This diary was inspired by the passion and enthusiasm of the Texas Dems in
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America has a secret history besides the one you learned in school. The origins of the New Deal can be traced to seven people on a porch in Lampasas County, Texas in 1877.
America has a secret history besides the one you learned in school. The origins of the New Deal can be traced to seven people on a porch in Lampasas County, Texas in 1877.
In that mythic heyday of the pioneer sodbusters, the truth was that small family farmers started getting screwed the minute they arrived on the prairie. Screwed by the grain and cotton dealers that bought their crops; screwed by the railroads that shipped them; screwed by the merchants that they had to buy necessities from on credit, the infamous "crop lien"; screwed by the jute bag trust that controlled the supply of bags they used to ship their crops. Exacerbating all of that was the steep deflationary spiral set off by the "crime of '73", the return to the gold standard. Heavily mortgaged farmers found themselves having to pay the principal and interest on loans with dollars far more valuable than the ones they had borrowed, ballooning the real rate of interest.
Seven fed-up farmers in Lampasas County, Texas met on a porch decided to band together to fight for their interests with the merchants, brokers and railroads, and organized a Farmers Alliance. Representatives were sent to nearby communities to encourage farmers to start their own Alliances. At first the idea spread slowly, in 1883 there were just 30 local Alliances, mostly in north-central Texas.
The Alliances realized they would have to expand and embrace far more farmers if they were to effectively challenge the powerful "special interests" (a term the Farmers Alliance gave its place in the American political lexicon.) Alliance leader C. W. McCune suggested the Alliance take advantage of the growing trend of traveling "lecturers", and hire its own "lecturers" to travel rural America organizing Alliances. The "lecturer" technique was a roaring success. The Alliance burst out of Texas like a prairie cyclone, first into the great granaries of Kansas and the Dakotas, then into the cotton belt south.
As the Alliances burgeoned, local and increasingly national political establishments and economic interests became alarmed and sought to suppress its power. The result forced the Alliances to turn to more explicitly political action to defend themselves and their interests. Since the Alliance was opposed by both major parties, and with their rapidly growing numbers, the clear answer for the Alliance farmers was to form their own party, which they did, the People's Party, remembered now usually as the Populists. In elections in 1892 and 1894, the People's Party made stunning advances, and honed a national agenda of railroad regulation, antitrust, government lending to agricultural producers, and reinflatin of the currency.
In 1896, the Populists fused with the Democrats in support of Nebraska Democratic Representative William Jennings Bryan for the Presidency. this was seen as their high point, but it was the beginning of the end of the Populists as a movement.
However, their ideas endured, percolating on the back burner of Democratic Party politics. Two generations later, in America's hour of greatest economic crisis, an eastern establishment patrician President adopted almost the entire agenda of the Farmers Alliance and the Populists in shaping his New Deal.
Seven people on a porch. It is our history. Can you get 7 people on your porch?