Mormon Church which had been seized as a punitive measure was restored in 1893. Utah was admitted in 1896.

The new States of the Far West reflected in their institutions the liberal ideas that were fighting in vain for recogWoman nition elsewhere in the country. Most notable suffrage among these was that of woman suffrage. Wyoming accepted the principle in its constitution of 1890 and Colorado adopted it by referendum in 1893. The new State of Utah accepted it from the start, and in November, 1896, Idaho became the fourth of the suffrage States. The movement had already been the objective of active reformers for half a century and now entered into the realm of practical politics. It was fourteen years before the next State, Washington, was added to the list. After 1910 opposition to woman suffrage rapidly diminished and it became a generally accepted fact.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Robert P. Porter, The West from the Census of 1800 (1882), and Julian Ralph, Our Great West (1893), are useful general surveys. F. L. Paxson, "The Admission of the Omnibus States, 1889-1890," in Wisconsin State Historical Society, Proceedings, 1911, contains many bibliographical references. L. A. Coolidge, Orville H. Platt (1910), is the life of a Senator long interested in the Territories. Local histories, in addition to the voluminous writings of Hubert Howe Bancroft, are John Hailey, History of Idaho (1910), Edmund S. Meany, History of Washington (1909), William A. Linn, Story of the Mormons (1902), and Joseph Schafer, History of the Pacific Northwest (1905).

CHAPTER XVII

POPULISM

THE social changes of the eighties brought statehood to seven Territories and internal reconstruction to the near-by States. In 1880 the United States comprised three regions of nearly equal size, the old States, the Territories, and the frontier States that bordered on the Territories. In these frontier States there were still free land and abundant opportunity. In Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado the actual changes of the decade were most extensive and the resulting shift in social needs and political ideals was most

severe.

Agricultural overproduction

The railroads built more than eleven thousand miles of track in these three States between 1880 and 1890, and in this region the results of artificial stimulation produced the greatest immigration. More than a million and a quarter new inhabitants appeared in them, most of them living on the farm and engaging with feverish haste in the erection of homes, towns, railroads, and the material things of life. Wheat and corn were the staple commodities of this region. The sugar beet began to appear toward the end of the period, but in general the farmers devoted most of their efforts to their standard crops. There was thrown upon the world a greater mass of food than could be immediately absorbed. By 1886 the cattle industry, that flourished just before the farmers came, had passed the period of its greatest profit. The falling price of meat due to unregulated production was followed by falling prices of other agricultural products. The readiness with which the manufacturers turned to Congress for relief and asked for protection to improve their market was paralleled among the farmers by a similar demand to raise the prices of their output.

The steady decline of prices hit with greatest severity

the industries in which arrangements were made over long periods and in which quick readjustments to a change in prices were most difficult. The Western and Southern farmers equally were dependent for their prosperity upon a market price that could not even be estimated when they prepared their fields and sowed their crops. The manufacturer could if need be store his output or reduce costs by laying off his hands. The farmer with a single crop had no such relief and must in general stick to his crop and sell it for what the market offered. The few facilities for storing cotton in the South were not controlled by farmers or managed in their interests. The Northern grain elevators had been objects of hostility to the farmers who patronized them since the Granger period. There appeared early in the eighties movements in the Northwest and South that looked, as the Grange had done, to the better organization of the farmers. The manufacturers had their home markets club and abundant means to advertise their desires. The agrarian movements were carried on by lesser men and showed in their course the poverty and political inexperience of most of their supporters.

The origin of the Farmers' Alliances that appeared in most of the Western States before 1880 is to be found in Farmers' the continuing consciousness of farmers' probAlliances lems. The Grange had passed the crest of its importance and the Alliance movement which succeeded it was a spontaneous growth out of local conditions rather than an expansion of a national organization. In October, 1880, the National Farmers' Alliance held a mass convention in Chicago and completed a loose federal organization. No credentials appear to have been required at this convention. and its permanent chairman permitted any one to participate who desired. The motive inspiring its three hundred delegates closely resembled that which inspired the Greenback Party in the same year. It was an anti-monopoly, anti-railroad body that hoped to accomplish results through economic coöperation rather than politics. When the organization held its next annual convention in 1881, the

delegates reported the existence of about one thousand local alliances with Kansas and Nebraska in the lead.

The social side of the alliances was similar to that of the Grange. In a few instances, where local leadership was strong, farmers' coöperative movements were developed and maintained general stores or grain elevators for the benefit of their members. The movement was so informal and the leadership so little known that the records of its growth are difficult to trace. Many of its members were identified also with the Greenback Party, and in their correspondence the common aims of the two movements are sometimes discussed. "The Farmers are waking up as they have not done since the Grange Movement," wrote one of them in 1882; "our County alliance is getting into working order, and I see calls in all directions for a revival of the Alliance Movement." "We are untrammeled advocates of Reform, with Rep. proclivities," wrote another to Lemuel H. Weller, who was running for Congress in Iowa on the Greenback ticket. Jesse Harper, an original member of the Republican Party, was speaking continuously for the Alliance in the South and West. "I am speaking for the poor man's party," he wrote to Weller, "hence do not charge much. Ten dollars a day and all expenses." From Nebraska another leader wrote to Weller: "We have some 150 farmer Alliances formed in the State. A fair proportion in your district. Monopoly candidates must stand from under as far as the Alliances are concerned. If you are a distinctively farmers' candidate and your opponent a R.R. attorney or a Monop. candidate, I could perhaps be of some service to you."

The National Alliance reported the existence of 2700 local alliances in 1883, and its leaders took an active part in the reform activities started by the Union Labor Party in anticipation of the election of 1888. "Every day brings tidings of the uprising of the people," wrote one of Weller's correspondents in 1886. Another observed that "God is killing all the Old Party Leaders pretty fast. My Prayer is he will take Cleveland, Manning, Blaine & John Sherman.

Then we may have some hope finantially [sic] in America." The activities of the leaders of the Alliance and of the Knights of Labor became closely interlocked. The National Farmers' Alliance developed its greatest strength among the Southern States, while Northern farmers tended to join the Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union. The warfare between these two bodies was largely a partisan struggle of leaders for individual advantage, but the Alliance was kept alive among the farmers. Thirty-five thousand members were claimed by the alliances in the summer of 1888 and fifty thousand in 1889.

The hopes with which farmers settled along the lines of the land-grant railroads in the early eighties turned to dismay before the decade ended. The agricultural Drought settlements had been worked too far west in Kansas and Nebraska, and there, as well as in eastern Colorado and parts of Dakota, were encroaching on the semiarid plains. In ordinary years the rainfall west of central Kansas is too scanty to sustain farming. From year to year, however, the average fluctuates. In the early eighties there was a series of years of excessive rainfall that produced good crops nearly all the way to Denver. The new regions filled up with newcomers who had no earlier knowledge of the country, and there were few old inhabitants to shake their heads at the possibility of farming on the high plains. The law of averages reasserted itself about 1887 with the result that the crops received even less than normal rainfall and dried up early in the summers. Local economists, who had fancied that the "new science of meteorology had changed the climate and increased the rainfall," learned their mistake. In all the organizations that appealed to discontented farmers membership and activity increased as the decade neared its end. The attempt to put together a Union Labor Party with a solid backing of workers, whether industrial or rural, was a failure in 1888, but the materials for making such a party became more numerous. The Knights of Labor, declining from the importance formerly held as the official spokesman of the labor movement, en