The Grange and Iowa Farm Populism

In eighteen sixty-six, a man named Oliver Hudson Kelley traveled from Washington through a South still shattered by the Civil War, watching isolated farm families living without any form of mutual organization or market power. Kelley was a clerk in the Department of Agriculture, born in Boston, trained as a farmer in Minnesota. What he saw that winter convinced him that American farmers needed what workers in the cities were already building: a network of solidarity.

He founded the Patrons of Husbandry, which most people called the Grange. By the early eighteen seventies, Iowa had become one of its strongholds. Farmers met in local Grange halls, many of which still stand in small Iowa towns, to share prices, pool orders for equipment and seed, and build the political leverage that individual farm families could never generate alone.

The Grangers had a specific enemy in mind: the railroads. The roads had been built with enormous public subsidy, in the form of federal land grants totaling tens of millions of acres. Once built, the railroads used their monopoly position to charge whatever the market would bear for shipping grain to Chicago. A bushel of corn that cost a few cents to grow could be consumed almost entirely by freight charges before it reached a buyer. Farmers called it robbery. They were not entirely wrong.

Iowa's Grange movement helped produce the Granger Laws of the early eighteen seventies, state statutes that asserted the right of government to regulate railroad rates. Such laws were challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In eighteen seventy-seven, in Munn versus Illinois, a case over an Illinois law, the Court upheld state rate regulation. The decision established a constitutional principle that would underpin the regulation of private business in the public interest for a century afterward. Iowa farm anger had written itself into American constitutional law.