Know that the potential scandals are on the test. We'll be covering all those things so those'll be a potential on there too.
Farmers
Some of the farmer groups that were important that were kind of the birth of the Populist Party.
These are organizations that are kind of like predecessors to the Grange:
- Animal Husbandry
- Southern Farmer's Alliance/The Farmer's Alliance
- (Yeoman farmers - were not an organization but many of them would be an important group in this but they're not an organization)
There are other things that though a cultural aspect that I want you to know: It was almost like you go to church with the same people so it would all be like the ran it almost like a religion. They would be running around together. They had girls and boys groups like boy scouts that would be associated with the Grange. Seems kind of weird to us but yeah. And then essentially they would unite for everybody supporting you know one single court case or political agenda. Like some sort of "we all support the same cause." Which is why people started recognizing that that was really important and joined together in what was called the Populist Party.
And the reason that they're a little bit difficult is that not all of them have the same aims. And that is partially why they fail as a party. They don't have a really clear sense of it. The clearest sense of it is when they come together and they have the two platform, one more important than the other: the Omah Platform and the other random one in Florida, the Ocala Platform. Those are two platforms you might run into.
Things that most Populists agree with:
- Government should own the railroad and telegraphs. So they want communication and they want all their basic services needed to transport their goods to be run by the government so that can get them low prices for everything.
- Free silver or cheap silver. They want to print money off of silver at a 16:1 ratio. The law that says 16:1 is a really good ratio and we should use that is the Bland-Allison Act. The Bland-Allison Act is going to create the 16:1 ratio but it doesn't require that people purchase a lot of silver and it doesn't require that it's printed. So that's why in 1890 we have the Sherman Silver Purchase Act which allows us to purchase the silver. We did print some off of it to make the Populists happy but not enough to entirely make them happy. One of the kind of galvanizing events that makes the Populists political party is going to be the demonetization of silver. It's going to be called the Crime of '73 and it cause the Panic of '73. So '73, 1873 and this is still during Reconstruction. They demonetize silver because they're worried that it's just getting out of control and that things are just going to have rampant inflation like we saw with the Nazi's or whatever. So they wanted to control that inflation and demonetize silver which was a little bit too drastic. That's why the Populists would intervene.
- Direct election of senators. So, having a really responsive government. They don't want socialism. They want more socialism. They want aspects of socialism. They do not want a socialistic government. They still want to be able to control for their own prices. Do you guys get that? They want to be good capitalists and make tons of money but they want the government to control the prices of other people so that they can't take their money. Railroads can't be good capitalists but farmers could be. So they are not socialist. They do not want socialism. They want aspects of it to make their lives better. So you see that because of the very responsive government - they want direct election of senators, they want secret ballot, the referendum recall.
- They want to have the government controlling a lot of industries to control prices for them. And them I mean farmers mostly in the west and the south. So Southern and Western farmers are going to be the people who want government to control industries to control their prices.
- Black Rights - they want them sometimes, at the very beginning, when they're small. And then when they need to appeal to more people they drop them.
- Women's Rights - same thing as Black Rights. They want them at the beginning and as they get bigger they're like "eh." Kind of gave up on women's rights.
Populists didn't want the government to take total control. They wanted the ability to control railroads and they didn't have the ability to do that themselves so they wanted a government to do it for them.
The divide between two types of farmers:
In the far west you had different goals compared with people in the South and the North and stuff. There are different levels of farmers.
You have plantation owners in the South with sharecroppers. They're not going to have the same issues with homesteaders in the West. So plantation owners, rich invested land owners, they're going to go for the Democratic party in the South. And then some of them are going to be Republicans. It sort of depends. Some of them may still be Populist. It depends on how rich you are. So one of the things you're going to see is as the Populist Party does kind of disintegrate the party that is going to adopt them is going to be the Democrats. The Democrats are going to open up and realize they weren't getting anywhere with the people who voted for Democrats right after the Civil War - the solid South, that meant they were the South, that meant they were Dixiecrats, racists - they realized that they weren't kind of getting anywhere with that, just that, and they decided to go ahead and take on Populist values and they get more votes that way.
So I guess we're just doing the story of the Populists - we'll go back and cover some other things later.
So, they managed to get some court legislation and some Supreme Court decision that will help the balance:
- Munn vs. Illinois - the government can use imminent domain to control and take over industries in the best interest of everyone. And the issue happened to be grain elevators. Frank Norris was a Progressive who wrote a book about grain elevators and grain speculation (called The Pitt) but was more famous for The Octopus - you want to know all those authors.
- Wabash vs. Illinois - not the same thing. Interstate commerce allows the federal government to control things like railroads. And it leads to a new entity called the ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission) which then allows them to enforce their control over the people. You need to tie that to something just to finish out that story - Wilson creates and organization that will be underneath the ICC that only deals with monopolies and trusts called the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). It's going to be underneath Wilson and it's goal is to stop trusts and monopolies. Up to that it'd been individual things and now he created a bureaucracy, Progressive-style, to take care of future potential problems.
Let's finish the silver story. So you have the Crime of '73, Panic of '73, Panic of '93 - drought's going to cause '93. Remember that's the Wizard of Oz, remember that drought, that's going to be Wizard of Oz. Crime of '73 isn't a scandal it's just a mistake by the government who says, "In order to stop this inflation let's demonetize all this silver right now!" And it's very likely they should have repealed it but maybe not so abruptly because it freaks everyone out. The money you have printed on silver is not worth anything. So what people had to do was take their money that was printed on silver and take it to the bank and the bank would actually take it out of circulation and return you money based on gold but in so doing it made the individual valuation of that money really high so you got back less money. So it happened over time, it wasn't like one day if you happened to be the sucker with silver money you're just poor. So in 1873, we have the Crime of '73 which demonetizes silver. In 1875 they make it even harsher and now they do basically what the specie circular was a long time ago in 1836, they just say you have to pay everything in hard currency. Basically what it was is they just said all greenbacks are no longer valid. You could have money based on gold. What it did was it got rid of greenbacks. During the Civil War you had greenbacks, just money printed off nothing, well after the war they continued issuing some of those greenbacks and it was allowing for inflation. Specie Resumption Act says the only money that is good is based on gold. So you had in '73 the devalued relaunch of silver and now you're saying that all those greenbacks that were out there that had value at one time now they're valueless too. And it'd be the same thing. It's not like you're the sucker with the greenbacks, now you have zero money. Basically the banks would turn that around, pay it back in lower amounts. This was in ways a response to the Panic of '73. The government doesn't know what it's doing. What they're trying to do is save the economy.
At the Constitution, we say the only people allowed to make currency is the federal government. However, many places did not exactly abide by it and no one fought that. So what's going to happen here with the Progressives is we're actually going to create the treasury system and we're going to create the FBI and soon we're going to have groups that are going to stop counterfeiters and you know actually have organizations.
When we were on the gold standard each dollar was backed by a certain percentage of gold in our treasury. It represented it directly and now it doesn't directly represent it, it just simply represents value.
This fight over silver ends in 1896 because they find gold in Alaska. That's what Yukon Gold or Klondike Gold means. So in 1896 their issue disappears. William James Bryan had championed their issue for the Democratic party who gives super famous speech called "Cross of Gold." Basically, he's putting his entire campaign on it and when we find gold in 1896 he loses. McKinley wins. That's weird because he doesn't have the campaign, Mark Hanna, his campaign manager, brings people to him while they're doing their riots. This is the last time you pay attention to the farmers in any election.
So, anyways, that's why the Populists are no longer as big a party anymore. The Democrats take all their positions and then when we get McKinley now we have the Progressives in power and a lot of those issues get taken by the Progressives.
We find some gold in South Dakota as well. So when we do find gold in South Dakota we kick the Indians out. So that's some of the Native American issues going on at this time period. Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado with the Indians there. Dawes Severalty Act making it so that individuals own that land so that we can sell it. Also there's where we take people and forcibly give them boarding school so that they lose their culture. Wounded Knee is going to be retaliation for Custer's Last Stand at Little Bighorn and the movement that leads the Native Americans to have that last standoff is Ghost Dance.
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