The term farmers’ alliances was used to refer to the two powerful organizations that succeeded the Patrons of Husbandry (the Granger movement) as the leading vehicles of agrarian protest in the post-Civil War period: the Northwestern Alliance and the Southern Alliance. Like the Grangers, the alliances were principally concerned with: declining agricultural prices, escalating railroad rates (shipping costs), problems with credit, land speculators, and the exploitation of farmers by the “money power” (banks and big business). Applying self-help solutions to their problems, they formed cooperatives and other marketing mechanisms such as stores, processing plants, and banks. These facilities were designed to break farmers’ dependence on the “finishing merchants” who acted as the middlemen in an economic cycle that kept farmers in perpetual debt. They favored an inflation of the money supply either through an increase in the amount of greenbacks (paper currency) in circulation or the free and unlimited coinage of silver (Free Silver movement). Alliance members also attacked the national banking system as a tool used by corrupt financiers and politicians to make an easy profit. In some ways, then, the alliances sought to create a new American society where economic competition would be replaced by cooperation.
As early as 1875, a group of Texas farmers had united to form an alliance against local cattle ranchers, railroad operators, and land speculators, but it was short-lived. A new farmers’ organization, the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, emerged in the 1880s to take its place. After 1886 Charles W. Macune and William Lamb led the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. It quickly expanded from Texas into neighboring southern states, and by 1890 the Southern Farmers’ Alliance had evolved into the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union. It worked with an independent organization of African-American farmers known as the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union and with the Knights of Labor.
Milton George, the editor of the Western Rural, a Chicago-based agricultural journal, founded the Northwestern Alliance in 1880. George wanted the new organization to combat what he believed were the unfair practices of railroads against the nation’s farmers. Under George’s leadership, the Northwestern Alliance established several local alliances in the Dakotas, Kansas, Minnesota, and Nebraska. Yet, the Northwestern Alliance never formulated a cohesive program and had great difficulty in attracting and keeping members.
Although the Alliance movement would eventually become far more widespread than the Granger movement, it suffered setbacks. Alliance cooperatives did not always work well, in part because the market forces were too strong to overcome but also because of mismanagement. These economic frustrations led several Alliance members to seek other avenues to remedy their situation. By the late 1880s, they helped steer the Alliance movement into electoral politics through the creation of a national political party.
Meeting in Ocala, Florida, in 1890, representatives of the farmers’ alliances made demands that Macune helped formulate. The Ocala demands called for the direct election of U. S. senators; a graduated federal income tax; an end to protective tariffs and the National Banking System; 2-percent federal loans to farmers; the establishment of federal “subtreasuries” for the storage of surplus crops on which the 2-percent loans to farmers could be based; prohibition of land ownership by aliens; the free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of 16-to-one; and effective government regulation and, if necessary, control of railroads and public utilities.
Of these demands, the establishment of a subtreasury system was most important. Farmers could hold their crops in government warehouses and claim Treasury notes for up to 80 percent of the local market value of the crops. The loan was to be repaid when the crops were sold. The idea was that the subtreasury system would help farmers pay their annual debts because they could hold on to their crops until market prices were more favorable.
Subsequently, leaders of the farmers’ alliances discussed plans for the organization of a national political party at meetings held in Cincinnati (1891) and St. Louis (1892). They would follow the lead of Alliance members in Kansas who had already launched the People’s Party (Populist Party) in that state during the summer of 1890. In July 1892 several Alliance members were among the delegates and spectators who met at Omaha, Nebraska, in what was the first national convention of the People’s Party. The Omaha plateorm in many ways mirrored the Ocala demands.
The creation of the People’s Party effectively brought an end to the Alliance movement. The leaders of the Northwestern Alliance in their enthusiasm for the new party forgot the original purpose of their protest movement, while the members of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance steadfastly identified with the Democratic Party and were reluctant to join the Populists. By the middle 1890s, the Alliance movement had lost its vitality on the national stage as the Democrats and the emerging People’s Party co-opted its ideas.
See also political parties, third; Simpson, Jerry.
Further reading: Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers Alliance and the People’s Party (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961); Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South, 1865-1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964); Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880-1890 (New York: Academic Press, 1976).
—Phillip Papas
Field, Stephen Johnson (1816-1899) Supreme Court justice
In his defense of property rights, Stephen J. Field, a U. S. Supreme Court justice for 34 years, anticipated laissez-faire constitutionalism. The son of a Congregational minister, who instilled in him a strong sense of right and wrong, Field was born in Haddam, Connecticut, on November 4, 1816, and grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His older brother David Dudley Field, Jr., is renowned for codifying New York’s laws, and his younger brother Cyrus West Field is famous for financing and promoting the transatlantic cable. Stephen Field graduated from Williams College in 1837, but his study of law with his brother David was interrupted when Stephen nearly died from a dose of calomel a physician had prescribed for an infection. Upon his recovery he completed his training at the Albany office of New York State attorney general John Van Buren. After Field was admitted to the bar in 1841, he became his brother’s partner until 1848, when he toured Europe with other members of his family. Returning to New York in October 1849, he caught the gold-rush fever and in November departed for California via the Isthmus of Panama.
Field arrived in California on December 28, 1849, and quickly rose to prominence. Pausing less than a month in San Francisco, he moved to Maryville, where, with legal talent in short supply, he was elected to the judicial-mayoral position of alcalde and served a year in the California legislature. From 1851 to 1857 he was in private practice. In those violent early California days, Field, who had a hot temper, was involved in controversies, had his life threatened, and always carried a pistol and a bowie knife. Marrying Sue Virginia Swearingen on June 2, 1859, had a stabilizing effect on Field’s tumultuous life. In 1857 he failed to be elected to the U. S. Senate as a Democrat but was elected to the California Supreme Court. There his decisions, upholding the property rights of large estates from Mexican patents, angered individual miners and homesteaders. His reelection was further endangered by the coming of the Civil War, which split the California Democratic Party and ensured a Republican triumph in the next judicial election. Rather than go down in defeat, Field, in March 1863, was elevated to the U. S. Supreme Court by Abraham Lincoln. The appointment of Field served two political purposes. Since he was a War Democrat, his appointment helped keep California in the Union, and his appointment repaid his brother David, a prominent Republican, who supported Lincoln’s nomination for president.
Having been dominated for a generation by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, the Supreme Court that Field joined subordinated the individual’s property rights to the public interest, as interpreted by a legislature. Unless clearly unconstitutional, legislative acts were allowed to stand. In conflicts between state police power and personal property rights, the Court tended to give the legislature the benefit of the doubt. Coinciding with Field’s term, during the Gilded Age the Court shifted to a conservative position, emphasizing the preeminence of property rights, conceiving of liberty as economic liberty, and undermining the legislative power to define the public interest. By the early 20th century the Supreme Court thought it, rather than legislatures, should determine social policy. Through the power of judicial review the Court maintained the status quo and ushered in laissez-faire constitutionalism.
The shift was gradual, and in it Field played a major role in dissents, whose ideas the majority adopted in the 1890s. Ever friendly to large-scale business, Field was the cutting edge of laissez-faire constitutionalism, but his decisions also reflected his loyalty to the Democratic Party. His strong commitment to individual liberty in his dissent in Ex parte McCardle (1869) was fueled in part by his hostility to Radical Republican Reconstruction measures, and his defense of property rights (debts incurred in gold should be paid in gold) in the Legal Tender Cases (1871) was consistent with a Jacksonian hostility to paper currency. In these cases he based his arguments on fundamental principles of justice rather than on a specific clause in the Constitution.
Field buttressed his dissent in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) with the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment (1868) to the Constitution, which was intended to protect the civil rights of African Americans from hostile state legislation. He argued that Louisiana abridged the “privileges and immunities” of New Orleans butchers without “due process of law” by compelling them to slaughter their animals for a fee in a narrow area controlled by one corporation. It set up a monopoly, which deprived butchers of their economic liberty to pursue a lawful calling. Field’s opinion forecast the increasing use in the Gilded Age of “liberty of contract” to attack state economic regulations and its corollary, “substantive due process,” under which the courts reviewed the substance of state regulations.
In subsequent dissents and decisions Field nudged the Supreme Court toward laissez-faire constitutionalism. In Munn v. Illinois (1877) he dissented from the majority opinion, which upheld a GRANGER-inspired law setting rates for Chicago grain elevators on grounds that their function involved “a public interest.” Upholding property rights, Field again restricted state police power and reserved for the courts the task of drawing the line between property that can be regulated and property that cannot be regulated. In his role as a circuit court judge, Field in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1883) ruled that corporations were “persons” and were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Upon appeal in 1886 the Supreme Court upheld Field’s position that California’s attempt to tax a corporation differently than other “persons” was unconstitutional. By the 1890s the Court adopted Field’s views on liberty of contract and substantive due process.
While expanding the compass of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect corporations, Field, reflecting the racist bias of the Gilded Age Democratic Party, restricted the amendment’s impact on African Americans. In dissents in 1880 he argued that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited discrimination by states but not by individuals, a view the Supreme Court adopted in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). It emasculated the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by allowing racial discrimination in hotels, theaters, and public transportation. Field harbored presidential aspirations, but his hopes for the Democratic Party’s nomination were frustrated in 1880 and in 1884 in part because his rulings in favor of the unpopular Southern Pacific Railroad hurt him in his home state of California. Field was frustrated further in 1888 when GROVER CLEVELAND did not name him chief justice. To prevent Cleveland from naming his replacement, Field spitefully hung on, despite growing feebleness, until December 1, 1897, establishing a longevity record on the Supreme Court. He died on April 9, 1899, in Washington, D. C.
Further reading: Paul Kens, Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); Robert Green McCloskey, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise: A Study of William Graham Sumner, Stephen J. Field and Andrew Carnegie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951); Carl Brent Swisher, Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law (Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution, 1930).
World History
