The Grange, the Farmers' Alliance, and the Farmer-Labor Tradition

On December fourth, eighteen sixty-seven, Oliver Hudson Kelley, a Minnesota farmer who had recently worked in the federal commissioner of agriculture's office in Washington, and seven colleagues founded the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, known from its beginning as the Grange. Kelley had spent time traveling through the post-Civil War South on a government survey and had been struck by the isolation and poverty of rural farm families and by the absence of any organization through which they might cooperate or advocate for themselves.

The Grange spread quickly across the Midwest and nowhere more quickly than in Minnesota, where by the early eighteen seventies it had tens of thousands of members. The movement was, at its foundation, educational and social, local Granges held meetings, ran libraries, organized cooperative buying of farm equipment and supplies, and provided a social life for families who might otherwise go weeks without seeing neighbors. But the Grange also began taking positions on economic grievances, and those grievances were substantial.

Minnesota wheat farmers in the eighteen seventies were being squeezed from multiple directions simultaneously. The railroads charged rates that farmers had no power to negotiate and that absorbed much of whatever profit the harvest might yield. The grain elevator operators at the railheads were often in collusion with the railroads and set prices and storage rates that farmers could not refuse. The banks that provided operating credit charged high interest on the logic that lending to farmers was risky.

The political response was the Granger Laws of the eighteen seventies, through which Minnesota and other Midwestern states established the first state-level regulation of railroad rates. The Supreme Court upheld the principle in Munn versus Illinois in eighteen seventy-seven, the state had the power to regulate private businesses that served a public function. It was the legal foundation for a regulatory state that would extend far beyond grain elevators.

The Grange's political energy evolved into the Farmers' Alliance of the eighteen eighties and then into the Populist Party of the eighteen nineties. Minnesota farmers helped found a tradition of agrarian radicalism, cooperative economics, public regulation of private monopoly, skepticism of concentrated financial power, that eventually produced the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, established in nineteen eighteen. The Farmer-Labor Party elected Floyd Olson governor in nineteen thirty, and later merged with the Democratic Party to form the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the DFL, which is still the name of Minnesota's Democratic Party today.