In Essentials, Unity - Jenny Bourne New Approaches to Midwestern Studies

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fondness for his niece Caroline Arabella Hall led to the nearly unheard-of inclusion of women in the association, as well as inspired the name of his railroad. Bylaws required each local chapter of the Grange to include at least one-third female enrollment. By 1875, the Grange boasted close to a million members, nearly half of them in the Midwest.

      Tensions among competing economic factions gave rise to the so-called “Granger railroad laws”; chapter 2 investigates this legislation and case law. Statutes passed in four Midwestern states in the late 1870s launched a new role for government in regulating private industry. Subsequent lawsuits—most notably Munn v. Illinois3—were the first to invoke the due process clause of the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. These “Granger cases” formed the foundation for modern transport regulation as well as provided key precedents for government intervention in privately held enterprises that were “clothed with a public interest.” Although the Granger laws themselves were short-lived, they left a significant imprint on US jurisprudence.

      Self-sufficiency and disdain for the middleman led the Patrons of Husbandry to undertake a variety of cooperative endeavors, including centralized purchasing, manufacturing, and sales. Chapter 3 looks at the early success and subsequent fizzling of most of these efforts, and the near demise of the organization itself. The remarkable explosion in the number of Grangers in the first half of the 1870s is matched by an equally precipitous decline in the second half. Organizations more politically active in representing agricultural interests—such as the Farmers’ Alliance and the Greenback Party—emerged in importance, only to be supplanted later by the National Farmers’ Union and the Farm Bureau. The enormous success of the Farm Bureau stemmed in part from its association with farm extension programs in land-grant colleges, which are supported chiefly by public funding.

      Although the Grange formed primarily for economic reasons, its early members also emphasized a commitment to education, community service, and fraternalism. After 1879, these features kept the Patrons alive. Unlike other nineteenth-century farmers’ organizations, the Grange continues to the present day and prides itself on being the longest-lived American agricultural society.4 Chapter 4 draws heavily on a new data source—the minute books and other materials from the Minnehaha Grange (Minnesota No. 398)—to present a lively picture of the inner workings of one of longest-lasting local Granges in the nation.

      The Minnehaha met twice monthly between September and May from its founding in 1873 to its last official gathering in 1978. In 1880, it built its own hall, which still stands in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Minnesota. The chapter concerned itself with a wide range of issues, including gender equity at the University of Minnesota, the safety of electrical appliances, the suspect nature of oleomargarine, the admission of China to the United Nations, and the size of portions in local restaurants. In 1894, Sarah Baird of the Minnehaha became the first female ever to head a state Grange. For years, the women of the Minnehaha tended the grave of Caroline Hall in Minneapolis’s Lakewood Cemetery.

      The final chapter of this book considers the legacies left by the Patrons of Husbandry. The early Granger efforts show how collective action can succeed when aspirations and talents are well matched, and how it can fail when they are not. These failures convinced even doubters that middlemen can serve a useful function and that specialization and comparative advantage are powerful economic concepts.

      Yet the issues raised by Oliver Kelley and his followers remain fresh: What does “clothed with a public interest” mean? How do we interpret the due process clause? And what is the role of the government in regulating private behavior? Citations to the famous Granger case of Munn v. Illinois appear in landmark Supreme Court opinions on topics ranging from minimum wage, rent control, and environmental regulation to birth control and lunch-counter sit-ins. Some scholars consider the Granger laws as a foundation for the Sherman Act and other antitrust statutes. Echoes of the Granger movement reverberate still, from the Occupy Wall Street protest that began on Constitution Day 2011 to the controversy surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.5 In short, the history of the Patrons of Husbandry exposes the classic tension between the desires for achieving overall economic success and for dictating how the spoils are split.

       1

       “Our Agricultural Brotherhood”

       Origins, Purposes, and Structure

      We propose meeting together, talking together, working together, buying together, selling together, and in general acting together for our mutual protection and advancement. . . . Sectionalism is, and of right should be dead and buried with the past. . . . In our agricultural brotherhood . . . we shall recognize no North, no South, no East, no West.

      —Declaration of Purposes of the Patrons of Husbandry

      Months before President Andrew Johnson formally declared an end to the US Civil War on 20 August 1866, he sent Bureau of Agriculture clerk Oliver Kelley to inspect the ravaged rural South. Six days after his fortieth birthday, Kelley departed Washington on 13 January 1866 and traveled across the South until 21 April, recording the effect of the war on southern agriculture.1 Although the South bore the brunt of the war’s devastation, farmers across the nation were suffering, especially when compared to the business titans emerging in the postbellum period.

      A year and a half after Kelley’s southern journey, the Patrons of Husbandry were born. The first official meeting of what became the Grange took place on 15 November 1867 in Washington, DC, and officers were elected on 4 December 1867. By no means the first nor the only American agricultural organization, the Grange nevertheless stands out for its longevity.2 Improving the economic lot of farmers was its original focus, but the Grange has sustained itself primarily by its appeal as a fraternal and social association that engages in community service and political advocacy for farmers.

       Setting the Stage for Farmer Discontent: Aftermath of the War

      Military deaths during the Civil War accounted for more than 2 percent of the US population, with most of the dead being able-bodied men in their prime. An estimated one out of ten men of military age never returned home; nearly a quarter of Southern men ages twenty to twenty-four in 1860 lost their lives in the war. The demobilization of both armies sent hundreds of thousands of survivors back to their farms, but many of them returned to neglect and disarray. The men themselves did not always come back whole: for instance, 20 percent of Mississippi’s entire state budget in 1866 went for artificial limbs. Although the Homestead Act of 1862 had opened up cheap land to aspiring farmers, improved capital-intensive farm technology made it difficult for small farmers to achieve economic success. Tumultuous weather and periodic pest infestations (fig. 1.1)—described so vividly in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books—added to the misery.3

      The official cessation of conflict also meant a downturn in demand for rations, animal feed, wool, horses, and mules. Emancipation and Reconstruction generated major changes in agricultural supply as well. Former slaves met with resistance, political suppression, and violence as they sought to distance themselves from the plantation and to grow their own crops and food. The war was over, but the struggle to move from a slave to a free society had only just begun. Under the leadership of General O. O. Howard, the Freedmen’s Bureau made heroic efforts to smooth the transition, but lack of funds hampered the bureau, which was disbanded under President Ulysses S. Grant.

      As a further irritant to farmers and other citizens, corruption plagued the postwar federal government. Perhaps the best-known episode was the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which consisted of financial hijinks by the directors of the Union Pacific Railroad abetted by certain members of Congress. The public learned the details of Crédit Mobilier in 1872, during Grant’s second run for office, but the shady behavior by government officials actually occurred during Andrew Johnson’s administration.4

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