THE BALLOT-BOX AS A JOKE 



gained or hoped from a third party in the 

 political field. Many other persons before 

 and since have run headlong against the same 

 stony fact. The people of the United States 

 have settled into the political habit of two 

 parties; nothing has yet appeared powerful 

 enough to turn them in appreciable numbers 

 from this practice, and in our time nothing 

 so equipped is likely. Yet even the Farmers' 

 Alliance was not the first futile lunge of the 

 oppressed agriculturists to get their own po- 

 litical machinery. When the Grange first 

 became formidable in Iowa in 1873 its enthu- 

 siastic members made a party of it and car- 

 ried the state, to the sound of much rejoicing. 

 But the Grange, though excellent in other 

 ways, was never fitted for such activities and 

 two years later the net result of the Grange 

 party was the memory of its well-meant laws 

 that had been repealed and the echoes of loud 

 vituperation from the Eastern press. The 

 railroads had rallied and regained their accus- 

 tomed sway over the affairs of the state, a 

 sway destined to endure for many years in 

 Iowa, as in all the West, as the strangest of 

 all examples of a practical working autocracy 

 in the midst of a republic. 



In the East the Populist movement was met 

 with a barrage of ridicule that in the end made 

 the very name a synonym for a political 

 madhouse. A thousand cartoons represent- 



97 



