Agriculture

American agriculture in the late 19th century underwent a profound revolution. Vast areas were put into cultivation; machines and techniques were improved and used more widely; and farmers increased their indebtedness, specialized more and more on money crops, became increasingly dependent on changeable markets, and had less and less control over their profits. With less diversification and greater dependence on a money crop, profits were determined by the elements (more than ever), interest rates, freight rates, and world supply and demand.

Expansion

From 1870 to 1900 farm acreage jumped from 408 million to 839 million, largely because RAILROADS crisscrossed the nation and connected arable land with markets. Although the Homestead Act (1862) enabled settlers to acquire 160 acres of public land as long as they remained on it for five years, most of the farms created from 1870 to 1900 were on land purchased from railroads and land speculators. The railroads had received land grants from the federal government to encourage them to build in sparsely settled territories. Their acreage was usually more fertile and accessible to their tracks than land available under the Homestead Act, and since the railroads were anxious to attract settlers to increase the volume of their freight, they sold the land for a reasonable price. Since the cost of converting virgin land into a productive farm with its buildings and machinery was high in comparison with the cost of good land, it was sound economics for farmers to purchase the most productive land available.

Machines

The basic principles of most of the machines used in the Gilded Age—steel plows, disk harrows, grain drills and corn planters, harvesters, binders, threshers—were patented by 1870. All, however, were significantly improved over the next three decades. For example, from 1868 to 1877 James Oliver developed the modern plow. Sulky plows and steam plows were improved, but steam plows were used only on giant wheat farms in the Far West. Binders were improved in 1878 with a twine knotter that eliminated the need for wire; threshers grew in capacity and utilized steam power; and by 1880 combines were used in California, but not east of the Rockies before 1910. Apart from steam plows and threshers, horses and mules powered farm machinery. Neither the cultivation of cotton nor tobacco was significantly affected by the introduction of machinery in the Gilded Age. An effective mechanical cotton picker was not developed until the 20th century. The dairy industry, however, was revolutionized after 1879 with the introduction of the centrifugal cream separator and the later development of the cream tester.

Techniques

Manly Miles of the University of Illinois built a silo in 1875, and by 1900 silos were in use throughout the corn belt. Farmers in arid areas relied on irrigation and experimented with methods of dry farming. Federal and state governments established schools and agencies to improve farming techniques. The federal government established the Department of Agriculture in 1862 and elevated it to cabinet status in 1889. The department disseminated information through hundreds of publications, studied plant and animal diseases and their cures, explored how to preserve soil fertility, and collected statistics, among other duties. In 1862 the Morrill Land Grant Act provided for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical (A&M) colleges in each state, and by 1898, 64 had been established with departments of general agriculture as well as specialized departments in animal industry, dairy husbandry, agricultural chemistry, and other areas. These schools also had model demonstration farms. Connecticut set up an agricultural experiment station in 1875, and several states followed suit; in 1887 the federal Hatch Act subsidized these stations in all states and territories. These stations coordinated their work with the A&M colleges and the Department of Agriculture in educating farmers.

Specialization

Mechanization led to specialization in cash crops for two reasons. Farmers wished to utilize the full productive

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This lithograph from the late 19th century asserts the importance of the farmer in American society. (Library of Congress)

Capacity of their expensive machinery, and they needed cash to pay debts incurred in acquiring those machines. In addition, railroads and refrigerator cars enabled each section of the country to become more specialized. The centers of wheat and corn belts moved west as did hog, cattle, and sheep raising. New England and the middle states were switching from corn and wheat to dairy farming and truck gardening. The South continued to specialize in tobacco and cotton, not because of mechanization but because of the perpetual indebtedness of tenant farmers.

Markets

Planting more cash crops made farmers more dependent on markets than when their production was more diversified. With rapid urban growth in the Gilded Age, domestic markets grew rapidly, but farm production grew even more rapidly. While the population less than doubled from 40 million in 1870 to 76 million in 1900, corn production more than doubled from 1.1 billion bushels to 2.7 billion bushels, and wheat also more than doubled from 254 million bushels to 599 million bushels. While cotton and tobacco exports grew at a relatively steady rate, wheat exports fluctuated wildly. In 1870, 37 million bushels were exported and in 1900 102 million bushels, but wheat exports fell as low as 46 million bushels in 1889, only to rise three years later to 157 million bushels.

Agrieultural Depression

From 1870 to 1900 American agriculture was depressed mainly because of overproduction. In the late 1860s wheat sold for over two dollars a bushel and corn for 78 cents a bushel, but in 1870 wheat was barely over one dollar and corn was at 52 cents. By 1895 wheat had fallen to half a dollar while corn in 1896 hit 21 cents.

In 1900 prices had rebounded to 62 cents for wheat and 35 cents for corn. With deflation prices declined, interest

Rates rose, and debtors had to produce more to pay their debts. Overproduction, however, drove prices lower, and the thousands of individual farmers had no way to control production. Wheat prices, furthermore, were set by worldwide conditions, and American farmers were competing with Canadians, Argentineans, Hungarians, and Ukrainians. Farmers sold their wheat in a world market but purchased manufactured goods in a protected national market. Middlemen profited in buying crops from farmers and in selling goods to farmers. Finally, although railroad rates were declining, farmers felt they were not declining as fast as the prices they received for their crops, and they knew they paid higher discriminatory rates for short hauls than urban shippers, with access to competing lines, paid for long hauls. This agricultural malaise led to the populist revolt of the 1890s.

Further reading: Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Fron-tier: Agriculture, 1860-1897 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1945).

Alabama claims See Washington, Treaty of.

Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888) novelist, short story writer

The author of some of the most popular and enduring juvenile fiction ever, Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on November 29, 1832, and grew up in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. Her father was Bronson Alcott, the educational innovator and transcenden-talist. Although he was part of a distinguished intellectual circle—close family friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—he was incapable of earning a sustained income, and his family frequently lived in poverty.

As a teenager, to help support her family, Alcott began working as a seamstress, a governess, and a domestic worker, among other jobs. She also began to write for publication. Her first published piece was a poem in Peterson's Magazine in 1851, and she followed it up with a variety of thrillers and potboilers that were published anonymously or under pseudonyms in publications like the Saturday Evening Gazette and the Atlantic Monthly.

In 1862 she briefly became an army nurse and served in a hospital in Washington, D. C., before contracting typhoid fever. She was treated with mercury, which permanently damaged her health, but she used that experience to write Hospital Sketches, which appeared in Commonwealth (May-June 1863) and was reprinted that same year in book form. In 1864 she published Moods, a novel about a young woman who feels forced by circumstance to marry a man she merely likes. Meanwhile, she continued to crank out sensational stories for magazines.

In 1868 she tried her hand at a book for adolescent girls. The result was Little Women, which was published in two separate volumes, the first in 1868 and the second in 1869. It was based on Alcott’s own family, and Jo, the tomboy heroine who chaffs under pressure to be ladylike, was based on Alcott herself. Within four years, Little Women had sold 82,000 copies, unprecedented numbers for juvenile fiction. Its success enabled Alcott to provide for her parents, but it also led to relentless pressure to produce more books, which added to her difficulties in her final years (she died on March 6, 1888) as her health broke down.

Alcott followed up Little Women with An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), a novel about a small-town girl trying to hold on to her values during an extended visit to a wealthy family in worldly Boston; Little Men (1871), a sequel to Little Women, in which Jo and her husband run a boy’s school, based in large part on the educational theories of Bronson Alcott; Eight Cousins (1875), about a sickly orphan girl whose health improves after she begins to spend time with her boisterous male cousins; Rose in Bloom (1876), a sequel to Eight Cousins; Under the Lilacs (1878), about a circus runaway; Jack and Jill (1880), about a boy and a girl convalescing after a sledding accident; and Jo's Boys (1886), a sequel to Little Men. All were successful, but none matched the sales figures of Little Women.

Alcott also published scores of short stories for children and adolescents and two more adult novels: Work (1873) and A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), about a young poet who sells himself for literary fame. But it was her adolescent books that brought her the bulk of her success and her enduring fame. She did not always enjoy writing them, referring to them at one point as “moral pap for the young,” but their success was no accident—Alcott remembered what it was like to be 14 or 15, and many of the problems her heroines struggled with were universal. In addition, her books hit the market at a time when an entirely new consumer group was emerging: middle-class girls, 12 to 16 years old, who were anxious to read about girls like themselves and had enough money to purchase moderately priced books.

Further reading: Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950).

—Lynn Hoogenboom

Alger, Horatio (1834-1899) children's fiction writer, poet

Born in Revere, Massachusetts, on January 13, 1834, Horatio Alger, the author of moral, melodramatic books for boys,

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Graduated from Harvard in 1852, sewed wild oats on a trip to Europe, and then for three years worked for local newspapers before attending Harvard Divinity School. After earning his divinity degree, Alger again traveled abroad and in 1864 became minister of the Brewster, Massachusetts, Unitarian church. Two years later, accused of being a pederast, he was dismissed.

Having already published sentimental poems and stories as well as sensational—but moral—novels, Alger moved to New York City to make his way as a writer. He did some tutoring for the wealthy and some social work at the Newsboys’ Lodging House, where he lived most of the time and drew on his observations in his books for boys. His most successful book, Ragged Dick: Or Street Life in New York, appeared in 1867, and Alger produced over a hundred more like it.

In a typical Alger tale, a poor boy of sterling character leaves the farm (perhaps to earn money to help his widowed mother); goes to the city; gets a job in a department store; is honest, diligent, and frugal; and by an extraordinary stroke of good luck comes to the attention of the merchant prince who owns the store.

By the end of the book the boy is on his way to a managerial position. Alger’s books have come to symbolize the “rags to riches” American dream. They were enormously popular among boys, not so much for the moralistic lessons and traditional values dispensed, but more for their adventurous and melodramatic character and the assurance that ultimately the hero (who eschewed gambling) would nevertheless hit the jackpot in the world of business.

In 1896 Alger moved to Natick, Massachusetts, to live with his sister and to write a great adult novel, but he failed to begin it before he died on July 18, 1899.

Further reading: Carol Nackenoff, The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press; 1994); Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

Allison, William Boyd (1829-1908) lawyer, politician William Boyd Allison boasted a remarkably long congressional career, serving Iowans eight years in the House of Representatives (1863-71) and 35 years (1873-1908) in the Senate. Shrewd and cautious, he bent sufficiently to survive intense pressures for change and would have been elected for a seventh senatorial term had he not died.

Born in Perry, Ohio, on March 2, 1829, Allison attended the preparatory academy connected with Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, taught school near Perry for a year or two, and completed his meager formal education with a year at Western Reserve College, then located in Hudson, Ohio. Admitted to the bar after having studied law for less than a year, he commenced its practice in Ashland, Ohio, in 1852, and achieved modest success. In 1854 Allison married Anna Carter, daughter of the town’s most prosperous citizen. He dabbled in politics, first as a Whig, then briefly as an anti-Catholic Know-Nothing (the nativist American Party), and in 1854 participated in the founding of the Republican Party. Allison remained devoted to it for the rest of his life. In 1856 that party nominated him for Ashland County’s prosecuting attorney. Although he ran well in a Democratic county, he lost. Frustrated political ambitions, coupled with a mediocre law practice, decided Allison to move west, and in 1857 he settled in the thriving town of Dubuque, Iowa. Suffering from tuberculosis, his wife, Anna, remained in Ohio and died there in 1860.

In Iowa Allison’s law practice served as an entering wedge into politics and enabled him to make contacts with businessmen. Despite his lack of property and his modest means, Allison, who exuded “safeness,” was within two years on the board of directors of the Dubuque branch of the Iowa State Bank. In that position he cultivated friends who supported his political ambitions and who anticipated reciprocal favors. Among these was the railroad builder and powerful Republican Grenville M. Dodge. Allison’s ambition was rewarded by election to Congress in 1862.

Allison served four terms in the House. By pushing for federal land grants for Iowa RAILROADS, he also served his strong supporters. He joined Radical Republicans and voted for congressional control of the political reconstruction of the South and for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, yet he was not an extremist and had the gift of retaining the respect and even friendship of opponents. He remained, for example, the faithful protege of Iowa senator James W. Grimes even after his deciding vote to acquit Johnson in the 1868 impeachment trial made Grimes a pariah among Iowa Radicals. In 1873 Allison married Grimes’s beautiful and accomplished niece Mary Nealley. Unfortunately, she became mentally unstable and committed suicide in 1883.

In 1870 his close association with the unpopular Grimes had prevented Allison from succeeding him in the Senate, but with the support of railroad interests, Allison defeated Senator James Harlan two years later. In addition to his interest in railroads, Allison became expert in currency, finance, and taxation. He was on the Finance Committee for 30 years and chaired the Appropriations Committee for 27 years. Above all else, Allison was, as Senator Nelson Aldrich described him, “a master of the arts of conciliation and construction.” To minimize the disappointment of disputants, he managed to adjust differences behind the scenes with much tact and little publicity. The one major act to which his name is attached, the Bland-Allison Act (1878), illustrates his genius as a compromiser. His

Amendment to the House’s inflationary Bland bill for the remonetization of silver limited its coinage and kept inflation in check. Neither western silver inflationists nor eastern creditors were completely satisfied, but silver dollars were minted and gold was not driven out of circulation.

Allison’s fellow party leaders appreciated his capacity to harmonize contentious voices among Republicans. He was a leading candidate for the presidential nomination in 1888, losing out to Benjamin Harrison. A second try in 1896 failed when William Mckinley was nominated. By the 1890s Allison was one of “the Big Four” dominating the Senate and determining congressional policy. The other three were Aldrich of Rhode Island, John Spooner of Wisconsin, and Orville Platt of Connecticut.

At heart a conservative, Allison never lost the trust of financiers, manufacturers, and railroaders. His pragmatic compromises, resolving difficult issues, may have impinged on, but did not endanger, their interests. Allison finessed agreements on controversial import duties in the McKinley Tariff (1890) and the Dingley Tariff (1897) and worked with Democrats on the sugar schedule in the Wilson-Gor-man Tariff (1894). He was also instrumental in adjusting competing interests in the debate over the 1906 Hepburn Act. The Allison Amendment (which Aldrich, President Theodore Roosevelt, and others probably helped originate) obfuscated and postponed the question of broad versus narrow judicial review of railroad rates to be set by the Interstate Commerce Commission and enabled the Hepburn bill to breeze through the Senate with only three negative votes. Allison, a Republican colleague remarked, “was so pussyfooted he could walk from New York to San Francisco on the keys of a piano and never strike a note.”

On August 4, 1908, Allison died at home in Dubuque, leaving a modest estate, unlike his colleague Aldrich, who had parlayed political influence into millions.

Further reading: Leland L. Sage, William Boyd Allison: A Study in Practical Politics (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1956).

Altgeld, John Peter (1847-1902) politician Democratic politician John Peter Altgeld was born to John Peter and Mary Altgeld on December 30, 1847, at Nieder Selters in Nassau, Germany. His parents brought him to the United States and settled in Richland County, Ohio, when he was only three months old. In 1864 he served in the Ohio Home Guards briefly, taught school for two years, and in 1869 at the age of 21 moved west to Missouri. He read law, was admitted to the bar in 1871, and in 1874 he was elected state’s attorney for Andrew County with Democratic-Granger support. Despite this apparent success, he resigned and moved to Chicago one year later.

At first Altgeld did not do well in Chicago. He slept in his office for two years before he could afford living quarters.

By 1879, however, he was secure enough to begin speculating in real estate. Over the next 11 years he parlayed a $500 initial investment into a $500,000 fortune. During this time he continued to practice law and to write. In 1884 he published Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims, suggesting that the poor had a less than equal chance in America. Another publication, The Immigrant's Answer (1890), responded to nativist attacks against aliens. He was also an effective politician, elected as a judge for the Superior Court of Cook County in 1886 and, six years later, became the Democratic Party’s successful candidate for governor.

Shortly after his inauguration, Altgeld, pressed by Clarence Darrow and other liberals, considered pardoning those convicted of the bombing during the Haymar-KET riot. After careful study he pardoned the three who were still alive, in June 1893. Altgeld suggested that the bomb was most likely thrown as an act of individual revenge, because the Chicago police often clubbed strikers who gave no offense. He also dismissed much of the evidence as “pure fabrication,” objected to the method of jury selection, and noted the obvious prejudice of Judge Joseph Gary. The press denounced Altgeld as an anarchist, a demagogue, a fomenter of lawlessness, and an apologist for murder.

The outcry did not deter Altgeld from supporting those he considered disenfranchised. He appointed Alzina P. Stevens assistant factory inspector for Illinois and supported her assault upon the sweatshop system. He protested the use of federal troops during the Pullman Strike of 1894, stating that President Grover Cleveland’s action was “unnecessary, unjustifiable, and unconstitutional.”

Altgeld played a major role in the Democratic Party’s repudiation of Cleveland. At its 1896 convention he helped write its platform, calling for the free coinage of silver (Free Silver movement), and his influence was so great that he would have been a serious contender for the nomination had he not been born abroad and thus ineligible for the U. S. presidency. The Illinois Democratic Party nominated him in 1896 for a second gubernatorial term, but although he ran well ahead of the Democratic Party’s national ticket in Illinois, he lost. Altgeld also suffered financial as well as political reverses, but he remained active as a lawyer and in politics. He was an outspoken advocate of municipal ownership of streetcar lines and an opponent of imperialism; indeed, he died in Joliet, Illinois, on March 12, 1902, just after delivering a speech attacking imperialism. The poet Vachel Lindsay celebrated Altgeld in his poem “The Eagle That Is Forgotten.”

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Further reading: Harry Barnard, Eagle Forgotten: The Life of John Peter Altgeld (Secaucus, N. J.: L. Stuart, 1968); Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal versus Changing Realities (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965).

—Harold W. Aurand