The Farmers’ Alliance

At the end of the 1800s, Texas was beginning to transform from a rugged frontier state into an economic powerhouse. Although the state was still impoverished following the Civil War, it had an abundance of land. This bounty brought with it extensive speculation by British and Northern capitalists and the Eastern railroads. Their interests often clashed with those of the existing residents, who fiercely resisted the parceling out and fencing in of the once-open range.

While there were plenty of opinions on what this new Texas meant, there was one thing everyone was certain of: cotton was still king. Of King Cotton’s subjects, the farmers were the worst off. Texas cotton farmers were trapped in a system of debt known as the crop lien system. The system allowed farmers to buy necessary goods on credit using their future harvest as collateral. It was rampant with abuse. The furnishing merchants sold goods to farmers at usurious markups, sometimes as high as 100 percent. On the purchasing side, cotton buyers colluded to keep prices low, and individual farmers had limited opportunities to negotiate higher prices. After selling their cotton, many farmers were still in debt, which would be carried over to the next year. Some debts became so large that farmers were forced to sell their land to the furnishing merchant, who would become their landlord.

Why is it that those “who work most get least, and those who work least get most?” This query was posed by S. O. Daws, one of the leaders of the Farmers’ Alliance, an organization founded to answer this question. Founded in Lampasas, Texas, in 1877, the Farmers’ Alliance began organizing farmers around their collective interests, advocating that they negotiate directly with merchants and establish cooperative stores, mills, and cotton gins. It would grow into one of the largest protest organizations in American history, boasting over a million members.

The Railroads

While farmers went hungry, railroad corporations were dining lavishly on government largesse. To encourage growth, the legislature had provisioned land grants for each mile of track laid. In three decades, Texas gave over 32 million acres of land to the railroad corporations. The railroad companies rewarded the state of Texas by jacking up freight costs. This only further squeezed the farmers, whose profits were hindered by increased transportation costs.

The railroad companies were equally miserly toward their workers. Workers in the old Southwest, including many in Texas, organized themselves into the Knights of Labor, one of the country’s first major labor unions. The national union sought to organize all workers and fought for higher pay, workers’ protections, and the eight-hour workday. In 1885, these workers waged a successful strike against the robber baron Jay Gould. The early success of the movement brought in more members, and the union swelled to nearly 700,000 strong. But the fight of 1885 was just the dress rehearsal for what would be known as the Great Southwest Strike of 1886.

The Birth of Populism

Meanwhile, the Farmers’ Alliance had hired a man named William Lamb as a traveling lecturer. A farmer himself, the self-educated Lamb became one of the top recruiters and thinkers in the organization. He also began to make critical connections linking the struggles of farmers and industrial workers, recognizing their mutual conflict with capitalists like Jay Gould.

After the strike of 1885, the Knights of Labor called upon the farmers to join in a boycott in support of longshoremen in Galveston, Texas. Up until then, the Farmers’ Alliance saw itself as strictly an advocacy group for farmers and had refused to involve itself in broader struggles. But William Lamb understood that a loss for the Knights was a loss for the farmers and began agitating for a boycott.

While most of the Farmers’ Alliance membership consisted of poor farmers, there was an influential portion of members who were well-off and less interested in taking on capitalists like Jay Gould. When Lamb first proposed the boycott, he was rebuffed by the president of the Farmers’ Alliance. The conservative editor of the Alliance’s official paper, the Rural Citizen, wrote that those who pushed for boycotts were “busy bodies in other men’s business.”

Populism could have died in its cradle. Instead, William Lamb took a defiant step toward building working-class solidarity among agrarian and industrial workers, eventually leading to the People’s Party and the birth of the American populist movement.

William Lamb challenged the conservative position of the Rural Citizen and Alliance president Andrew Dunlap. In a letter to the membership, Lamb wrote, “We think all members should show the world which side they are on.” He condemned the conservative leadership of the Alliance, adding, “We are looking forward to men that will advocate our interests; those who are working against us are no good for us.”

Most important, Lamb didn’t use the narrow language of rural revolt but spoke to farmers as members of the broader working class. He asked them to examine what capitalism had done to them. The crop lien system and the corporate control of government had changed agricultural work in Texas. Farmers were becoming tenants on land they once owned. Those who still owned their land could see they were much closer to landless workers than the landed gentry.

Lamb may have been overruled at the top, but the decentralized organization of the Farmers’ Alliance meant county chapters were free to decide for themselves. Many supported the boycott.

The Great Southwest Strike

Political conservatives in the Farmers’ Alliance had a strong argument on their side. The experiment with building a coalition between urban workers and farmers risked the entire project of the Farmers’ Alliance, as they too might face a similar crackdown. William Lamb’s dream of unity between rural and urban workers was under threat.

To Lamb’s delight, by the time the Farmers’ Alliance held its state convention in Cleburne, Texas, membership in the organization had grown from 55,000 at the beginning of 1886 to 75,000. The repression of the Knights of Labor did not lead to a conservative reaction from the farmers; it led to a radical one.

The Cleburne Demands of 1886 are the foundation of populism. Not yet a political party, the demands of these farmers read like the preamble to a political platform:

We . . . demand of our State and National 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 the arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations.

The document demonstrated concern not just for farmers but for all workers. The first demand:

The recognition by incorporation of trade unions, co-operative stores, and such other associations as may be organized by the industrial classes to improve their financial condition, or to promote their general welfare.

This was followed by demands that the state revise its land policies to benefit everyday people, not just corporations; that land used for speculation be seized via taxation; and that ownership of large tracts of land by foreign capitalists be curtailed. Other demands were to weaken corporate power, ensure corporations pay the wages promised, end convict labor, remove unlawful fences from public and school lands, and form a national bureau of labor statistics, which indeed exists today.

Demands surrounding land reform are what one might expect from a coalition of farmers, including calls for the protection of cooperative enterprises. But what does it matter to the farmer if labor unions are recognized, wages are paid on time, and convict labor is banned? The farmers did not see themselves primarily as countrypeople in opposition to townspeople but as workers in opposition to capitalists.

A few years later, a coalition of farmers and Knights of Labor would gather together to form the People’s Party of Texas. It would directly challenge the Democratic Party and bring about a decade of two-party competition in Texas, leading to significant reforms and improvements in workers’ rights. Rural radicals like Stump Ashby would stand side by side with urban workers, men like Melvin Wade, a black leader of the Knights of Labor. William Lamb would preside over the founding of the alliance, ushering in a new chapter in the history of the American working class.