Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  With the passing of those days ended the distinctive frontier experience—the distinctive American experience. “What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

  HISTORIANS WOULD SPEND DECADES DEBATING THE VALIDITY of Turner’s frontier thesis. Few bought the whole argument, but the fact that skeptics devoted so much time to refuting it suggested he was onto something.

  A Turnerian gloom was in the American air in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Financial troubles in London shook markets across the Atlantic; American banks large and small collapsed by the dozens per week. The effects of the panic spread to the larger economy, forcing railroads to seek bankruptcy protection, factories to close, mines to cancel shifts, and furloughed workers to scrounge for other sources of income.

  For Western farmers, the depression that followed the panic of 1893—the worst depression in the nation’s history until then—merely added to the stresses they had been feeling for decades. Since the 1870s farm prices had been falling relentlessly, pushing prosperous farmers into the ranks of the marginal, and marginal farmers into ruin. Ironically, a principal cause of the price decline was the farmers’ very success: they produced more corn, wheat, cotton, pork and so on than the markets for those commodities could absorb. Some of the overproduction was the result of the increase in farm acreage, notably under the Homestead Act. Some was the consequence of the mechanization of the farm process.

  But farmers didn’t like hearing this explanation. It demeaned their labor and accomplishment. They were suffering because they had succeeded too well? It made no sense. And it implied that some of them—maybe very many of them—would have to go out of business.

  So the farmers blamed something else: the money system. A Nebraska farmer wrote to the editor of a local farm journal in 1891 lamenting the hard year he and his neighbors were having. “The hot winds burned up the entire crop, leaving thousands of families wholly destitute, many of whom might have been able to run through the crisis had it not been for the galling yoke put upon them by the money loaners and sharks—not by charging 7 per cent per annum, which is the lawful rate of interest, or even 10 per cent, but the unlawful and inhuman country-destroying rate of 3 per cent a month, some going still farther and charging 50 per cent per annum,” he said. “We are cursed, many of us financially beyond redemption, not by the hot winds so much as by the swindling games of the bankers and money loaners, who have taken the money and now are after the property, leaving the farmer moneyless and homeless.”

  The farmer explained how the system worked against those like him who had to borrow to run their businesses. “I have borrowed, for example, $1,000. I pay $25 to the commission man. I give my note and second mortgage of 3 per cent of the $1,000, which is $30 more. Then I pay 7 per cent on the $1,000 to the actual loaner. Then besides all this I pay for appraising the land, abstract, recording, etc., so when I have secured my loan I am out the first year $150.” Things get worse. “This is on the farm, but now comes the chattel loan. I must have $50 to save myself. I get the money; my note is made payable in thirty or sixty days for $35, secured by chattel of two horses, harness and wagon, about five times the value of the note.” The note comes due; the farmer asks for a few days. “No, I can’t wait,” says the lender. “I must have the money.” Says the farmer, to himself and the editor: “If I can’t get the money I have the extreme pleasure of seeing my property taken.”

  The editor remarked that he received such letters every day. They revealed how conditions on the Middle Border were beating the average farmer down. “Take a man, for instance, who labors hard from fourteen to sixteen hours a day to obtain the bare necessaries of life. He eats his bacon and potatoes in a place which might rather be called a den than a home; and then, worn out, lies down and sleeps. He is brutalized both morally and physically.” His work had kept him from attaining the higher things in life, or even realizing that they existed. “He has no ideas, only propensities. He has no beliefs, only instincts. He does not, often cannot, read. His contact with other people is only the relation of servant to master, of a machine to its director.” This man was a product of a system of finance that threw one farmer against all the others in a cutthroat competition for survival of the fittest. “Deny it if you can; competition is only another name for war. It means slavery to millions; it means the sale of virtue for bread; it means for thousands upon thousands starvation, misery, and death. After four thousand years of life, is this the best that we can achieve?”

  MARY ELIZABETH LEASE THOUGHT NOT. THE DAUGHTER OF Irish immigrants, Mary Clyens moved to Kansas and married a druggist named Lease. She lost two children in infancy, and as her other children grew older she filled her free time by studying law and gaining admission to the bar. But she found political advocacy more fulfilling than the legal kind. She spoke for women’s suffrage, prohibition and, increasingly, the rights of farmers against the banks, railroads and other corporations that beset them. “Wall Street owns the country,” she declared. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are prostrate before the manufacturing East. Money rules.” The inequality of wealth and opportunity in America was shocking. “There are thirty men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars; there are half a million looking for work.”

  Mary Lease joined the Populist party, which put farmers’ issues front and center. Speaking for the Populists, and especially for the farmers of Kansas, she spelled out their demands: “We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of national banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out. Land equal to a tract thirty miles wide and ninety miles long has been foreclosed and bought in by loan companies of Kansas in a year. We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.”

  Mary Lease’s most famous line was one she might not have uttered but which she didn’t disavow: “What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more hell.”

  THE POPULIST REVOLT AGAINST THE EASTERN ESTABLISHMENT was something new in the history of the West, a product of the post-frontier age. The fight over land had been settled, in the favor of whites. The fight over politics—to determine which of the whites would rule in the West, and what policies they would adopt—was just beginning.

  William Allen White weighed in against the Populists. White was more Kansan than Mary Lease, having been born in Emporia, grown up in El Dorado, studied at the University of Kansas, and become owner and publisher of the Emporia Gazette. He refused to let Mary Lease, or any of the Populists, speak for Kansas. “What’s the matter with Kansas?” he asked in a blistering 1896 editorial against the Populists. The answer: the Populists themselves. A recent survey revealed that the economy of the country had resumed its growth, but Kansas continued to languish. “In five years ten million people have been added to the national population, yet instead of gaining a share of this—say, half a million—Kansas has apparently been a plague spot and, in the very garden of the world, has lost population by ten-thousands every year.” The Populists, with their rants against money and wealth, were driving good people away. “Every moneyed man in the state who could get out without loss has gone. Every month in every community sees
someone who has a little money pack up and leave the state. This has been going on for eight years. Money has been drained out all the time. In towns where ten years ago there were three or four or half a dozen money-lending concerns, stimulating industry by furnishing capital, there is now none, or one or two that are looking after the interests and principal already outstanding.”

  White acknowledged that life on the Middle Border could be challenging. But other states were doing all right. Nebraska, the birth twin of Kansas, was gaining wealth and population. He demanded again: “What’s the matter with Kansas?”

  And he answered again: the Populists, who couldn’t abide that anyone should succeed when they did not. “We have an old mossback Jacksonian who snorts and howls because there is a bathtub in the State House; we are running that old jay for Governor. We have another shabby, wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatic who has said openly in a dozen speeches that ‘the rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner’; we are running him for Chief Justice.” In a direct swipe at Mary Lease, White added, “Then, for fear some hint that the state had become respectable might percolate through the civilized portions of the nation, we have decided to send three or four harpies out lecturing, telling the people that Kansas is raising hell and letting the corn go to weed.”

  “Oh, yes, Kansas is a great state,” said White, dripping sarcasm. “Here are people fleeing from it by the score every day, capital going out of the state by the hundreds of dollars; and every industry but farming paralyzed, and that crippled, because its products have to go across the ocean before they can find a laboring man at work who can afford to buy them. Let’s don’t stop this year. Let’s drive all the decent, self-respecting men out of the state. Let’s keep the old clodhoppers who know it all.”

  “What’s the matter with Kansas?” he asked once more. “Nothing under the shining sun. She is losing wealth, population and standing. She has got her statesmen, and the money power is afraid of her. Kansas is all right. She has started in to raise hell, as Mrs. Lease advised, and she seems to have an over-production. But that doesn’t matter. Kansas never did believe in diversified crops.”

  WHITE WAS A REPUBLICAN, AND THE NATIONAL PARTY SOON elevated him to the status of sage of the West for showing that the Populists didn’t speak for all the West, or even all Kansas. The Democrats looked to another Westerner, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, in seeking to hold the White House that season. Bryan had been a congressman and an editorialist, but he was, above all, an evangelist—a preacher of the gospel of democracy and respect for the ordinary men and women of America. Bryan attended the Democratic national convention as a relative unknown; he emerged as the party’s nominee after delivering a powerful speech that praised America’s farmers for their devotion to traditional values, condemned the money changers for their insistence on the debtor-strangling gold standard, and concluded with a call to arms: “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns! You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”

  Bryan’s speech carried the Democratic convention, and it won him the Populist nomination as well. His opponent was William McKinley, who represented all the interests Bryan attacked. Bryan stormed around the country campaigning, while McKinley stayed home in Canton, Ohio. Bryan shouted himself hoarse, speaking morning, noon and night; McKinley rocked in his chair on his front porch, smiling and waving at those who came to pay their respects. Bryan lit a prairie fire that spread west from Nebraska; he wound up carrying every state in the West but North Dakota, Oregon and California. He also won the traditionally Democratic South. Yet the industrial states of the Northeast and the Great Lakes went for McKinley, and their large populations and numerous electoral college votes put him over the top.

  49

  BONANZA

  WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE’S ANTI-POPULIST BROADSIDE earned him not merely a reputation in the East but space in the columns of Eastern papers and magazines. In 1897 Scribner’s enlisted him to report on a striking new form of Western agriculture: the bonanza farm. Bonanza farms were giant operations devoted to the cultivation of wheat; ranging in size from several thousand acres to seventy thousand, they applied modern factory methods to a process with roots in the Neolithic era.

  Bonanza farms sprang up in the Central Valley of California and the Palouse district of eastern Washington, but the most impressive were found in the Red River Valley of North Dakota. White traveled there to see the phenomenon for himself. The first thing he noticed was that the giant farms were a function of American law as much as of North American geography. The Red River—of the North, to distinguish it from the Red River of Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana—is that rarity in the United States: an important stream that flows from south to north. (The Willamette River of Oregon is another.) The Red River drains North Dakota before passing into Canadian Manitoba on its way to Lake Winnipeg. A striking disparity was obvious to the most casual observer who visited both sides of the boundary line. “When the river crosses the Canadian border,” White wrote, “the bonanza farms are not found in its valleys, and even smaller farms have not been established universally upon the rich soil, as they have been a few score of miles south in Yankeedom.”

  White didn’t track down the reasons for the disparity, which related to the larger rewards to entrepreneurialism in the United States, and America’s greater tolerance for corporate gigantism. He suggested that Canada might one day catch up. But for now the American phenomenon was enough to astonish any student of agriculture. White wasn’t even sure whether this counted as agriculture. It looked more like industry. “In the valley upon the American side there is not a barren acre,” he said. “Wheat stretches away from the car-window to the horizon, over a land flat as a floor. The monotonous exactness of the level makes one long for the undulating prairies of the Middle West.” White appreciated that the monotony made for greater efficiency. “The very evenness of the plain has a commercial value, and makes the location here of the great wheat-farms possible. For in a rolling country there is waste land: here an ‘eighty’”—acres—“on a hill-top, there a ‘forty’ in a swamp. But in bonanza farming every foot of land must be productive with the expenditure of the least possible amount of human labor upon it.”

  All aspects of the bonanza farms were huge, from their physical extent to the tools employed in their cultivation. “In the lexicon of the Dakota farmer there is no such word as ‘hoe,’” said White. “The smallest implement upon a big wheat farm is a plough. And from the plough to the elevator—from the first operation in wheat-farming to the last—one is forced to realize how the spirit of the age has made itself felt here.” That spirit began with a celebration of size. John Rockefeller built an empire of oil, Andrew Carnegie of steel. No one person dominated farming as Rockefeller and Carnegie did oil and steel, but the county-sized farms of Dakota were to the quarter-sections of Ohio as Carnegie Steel was to the shop of the village blacksmith.

  The spirit of the industrial age also glorified the power of machines. Human muscle power had been replaced by machine power on the big farms, White said. “The man who ploughs uses his muscle only incidentally in guiding the machine. The man who operates the harrow has half a dozen levers to lighten his labor. The ‘sower who goeth forth to sow’ walks leisurely behind a drill and works brakes. The reaper needs a quick brain and a quick hand, but not necessarily a strong arm nor a powerful back.” Steam engines drove harvesters and threshers, replacing not only men but horses. The trend appeared certain to continue.

  White remarked a profound convergence between industry and agriculture, between East and West. “The farm laborer in the West today, where machinery is employed, finds himself advanced to the ranks of skilled labor and enjoys a position not widely different from that of the mill-hand in the
East. Each is a tender of a machine.” Like the Eastern industrialist, the Dakota wheat grower had to match output to market demand. “His profits are large or small according to the caprices of the market,” White said. Yet here the wheat man was at a disadvantage to the iron-monger or textile-weaver. He was at the mercy of forces of nature beyond his control. “The rain, the hail, or the drought may cut his crop short fifty per cent, within a fortnight of the harvest.” When it did, the unit cost of the farmer’s output doubled.

  The bonanza farms had not grown organically the way other farms did. They had not originated in the homestead laws, or evolved by the amalgamation of many small properties. They were born big, offspring at one remove from the federal government. The government had granted millions of acres of public land to the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, and other railroads built on the same model; the railroads then sold the land, in very large parcels, to the current owners of the bonanza farms. “The railroad people interested capitalists, and the establishment of the farms came naturally,” White observed.

  The result was something strange to the American mind. “It is difficult to present the idea of the bigness of these farms to the person whose preconceived notion of a farm is a checker-board lying upon a hillside or in a valley,” White said. A farm of many thousands of acres operated more like a principality than a farm. “Crews of workmen living at one end of the farm and operating it may not see the crews in other corners from season’s end to season’s end.” The fields were so vast that it didn’t pay for the crews to eat lunch at a mess hall, which might be a half-hour’s walk away. Instead the mess halls were put on wheels and rolled out to the workers in the fields.