In 1867 the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Granger movement, was founded in Washington, D. C. Its strength was among farmers in the upper Mississippi Valley, who joined it to better their economic position and to enhance their social life. Led by Oliver H. Kelley, the organization originally had secret rituals that included songs, flags, costumes, and passwords and admitted both men and women to membership. Each local chapter was known as a “grange,” and in many farming communities across the United States it became the center of social activity.
The Granger movement spread rapidly where farmers experienced the greatest hardships. In the years immediately following the Civil War, wheat and corn prices made farmers on the Great Plains optimistic. Unfortunately, the panic of 1873 coupled with severe blizzards, droughts, and grasshopper infestations dashed their dreams. Furthermore, faced with growing competition from Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, and Russia, farmers in the South and Middle West began to experience declining prices for their grains and cotton. Many of the nation’s farmers were on the brink of bankruptcy, and many of them believed that only through collective action through the grange could their economic condition improve. They began to join the Granger movement en masse. In 1875, spurred on by the publication of Ignatius Donnelly’s influential weekly, the Monopolist (1874-79), membership in the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry reached a peak of 858,050.
Grangers blamed bankers, railroad operators, eastern land companies, and the manufacturers of farm equipment for compounding their sudden economic hardship. They complained, for example, that farm supplies and equipment were being sold at exorbitant prices, forcing many farmers to borrow money and incur debts averaging twice that of other Americans. Banks and eastern land companies charged farmers unusually high interest, making it difficult for farmers to pay off their mortgages. Grangers also complained to lawmakers about the price-fixing policies of grain wholesalers, warehouse owners, and grain elevator operators. Furthermore, they attacked RAILROADS for their discriminatory shipping rates that commonly charged farmers (who had no alternative means of transportation) more to ship their crops short distances than shippers (where competition existed) paid for long hauls. Grangers believed that the monopoly held by the railroads over travel and freight should be regulated for the good of the public.
Promotional print for Granger members showing scenes of farming and farm life (Library of Congress)
Between 1871 and 1874, the Grangers became very active in politics and scored major legislative victories in several midwestern states. The Granger movement gained a political boost from independent farmers’ parties that had been organized in nine midwestern states and in California and Oregon. As a result, so-called Granger laws were enacted in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. In 1871 the Illinois legislature prevented railroads from charging less for a long than for a short haul. In 1874 the legislatures of Wisconsin and Iowa began to regulate interstate railroad freight rates. Just a year earlier, the Illinois legislature enacted the Warehouse Act, which established maximum storage rates for grains and other crops.
The constitutionality of the Granger laws was soon challenged in the U. S. Supreme Court. In Granger cases, the most famous of which was Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Court upheld the Illinois Warehouse Act on the grounds that states had the authority to regulate private property when it was used in the public interest. The Court denied that Illinois violated the DUE PROCESS CLAUSE of the Fourteenth Amendment or, in the absence of federal legislation, the commerce clause of the U. S. Constitution.
Along with its political program, the Granger movement also established cooperative enterprises for both the purchase of supplies and the marketing of crops. They opened retail stores, operated local grain elevators, and manufactured their own farm equipment. A few of the local granges even ran banks and fraternal life and fire insurance companies.
The deepening economic depression of the 1870s, however, dealt the Granger movement a severe blow as several of its cooperatives were driven out of business. By 1880 membership in the Patrons of Husbandry had dropped to 124,420 members. In addition, the Supreme Court in Wabash v. Illinois (1886) overturned its earlier decisions in the Granger cases. The Court declared that under the commerce clause of the Constitution, states could not regulate railroad rates on interstate shipments. This regulatory void led CONGRESS in 1887 to pass the Interstate Commerce Act. Although membership in the Patrons of Husbandry declined nationwide, the grange survived as a center of rural, small-town life in New England and a few Middle Atlantic states. Despite these setbacks, the Granger movement increased public awareness of the monopolistic practices of the nation’s railroads and set an example for farmer cooperation and political action that would influence agrarian protests for the rest of the 19th century.
See also fARMERS’ ALLIANCES.
Further reading: Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agrarian Organization and Its Political, Economic, and Social Manifestations, 1870-1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1913); George Miller,
Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971); Dennis S. Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867-1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974).
—Phillip Papas
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer (1804-1894) educator, publisher
Founder of American kindergartens, and transcendental-ist, Elizabeth Peabody was born in Billerica, Massachusetts, on May 16, 1804. When her mother, a teacher, became prostrated over the death of her seven-week-old baby girl, Peabody, at 15, taught her mother’s school and became her family’s financial mainstay. She worked in education the rest of her life. The oldest of seven children, she helped bring up her younger siblings, thought much about child development, and concluded that society could be reformed by properly educating children. She usually taught in her own schools, often with her sisters Mary and Sophia, but in 1834 she helped Bronson Alcott start the Temple School in Boston. Not only did she join him in his Socratic questioning of their scholars, but her description of their experiment in Record of a School (1835) brought Alcott notoriety and the friendship of Peabody’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Teaching gave Peabody an independence, which, joined with her intellect and reading, enabled her to befriend as an equal male intellectuals. Emerson, who had tutored her in Greek in 1822, remained her friend and associate. In 1833 Peabody became acquainted with the educator Horace Mann, who seemed to have a romantic interest in her until he chose her sister Mary instead. In 1839, through the historian George Bancroft, Peabody obtained a position for Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Boston Custom House. Their names had been linked romantically, but he married her sister Sophia. Peabody and Reverend William Ellery Channing, whose daughter Mary attended her school in the 1820s, regularly discussed theology and literature on Saturday afternoons. Peabody not only influenced his sermons but also prepared 50 of them for publication, adding to his renown as the “apostle of Unitarianism.” Years later she published her charming Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing, D. D. (1880). John T. Kirkland, president of Harvard, invited Peabody to use his library and corresponded with her when he was in Europe. She also corresponded with William Wordsworth.
In 1840 Peabody opened her Boston bookstore in the front parlor of the house she had rented for her family. It became the meeting place for transcendentalists, and Margaret Fuller moved her famous Wednesday evening conversations there. Both the Dial, the quarterly magazine of transcendentalism, and Brook Farm, the famous Utopian community, were shaped in Peabody’s bookstore, whose doors remained open for a decade. In it Peabody, who knew 10 languages, made foreign books and periodicals available by purchase or loan and established herself as the first woman publisher in Boston and probably in the nation. Among her publications were Channing’s pamphlet on emancipation, three of Hawthorne’s children’s books, the Dial, and the one issue of her own Aesithetic Papers (1849), containing Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”
Between 1850 and 1884 Peabody wrote and published 10 books and 50 articles, most of which advanced her ideas on education. Captivated by a method of learning historical dates by Josef Bem, a Polish general, she devised charts to illustrate it and published her Universal History (1859) to accompany these charts. While publicizing this new system, she became known among educators, who attended her lectures and read her books and articles.
Through kindergartens Peabody made her greatest impact on education. She first heard about them in 1859, from Margarethe Meyer Schurz, who was part of the German kindergarten movement, founded by Friedrich Froe-bel. Although Peabody started a kindergarten in Boston the next year and with her sister Mary wrote Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide (1863), she was not satisfied until she had visited Froebel kindergartens in Germany (1867-68). Upon her return she promoted kindergartens as happy places where all children were involved and with her sister edited the Kindergarten Messenger for teachers. Peabody’s promotion was so successful that by the century’s end there was at least one kindergarten in every state in the nation.
During her last years Peabody, with her sister Mary, helped educate Native Americans by funding a school with Native American teachers, founded by Sarah Winnemucca, advocate for Indian rights. Mary had earlier encouraged Winnemucca to write her autobiography and saw that it was published in 1883.
Peabody never married. Perhaps she was too formidable intellectually, too impossible to dominate, for males in that sexist time. Despite her sparkling conversation, her lack of interest in dress and appearance did not encourage romance. Although the portrait that the celebrated Boston artist Chester Harding painted of Peabody (in exchange for his children attending her school) burned in a warehouse fire, there is a vivid word portrait of her as Miss Birdseye in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. Peabody was almost 90 when she died in her home in Jamaica Plain, now part of Boston, on January 3, 1894.
Further reading: Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Bruce A. Ronda, ed., Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: American Renaissance
Woman (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984); Louise Hall Tharp, The Peabody Sisters of Salem (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950).
—Olive Hoogenboom
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839-1914) scientist, mathematician, logician, philosopher Charles S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Benjamin Peirce, the first U. S. mathematician with an international reputation, recognized his son’s genius and developed his powers of concentration, but, as Peirce later remarked, failed to teach him “moral self control.” He was disciplined when searching for laws and principles to solve the mathematical problems his father gave him, when at age 12 he set up his own chemistry laboratory, and when the next year he mastered his older brother’s textbook on logic. At Harvard College, though, he was an indifferent student, graduating near the bottom of his class in 1859, doing whatever he pleased, such as studying Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Peirce’s personal problems stemmed in part from his taking opium, the only available painkiller, for the facial neuralgia he suffered. Henry James noted, “he has too little social talent too little art of making himself agreeable,” and Peirce accurately characterized himself as vain, snobbish, uncivil, reckless, lazy, and ill tempered. Worse, he was an unprincipled womanizer, seducing girls with promises of marriage. These shortcomings plagued his career and limited his influence.
Despite his love of philosophy Peirce pursued his studies in science and mathematics. He worked for the U. S. Coast Survey (with which his father was associated) in 1859 and was appointed to it in July 1861. He also studied chemistry at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School and in 1863 received a Sc. B. degree summa cum laude. It was there that he met William James, who noted he was “independent & violent.” In 1862 Peirce had married Harriet Melu-sina “Zina” Fay, a flamboyant feminist. It was not a happy union; they had no children.
Peirce did not abandon philosophy, but mathematics and science predominated during his 30 years with the Coast Survey. Even though he lectured at Harvard on the philosophy of science in 1864 to 1865, gave the university lectures in philosophy in 1869 to 1870, and the next year was the university lecturer on logic, President Charles William Eliot judged him not “safe” for a Harvard professorship. From 1869 to 1875 Peirce made astronomical observations at the Harvard Observatory, which were lauded by physicists and astronomers when he published them as Photometric Researches (1879). Beginning in 1873 he worked as a computer for the Nautical Almanac, investigating gravity, and in 1875 he went to Europe to bring
See Grand Army ol the
His country up to European standards in the science of geodesy (determining exact positions on the Earth). He lived extravagantly in France, sampling Medoc wines while studying the pendulum. When his wife left him in the fall of 1875, he became depressed and psychosomatically paralyzed. She returned to nurse him but left him permanently the next year. That same year he started a long affair with Juliette Pourtalai, whom he married in 1883, two days after his divorce. His work on the pendulum won him the thanks of the International Geodetic Association in 1877 and election to the American National Academy of Science.
Peirce thought of himself primarily as a logician. In the early 1870s he read draft chapters of a book on logic to the Metaphysical Club (to which he, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., belonged). It was in these readings that the “name and doctrine of pragmatism saw the light.” From 1877 to 1878 Peirce published “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” in six essays in Fopular Science Monthly, the first two of these, “The Fixation of Belief’ and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” James called the “birth certificates” of pragmatism. Rejecting metaphysics, ethics, and deduction, Peirce advocated making the starting point of logic the world as we conceive it and observed that our conception of an object’s effects is our conception of the object. These articles gave Peirce an international reputation, earning him praise as “the greatest living logician.” In 1879 Daniel Coit Gilman appointed him lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University. Although his lectures were difficult to understand, Peirce inspired brilliant students, including John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen. Even though he was considered the world’s greatest logician and had married Juliette the year before, Peirce lost his job at Johns Hopkins in 1884 when gossip became rampant about his long premarital affair with her. Losing his job started a long personal and professional decline.
Peirce’s scientific work ended, and his income plummeted in 1891, when he was dismissed, in part because his reports were overdue, from the Coast Survey. In 1887 he and Juliette had moved to Milford, Pennsylvania, where they lived for the remainder of their lives in increasing seclusion and poverty. The Peirces were friendly with James and Mary Eno Pinchot, the millionaire parents of forester Gifford Pinchot, and Peirce occasionally saw New York City friends at the Century Club and continued to be extravagant with his declining income. His grandiose get-rich schemes (one involved painter Albert Bierstadt) never came to anything. When not writing encyclopedia entries and reviews for the Nation, he concentrated on philosophic questions that intrigued him. Peirce believed in permanent truths and in the reality of God, with the search for truths requiring constant investigation, criticism, and correction. Natural laws, he believed, developed out of “pure chance” and were not absolute. His writings on logic, while containing brilliant insights, were difficult to understand and were not published, but he continued striving to explain the universe. In his retirement he churned out approximately 80,000 difficult pages in that quest.
Realizing Peirce’s increasingly straitened circumstances, William James and JosiAH RoYCE, his Harvard philosophy colleague, helped Peirce by arranging, in 1898, for him to give a series of successful lectures in the informal setting of a Cambridge private home. In 1903 Harvard relented, thanks to James’s persistence, and allowed Peirce to return to the campus to lecture on pragmatism. These formal lectures were called obscure, confusing, and unintelligible, and James, who could not understand them, did not recommend their publication. As Peirce became increasingly poor and reclusive, friends such as James, Royce, and the Pinchots aided him financially until he died, on April 19, 1914, a brilliant, tragic failure. His papers have been collected, and his influence lives on.
Further reading: Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Feirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (NewYork: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001).
World History
