3 2 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



government ownership, only as a means of retaining for themselves the 

 right to hold property and to do business on a reasonably profitable basis. 2 



It should be remembered that these rights, throughout the greater part 

 of the western Middle West, were most imperiled by the railroads, and 

 that it was against the railroads more specifically than against any other 

 type of enterprise that the farmers aimed their principal reforms. The 

 railroads had created the region; they had brought the population in; they 

 were in close alliance or even partnership with other industries such as 

 lumber, elevator, milling, and packing corporations; they were the chief 

 exploiters of the farm population, which was obliged to pay them rates 

 both coming and going. When the average middle western farmer living 

 west of Chicago talked about monopolies and trusts, he was thinking 

 primarily of the railroads. Even the towns and cities were peculiarly 

 railroad-conscious. They had no other equally big businesses, and their 

 very lives as trading centers depended upon the fairness, or sometimes 

 the favor, with which railroad rate makers treated them. 3 



Implicit in the Populistic concept of government intervention in eco- 

 nomic affairs was the assumption that the government itself should be 

 truly representative of the people, that the long-established control of the 

 "plutocrats" should be broken. The first task that the agrarian leaders 

 set for themselves, therefore, was to capture for the people the machinery 

 of government. 4 It was with this end in view that Farmers' Alliance and 

 Populist candidates sought control of state governments, and that die 

 Populist party nominated J. B. Weaver in 1892 and William Jennings 

 Bryan in 1896 for the Presidency of the United States. Bryan's first defeat 

 rang the death knell of Populism as an effective party organization and 

 served notice on the people generally that the ousting of the "plutocrats" 

 was to be no easy task. But the idea lived on. As Frederick Jackson Turner 

 once phrased it, "Mr. Bryan's Democracy, Mr. Debs' Socialism, and Mr. 



2. Benton H. Wilcox, "An Historical Definition of Northwestern Radicalism," 

 Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXVI (December, 1939), pp. 382, 394. This 

 article sets forth the principal findings of the author's more elaborate study, "A 

 Reconsideration of the Character and Economic Basis of Northwestern Radicalism" 

 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1933), hereafter cited 

 as Wilcox, "Northwestern Radicalism." 



3. Wilcox, "Northwestern Radicalism," p. 50. 



4. John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis, 1931), pp. 405-6. 



