The Ocala Demands: When Farmers Changed American Politics
Near Ocala, Florida
In December of eighteen ninety, the Marion Opera House on Main Street in Ocala hosted one of the most consequential political conventions in American history. Most people have never heard of it.
Delegates of the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union, along with the Colored Farmers' Alliance and the Farmers' Mutual Benefit Association, had gathered to address a crisis. American farmers were being crushed. Railroad freight rates were set by corporations with no competition. Banks controlled credit at crippling interest rates. Currency was scarce and prices were falling. From Texas to Virginia, from Kansas to Florida, farm families were losing land they had worked for generations.
The platform they adopted in Ocala was a list of demands aimed directly at the power structures squeezing them. Abolish the national banks. Create a system of government sub-treasuries where farmers could obtain low-interest loans using stored crops as collateral. Issue more currency, specifically through the free and unlimited coinage of silver. Ban speculators from trading commodities futures. Elect United States senators by a direct vote of the people rather than by state legislatures, which the railroads and banks had long controlled.
These were radical ideas in eighteen ninety. Within two years, the Farmers' Alliance had helped found the People's Party, known as the Populists, and the Ocala Demands became the blueprint for the Populist Party's Omaha Platform of eighteen ninety-two. Much of what the Ocala convention demanded eventually became law: the direct election of senators is now the Seventeenth Amendment. The Federal Reserve, created in nineteen thirteen, answered the same complaint about scarce and inflexible credit. The income tax, finally enacted in nineteen thirteen, was another Ocala demand.
A convention in a Florida opera house helped draw the map of twentieth-century American economic policy. The downtown square where those delegates gathered still stands. History has a way of returning to ordinary corners.
