People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [170]
The government played its part in helping the bankers and hurting the farmers; it kept the amount of money—based on the gold supply—steady, while the population rose, so there was less and less money in circulation. The farmer had to pay off his debts in dollars that were harder to get. The bankers, getting the loans back, were getting dollars worth more than when they loaned them out—a kind of interest on top of interest. That is why so much of the talk of farmers’ movements in those days had to do with putting more money in circulation—by printing greenbacks (paper money for which there was no gold in the treasury) or by making silver a basis for issuing money.
It was in Texas that the Farmers Alliance movement began. It was in the South that the crop-lien system was most brutal. By this system the farmer would get the things he needed from the merchant: the use of the cotton gin at harvest time, whatever supplies were necessary. He didn’t have money to pay, so the merchant would get a lien—a mortgage on his crop—on which the farmer might pay 25 percent interest. Goodwyn says “the crop lien system became for millions of Southerners, white and black, little more than a modified form of slavery.” The man with the ledger became to the farmer “the furnishing man,” to black farmers simply “the Man.” The farmer would owe more money every year until finally his farm was taken away and he became a tenant.
Goodwyn gives two personal histories to illustrate this. A white farmer in South Carolina, between 1887 and 1895, bought goods and services from the furnishing merchant for $2,681.02 but was able to pay only $687.31, and finally he had to give his land to the merchant. A black farmer named Matt Brown, in Black Hawk, Mississippi, between 1884 and 1901, bought his supplies from the Jones store, kept falling further and further behind, and in 1905 the last entry in the merchant’s ledger is for a coffin and burial supplies.
How many rebellions took place against this system we don’t know. In Delhi, Louisiana, in 1889, a gathering of small farmers rode into town and demolished the stores of merchants “to cancel their indebtedness,” they said.
In the height of the 1877 Depression, a group of white farmers gathered together on a farm in Texas and formed the first “Farmers Alliance.” In a few years, it was across the state. By 1882, there were 120 suballiances in twelve counties. By 1886, 100,000 farmers had joined in two thousand suballiances. They began to offer alternatives to the old system: join the Alliance and form cooperatives; buy things together and get lower prices. They began putting their cotton together and selling it cooperatively—they called it “bulking.”
In some states a Grange movement developed; it managed to get laws passed to help farmers. But the Grange, as one of its newspapers put it, “is essentially conservative and furnishes a stable, well-organized, rational and orderly opposition to encroachments upon the liberties of the people, in contrast to the lawless, desperate attempts of communism.” It was a time of crisis, and the Grange was doing too little. It lost members, while the Farmers Alliance kept growing.
From the beginning, the Farmers Alliance showed sympathy with the growing labor movement. When Knights of Labor men went on strike against a steamship line in Galveston, Texas, one of the radical leaders of the Texas Alliance, William Lamb, spoke for many (but not all) Alliance members when he said in an open letter to Alliance people: “Knowing that the day is not far distant when the Farmers Alliance will have to use Boycott on manufacturers in order to get goods direct, we think it is a good time to help the Knights of Labor. . . .” Goodwyn says: “Alliance radicalism—Populism—began with this letter.”
The Texas Alliance president opposed joining the boycott, but a group of Alliance people in Texas passed a resolution:
Whereas we see the unjust encroachments that the capitalists are making upon all the different departments of labor . . . we extend to the