Ignatius Donnelly - Reforms for the Farmer

Another prairie radical of the late 1880s was Ignatius Donnelly.  Donnelly was a lawyer, a writer and a thunderous orator who charged that "there is an organized conspiracy in this country whole sole object is to ignore and depress the agricultural interests and set up as the gods of national idolatry, a few spindles and mines.  If the nation is to live, it must not be with one section fastened like a wolf on the vitals of the rest."

Donnelly was born in 1831 in Philadelphia.  He practiced law there and was a land speculator in Minnesota before being wiped out in 1857.  Donnelly decided to switch to politics where he served as Congressman from 1868-1869.  He left Congress to find a cause to redeem and took up the farmer's platform.  

Called the "Prince of Cranks" by his foes, Donnelly played an important role in founding the Populist Party in the 1890s which was a coalition of farmer's organizations and the Knights of Labor, an early American labor union.  The Populists called for graduated income tax, popular elections of Senators, restricted migration, government ownership of the railroads, an eight hour factory day, and free coinage of silver.  At that time, these were extremely radical proposals.

Donnelly also wrote, and his thoughts were that the world faced destruction if reforms were delayed.  He wrote about it in 1890.  He described a world of 1988 ruled by plutocrats who had poison gas bombs at their command.  A secret revolutionary force overthrew the plutocrats and launched a war of murder and looting.  Fortunately a few reformers escaped to Africa where they organized a socialistic state based on the Populist Party.  Of course, they lived happily ever after!

Next time...Give Us Silver - or Not

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Today in Pioneer History: "On November 15, 1806,  approaching the Colorado foothills of the Rocky Mountains during his second exploratory expedition, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike spots a distant mountain peak that looks “like a small blue cloud.” The mountain was later named Pike’s Peak in his honor

Trouble Ahead

Years of easy credit and high prices  - when farmland was prized more for speculative purposes than for growing crops and the values of well-placed town lots rose 1000% -  couldn't last.  By 1886-1887, frontier farmers awoke from the dream to a decade long nightmare.

The mid-1880s saw short harvests.  Commodity prices fell, and less profit for what grain did actually grow.  The conventional thought - by bankers, industrialists and merchants - blamed the farmers' distress on world-wide overproduction of food, even though the Plains were producing less.  The farmers, citing the millions of malnourished in America, said the fault lay in the distribution system set up for quick profit.  The reality was pressure from bankers and merchants who had extended all that easy credit.  Many farmers were in no position to meet those obligations.

Between 1889-1890, some 11,000 farmers lost their farms due to foreclosure.  Not every farmer was willing to forfeit his land and equipment and a sense of militancy swept the Plains.  An attorney named Mary Elizabeth Lease, aka the "Kansas Pythoness", set out to rally debt-ridden farmers.  In Paola, Kansas, she shouted, "You farmers were told to raise a big crop.  What became of it?  Six-cent corn, ten-cent oats, one-cent beef.  We want the foreclosure system wiped out!  We will stand by our farmers and use force if necessary.  We will not pay our debts to loan sharks until the government pays its debts to us!"

The Farmer's Alliance was founded in 1875 in Texas and spread throughout the South and West that began a political voice for the farmers.  The farmer's political platform included crop prices, railroad rates, even gold vs. silver money.

Next time...Ignatius Donnelly
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Today in Pioneer History: "On November 12, 1799, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an early American astronomer born in Vermont, witnesses the Leonids meteor shower from a ship off the Florida Keys, the first meteor shower ever witnessed.