Production was soaring.

It's a total paradox.

More food than ever before, technologically amazing, but the sheer volume tanks the prices.

So the very efficiency that should have helped was actually pushing farmers towards bankruptcy.

Okay, so let's break that down.

Part one of this crisis seems to be specialization, right?

Moving away from diverse farming.

Exactly.

Farmers felt pressured or maybe saw an opportunity to focus on single cash crops.

Think wheat out west, cotton in the south.

Which immediately ties them to world prices.

No longer just feeding your family, you're competing globally.

And it turns the farm, like you said earlier, into something more like a factory.

And factories need machinery, expensive machinery.

What kind of tech are we talking about here?

Well, the sources mentioned powerful steam engines for plowing and seeding, and then a huge innovation in the 1880s.

The Combine.

Combined Reaper Thresher.

That's the one.

Speeds things up incredibly, handles huge volumes, but wow, the cost.

A massive capital investment for an individual farmer.

And this leads to incredible scale.

I remember reading about those Bonanza farms, especially in Minnesota and the Dakotas.

Yeah, 15 ,000 acres, sometimes more.

Early agribusiness, really.

Huge operations.

With that scale comes vulnerability,

especially with debt.

Oh, absolutely.

And that vulnerability gets magnified by deflation.

We really need to get our heads around this deflation cycle because it's key.

Okay, walk us through it.

All right, imagine you're a farmer.

Say back in 1875, you borrow $1 ,000.

Wheat's selling for a dollar a bushel.

So your debt is effectively a thousand bushels of wheat.

Makes sense.

You owe the value of a thousand bushels.

But fast forward to 1890, because of overproduction and other factors, the price of wheat has maybe dropped to 50 cents a bushel.

Now, to pay back that same $1 ,000 loan, you don't owe a thousand bushels anymore.

You owe 2 ,000 bushels.

Wow.

Twice the amount of actual farm product.

Just because the value of the dollar went up or the price of wheat went down.

Exactly.

You didn't borrow more.

You didn't spend more foolishly.

The money itself became more valuable, making your debt heavier in real terms.

Farmers felt this was fundamentally unfair.

And they weren't wrong to blame the money supply, were they?

The sources mentioned it was pretty static.

Yeah.

The actual amount of currency and circulation per person barely budged between 1870 and 1890.

Something like $19 .42 per capita in 1870 and only $22 .67 20 years later.

Not nearly enough growth to keep pace with the expanding economy.

Right.

So everyone's scrambling for dollars, which pushes prices down, which is great if you're lending money, but absolutely crushing if you're a debtor like most farmers.

And the result is foreclosure.

Gas foreclosures.

Mortgages just swallowed homesteads.

The sources cite over 100 ,000 farms mortgaged in Nebraska alone by 1890.

So people who own their land were becoming renters.

Farm tenancy exploded, especially in the South with sharecropping.

It's a fundamental shift away from that Jeffersonian ideal of the independent landowner.

And just to make things worse, it wasn't only economics, right?

Nature played a role.

Oh, big time.

The sources list a grim catalog.

Grasshopper plagues, the cottonball weevil devastating southern crops, floods, and then the series of brutal droughts starting around 1887, particularly in the West.

That's where that saying came from, wasn't it?

In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.

That's the one.

Captures the desperation perfectly.

OK, so bad weather, bad prices.

What else were farmers angry about?

They had grievances against corporations, too.

Yeah, definitely.

They felt unfairly taxed on their land, which is hard to hide compared to wealthy Easterners who could conceal financial assets.

And tariffs.

Huge issue.

High protective tariffs helped northern manufacturers but forced farmers to sell their crops, like wheat, in a fiercely competitive, unprotected world market.

So they sell cheap.

And then have to buy expensive manufactured goods tools, fertilizer, barbed wire from trusts that controlled prices in a protected home market.

Like the Harvester Trust, the barbed wire trust.

Exactly.

They felt squeezed from both ends.

And then there was the railroad.

Ah, the railroad octopus, as they called it.

Yeah.

Farmers were at their mercy.

Extortionate freight rates to ship crops, high fees for storing grain in elevators often owned by the railroads.

I read somewhere that sometimes it was literally cheaper for farmers to burn their corn as fuel than to pay the freight costs to ship it.

It happened.

It sounds unbelievable, but it shows how desperate the situation was.

And the core problem, the sources emphasize, was disorganization.

Farmers were nearly half the population in 1890.

A huge voting bloc, potentially.

Potentially.

But they were scattered, individualistic by tradition and just hopelessly disorganized against these powerful, coordinated corporate interests.

Okay, so that feeling of being powerless,

squeezed, disorganized, that must have led to attempts to organize.

It absolutely did.

The first major effort was the national grange of the patrons of the Gaspendrie, usually just called the Grange, founded in 1867.

By Oliver Kelly.

That's him, a Minnesota farmer working as a clerk in Washington.

Initially it was really about combating the isolation and loneliness of farm life, social events, education, fraternal bonds.

Like a rural social club.

Pretty much.

But it grew fast, and the focus quickly shifted towards economics and politics.

How so?

They started setting up cooperatively owned businesses, stores, grain elevators, warehouses, trying to bypass the middlemen and the trusts.

Taking control themselves.

And politically.

They pushed hard for state laws to regulate railroad rates and storage fees.

These became known as the Granger laws.

And they had some success, initially.

But there's always a but.

Well, the railroads fought back hard in court.

And the big blow came with the Supreme Court's Wabash decision in 1886.

Right, that limited the state's power to regulate interstate commerce, which most railroad traffic was.

Exactly.

It really undercut the Granger laws, and the Granger's political influence started to fade after that.

But the anger didn't go away.

It just changed form.

Pretty much.

It evolved into the Farmers' Alliance, which started in the late 1870s and really took off.

They were even more focused on cooperative buying and selling as a weapon against railroads and manufacturers.

Bigger than the Granger.

Oh yeah.

By 1890, they claimed over a million members.

A huge movement.

But there was a significant weakness, wasn't there?

Around race.

A critical weakness.

The Maine Farmers' Alliance largely excluded black farmers and also landless tenant farmers and sharecroppers.

Which meant a separate organization had to form.

Yes, the Colored Farmers' National Alliance.

It was also substantial, claiming over a quarter million members by 1890.

But that division along racial and, to some extent, class lines really hampered their collective political power.

They couldn't form that unified front.

And it's out of the Farmers' Alliance's that the Populous Party emerges.

Correct.

The People's Party formally launched in the early 1890s.

This was a full -blown third -party political challenge.

They went straight after Wall Street.

The banks.

The money trust.

And their big issue was silver.

Right?

Free silver.

That became their central rallying cry.

The free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 ounces of silver to one ounce of gold.

Basically inflating the currency to help debtors.

And they had some fiery speakers and writers backing this up.

Absolutely.

The sources mention William Hope Harvey's pamphlet, Coins Financial School.

It was incredibly popular, using simple allegories like a gold ogre versus a silver maiden to make the case for silver.

Very visual.

And Mary Elizabeth Lease.

Mary Ellen Lease, the Kansas pythoness, a powerful orator, famous for supposedly telling Kansas farmers to raise less corn and more hell.

She embodied the passionate anger of the movement.

So all this energy comes together in their platform.

The Omaha platform of 1892.

What was in it?

It sounds pretty radical.

It was radical for its time.

Number one, of course, was free silver at 16 to one.

But it went way beyond that.

Like what?

They demanded a graduated income tax.

The more you earn, the higher rate you pay.

Which we have now, but was radical then.

Totally.

They also called for government ownership of railroads, telegraph and telephone systems.

Complete government takeover.

Wow.

Nationalization.

Yes.

Plus political reforms.

The direct election of U .S.

senators instead of by state legislatures and tools of direct democracy like the initiative and referendum so voters could propose and pass laws themselves.

That's a fundamental challenge to the existing economic and political system.

Hashtag depression and labor upheaval.

It really was a declaration of war on laissez faire capitalism as it existed then.

But did they even get a chance to push this platform before things got worse?

Barely.

Just as the populace were hitting their stride, the panic of 1893 hit.

Grover Cleveland had just retaken office and boom, the worst depression the country had faced up to that point lasted about four years.

What caused it?

The usual suspects.

Yeah.

The sources point to overbuilding, particularly railroads, rampant speculation, labor unrest adding to uncertainty and agricultural depression.

Plus, a shaky European economy led foreign creditors to call in loans, draining gold from the U .S.

And that drain triggered a gold crisis for the Treasury.

A major one.

The Treasury was required by law, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 to issue paper notes to buy silver.

But people were nervous about the value of silver in these notes.

So they take the notes, immediately go to the Treasury and redeem them for gold, which was seen as safer.

So the gold just kept flowing out.

Like an endless chain, as the sources call it.

The Treasury paid out gold for the notes, then had to reissue the notes as required by law when buying silver, which were then promptly redeemed for more gold.

It was bleeding the reserve dry.

Below the minimum level.

Yeah.

It dipped below the hundred million dollar level, considered the safe minimum for supporting the currency.

Cleveland, who was a staunch gold bug, saw this as a disaster.

So he moved to stop the silver purchases.

He strong -armed Congress into repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893.

He thought that would stop the bleeding.

Not entirely.

The gold drain continued.

So in 1895, in a move that became incredibly controversial, Cleveland basically went hat in hand to Wall Street.

To J .P.

Morgan.

To J .T.

Morgan and a syndicate of bankers.

They agreed to lend the government $65 million in gold, half -sourced from overseas, to shore up the Treasury Reserve.

They charged a hefty commission, too.

Oof.

How did that look politically?

Terrible.

Especially to the populists and silver rights.

It looked like a complete sellout.

The president turning to the money trust to bail out the government.

It just confirmed their worst fears about who really held power.

And meanwhile, the Depression is causing widespread misery.

Does this fuel the populist cause?

Absolutely.

It seemed to prove their point that the system was broken and favored the rich.

And it led to some dramatic protests by labor and the unemployed.

Like Coxie's army.

Exactly.

General Jacob Coxie, who was actually a wealthy quarry owner from Ohio, but sympathetic to He proposed a public works program building roads funded by printing $500 million in new paper money to create jobs and inflation.

So he marched on Washington.

He led a Commonwealth army of a few hundred unemployed men to D .C.

in 1894 to demand action from Congress.

And the government's response.

They arrested Coxie and his lieutenants for walking on the capital grass.

Seriously.

Yeah.

Walking on the grass.

Seriously.

It sounds ridiculous, but it showed the establishment's fear and unwillingness to even engage with these demands.

And there was an even bigger labor conflict around the same time, wasn't there?

The Pullman strike.

Yes.

Also in 1894 near Chicago,

the Pullman Palace Car Company cut workers wages drastically due to the Depression, but didn't lower the high rents.

They charged workers living in the company town of Pullman.

So the workers went on strike led by Eugene V.

Debs and his American Railway Union.

It started at Pullman, but spread rapidly as railway workers across the country refused to handle Pullman cars, paralyzing rail traffic, pretty much everything west of Chicago ground to a halt.

How did the government react to this one?

Even more forcefully.

President Cleveland, urged on by Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, took action on what grounds only argued the strike was interfering with the delivery of U .S.

mail.

Since Pullman cars were often attached to mail trains, he got a federal court injunction ordering the strikers back to work.

And when they refused?

Cleveland sent in federal troops, bypassing the Illinois governor.

There was violence, the strike was brutally crushed, and Debs was arrested and jailed for contempt of court for violating the injunction.

So the government used the courts and the army to break the strike.

Yes, and it led to widespread outrage and cries of government by injunction, the idea that the legal system was being used as a weapon against labor on behalf of capital.

Debs actually became a socialist while in prison reading radical literature.

Hashtag the showdown of 1896 and the end of agrarian political power.

OK, so you have this backdrop.

Farmer debt, deflation, corporate power, a gold crisis, a sellout perception, a deep depression and violent labor suppression.

It all comes to a head in the election of 1896.

It's one of the most dramatic and significant elections in American history, fought largely over the money issue.

The Republicans nominate William McKinley from Ohio.

Who's backing him?

His campaign is masterminded and largely funded by a wealthy Ohio industrialist named Marcus Alonso Hanna, Dollar Mark Hanna, they called him.

What was Hanna's philosophy?

He believed the prime function of government was to aid business.

Prosperity starts at the top, he argued, and then it would trickle down to the laborer.

He wanted stability, the gold standard, and high tariffs.

And he ran a modern campaign, didn't he?

Very sophisticated, raised enormous amounts of money, used pamphlets, posters, organized speakers.

Their slogan was aimed right at the working man worried about the depression.

McKinley and the full dinner pail.

OK, so that's the Republican side.

What about the Democrats?

They ditch Cleveland.

Oh, completely.

The Democratic convention was taken over by the pro -silver wing of the party.

They repudiated Cleveland's hard money policies.

And they found their champion.

They found their champion in a young, charismatic congressman from Nebraska,

William Jennings Bryan, only 36 years old, the boy orator of the Platte.

And he gives the speech.

He gives the speech, the Cross of Gold speech.

It absolutely electrified the convention.

He defended farmers and laborers, attacked the gold standard, and ended with that thunderous line.

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor, this crown of thorns.

You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Chills, just thinking about it.

It won him the nomination on the spot.

An incredible moment.

So Bryan is the Democratic nominee running on free silver.

What did the populace do?

Their main issue was just adopted by a major party.

It was a tough spot for them.

They also nominated Bryan, essentially fusing their party with the Democrats for this election.

They sacrificed their broader platform and distinct identity, pinning all their hopes on Bryan and silver.

So it's McKinley, Hannah, gold and big business versus Bryan, silver, farmers and debtors.

How did the campaign play out?

It was incredibly intense.

Hannah and the Republicans vastly outspent Bryan.

Something like $16 million to maybe $1 million, a huge disparity back then.

They used fear, effectively.

Very effectively.

Factory owners were pressured by Republicans to tell their workers that factories would close or wages would be paid in 50 cent pieces, devalued silver, if Bryan won.

They painted Bryan as a dangerous radical.

Bryan campaigned tirelessly, though.

He traveled thousands of miles, gave hundreds of speeches.

But here's the crucial point the sources make.

He couldn't win over the urban workers in the East.

Why not?

Weren't they suffering, too?

They were, but their interests were different.

Factory workers earned fixed wages.

Inflation, which free silver was designed to cause, would hurt them by reducing the purchasing power of their paychecks.

They needed that full dinner pail.

McKinley promised more than they needed inflated currency.

So the agrarian revolt couldn't bridge the gap to the industrial working class.

Exactly.

The farmer labor alliance that populists dreamed of just didn't materialize in a way that could win nationally.

And the result?

McKinley won and won fairly decisively.

271 electoral votes, 276 for Bryan.

McKinley swept the populist industrial East and the upper Midwest.

Bryan carried the South and the West.

What was the significance of this election?

Why does it matter so much?

Well, the sources market as the last real attempt to win the White House with primarily agrarian votes.

It showed that the future lay with cities and industry, not the farm.

And it ushered in a new political era.

Yes, what historians call the fourth party system.

It meant Republican dominance for much of the next few decades,

generally lower voter turnout than in the Gilded Age, and a shift in the national debate away from farmer grievances towards issues like regulating industry and overseas expansion.

So McKinley takes office.

And what happens?

He presides over a return to prosperity, partly because the depression was naturally ending anyway.

He signed the Dingley Tariff in 1897, pushing rates back up to very high levels, around 46 .5 percent on average.

And the money issue?

Did they settle the gold versus silver debate?

They did, officially.

The Gold Standard Act of 1900 made gold the sole standard for redeeming paper currency.

But ironically, the currency issue itself kind of faded away.

How come?

Because moderate inflation started happening naturally.

New gold discoveries, the Klondike in Alaska, South Africa, combined with new, more efficient chemical processes like using cyanide to extract gold from ore, increased the world's gold supply.

So the very inflation the silver rights had demanded through politics ended up happening through geology and technology.

Pretty much.

It provided more currency, eased debts, and took the wind out of the sails of the free silver movement.

Hashtag tag outro.

Wow.

So if we recap,

you have this massive upheaval among American farmers driven by debt, falling prices, corporate power.

They organize, they build a powerful political movement,

populism with radical demands.

Only to see it ultimately co -opted and then defeated in this huge symbolic clash of 1896, pitting agrarian and debtor interests against the rising power of industries, cities, and finance.

It really marks the end of an era, the end of the farmer's ability to dictate national politics.

But the sources point to one more lasting and maybe darker consequence, particularly in the South.

That's right.

Some populist leaders like Tom Watson in Georgia had briefly, pragmatically, tried to build alliances across racial lines, arguing that poor white and poor black farmers shared common economic enemies.

A class -based appeal over race.

For a moment.

But the failure of populism and the fear among the white elite of any black political power led to a harsh backlash.

You mean increased efforts to stop black people from voting?

Exactly.

After the populist threat subsided, southern states moved aggressively to disenfranchise black men through poll taxes, literacy tests, property requirements, and the infamous grandfather clause.

Which effectively locked in white supremacy in the solid South for Democrats for decades.

It did.

So here's a final thought, something for you to maybe ponder.

How did this immense economic struggle of the farmers, which had this potential to unite poor people across racial lines against industrial capitalism,

how did its failure ultimately end up solidifying the political and racial divisions, especially in the South, for the next 50 years or more?

How did the defeat of populism help ensure that unified front never really formed?

A really powerful question about the tangled legacies of this era, something to definitely think about.

Indeed.

Well, that wraps up our deep dive into the rumbles of discontent.

Thanks for joining us.

See you next time.