CONCLUSION 311 



Prior to about 1870 American history appears to have had 

 two distinguishing and characteristic features to which nearly 

 everything else can be related. In the first place it was the 

 history of the occupation of a continent by a civilized people; 

 and, secondly, it was the history of a struggle between two 

 incompatible social and economic systems established in the 

 two great sections of the country. One of these features passed 

 into the background with the Civil War and reconstruction, the 

 other with the practical disappearance a few years later of 

 free land suitable to the purposes of the individual pioneer. 

 Before the Civil War there had been no great accumulations 

 and combinations of wealth; but the industrial stimulus of the 

 war, the development of the corporate idea, and the great advance 

 in the applied sciences brought such accumulations and com- 

 binations rapidly to the front, while the disappearance of the 

 frontier closed a door of opportunity which had previously been 

 open to the oppressed and discontented. The result was a 

 tendency toward protective and cooperative organization along 

 class lines, of which the labor movement is one aspect, and the 

 farmers' movement another. The Grangers organized to fight 

 this " greater capitalism " wherever it made its appearance. 

 They saw it in the great railroad corporations of the country, 

 and they strove to subject them to public control; they saw it 

 in politics, and they organized independent parties to oust it;\ 

 they saw it in great industrial establishments and their agents, 

 the middlemen, and they established cooperative enterprises 

 in the endeavor to restore their economic independence. The 

 Greenbackers and the Populists believed that the stronghold 

 of this greater capitalism was in the monetary system of the 

 country, and they proposed to break its power by the issue of 

 fiat money. Thus in one form or another the struggle has been 

 carried on by agricultural organizations, by labor unions, and by 

 political parties or factions within political parties until it seems 

 to have culminated in a nation-wide movement for political, 

 social, and economic reform. 



If this interpretation be correct, then the Granger movement 

 deserves a prominent place in American history. The decade 



