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

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Like transportation costs, borrowing costs were a constant worry for farmers.

      Figure 1.13. Density of Minnesota Granges by County and Minnesota Railroad Lines, 1874. Sources: Minnesota Historical Society, http://www.worldmapsonline.com/historicalmaps/kr-1874-minnesota.htm

      The postbellum years were particularly difficult because many farmers had very little cushion. Discharged soldiers came home to find that years of neglect had taken their toll on farms. Abolition complicated matters in the South, as people had to adapt to a new sort of labor force. Because most battles had taken place on southern soil, destruction of property—including railroad lines and rolling stock—and disruption of land made things even worse. Families who had lost young men especially suffered. Low real wages for common soldiers during the war, coupled with high prices for many “store-bought” goods, meant that few farm families had any savings when peace came. Adding to these woes, the nation’s return to a gold standard after the war led to deflation. To the extent that debtor farmers did not anticipate this, they had borrowed dollars at one value but had to pay back dollars that were worth substantially more.

      Grange organizers stressed the potential of collective arrangements that could help ease credit problems for farmers. These problems became that much more acute just as the Grange movement took off. The Panic of 1873, sparked in part by risky behavior by some railroad companies, led to a severe recession and major financial upheaval. Foreigners were particularly reluctant to invest in US railroads, drying up capital even further.45

      Taxes. Although the United States experimented with a federal income tax during the Civil War, this method of raising money quickly disappeared once the conflict ended, and it did not return until 1913 with the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment. State taxation on slave property, of course, also went by the wayside after war’s end.

      State and federal tax revenue came instead from property taxes (particularly on cultivated land), excise taxes (especially on alcohol), and import tariffs (mostly on manufactured goods). The Grange thus had little trouble persuading farmers that they disproportionately bore the burden of taxes in the United States, both on production inputs and on the consumption items they purchased. Oddly, under the Tariff Act of 1883 domestic vegetable (but not fruit) growers benefited from protectionist import duties, with the case of Nix v. Hedden confirming that tomatoes should be considered a vegetable.46

      FARM VALUE: AN ALTERNATIVE LOOK AT ECONOMIC STATUS

      The value of an asset reflects expected future flows—income and nonpecuniary benefits—yielded by that asset. Thus, another way to evaluate how well farmers were doing in the 1870s is to look at the value of what they owned.

      Table 1.1 shows that, in real terms (using 1860 prices as a base), the average value of an acre of farm land was lower in 1870 than in 1860. Over the same period, average farm size fell from nearly 200 acres to just over 150 acres. Although the per capita value of GDP and per capita wealth fluctuated over the decade, the general trend was upward.47 So, by comparison to the average American, the average farmer was not keeping up in terms of asset holdings. The Grange could and did exploit this discrepancy in its efforts to recruit members.

      Source: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/farm-income-and-wealth-statistics.aspx#27514, Carter et al. (2006, Series Cc2).

       Self-Improvement, at Least for Some

      Improving farmers’ economic status was paramount for the early Grangers, particularly Oliver Kelley, and appealing to economic interests generated the Grange’s initial success. But the inability of the Grange to live up to its economic goals also caused it to founder a few years later, as Chapter 3 discusses.

      From the beginning, however, some Grange founders also emphasized its mission to provide for the moral and educational uplifting of the farmer.48 Chapter 4 shows that these features of the Grange helped sustain it as a fraternal organization into the twentieth century and today.

      Regrettably, the morals of the early Grange did not extend to welcoming African Americans into the fold, particularly in the South. Given that half of the people engaged in southern agriculture were black, this excluded a large swath of farmers. The first subordinate Grange in Louisiana—a state firmly under control of the Radical Republicans since before the end of the Civil War—reportedly let all join without regard to color, but this was not true elsewhere. A reporter at the New Orleans Times-Picayune asked National Master Dudley Adams in October 1873 whether a subordinate Grange would admit “colored” members, and he replied that this was a question best left to local interests. Some white southern Grangers organized blacks into a Council of Laborers, primarily in an attempt to groom blacks to be reliable farmhands rather than to offer them any sort of equal voice or treatment. The later Farmers’ Alliance did not admit blacks, either. The Colored Farmers’ National Alliance, the first massive black organization in the United States, finally emerged near the end of the 1880s.49

      Race wasn’t the only possible excluding factor. Article 12 of the Granger Constitution states that no religious tests for memberships would be applied. But the activities of the Minnehaha subordinate certainly exhibit a strong mainstream Protestant Christian influence. An entry from 6 April 1883 states that “A member of our order—when joining he confessed he was astonished to find so much of the teachings of the [N]ew [T]estament in our lessons—and when he was called south to organize a church where its members were composed of many denominations, advised them to organize a Grange instead, to avoid sectarianism and quarreling.” Each meeting closed with a hymn, with favorites including “Blest Be the Tie that Binds,” “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Church in the Wildwood,” “Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow,” “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Members were exhorted each year (as least as late as 1962) to observe “Go to Church” Sunday in honor of Oliver Kelley’s birthday. The chapter contributed funds to local Lutheran and Evangelical churches. These practices undoubtedly created a less-than-welcoming atmosphere for people who were not white Protestants.

       Political Voice (But No Political Party)

      The Declaration of Purposes emphasizes that the Grange is not a political or party organization, and Grangers could not talk about partisan politics, call political conventions, or nominate or discuss political candidates in their meetings. In the 1950s, for instance, the Minnehaha Grange refused to rent its hall for a political meeting, even though its treasury was in major need of funds. Nor would it allow the hall to be used as a polling place if doing so entailed the storage of voting machines.50

      Refusing to align themselves with a political party did not mean that the Grangers failed to participate in the political process. Grange members in the Missouri legislature determined that they would “act as a unit on all questions of financial policy and political reforms, without regard to their former political associations, and that they [would] introduce bills providing for cheaper railroad rates.”51 Texas Grangers joined with Republicans at the 1875 Texas constitutional convention to defeat a poll tax, fearing that it would disenfranchise poor whites. And the first resolution by Washington Grangers in September 1889 was to object to the new state constitution because they considered public-servant salaries fixed at too high a rate. They also opposed its apparent welcoming of foreign purchasers of state land and industries.52

      But the professed

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