20.2:

Farmers and Workers Organize Their Communities

A. The Grange1. Farmers and workers built movements that challenged

the existing system. 2. The Grange formed in the 1870s by farmers in the

Great Plains and South who suffered boom and bust conditions and natural disasters.

3. Grangers blamed hard times on a band of “thieves in the night,” especially railroads, and pushed through laws regulating shipping rates and other farm costs.

4. Grangers created their own grain elevators and set up retail stores for farm machinery.

The depression of the late 1870s wiped out most of these programs.

The symbols chosen by Grange artists represented their faith that all social value could be traced to honest labor and most of all to the work of the entire farm family. The hardworking American required only the enlightenment offered by the Grange to build a better community. SOURCE:Kingfisher Reformer , May 3,1894,Library of Congress.

B. The Farmers’ Alliance 1. In the late 1880s, Texas farmers, led by Charles W.

Macune, formed the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, in cooperation with the Colored Alliance. The Alliance sought to:

a. challenge the disproportionate power of the governing classb. restore democracyc. establish a cooperative economic program

2. Northern Plains farmer organizations soon joined the Alliance.

3. Midwestern farm groups battled railroad influence. 4. By 1890, the Alliance was a major power in several states

demanding demanded a series of economic reforms.

C. Workers Search for Power 1. In 1877, a “Great Uprising” shut down railroads all

across the country. a. Federal troops were called out, precipitating violence. b. Government created national guards to prevent similar

occurrences. 2. Workers organized stronger unions that increasingly

resorted to strikes and created labor parties. 3. Henry George ran for mayor of New York on the United

Labor Party ticket and finished a respectable second. 4. In the late 1880s, labor parties won seats on numerous

city councils and in state legislatures in industrial areas where workers outnumbered other classes.

The Great Uprising of 1877, which began as a strike of railroad workers, spread rapidly to communities along the railroad routes. Angry crowds defied the armed militia and the vigilantes hired to disperse them. In Philadelphia, for example, strikers set fire to the downtown, destroying many buildings before federal troops were brought in to stop them. More than a hundred people died before the strike ended, and the railroad corporations suffered about a $10 million loss in property. SOURCE:Contemporary engraving.The Granger Collection,New York (0008654).

MAP 20.1 Strikes by State, 1880 Most strikes after the Uprising of 1877 could be traced to organized trades, concentrated in the manufacturing districts of the Northeast and Midwest. SOURCE:Carville Earle,Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems (Stanford,CA:Stanford University Press,1992).

D. Women Build Alliances 1. Women actively shaped labor and agrarian protest. 2. The Knights included women at their national

convention and even ran day-care centers and baking cooperatives.

3. Women were active members in the Grange and Alliances.

4. The greatest female leader was Frances E. Willard, who:

a. was president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union

b. mobilized nearly 1 million women to promote reform and to work for women’s suffrage

Frances E. Willard (1839-1898) became a full-time activist for the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. From 1879 until her death, she served as president, pushing the organization to expand its interests beyond temperance under the rubric of her “do-everything” policy. Under her leadership, the WCTU established 39 departments promoting a wide array of reform causes ranging from the establishment of free kindergartens to the prohibition of the manufacure of cigarettes. Source:Couresy of the Library of Congress

E. Populism and the People’s Party

1. Between 1890 and 1892, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Knights of Labor, the National Colored Farmers’ Alliance and other organizations formed the People’s Party.

2. The People’s Party platform called for: a. government ownership of railroads, banks, and the telegraphb. the eight-hour dayc. the graduated income tax, and other reforms

3. Though the party lost the 1892 presidential race, Populists elected three governors, ten congressional representatives, and five senators.