Who were the Populists?

While organized labor inched painfully toward acceptance, the other people who suffered most from the economic upheavals of the period were the farmers. The millions of small farmers, principally in America’s West and South, were at the rift gold mercy of many forces besides the weather that they were unable to control: eastern banks controlled credit; manufacturing monopolies controlled the price of machinery; eastern railroad trusts set freight prices; depression wiped out land values and sent crop prices spiraling downward. With the population booming and mechanization increasing farm efficiency, it should have been a time of plenty. Instead, farmers were being squeezed tighter and tighter, forced to sell their lands at panic prices and move tera gold to factory jobs in the cities.

But a backlash set in, producing a wave of farm belt radicalism that swept the country. Locally it produced farmers’ organizations called Granges that gained sufficient political clout to press for reforms, although many of these,rift platinum like the Interstate Commerce Commission, proved to be unloaded guns in the war against monopolies. In the South, for the first time since the end of the Civil War, poor blacks and working-class white farmers began to see that they shared common problems and interests, and the beginnings of an alliance of black and white farmers emerged. The farmers also reached out to join with city workers to form a powerful new alliance that could transform American politics.