Granger Movement

Granger Movement. The Granger movement was the first stage of the agrarian crusade of the late nineteenth century in which farmers voiced their dissatisfaction with deteriorating economic conditions and agriculture's declining status in a rapidly industrializing nation.The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, was founded in 1867 in Washington, D.C., by Oliver Hudson Kelley (1826–1913). A Minnesota farmer turned government clerk, Kelley believed that a rural social organization modeled on the Masonic order but admitting women to full membership could improve the intellectual life of farmers and overcome rural isolation. As secretary of the group, Kelley set out to form local granges. He enjoyed little success at first, but beginning in 1869 the Grange grew rapidly. At its peak in the mid‐1870s, with a network of county and state organizations, the national Grange claimed 775,000 members in twenty thousand local groups.

Although Kelley initially viewed the Grange as primarily a social organization, the order discovered other interests as it grew in strength. Its social role remained, especially at the local level, but the Grange also became an educational agency. Granges devoted a portion of each meeting to debate and discussion, thereby encouraging the members to read and to think about contemporary issues. Granges interested themselves in the one‐room country schools, seeking to make the instruction more relevant to pupils’ lives, and in the land‐grant colleges, which they considered to be their institutions. The Patrons of Husbandry embraced economic cooperation as one way to improve farmers’ economic condition, especially by reducing the role of middlemen. Members formed farmer‐owned stores, elevators, and creameries, launched mutual insurance companies, and in a few instances established factories to manufacture farm machinery. Most of these enterprises failed, owing to inadequate capital and management, but they presaged the successful farm cooperatives of the twentieth century.

While the Grange was officially nonpartisan, discontented farmers organized by the Grange often turned to political action. Railroad abuses especially concerned them, and in the four states of the upper Mississippi Valley, they successfully campaigned for the so‐called Granger Laws that sought to bring railroads under public control. These laws, in turn, laid the groundwork for the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. By then, however, the Grange had lost most of its membership and influence, although the organization remained a voice of agriculture and a social institution for farmers in the northeastern states.
See also Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Education: The Public School Movement; Education: The Rise of the University; Gilded Age; Homestead Act; Industrialization; Populist Era; Populist Party.

Bibliography

Dennis S. Nordin , Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867–1900, 1974.
Thomas A. Woods , Oliver H. Kelley and the Origins of the Grange in Republican Ideology, 1991.

Roy V. Scott