Il8 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



Everitt expected to recruit a million members, and with their support to 

 usher in an era of profitable prices by the control of marketing. But even 

 at this nominal fee the farmers were slow to respond. Equity obtained only 

 about twenty or thirty thousand members during its first few months of 

 existence, which was far short of the several hundred thousand which 

 Everitt had anticipated. Hoping to speed up the drive for membership, 

 Everitt lowered the rates, first to fifty cents and then to twenty-five, but 

 all to no avail. He had hoped, too, also in vain, that these reductions would 

 curb rumors that he was building up his fortune at the expense of the 

 society. 13 



What membershi, , figures are available are incomplete and perhaps 

 unreliable. In 1906, one estimate placed the number at 200,000, but it ap- 

 pears unlikely that the society had more than 100,000 members at its peak. 

 In 1907, the number was placed at 60,000, and in October, 1908, at 26,259. 

 By the latter year state organizations, which were no part of the original 

 scheme, had been formed in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Ken- 

 tucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Okla- 

 homa, South Dakota, Virginia, and Wisconsin, but Equity attained its 

 greatest strength in Kentucky, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and 

 Montana. 14 



During the early years the price-setting activities of Equity revolved 

 chiefly around wheat and tobacco. Wheat appears to have had primary 

 place on the agenda. In 1903 Everitt distributed the first of a series of 

 "Dollar Wheat Bulletins" urging the farmers to hold their wheat for 

 a dollar a bushel. The following year he asked them to demand $1.20 a 

 bushel. At the same time he also appealed to the southern farmers to hold 

 their cotton, but the cotton growers apparently preferred to join organiza- 

 tions with a southern background, such as the Southern Cotton Associa- 

 tion or the Farmers' Union, and paid little attention to Equity. In 1904, 

 an organization of tobacco producers was established in Lynchburg, Vir- 

 ginia, largely under the influence of Equity, and late that same year the 

 society began to attract attention in the tobacco fields of Kentucky and 



13. Everitt, The Third Power, third edition, pp. 280, 284; Wisconsin Equity Newf, 

 June 10, 1912, p. 2. 



14. Indian-Arbiter (Ada, Okla.), March i, 1906, p. 12; Equity Farm Journal, I 

 (November, 1907), p. 2; (October, 1908), p. 9; (January, 1908), p. 9. 



