Farmers' Alliance Movement

Farmers' Alliance Movement. The Farmers' Alliance, the largest agricultural movement in American history, was triggered by worsening agricultural conditions in commercial crop producing areas of the southern and Great Plains states, particularly the fall in agricultural prices after the Civil War and consequent loss of land by small farmers. To counter these conditions, the Texas Alliance appeared in the late 1870s, and by 1884 was promoting cooperative ideas and antimonopoly politics.

A democratic organization centered around local suballiances and a system of lecturers, the Texas Alliance in 1886 began its spread into the Southeast and north into Kansas. Women were encouraged to join but African‐American farmers could not, although the Southern Alliance did cooperate with the Colored Farmers' Alliance, organized in 1886. By 1889 Alliance cooperative enterprises, including statewide cooperative purchasing and marketing exchanges, had spread across the South. The state exchanges failed or did not live up to expectations, but local cooperative efforts often succeeded temporarily.

In the latter half of the 1880s the Farmers' Alliance movement, still incorporating the message of cooperation and antimonopoly politics, appeared in the tier of states from the Dakotas to Nebraska and in parts of the Middle West. Efforts in 1889 at St. Louis to combine all the organizations in the movement failed, but most joined the new National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union on an antimonopoly platform calling for an end to large landholding; government ownership of the railroads and telegraph systems; the free and unlimited coinage of silver; the replacement of national bank notes with legal tender notes issued by the federal government; and the subtreasury plan, a sophisticated proposal developed by Charles Macune for using nonperishable crops as collateral for federal loans to farmers and as a way to increase seasonal currency flexibility.

Between 1889 and early 1892 much of the Farmers' Alliance movement entered independent politics. Until then, support for the Farmers' Alliance movement had been strong, even among nonfarmers. Its entry into third party politics in 1892 with Populism—the Populist party adopted the Farmers' Alliance St. Louis platform—produced opposition as well as many defections from the Alliance. Indeed, the Farmers' Alliance movement fell apart that year, a victim of internal dissension. By 1893 only a few local Alliances and Alliance cooperatives survived. While the movement did pass the cooperative ideal to another generation of farm organizations, it proved less successful in transmitting its conviction that a democratic government should play an active role in the political and economic life of its citizens.
See also Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Agriculture: The “Golden Age” (1890s–1920); Free Silver Movement; Gilded Age; Granger Laws; Granger Movement; Monetary Policy, Federal; Populist Era.

Bibliography

Lawrence Goodwyn , Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America, 1976.
Robert C. McMath Jr. , American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898, 1993.

Bruce Palmer