REGION OF DISCONTENT 7 



then only seven in number and not thickly settled at that. Four years later, 

 with many more states offering Greenback tickets, the proportion was 

 still 41 per cent. 5 After the Greenbackers came the Populist revolt. This 

 movement, in its western manifestation, was strongest in the states border- 

 ing on the Great Plains the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas but it 

 picked up notable followings in both Minnesota and Iowa, and to the 

 latter state it turned in 1892 for a presidential candidate. 



In the twentieth century the gusty winds of reform continued to lash 

 the western Middle West. The new crusades rarely struck with equal 

 force in each of the nine states, but there were few periods in which one 

 part or another of the region was not storm-tossed. The Wisconsin Idea 

 got off to a good start early in the century. Hard on its heels came the 

 Iowa Idea. Then, during and after the first World War, the Nonpartisan 

 League upset the equanimity of all "right-thinking" people in North 

 Dakota and Minnesota and to a lesser extent in neighboring states. In 

 Congress the farm bloc, drawing heavily from all the states of the western 

 Middle West, refused to permit the nation to forget the plight of the 

 farmer. Here McNary-Haugenism originated, and here it found its most 

 ardent supporters. Out of the same soil grew also the Farmer-Labor party 

 of Minnesota, the Progressive party of Wisconsin, and many of the agri- 

 cultural policies of the New Deal. From this region, possibly as a matter 

 of appeasement, came seven of the nine secretaries of agriculture who held 

 office during the first four decades of the twentieth century. 



While agricultural discontent, both for the Middle West and for the 

 United States as a whole, centered primarily in this region, economic 

 forces have a way of straying at will across any such interior boundary 

 lines as have been described. The plight of the corn farmer in Ohio and 

 Indiana was not particularly different from the plight of the corn farmer 

 in Illinois and Iowa. Wheat farming in Montana was a kind of projection 

 of wheat farming in North Dakota, and similarly wheat farming in Kansas 

 was much the same as wheat farming in Oklahoma. The Kentucky to- 

 bacco grower and the Wisconsin tobacco grower had much in common. 

 Thus any investigation of the sources and consequences of farmer dis- 

 content in the western Middle West will frequently involve not only all 



5. Based on Edward Stanwood, A History of the Presidency (Boston, 1898), pp. 

 383, 417. 



