The Populist Revolt: Kansas and the Farmer's Last Stand

In the summer of eighteen ninety, a Kansas farmwoman named Mary Elizabeth Lease is said to have told Kansas farmers that they needed to raise less corn and more hell. The phrase became the slogan of a movement. The movement very nearly changed the country.

The Populist Party, officially the People's Party, was born out of conditions that had been building on the Great Plains since the mid-eighteen eighties. Wheat and corn prices had fallen sharply. Drought had returned to western Kansas. Railroad freight rates and grain elevator fees, both controlled by corporations that farmers could not escape, ate whatever margin remained. Mortgage debt on land that had been worth speculative prices in the boom years of the early eighteen eighties was now worth less than what was owed. Tens of thousands of Kansas farm families were failing.

The Farmers' Alliance, which preceded the Populist Party, had organized across the plains through the late eighteen eighties with a sophisticated critique of American finance capital: that tight money policy by Eastern banks and the deflationary contraction of the money supply was deliberately impoverishing rural producers to benefit creditors. Whether or not that analysis was fully correct, it described the experience of Kansas farmers with enough accuracy to mobilize a mass political movement.

In eighteen ninety-two, the People's Party ran James B. Weaver for president and won twenty-two electoral votes, carrying several western states and polling over a million popular votes. It was the most successful third-party presidential campaign since the Civil War. Kansas sent Populist candidates to Congress and elected a Populist governor. In eighteen ninety-six, the party fused with the Democratic Party behind William Jennings Bryan and his free-silver platform. Bryan lost the election to William McKinley, and the Populist Party collapsed in the aftermath.

The failure was remembered as a defeat. Some of its ideas were not. Federal regulation of railroad rates, graduated income taxation, direct election of senators, and government grain warehouses, all proposals in the eighteen ninety-two Populist platform, became law within a generation. Kansas had been the epicenter of the most serious challenge to Gilded Age economic arrangements that American politics produced.