XVIII - DECLINE OF THE PEOPLE'S PARTY, XIX - LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

The people and their leaders who had so joyously celebrated the Populist victory in the fall, and had with such high hopes inaugurated the first People's Administration on earth, were keenly disappointed when the legislature finished its work and adjourned with no Populist legislation to its credit. The only plank in the whole platform that passed was the resolution to submit the equal suffrage amendment to the people. True enough, the Dunsmore House, with the aid of the Senate, had passed practically everything that the platform called for but with the final decision of the courts in favor of the Douglass House, these measures did not become laws. Why, under these circumstances the election of Senator John Martin and State Printer E. H. Snow was not also illegal, has not been explained.

The Populist Manifesto covering the Lewelling administration and the Legislature of 1893 does not call attention to a single Populist measure on the statute books, but it contains much interesting matter. For instance, it shows that the bill put in by the Copeland Hotel for sandwiches for the Douglass House was $1,460.20. The State paid the bill. The Populists bought their own sandwiches. Aside from the fact that the State was not supposed to board its law-makers in addition to paying them, the sum mentioned in the bill was sufficient to have boarded the Douglass House all winter at the price being paid for produce at that time. With meat three cents per pound and wheat at 30 cents per bushel, the sandwiches could have been sold two for a nickel, and an enormous profit realized. This would have been 584,080 sandwiches, or 8,718 sandwiches for each of the 67 members of the Republican House, which would have made 167 apiece per day for the entire session. Considering, however, that these sandwiches were eaten in the three days' siege, making 2,906 for each man every day, it shows that the Republicans had capacity, if not ability. And it is little wonder that people of such enormous physical necessities should have been compelled to become tools of the wealthy corporations in order to live, as it would be quite out of the question for them to raise that much food for themselves, or earn it by ordinary means.

This was merely an example of Republican policy. Everything that the Republicans of that time touched seemed to turn to graft. The Populists on the other hand tried to keep down expenditures, especially those of the unnecessary kind, and to increase the State's income at the expense of the corporations. The Populist board of Railway Assessors raised the assessed valuation of railroad property in the State by $10,326,491, which was 25% to 28% on all roads. On items of contingent expense the Populists saved a great deal over the expenditures of the Republicans.

However these things were really very small matters in comparison with what they had hoped to accomplish, and this together with the election of John Martin instead of a Populist to the United States Senate, took the enthusiasm out of many of the leaders and the people as well. Mrs. Lease was so bitterly disappointed that she did not again enter the lists except as a disturbing element within the ranks. Benj. H. Clover, Benj. Harrison, Cyrus Corning, Senator Taylor, John F. Willits, Associate Justice Allen, General John G. Otis, Carl Adkins, of The Atchison Graphic, and James Gray, a representative of the miners of the Galena district, came out in the next campaign as anti-administration Populists.

In regard to the economic conditions, the Populist warnings of 1890 and 1892 had not been a wolf cry. Even while they were yet speaking, one of the greatest economic rebellions in the history of the country was going on in the way of great strikes, not confined to any one occupation or locality. There were the miners striking in the west, the steel-workers at Pittsburg and Homestead, and the laborers in Tennessee resisting convict labor and military force. The election of Grover Cleveland was a protest against the conditions which were bringing on these troubles. It would seem that the workers of the country were very blind indeed to elect to the President's chair the man who had been the first to inaugurate the use of military power in quelling riots. But they wanted a change, and instead of voting for General Weaver, who would have given them a change for the better, they took the attitude that be could not be elected, and voted for Cleveland who promptly gave them a change for the worse.

The country was famishing for lack of a circulating medium, but the legislation of the Cleveland administration tended to further destroy rather than to create a silver circulation. The forces; were now rapidly lining up as monomentalists and bi-mentalists. At first the people were not divided according to party on this question. There were plenty of free-silver men in the Republican party and gold men in the Democratic party. Cleveland seems to have been a gold man. Times went from bad to worse until, in the early summer of 1893, the country was in the grip of a panic. Business and bank failures were a daily occurrences, and two million men were out of work and tramping the country. It was at this time that Governor Lewelling issued his famous tramp circular which endeared him to the hearts of all thinking and fair-minded people. These tramps were reviled and persecuted by the press and public, as though they had chosen their state of misery with malice and forethought, and out of pure depravity. Governor Lewelling made a plea for the kind treatment of these poor unfortunates without the means of livelihood and with nowhere to lay their heads, and called attention to the fact that they were hard-working people, robbed and legislated out of a means of livelihood and denied a right to support themselves and families.

One of the most startling features of this period of financial depression, suffering and revolt, was the Commonweal Army, commonly called Coxey's Army on account of the main branch of it being financed by Jacob Selcher Coxey, of Massillon, Ohio. His assistants was Carl Brown, an idealist, and an artist, of Berkeley, California, who came to Chicago to a big labor convention in 1893 and talked with Mr. Coxey about such a project. Mr. Coxey took Brown home with him and told him to go ahead with the enterprise and he would finance it. It is hard to tell just who originated the idea of the workingmen marching to Washington. R. L. Polk, National President of the Farmers' Alliance, had advocated such a plan before his death.

Mr. Brown began preparations for the march in November, 1893, but it was the next Easter before it really began. In the meantime the idea spread and seventeen different divisions were mustered in different parts of the country and took up the march to Washington. The purpose was to call the attention of Congress to the necessity of providing employment for the relief of 4,000,000 workingmen out of employment, and their families, making a total of 15,000,000 destitute people who had a right to appeal to the Government for a chance to live. The main division of the Commonweal Army, headed by Coxey, took with them two bills which they wished passed. They were introduced into the Senate by Hon. W. A. Peffer, of Kansas, and were as follows:

An act to issue treasury notes to the amount of $500,000,000 for the purpose of setting the people to work building good public highways.

The second was a non-interest bearing bond bill, allowing the states, counties, towns and cities to deposit non-interest bearing bonds for any amount, not more than half the assessed valuation, for the construction of public improvements, and to withdraw a like sum in treasury legal tender notes.

The story is well known of how President Cleveland, who had pretended to be the workingman's friend, had these men arrested when they got to the Capitol City. A great deal of fun was made of the Commonweal Army by people who could ill afford to discredit such an effort. It was not a crazy man's scheme. It was based upon reason and experience. The bankers, the manufacturers, the corporations and all their ilk had been calling at the White House for thirty years with pretty good success; why wouldn't it do for the workingman? And as to riding on trains, without paving fares, the Congressmen and all other public men were doing the same thing, and then charging up mileage to the Government.

One division of the Commonweal Army under General Bennett, passed through Topeka at the time of the People's Party convention June 12, 1894, and the convention raised $102 for him.

It was apparent to all the Populists long before the State Convention was called that the party was on the wane. Efforts made to appease the anti-administration crowd only drove the factions farther apart. The work of alienating the Democrats, already begun in Lewelling's administrative policy, was finished by the State Convention in endorsing the suffrage amendment. The Republican convention had met a few days before and refused to endorse the amendment, but promised the women on the quiet that they would work for it, which they hadn't the slightest intention of doing. Fatal as was the endorsement of the suffrage amendment to both the cause of suffrage and the Populist ticket, it is hard to see how it could have been avoided. The Populist women insisted upon it, and as it was a Populist measure, it was out of the question to turn it down, without laying the party open to the charge of bad faith. If the women had had the good judgment to have known that an amendment which goes to a vote of the whole people is better off without the endorsement of any political party unless it has all of them, they might have been voting in this state twenty years before they did. It was not the Kansas women, however, who made the blunder. Susan B. Anthony who had forgotten the Kansas language, Anna B. Shaw, and Carrie Chapman Catt, came here from the East and forced the Kansas women into the action on threat to withdraw all support of any kind whatsoever from the state if the Kansas women should not consent to force the issue in the Populist convention. The Kansas women at that time thought they could not live except these great gods gave them breath, and against their better judgment they sealed the doom of suffrage and further divided the Populist party in insisting upon an endorsement.

The ticket nominated was the same as in 1892, except for Secretary of State and Lieutenant Governor. J. W. Amis was put in the place of Osborne for the former office, and D. I. Furbeck in place of Daniels. Osborne and Daniels were anti-administration. The platform was essentially the same except that the graduated income tax was left out to keep Daniels in the party. George W. Clark was candidate for Associate Justice.

The campaign was formally opened July 12, with a big old-fashioned Populist rally at the City Park in Topeka. Governor Waite of Colorado was the Lion of the occasion. After he was through talking, Mrs. Lease got up and attacked Mrs. Diggs. Sister Diggs responded, and called her a liar, and the campaign was properly launched. Mrs. Lease blew hot and cold and played fast and loose. She seems to have lost her balance wheel. One day she would be condemning the administration, Governor Lewelling, and Chairman Breidenthal in particular. The next day she would be glorying in the fact that there had been no fusion, that the flag still waved, and that Governor Lewelling, a grand and noble man, had been chosen to lead the party, and she would put on her fighting harness to defend him from the attacks of his enemies. In former campaigns the Republicans tried to make a joke of her. This time they succeeded. Mrs. Diggs stayed with the administration consistently, believed in fusion, supported it in 1896, 1898, and in 1900, and became the first and only real woman political boss in State affairs in Kansas.

In September the anti-administration Populists outlined an opposition ticket, and were circulating it for signers to get it on the ballot. It was as follows: Governor, Cyrus Corning; Lieutenant Governor, M. A. Pratt; Associate Justice, W. H. Bennington; Secretary of State, Fred Anthony; Auditor, Alexander Young; Attorney General, H. A. White; Treasurer, S. T. Cherry; Superintendent of Public Instruction, Mrs. Etta Semple. Populism, divided, antagonistic and calling each other by the most vindictive names known to the science of etymology, went against a united Republicanism in November and lost out.

In 1896 Free Silver at a ratio of 16 to 1 was the big issue. Sixteen to one simply means to coin a silver dollar with sixteen times as much metal in it as there is in a gold dollar. Bryan had been lecturing all over the West under the auspices of the Bi-Metallic League. He had been stumping the country for three years on the money question, and was a finished orator, though only 36 years of age. He went to the Democratic Convention at Chicago and electrified the country with his great speech in which he said, "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." A new star of revolution seemed to have blazed into the heavens. He captured the convention, and the platform was shaped to draw the Populist vote for Free Silver. The Populist National Convention met and endorsed Bryan and the Democratic platform, adding a few resolutions.

in Kansas an agreement was made between the Populists and Democrats, and a fusion ticket made up which both agreed to adopt at their conventions. It was as follows: Governor, John W. Leedy; Lieutenant Governor, A. M. Harvey; Secretary of State, W. E. Bush; Auditor, W. H. Morris; Attorney General, L. C. Boyle; Treasurer, David Heflebower; Superintendent of Public Instruction, William Stryker; Chief Justice, Frank Doster; Congressman at Large, Jerry Botkin. Most of these were either Democrats, or, like Doster and Botkin, had always been Democrats at heart, though in the Populist party. The ticket was elected. The Anti-Fusion faction organized a Middle of the Road Populist Party, but put up no state ticket. Jerry Simpson defeated Long for Congress, and the fusion ticket elected congressmen in all but the first district. The legislature was anti-Republican, and twenty Populist laws were passed:

An act regulating the organization and control of banks.
An act authorizing cities to obtain gas light, electric light, electric power, water or heat, either by purchase or construction.
An act providing that contracts fixing a different time for the bringing of actions than that provided by law are void.
An act to establish trial by jury in cases of contempt of court and to restrict the power of judges and courts in contempt proceedings.
An act requiring clerks of the Appellate Court to account for the fees collected.
An act putting the clerk of the Supreme Court on a salary and requiring him to account for fees collected.
An act to prevent blacklisting.
An act shutting out the Pinkerton detective force by forbidding the hiring of non-residents as peace officers.
An act reducing the fees and salaries of county officials.
An act taking the weighing and inspecting of grains away from the boards of trade and placing it under the management of the State.
An act fixing the liabilities of insurance companies.
An act providing for the health and safety of persons employed in mines.
An act requiring the railroads to furnish transportation to shippers.
An act providing for the recording of the assignment of mortgages.
An act for the protection of motorneers.
A school text-book law.
Stockyards law.
A law for the taxation of mineral reserves.
A law requiring the reports of telephone and telegraph companies and providing for their taxation.
A law prohibiting trusts.

After the fusion of 1896, the Populists did not again put up an independent fight. The Republican Populists lost no time in seeking the original fold, as they did not want to support Democrats. Mrs. Lease was among these. In 1898, the Fusionists put up the same ticket with the addition of S. H. Allen for Associate Justice, his term having expired. The Republicans won everything except Congressman in the third district. In 1908, the state went Republican again. The Populist party gradually dwindled away, and even the semblance of the organization was dropped in 1906, ten years after the fusion with the Democrats took place.

Populism played a short return engagement under a different name in 1912. The Progressive Party, with a platform not unlike that of the People's Party, divided the Republican forces and swept the state and nation that year, with the result that a Democratic administration was elected. Kansas got over it in two years so far as the Democrats were concerned, and elected a Republican governor who was a Progressive. In 1916, the State voted for the Democratic National administration, and retained the Republican Progressive administration.

The most lasting and permanent memorial of the People's Party is the changed ideal of government. They taught, and were really successful in getting men and women to understand, that this is our government, made to serve our needs. The ideal in government before the time of the Populist Uprising was that laws should be made in the interests of a few people who are allowed to control the destinies of the masses, and that through their great prosperity a few crumbs, as many as he is entitled to, will, automatically, drop to the producer of wealth. The Populist view was that laws should be made in the interests of the producer of wealth, and if any one wants prosperity let him become a producer of something. This view is now the generally accepted one in theory at least. The concourse of laboring men who called upon President Wilson a few months ago in the interests of the eight hour law and more pay were not treated with the contempt with which Cleveland treated those who came to him asking merely the right to live.

Populism educated the grass roots, and bequeathed to posterity a knowledge of politics and government such as has probably never been in the possession of so large a mass of people in the history of civilization. It is doubtful if, with the present knowledge attained by the voter in this country, such outrages as the financial policy of the sixties and seventies could be inaugurated. Of course these things go on, but by reason of the fact that they are in accordance with the system which was established at that time and is only gradually being overthrown. But in the days of the Civil War and just after its close, it was rank heresy for a voter to think. He was made to believe that if he doubted the wisdom of his party he was a traitor. To doubt Grant was as bad as to doubt Christ. The Populists educated us out of this condition of mind, and left us both example and precept to think for ourselves. The movement awakened initiative in the people.

The desire of the Populists to educate is illustrated in. the action of Jerry Simpson, who gathered his Populist colleagues together, and taking Henry George's Progress and Poverty, assigned certain portions of it to each man, to be quoted by him in speeches sometime during the session, so that the whole of this book was spread upon the Journal of Congress. Simpson prized this work and did not want its teachings lost to posterity.

The Populist doctrines had so permeated the consciousness of the masses, that although the Republicans succeeded in defeating the party, the people had turned Populist, and believed in the Populist program, and in order to keep down the party of that name the Republicans were compelled from time to time to give the people measures which they had learned to think of as their right. The big fight in the Legislature in 1905 over the State Oil Refinery, the pipe lines and the anti-discrimination against towns in making prices which attracted attention all over the country, was a Populist fight. The anti-discrimination law put upon the statute books by the independent oil producers, compelling the oil trust to sell their product at the same price plus the freight, in every town in the State, was a joy to the old battle-scarred Populists of the nineties.

The Populists wanted anti-trust laws, and we have them galore. Some of them have helped and some of them haven't, but everybody is a Populist in that particular. We no longer recognize the divine right of wealth and cussedness. We did away with railroad free passes, not only for public men but for everybody. The Populists wanted legislation regulating freight and passenger rates and we got it. We have the Utilities Commission with ever increasing power to regulate the public service corporations, until before long this regulation will be equal in effect to public ownership. Then there is the Australian ballot, the Parcels Post, Free Rural Delivery of Mail, Postal Savings Banks, Rural Credits Banks to loan money direct to the people, non-Partisan Tariff Board, income tax, election of United States senators by direct vote, equal suffrage, state publication of school text-books, election of insurance commissioner and state printer by the people, all found in the will of the political Sampson who slew more Philistines at his death than he ever did in his life.

The present laws for the arbitration of labor troubles are founded on a plank which the Populists borrowed from the Union Labor party. Much improvement in favor of the debtor has been made in the laws governing the collection of debts and the foreclosure of mortgages, and in the selling of land for taxes. Immigration laws have been improved, the contracting of convict labor has been done away with and the eight hour laboring day is rapidly becoming the universal rule. The Populists were opposed to grain gambling. Bucket shops have been done away with in Kansas, and the Federal Government is hot on the trail of the grain gambler. But the curse of both the producer and consumer of farm products is still the speculator, who buys and holds produce for large gains. He will never be put out of business until we get the subtreasury, which was the Populist solution of the evil. Free silver was another principle which has never been enacted into law, and probably never will be. But flexible currency, which was the Populist remedy for panics is looked upon by students of finance with great favor. The People's Party had its birth in the desire to save the farming land to the people, but it was born a few years too late. The foreclosure of mortgages which was going on at an alarming rate in 1888, 1889, 1890, continued unabated while the hands of the legislatures of 1891 and 1893 were tied by Republican interference, and by 1896 half of the land of Kansas had passed into the hands of the loan sharks and the tax title sharks, and to-day not more than 50% is in the possession of the actual tillers of the soil, and it looks as though it would take the application of the old Populist doctrine that the rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner, to get it back into the hands of the people where it ought to be.

The Populist Party came to rather an ignoble end, in its fusion with the Democrats in order that some of its prominent leaders might satisfy their ambition to hold office; but its original aim was high and it will be a matter of more and more pride to us as the years pass on that the inauguration of the first People's administration on earth took place in Kansas. whether much or little was accomplished. because it places our State exactly where it belongs in relation to progressive ideals.

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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