CHAPTER VIII 



THE ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN AGRI- 

 CULTURE AND COUNTRY LIFE 



FOR half a century the leaders of farmers have urged 

 " organization " or " cooperation " as the second of 

 the two essentials to rural progress, and many efforts 

 have been made to organize farmers. The results 

 have not been entirely satisfactory. In earlier days, 

 the aim was to form great farmers' organizations 

 associations dealing with all aspects of agricultural im- 

 provement and designed to include the farmers gener- 

 ally, irrespective of the section of the country in which 

 they lived or of the particular kind of agriculture in 

 which they were engaged. The Grange was the ear- 

 liest and is yet the most typical of these organizations. 

 A secret society, it was frankly patterned after one of 

 the great fraternal orders. It has its rituals, its pass- 

 words, its initiations. The Grange movement swept 

 the country, then subsided, and again began a steady but 

 substantial growth. For the past ten or fifteen years, 

 it has more than held its own where at the beginning of 

 the century it had any real foothold. The Farmers' 

 Alliance sprang up and for a time took the place of the 

 Grange, but was finally absorbed by the Knights of La- 

 bor and the Populist party. Its successor is the Farm- 

 ers' Union, patterned in many respects after the Grange 

 but less avowedly pushing its educational and social 

 aims, and frankly ambitious to secure business coopera- 



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