V - THE POLITICAL ACTION OF ORGANIZED LABOR, VI - THE ECONOMIC BASIS OF POPULISM, VII - THE FARMERS' ALLIANCE

After the decline of the Greenback movement, and while the forces for a larger effort in the same line were working under the ground, the field of the Third Party was occupied for a short time by organized labor. The disintegration of the Greenback-Labor combination left the forces of the farmers and laboring people divided up into various camps. There was the Union Labor Party, the United Labor Party, the Progressive Labor Party and the American Reform Party among the laborers. Among the farmers were the Tax Reformers, the Anti-Monopolists, the Grange, which was going down, and the Farmers' Alliance, which was rapidly gaining strength. The labor forces combined first and formed the Union Labor Party of 1886, absorbing the farmer vote. Two years later the farmers had effected a powerful organization and absorbed the labor vote in the Alliance or People's Party.

Although by a few palliating measures the old parties had for the time being defeated the Third Party, the necessity for independent political action had not diminished. The condition of the two producing classes, wage laborers and agriculturists in 1887 was most deplorable.

Through the scarcity of money, the combination of middlemen and railroads, the inability of the farmer to sell his product for what it cost to raise it, and the inability of the laborer to sell his labor for what it cost him to live, the avarice of the money lender into whose clutches the people were doomed to fall, and from whose toils there was no escape, the people were rapidly being reduced to peonage.

The United States Commissioner of Labor in his report for 1885 declared that "The prime cause of the industrial conditions which prevail among the manufacturing nations is due to labor not receiving an equitable share of the product." Although wages had doubled between 1828 and 1880, yet production had increased many fold, and the surplus product would not be bought by the people, hence it was stored up and caused a glut in the market, and, eventually, industrial depression and panics. As expressed by the Labor Commissioner, "The consuming power of the larger part of the population of the United States had been crippled." The recommendations of the Commissioner are interesting as they indicate that if the people's movement was anarchy and its doctrines the product of insanity, both had pretty high endorsement. The recommendations were:

Laws against speculation and laws governing the extending of railroad building and organization of manufacturing corporations. The restriction of land grants, the regulation of the collecting of debts and the prevention of the misuse of credit. Bankruptcy laws which would help the poor man as well as the rich. Regulation of freight rates. Tariff on a basis of justice and science, instead of a basis of individual interest. Restriction of low class immigration, industrial education, and a legitimate increase in the consuming powers of the people. Arbitration of labor troubles and all contracts for lab-or to be as free as contracts for commodities. Industrial copartnership through methods of profit-sharing, through wise permissive laws: Capital and labor each to receive a fixed and reasonable compensation for its investment, and after that the net profits to be divided under profit-sharing plans. Shorter hours for labor and a condition where production shall be regulated by demand.

The Kansas Bureau of Labor made an investigation on the matter of wages and chattel mortgages in the State, findings of which are printed in the reports of 1886. It shows that the average wages of working people in Kansas at that time were about 85c per month above the absolute necessities of life, leaving nothing for recreation, reading, education, and emergency funds. Wages were from $1.10 to $1.60 per day, or about $40.00 per month. Sometimes with the whole family working the income did not go more than that amount, and seldom above $50.00 per month. The long periods between pay days, emergencies which were likely to arise calling for cash, and times of enforced idleness, forced the worker into the clutches of the loan shark. In the investigation of the dealings of these bloodsuckers some startling revelations were made. The loan made in each instance was usually about $25.00, and given on household goods. The interest was from 10% per month on up, sometimes running as high as 375% annually. The average annual interest extorted from these helpless people was 147%. The loans were usually made for the support of the family, sickness or funeral expenses. In many of these cases a prompt payment of wages on the part of the employer would have obviated the necessity of the loan. But the corporations were holding back two weeks wages on every man, and paying every two weeks, so that the laborer received no wages until the end of the first month and then only two weeks pay. The workingmen in their organizations were asking for the following things: Technical education, eight hour law, weekly payment of wages in coin of the realm, restrictions of land ownership, the issue of money according to constitutional provisions, and abolition of National Banks, laws governing immigration, arbitration of labor troubles and government ownership of railroads, telephones and telegraph.

These principles formed the basis of the Union Labor party, which was organized at Cincinnati, Ohio, February 22, 1887. The Union Labor party had its inception in the bitter disappointment of the people, especially the wage workers, in President Cleveland. He had promised much that they thought would be to their advantage, but instead of extending a helping hand in the great labor troubles of 1885 and 1886, he crushed the strikers with an iron hand, calling out the militia at the behest of the corporations who hired thugs to commit depredations and had the laborers shot for it by Pinkertons and soldiers. This action aroused labor to a white heat, and in the strike on the Gould lines in the West, over $3,000,000 worth of corporation property, as well as a vast amount belonging to private individuals, was destroyed. At a street-meeting held in Chicago to protest against the actions of the Pinkerton detectives and the police in shooting the strikers, a bomb was thrown at the police by a man in the crowd, who escaped. Instead of trying to find him, the police arrested the man who was making the speech and a number of his colleagues, and after an unfair trial they were convicted and two of them hanged and the rest given life sentences without any evidence being introduced that they even had knowledge of the bomb. Everybody who dared even sympathize with them or suggest the possibility of their innocence were branded as anarchists in the most lurid terms. But the people were stirred up, and the sentiment crystallized in the form of political action. The Knights of Labor was then at its zenith and was the strongest organization of the industrial classes of the time. The reformers united under its banner as it held the key to the situation.

The first State meeting of the Union Labor party convened in the hall of the House of Representatives August 9, 1887. There were two factions: The United Labor faction who were single taxers, and the Union Labor faction who were going on the Greenback-Labor principles. The latter won out. The orators of the towns were snowed under by those of the short grass country. The platform of the National Convention was adopted which had very little in it that was new. It covered the scope of former reform plat-forms in regard to money and labor, advocating public onwnership of railroads, telegraph, and telephones, asked for irrigation in the and districts under government control, declared against child labor, and said that the employment of armed men by corporations ought to be prohibited. There was no State election that year, hence no State ticket. However, in the local and Congressional elections the reformers made a good showing, casting 40,000 votes in the State. Cowley County, where the People's Party had its birth in 1889, polled 1,500 Labor votes. Labette County elected the entire ticket. Linn County polled 1,200 votes and elected a sheriff. In Clay County a Miss Mary P. Coleman was advertised as "the People's candidate for Register of Deeds."

Early in 1888 the ill-fated Order of Videttes sprang up in Kansas and spread very rapidly over the State, - so rapidly that by the time the National convention was held in May there were enough Videttes sent from Kansas to control the convention. The Videttes were a secret organization in which the Vincent brothers, publishers of a very able reform paper called the Non-Conformist, at Winfield, Kansas, were the leaders. Among the prominent members were C. B. Hoffman of Enterprise, and John W. Breidenthal. This organization was bitterly assailed by the Republican press. In becoming a Vidette, a man was required to abandon the political faith of his childhood, and this was heralded as blood-red death-dealing anarchy. The cause of humanity was made paramount, in the Vidette ritual, to the cause of country, and this was branded as the creed of a traitor. The order, in one of its meetings, considered the raising of $10,000 to establish a printing plant, and this was denounced as the most heinous of crimes. If there was a crime committed, it was charged to the "anarchist Videttes," whose mission in life, according to the Republican papers, was to kill, slay and make afraid.

The second National Convention of the Union Labor was held at Cincinnati, May 16, 1888. The platform was much the same as the year before except for the introduction of Woman suffrage, the fostering of cooperative associations, graduated income tax, and the election of Senators. by direct vote of the people, Andrew J. Streeter of Illinois, was named for President, and Charles E. Cunningham, of Arkansas, for Vice-President. The National ticket polled 146,000 votes.

In Kansas the party nominated P. P. Elder, afterward a famous Populist, for Governor, and polled 63,000 votes, giving the Republicans a close race in some localities. Three Union Labor men were elected to the Legislature. Just prior to the election two unfortunate incidents occurred which had the effect of cutting down the Labor party vote. The ritual of the Videttes was stolen from the office of the Non-Conformist, along with the code, and was transcribed and elaborated upon in the most lurid manner by the Republican press, On October 18, a bomb was brought to the express office at Coffeyville by an unknown man who sent it to the address of one of the reform leaders at Winfield. The train was late and the expressman took it to his home where it exploded, frightfully wounding his wife and daughter. The Republicans made great capital out of the incident, using it to prove that the Winfield reformers were bomb anarchists. The Union Labor press and platform Raid that the bomb was sent at the instance of the Republican State Central Committee to involve the reformers in some kind of trouble, probably with the idea of arresting the man to whom it was sent as soon as he should innocently take it from the express office. This is the more probable explanation. Whether it was sent by the Republicans or not, nothing could have served their purpose better. The Union Labor party had practically disbanded in Kansas before the close of the year, and an organization known as the State Reform Association took its place, pending the concentration of all forces into the People's Party.

What was the matter with Kansas in the eighties? No sooner had the Greenback party been disposed of by the superficial adoption by the old parties of a portion of their platform than the Union Labor party sprang right up in the same spot. The Union Labor party having been plotted against, villified and scandalized out of existence, the farmers again came to the mark with a new organization, but with the same old leaders and the same principles. There must have been a grievance of some kind. The industrial classes had an idea that their interests were not being conserved by the old parties. They based their opinions on the following facts:

The farmers of Kansas were burning corn because it could not be exchanged for coal except at a loss. The coal miners were out of work and going hungry because they could not get the corn. The farmer was going without clothing because he could not exchange his corn, wheat, butter, eggs and meat for clothing. But the shelves of the merchants and the storehouses of the manufacturers were loaded with clothing, and the man who made clothes was starving because there was no demand for the product of his toil. The pirates of trade stood between the farmer and the wage worker preventing them from exchanging the fruits of their toil, except by the payment of so heavy a tribute that they could not raise the sum. There was no medium of exchange left to the industrial classes. They had been borrowing the medium of the bankers since 1873, and now they couldn't even pay the interest, to say nothing of borrowing more. The Republicans called it over-production, and saw nothing in the situation to warrant a political upheaval. An over-production of the necessities in life in which the producers are starving and freezing has been the custom ever since the masters that oppress humanity discovered that wage slavery was more profitable than chattel slavery, so the Republican politicians thought this condition quite common, natural and necessary. The idea that laws could, would, or should be made in the interests, of the people was quite preposterous to them. The remedy which they applied was a tirade of abuse upon both the farmer and the laborer. They told them that if they wouldn't talk so much, times wouldn't be so hard, and advised that they go to work, but no work was provided for the laborer, and no market for the farmer.

The man who I had followed the advice of Horace Greeley and gone west in the early seventies, after losing his Indiana or Ohio farm in the panic of 1873, was in sore straits. He had mortgaged his farm for improvements, and when be could not sell his produce he had been obliged to borrow on his chattels at the rate of from 3% to 10% per month, to pay taxes and interest on that already borrowed. Practically every farm in Central and Western Kansas was hopelessly encumbered. Threefourths of all the farms in the state were mortgaged, the farm mortgaged indebtedness amounting to $235,000,000, according to the Government census of 1890, on which an average interest of 9% per annum. was paid. On chattel mortgages a rate of from 40% to 375% per annum was paid. No wonder the farmers looked longingly at the Government money that was being loaned to the banks at 2% on security not any better than theirs. In Lyon County, one of the oldest and most prosperous in the State, there was a mortgaged indebtedness of $5,588,660, against a valuation of $6,493,491, the number of mortgages being 6,581. In Reno County there were 426 foreclosures in one term of court. In Lincoln County the mortgage indebtedness was $1,672,703 in 1888, or 77% of the assessed valuation. In 1890 it had increased to $1,817,513, or 83% of the assessed valuation. Many of the mortgages had been discounted heavily, that is, the farmer only received two-thirds or three-fourths of the face value of the mortgage, while his obligation compelled him to pay the full amount with interest at ten per cent.

Foreclosures were the order of the day. In the first six months of the year 1890, there were 2,650 foreclosures, and a like number of farms were deeded to mortgage companies to avoid the expense of foreclosure, making about 10,600 farms, or about 1,696,000 acres of land lost to the farmers that year. In the decade from 1880 to 1890, mortgages to the number of 441,406 were written on Kansas property, of which in the neighborhood of 150,000 were foreclosed or deeded to the holder of the mortgage without legal proceedings. In that decade the number of farmers tilling their own soil had decreased 12%. This accounted only for those who went into tenantry, and not for those who left the State. And at this time, especially in the latter eighties, there was a steady stream of farmers leaving the soil. In 1890, Sam Wood said that the loan companies were in possession of 90% of all the land in Southwest Kansas.

But when he left, the farmer did not leave free. The mortgage company had a lien on his future prospects, and the product of his future toil. By virtue of the policy of contraction of currency delineated at the beginning of this article, the property decreased heavily in value while the mortgage remained the same. Senator Plumb said in 1888, that the contraction of the past five years had been sufficient to lessen the value of property three billion dollars. Here is the result of that condition. The farmer had a piece of land worth $3,000 in 1880. He mortgaged it at that time for $1,000 with which to put on improvements. After paying the original amount in interest, at the rate of $100 per year, at the end of ten years it came to foreclosure. He found in this foreclosure suit that instead of having an equity, the value of his $3,000 property with $1,000 worth of improvements, besides what he had put on in labor, had fallen so low that the loan company not only got the whole thing, after already getting their money back in interest, but that it even sold so low that the company had a good sized judgment against him, to prevent him from starting in somewhere else. The farmer in these straits was abused unmercifully by the Republican press. He was called a crook and a defaulter, and accused of mortgaging his property for more than it was worth with the intention of abandoning it and robbing the mortgage company. If those miserable creatures who drove East to their wife's folks, or West to find new homes, or walked to the cities in the vain hope of employment, had robbed anybody, they had a pretty smooth way of concealing it. They did not put up the appearance that the robbers of Wall Street did, or those of the railroads and monopolies.

T. E. Bowman writing in the interests of money at this time, says that any legislation adverse to capital will injure the borrower more than the lender. But the borrower saw no terrors in such legislation, as he was in such desperate straits that any change had to be for the better. In 1890, there was a real estate mortgage for every five people in Kansas, an average of $170 per capita, on which an interest of $16.70 was paid. Counting all indebtedness, public and private, including railroad, and public improvement bonds, State, municipal, county and township bonds, and mortgaged indebtedness, the debts of the people of this State at the time the Government census of 1890 was taken, amounted to $400 per capita, on which an annual interest of at least $36 was paid. The per capita circulation of the country had fallen very low in 1886-87, and although it had revived slightly, it was even yet less than $10 per capita. How to pay an interest of $36 to say nothing of a debt of $400, with $10, when even the $10 was in the Eastern banks, was the problem of those times.

This was the condition in which the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party found Kansas, and if it was a virus, as the Republicans claimed, the vaccination certainly took.

The first mention we have of the Farmers' Alliance is in connection with the fight of the settlers on the Osage ceded lands, to hold their homesteads which they had taken from the Government in good faith against the trumped up claims of the railroads who sought to make them pay, not only for the lands they had preempted from the Government, but for their own improvements which they had made. Finding that they were spied upon in their open meetings, the settlers formed secret societies known as Settlers' Protective Associations, or Settlers' Alliance. Inquiries as to the plan of organization came from' New York state, and Mr. G. Campbell, of Oswego, who became a prominent Populist, tells of sending the plan of the society to that state, where Alliances were formed. But these merely kept their identity until after the fall of the Grange and the defeat of the Greenback movement, when the Farmers' Alliance took the place of the Grange. It was the New York organization that developed into what was known as the Northern Alliance, which was introduced into this State about 1880, but which never took part in politics.

The Populist movement was based on what was known as the Southern Alliance. About the time that the Alliance was organized in New York, a man by the name of Farmer moved from Parsons, Kansas, to Texas, and, according to Mr. Campbell, introduced the Alliance in that State. The first Texas Alliance favored the Greenback movement which proved its undoing. It was organized again in 1879, but did not spread beyond the confines of that state until 1887. At the beginning of that year it united with the Farmers' Union of Louisiana. Organizers were sent to other states, and before the end of the year Missouri, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, and Arkansas were brought into the Alliance fold.

This Southern Alliance was a secret organization. It was brought to Kansas by the Vincent Brothers, publishers of the Non-Conformist at Winfield. They went to Texas, were initiated, and returned to organize in this State. They began in Cowley county where the People's Party was founded in 1889. While the Union Labor Party was staging its campaign of 1888, the farmers were organizing, and in the summer of that year the State Farmers' Alliance was formed with Benj. Clover, the head of the Cowley County Alliance, as President. At the close of the campaign the Videttes and the Union Labor people were ready to disband, and they went over to the Alliance in a body.

The Alliance saw its greatest growth in 1889. In 1890 there were 130,000 members in Kansas, and the organization transacted $1,000,000 worth of business in farm implements that year. The Alliance Chiefly talked education and co-operation at first. It established co-operative stores. The idea was to go together in buying and selling and save money, beat the food trust in selling and the other monopolies in buying. But they found they were going against a fixed game in which the product and manufacturing monopolies were in with the banks and the railroads to defeat their purposes. Then they began to wake up and talk about politics. At the first annual meeting, after urging the farmers to secure literature on economic subjects and educate themselves and their families on the subject, the political objects of the Alliance were stated about as follows:

To secure the enactment of state laws auxiliary to the interstate commerce law, and to establish equitable relations between the people and the roads, making the rights and duties of each depend, not upon doubtful discretion, but upon positive enactment. Laws prohibiting free passes for public officials. Equitable distribution of tax burdens among all classes. Better representation of the agricultural interests of the country in the National Congress, and in the State Legislature. Prohibition of alien land and cattle syndicates. Election of the United States senators by direct vote of the people.

The interest question was taken up at some length and it was shown that the farmer could not pay ten per cent interest and retain his farm because he was not making that much even in a good year. The idea was advanced that the value of products should be controlled by the law of supply and demand and that the felon who goes to prison may have robbed one individual, but the felon who occupies a high seat of reputed honor may reach out the hand of might over a whole continent and rob thousands of victims of their property and homes. Concerning railroads it was said: "The magnitude of this evil is almost beyond comprehension. Nearly four thousand millions of dollars of securities representing no actual investment of money are now in existence in this country, beside which, that of the national debt sinks into insignificance. These securities are equivalent to an irredeemable, constantly growing national debt, an ever present incubus upon the labor and land of the nation."

The farmers had been advised to read, and there was no dearth of reading matter. Besides the Non-Conformist of Wichita, the Advocate of Meriden, and a dozen other reform papers, the number of which grew in 1892 to 150, there was a perfect avalanche of literature, most of it in convenient pamphlet form selling for twenty-five to fifty cents each. The questions of money, poverty, wealth, strikes, panics, monopoly, political graft, railroads, produce piratage, single tax, mortgages, interest, taxation, etc., were discussed from every possible angle, and arrays of figures were produced. Senator Plumb said that the produce trust was robbing the people of Kansas of $40,000,000 annually, which should be going to pay off mortgages. It was learned that the annual interest on the war debt was four times the amount of pensions paid to the Union soldiers. These things were spread broadcast. Pamphlets were sold by the tens of thousands. The Alliance was sowing the ground of Kansas to dragon's teeth. President Clover said: "The year 1889 will witness the most stupendous uprising of farmers ever known in history. Where will Kansas be found, I ask you? We are driven to the wall, we must fight, and brother farmers, we might as well buckle on the armor."

TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME 1 & 2
BIOGRAPHIES — VOLUMES 3, 4, & 5
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | Y | Z

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