The vacuity of American politics may well have stemmed from the complacency of the middle-class majority. The country was growing; no foreign enemy threatened it; the poor were mostly recent immigrants, blacks, and others with little influence, who were easily ignored by those in comfortable circumstances. However, one important group in society suffered increasingly as the years rolled by: the farmers. Out of their travail came the force that finally, in the 1890s, brought American politics face to face with the problems of the age.
After the Civil War, however, farmers did well. Harvests were bountiful and wheat prices high at over a dollar a bushel in the early 1870s. Well into the 1880s farmers on the plains experienced boom conditions. In that decade the population of Kansas increased by 43 percent, that of Nebraska by 134 percent, and that of the Dakotas by 278 percent. Land prices rose and farmers borrowed money to expand their farms.
A farm family in Custer, Nebraska, in 1888, a region where Populist sentiment was strong.
In the 1890s disaster struck. First came a succession of dry years and poor harvests. Then farmers in Australia, Canada, Russia, and Argentina took advantage of improvements in transportation to sell their produce in European markets that had relied on American foodstuffs. The price of wheat fell to about sixty cents a bushel. Cotton, the great southern staple, which sold for more than thirty cents a pound in 1866 and fifteen cents in the early 1870s, at times in the 1890s fell below six cents.
The tariff on manufactured goods appeared to aggravate the farmers’ predicament, and so did the domestic marketing system, which enabled a multitude of middlemen to gobble up a large share of the profits of agriculture. The shortage of credit, particularly in the South, was an additional burden.
The downward swing of the business cycle in the early 1890s completed the devastation. Settlers who had paid more for their lands than they were worth and borrowed money at high interest rates to do so found themselves squeezed relentlessly. Thousands lost their farms and returned eastward, penniless and dispirited. The population of Nebraska increased by fewer than
4,000 persons in the entire decade of the 1890s.
World History
