American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  It was these ideas that Gompers carried into the organization of a new national federation. A sturdy, outspoken man of inexhaustible enthusiasm and energy, he articulated better than any of his comrades the philosophy of pragmatic labor organization and action. He wanted practical results: wages, hours, safety, benefits. From such advances, workers could progress further in economic and moral education and in their understanding of ultimate ends. The first step was to improve conditions of work and life. “The more the improved conditions prevail, the greater discontent prevails with any wrongs that may exist. It is only … the enlightenment begotten from material prosperity that makes it at all possible for mental advancement.” This idea sharply separated Gompers’s strategy from the Marxists’.

  Gompers, indeed, was almost a neo-Social Darwinist in his ideology. He accepted industrialization and free enterprise. Capitalism was progress, and profits were necessary to capitalism. As corporations and trusts gained more power, labor must do the same—through solidly based organization. In the organization of business unions, Gompers believed that, in order to protect the adult male wage, unskilled as well as skilled, women as well as men, blacks as well as whites, ought to take part, though on a subordinate basis. These were “practical” views, for he believed not that blacks were equal to whites but that they could take over white jobs and hence must be organized. The same applied to women and immigrants. All this was crucial to the ability of organized labor to compete with organized capital.

  He was far more cautious in regard to political action. He fought off any involvement of the AFL with socialist parties, preferring to deal with the major parties on the basis of expediency. He gave clear priority to economic action over political. Workers should expect little from the government. “The only desirable legislation for the workers,” as a group of scholars later summarized Gompers’s and the AFL’s position, “is that which offers protection to their labor market by restriction of immigration, and which restrains government activities, such as the courts and police, from encroaching upon or hampering such union activities as strikes, picketing, and boycotts. The workers ought not to demand more positive legislation from the government…. Therefore such legislation as they need can be obtained more readily by opposing or supporting candidates of the two large parties rather than by organizing a separate labor party.” Above all, no long-range, visionary programs or tactics should be used. Government hands-off—broker politics—gradual betterment: this was Gompers’s and Strasser’s response to the Social Darwinism of the day; this was their own Social Darwinism. During the capitalist boom, it was an idea that seemed to work. While the Knights declined in leaps and bounds, the AFL moved ahead in numbers as slowly—and as steadily—as the tortoise. Its tests would come with hard times and in a political situation in which both “large parties” were conservative, and labor might have to look for allies on the left. By the late 1880s, such a potential ally seemed to be rising in America’s South and West.

  The Alliance: A Democracy of Leaders

  Somewhere in central Texas, sometime in the late eighties:

  In the twilight splendor of the Plains, men and women march along dusty trails toward the glow of a campfire in the distance. Some walk; some ride horses or burros; some—whole families—jolt along on covered wagons or buckboards. With their creased, careworn faces, their poor gingham clothes, they might seem to be one more trek in the great western movement of American homesteaders. But not so. These people walk with hope and pride—even with exhilaration as they reach a hillcrest and see stretching for miles ahead and behind thousands of people marching with them, hundreds of wagons emblazoned with crude signs and banners. Soon they reach their encampment, not to settle down for the night but, in company with five or ten thousand comrades, to hear fiery speeches late into the evening.

  These people will be part of an arresting venture in popular grass-roots democracy, part of the “flowering of the largest democratic mass movement in American history,” in Lawrence Goodwyn’s judgment. Ultimately they will fail—but not until they have given the nation an experiment in democratic ideas, creative leadership and followership, and comradely cooperation.

  At first on the Texas frontier but soon in the South and Midwest, farmers in the mid-1880s collectively sensed that something was terribly wrong. In the South, farmers white and black were shackled by the crop lien system and the plummeting price of cotton. In the West, homesteaders were losing their mortgaged homes. Grain prices fell so low that Kansas farm families burned corn for heat. Everywhere farmers suffered from a contracting currency, heavy taxation, and gouging by railroads and other monopolies. As farmers perceived the “money power” buying elections and public officials in order to pass class legislation, some agrarian leaders and editors wondered if the farm areas trembled on the brink of revolution.

  The crop lien system, tight money, and the rest of the farmers’ ills—these seemed remote and impersonal to many an eastern city dweller. But for countless Southern cotton farmers “crop lien” set the conditions of their existence.

  It meant walking into the store of the “furnishing merchant,” approaching the counter with head down and perhaps hat in hand, and murmuring a list of needs. It meant paying “the man” no money but watching him list items and figures in a big ledger. It meant returning month after month for these mumbled exchanges, as the list of debts grew longer. It meant, as noted earlier, that the farmer brought in the produce from his long year’s hard labor, watched his cotton weighed and sold, and then learned that the figures in the ledger, often with enormously inflated interest, added up to more than his crop was worth—but that the merchant would carry him into the next year if he signed a note mortgaging his next year’s crop to the merchant. It meant returning home for another year’s toil, knowing that he might lose his spread and join the army of landless tenant farmers. From start to finish it meant fear, self-abasing deference, hatred of self and others.

  Above all, the system meant loss of liberty, as the farmer became shackled to one crop and one merchant—loss of liberty for men and women raised in the Jeffersonian tradition of individual freedom in a decentralized agrarian republic, in the Jacksonian tradition of equality of opportunity in a land free of usurious banks and grasping monopolies. Their forefathers had fought for independence; was a second American revolution needed to overthrow a new, an economic, monarchy? “Laboring men of America,” proclaimed a tract, the voices of 1776 “ring down through the corridors of time and tell you to strike” against the “monopolies and combinations that are eating out the heart of the Nation.” But strike how? “Not with glittering musket, flaming sword and deadly cannon,” the pamphlet exhorted, “but with the silent, potent and all-powerful ballot, the only vestige of liberty left.”

  One course seemed clear—people must organize themselves as powerfully against the trusts as the trusts were organized against them. But organize how? Economically or politically? Experience did not make for easy answers. Farmers had plunged into politics with Greenbackers and laborites and ended up on the short end of the ballot counts. The answer of the recently founded Farmers’ Alliance in Texas was to try both economic and political structures, but more intensively and comprehensively than ever before. Built firmly on a network of “suballiances”—neighborhood chapters of several dozen members meeting once or twice a month to pray, sing, conduct rituals, debate issues, and do organizational business—the state Alliance experimented with several types of grass-roots cooperatives, including stores, county trade committees to bargain with merchants, and county-wide “bulking” of cotton.

  The key to Alliance power was not organization, though, but leadership—and not the leadership merely of a few persons at the top but of dozens, then hundreds, of men and women who were specially hired and trained to journey across the state visiting suballiances, helping to form new ones, and above all teaching members graphically and in detail about the complex political and economic issues of the day, both national is
sues like money and finance and local ones like the building and expanding of co-ops. These were the famed “lecturers,” who in turn were responsible to a state lecturer. The Alliance’s first state lecturer was William Lamb, a rugged, red-haired, thirty-four-year-old farmer. Born in Tennessee, he had traveled alone at sixteen to the Texas frontier, where he lived in a log hut until he could build a house, raise children with his wife, and learn to read and write at night.

  Lamb soon emerged as one of the most creative and radical of Alliance leaders. When the Great Southwest Strike erupted against Jay Gould’s railroad early in 1886, Lamb defied the more conservative Alliance leaders by demanding that the Alliance back a Knights of Labor boycott. Though suballiances gave food and money to striking railroad workers, the strike collapsed. The Knights continued on their downward slide, but the Texas Alliance continued its phenomenal growth, with perhaps 2,000 suballiances and 100,000 members by the summer of that year.

  Lamb and other lecturers also look leadership on another critical issue facing the Alliance. Wracked by scorching drought, crop failures, and increasing tenantry, Texas farmers by 1886 were meeting in schoolhouses and clamoring for a new strategy—political action. They were impatient with the old shibboleth that the Alliance must steer clear of politics because politics would kill it. The decisive turning point in the agrarian revolt came at the Alliance state convention in Cleburne in early August 1886. A majority of the disgruntled, rustic-looking delegates from eighty-four counties “demanded” of the state and federal governments “such legislation as shall secure to our people freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and arrogant corporations”—legislation including an interstate commerce law and land reform measures. A conservative minority, opposing a proposal for greenbacks that defied the Democratic party, rejected the demands, absconded with the treasury, and formed a strictly “nonpartisan” Alliance.

  At this critical moment Charles Macune, another leader fresh from the grass roots, stepped into the fray. Settled on the Texas frontier at nineteen after early years of poverty and wanderings, Macune had married, studied law and medicine, and practiced both. Developing into a skillful writer, compelling speaker, and innovative thinker, Macune had become well versed in farming matters and active in his county Alliance. And now this tall, magnetic physician-lawyer-farmer, buoyed by the rising militance of the delegates, proposed an ingenious compromise that was also a creative act of leadership.

  Persuading the conservatives to give up their rival Alliance and the radicals to tone down their drive toward partisan politics, he proposed an expansion that was both geographic and functional. In his dazzling vision, a national network of state Alliance “Exchanges,” starting in Texas, would collectively market cotton and buy supplies and farm equipment. This giant farmers’ cooperative would not only achieve higher, more stable prices, but would provide the credit to free all farmers from the furnishing merchant and mortgage company. Thus, he proclaimed, mortgage-burdened farmers could “assert their freedom from the tyranny of organized capital.” At a statewide meeting at Waco in January 1887 the farmer delegates enthusiastically adopted Macune’s grand strategy, decided on merger with the Louisiana Farmers’ Union, and chose Macune as first president of the National Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union. The state Alliance built a huge headquarters in Dallas even while doubling its membership and preparing a small army of lecturers to proselytize the South during mid-1887.

  Even that army of enthusiasts seemed astonished by the response. “The farmers seemed like unto ripe fruit,” one reported from North Carolina. “You can garner them by a gentle shake of the bush.” He had held twenty-seven meetings in one county and left twenty-seven suballiances in his wake. With cotton down to eight cents a pound, farmers were desperate for relief. Together they and the lecturers set up trade committees, cotton yards, and warehouses in hundreds of counties, along with state exchanges. Georgia, with its big state exchange and its cooperative stores, gins, and warehouses, was the most successful. When manufacturers of the commonly used jute bagging organized a trust and doubled the price, the Georgia Alliance—and later other state groups—successfully boycotted the “jute trust,” using cotton or pine straw instead, while protesting farmers donned cotton bagging and even witnessed a double wedding in which both brides and both grooms were decked out in that finery.

  The idea of farm cooperation swept into the Midwest. The Alliance came to be most deeply rooted in the corn and wheat fields of Kansas, where a great boom had busted in 1887 amid mounting debts and foreclosures. When political efforts failed the next year, farm leaders visited Texas and returned full of missionary zeal. The formation of suballiances and the building of cooperatives proceeded feverishly until the entire state boasted of over 3,000 local units. When the “twine trust” hiked by 50 percent the price of the twine used to bind wheat, Alliance staged a boycott. The trust lowered its price.

  As early as 1889, however, Alliance leaders in Kansas were concluding that education and cooperation were not enough, that electoral political action was necessary too. The question was not whether to engage in politics but how—independent political action versus third-party efforts versus working through a major party; lobbying and pressuring established parties versus direct action to take power. The existing political landscape was barren. The Republican and Democratic parties both were sectional entities, appealing to lingering Civil War hatreds to win elections. Farmers who actually shared common conditions and needs were polarized by politicians who waved the bloody shirt. Though most farm leaders in Kansas spurned “partisan politics” at every turn, what they actually rejected was the familiar brand of party politics animated by sectionalism and penetrated by railroad and other monopolies. Many envisioned not just an alternative party, but an alternative kind of party that would overcome racial and sectional hatred and respond to grass-roots needs.

  A county “people’s convention” that nominated—and elected—a “people’s ticket” for county offices against the trusts inspired Alliance leaders in Kansas to raise their sights to state action. A convention of industrial organizations in Topeka, with delegates from the Knights of Labor and the “single tax” movement as well as from Alliance groups, assembled in Representative Hall in the statehouse, formally set up the People’s Party of Kansas, and called a state convention to choose statewide candidates and adopt the first People’s Party platform.

  Once again new leaders emerged out of this agitation and conflict. In the “Big Seventh” congressional district in southwest Kansas, a Medicine Lodge rancher and town marshal named Jerry Simpson quickly emerged as the most noted Kansas Populist. A sailor on the Great Lakes and later an Illinois soldier in the Civil War, Simpson had run a farm and sawmill in northeastern Kansas before turning to cattle-raising. After the harsh winter of 1887 killed his cattle and destroyed his life’s savings, he turned to the Alliance and the new political insurgency.

  Simpson won his imperishable title as “Sockless Jerry” during his campaign in 1890 against Colonel James Hallowell. “I tried to get hold of the crowd,” Simpson recalled. “I referred to the fact that my opponent was known as a ‘Prince.’ Princes, I said, wear silk socks. I don’t wear any.” Hallowell, he went on, boasted that he had been to Topeka and had made laws. Picking up a book, Simpson recalled, he tapped on a page with his finger. “I said, here is one of Hal’s laws. I find that it is a law to tax dogs, but I see that Hal proposes to charge two dollars for a bitch and only one dollar for a son of a bitch. Now the party I belong to believes in equal and exact justice to all.”

  Women leaders in Kansas attracted even more attention than the men. “Women who never dreamed of becoming public speakers,” wrote Annie Diggs, “grew eloquent in their zeal and fervor. Josh Billings’ saying that ‘wimmin is everywhere,’ was literally true in that wonderful picknicking, speech-making Alliance summer of 1890.” While most Alliance women did rather mu
ndane tasks, a good number of them emerged as compelling leaders and stump speakers. Diggs herself had worked actively in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Kansas and as a lay preacher in the Unitarian Church when, in the mid-eighties, she journeyed east to become Boston correspondent for several Kansas papers. She returned to Kansas, worked with the Alliance, wrote on suffrage and temperance and Alliance issues despite a public disavowal by her Republican editor, and then joined Stephen McLallin, a leading Populist editor, as associate editor of the Topeka Advocate. Together they shaped it into the leading reform paper in the state.

  There were other noted women leaders: Fanny McCormick, assistant state lecturer who ran for state superintendent of public instruction; Sarah Emery, author of the widely read Seven Financial Conspiracies and a spellbinding orator; Kansas-born Fanny Vickrey, another gifted orator. But attracting most attention of all was the indomitable Mary Lease.

  Lease was born in Pennsylvania of parents who were Irish political exiles and grew up in a family devastated by the Civil War; her two brothers died in the fighting, her father in Andersonville prison. She moved to Kansas in the early 1870s, taught parochial school, raised a family, tried and failed at farming, studied law—“pinning sheets of notes above her wash tub”—became one of the first woman lawyers of Kansas, and began a tempestuous career as a speaker for Irish nationalism, temperance, woman’s suffrage, union labor, and the Alliance. A tall, stately woman, she had “a golden voice,” in William Allen White’s recollection, “a deep, rich contralto, a singing voice that had hypnotic qualities.” But she could also hurl “sentences like Jove hurled thunderbolts,” Diggs said, as she gave scores of speeches, some over two hours long, throughout Kansas. Pointing to the starving families of Chicago and the wasted corn piled along the railroad tracks or burned for heat, she exclaimed, “What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more Hell!”