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Populism to Progressivism in Alabama
By Sheldon Hackney
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2009 Sheldon Hackney
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5650-7
Chapter One
Who Were the Populists?
To embrace Populism in the 1890s was an act of defiance. A man could not thereby increase his social prestige, for the Democrats constantly taunted Populists with the accusation that they were not quite respectable. No one voted Populist from habit, for the People's Party was new. Men who voted Populist were frequently plagued by social ostracism, loss of financial credit, and sometimes physical intimidation. If the charges of the white Democrats were true, Populists were guilty of treason to party, race, region, and sacred Jeffersonian principles. Yet 115,000 Alabamians, virtually half of the voting population, cast their ballots for the People's Party candidate for governor in 1892.
Obviously these were unusual times. The deepening two-decade decline in the price of farm goods, the growing incidence of farm tenantry and debt, the migration of people to new farm lands and new industrial towns in north and southeast Alabama in the 1880s, the intense competition of rural Southerners for the low-wage jobs in the lumber industry, in mining, and in the new cotton mills, the tremors of financial panic that were felt in the South in 1891 and 1892 following the fall of the House of Baring in November 1890, the spreading blight of industrial collapse that by 1893 was a full-scale national depression—all these disruptive forces coalesced to create the crisis that gave rise to Populism.
As intense as the dislocations were, they did not make a third-party political revolt inevitable. When disaster strikes a well-integrated community, the result is likely to be an increase rather than a decrease in social solidarity and altruistic identification with the community. When a crisis occurs in a poorly integrated society it may well lead to conflict across the fault lines of previously existing social stress. This was the case in the 1890s. Outside the South, Populism was most successful in newly settled states. Within Alabama, Populism flourished in those areas that experienced significant immigration in the post-bellum period and where traditional animosities toward the dominant social and political groups in the state were concentrated. This suggests that Populism was the product of people whose social position and relationships did not link them securely to their society. Even in areas susceptible to such disorganization, however, there were divisions that can only be explained by knowing who the Populists were and how they came to be Populists.
Firm evidence about the identity of the Populists was not available until they began to vote, but one clue to their origin lay in the ambitions of Reuben F. Kolb. Furthermore, the contrast between the careers of Kolb and his chief antagonist, Thomas Goode Jones, is instructive. Kolb was the leading Populist and perhaps the most successful Alabama farmer of his time. Raised by his grandfather, who was the brother of Governor John Gill Shorter, and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1859, Kolb entered adulthood with all the advantages that a prominent Alabama family could give a son. Nevertheless, his success story was real.
What would have been the normal course of Kolb's life as a planter and merchant in Barbour County was interrupted by secession and the Civil War. As the youngest member of Alabama's secession convention, Kolb voted for secession and shortly thereafter entered the service of the Confederate States of America as a sergeant. Later he raised his own company of troops, Kolb's Battery, fought through the war and emerged in 1865 with a captain's commission and an honorable record. Family, place, breeding, education, service to the Lost Cause—Kolb's future should have been secure.
Unfortunately the world which gave genteel attributes their meaning was seriously disjointed. Kolb returned from the war to find his family fortune in ruins. Like most other farmers in the deep South, he planted his large farm almost entirely in cotton, and until the war-starved market was satiated things went well. Cotton prices hit a post-1865 peak of 17.9. cents per pound in 1871 but then began to decline. By 1878 the price per pound was 8.59 cents. It fluctuated near this level through 1890, while local and world production surged ahead. At this price level, farmers were squeezed between the high cost of land, mechanization, and credit on the one hand, and declining farm prices and deflating money values on the other. When the price of cotton reached a low of 5.73 cents in 1898, the estimated cost of production was 7 cents per pound. "This of course could bring but one result," Kolb later wrote, "disaster." Through the years of Reconstruction, Kolb searched for ways to avoid personal disaster. He tried the grocery business, managed an "opera house" in Eufaula for a time, and even sought appointment as postmaster. Nothing succeeded.
Eventually Kolb found success in his watermelon patch. He began to experiment and soon developed his own strain of melon, the "Kolb Gem," whose popularity spread. Orders mounted until Kolb was primarily growing and shipping seed. As his cash returns rose, he also learned to grow foodstuffs for his own farm rather than buying his supplies. Modernization usually means specialization, but Kolb and other agricultural reformers were convinced that diversification was the southern farmer's road to the future. "There is, nor can be but one outcome to the all cotton idea," thought Kolb. It meant "disaster not only to the pocketbook, but to the land as well."
Kolb's experience made him an apostle of scientific agriculture and his success made him a leading agricultural spokesman. In 1887 he served as president of the National Farmers Congress at Chicago and was reelected when the meeting was held in Montgomery in 1889. When Governor Thomas Seay appointed him Commissioner of Agriculture in 1887, Kolb used his position to further his dream of making agriculture in Alabama modern and capable of competing in national and world markets. Through farmers' institutes, all-day meetings held throughout the state, Commissioner Kolb spread the knowledge that was coming out of the growing experimental farm system.
It soon became evident that Kolb wished to do well as well as do good, for he had strong political ambitions. The institutes gave him the opportunity to meet and speak to thousands of Alabamians, an opportunity he exploited to the full. His department also flooded the state with agricultural bulletins, each of which bore the commissioner's name as well as useful information. Touring the Northwest in 1888 with an exhibit called "Alabama on Wheels," Kolb won additional publicity for himself, though he lured very few immigrants to Alabama. At this time he was already thinking of running for governor in 1890.
Kolb's ambition and sympathies happened to coincide with those of the Farmers' Alliance. Following on the heels of rural discontent, the first lodge of the Alliance in Alabama was organized in Madison County, in the Tennessee valley of Alabama, in March 1887. The Agricultural Wheel, the other mass farm organization in Alabama, had entered the state in 1886, and in September 1887 helped to organize the Union Labor Party, which brought together laborers and farmers under the leadership of Republicans, old Green backers, and leaders of the Knights of Labor. But the tension between those who wanted the Wheel to go into politics and those who wanted it to stay out of politics rendered it ineffectual. When the two farm organizations merged in October 1889 the Wheel boasted 75,000 members, but many of these were also members of the Alliance, which claimed 3,000 lodges and 125,000 members.
Few of the farmers who belonged to the Alliance were as successful as Kolb—but they wanted to be. Among the economic enterprises designed by the Alliance to aid farmers in their quest for success were cotton mills, fertilizer companies, bagging plants, warehouses, and even a bank. The largest undertaking was the Alabama State Exchange, a cooperative marketing and purchasing agency that enjoyed great popularity among the membership. The Alliance also planned a farm implement factory and a wagon works for the future. As practical as these attempts to accommodate to the changing times were, they enjoyed only brief success. Even before cooperative business proved a failure, however, the Alliance showed its interest in political activity.
The disgruntled farmers began to look to politics as early as the Farmers' Alliance convention held in Auburn in August 1889. This convention approved the merger with the Wheel, voted to support what proved to be a successful boycott campaign against the jute-bagging trust, and ratified the constitution of the Southern Alliance. Perhaps more important were the resolutions commending the efforts of Commissioner Kolb and condemning the criticisms of the Alliance voiced by the Montgomery Advertiser, the most influential newspaper in the state.
The Advertiser was opposed to the Alliance's economic boycott, as well as to Kolb's political ambitions. Its anxieties were not calmed by the informal poll of the convention showing that Kolb was the favorite of the delegates for the governorship in 1890, nor did the convention reassure the Advertiser when it named Kolb to head a committee of five to attend the national Alliance convention in St. Louis.
The action of the convention in St. Louis doubtless increased the Advertiser's fears of a third force in state politics. The convention failed to unite the Northern and Southern Alliances, but the Southern Alliance adopted a set of "demands" which were endorsed by the Knights of Labor. These demands sounded the basic Populist trio of concerns—money, land, transportation. They called for various inflationary measures, legislation to eliminate large landholdings by aliens and railroads, and nationalization of the means of transportation. But these planks did not alarm the Advertiser as much as did two other acts of the convention.
The first bit of heresy in the Advertiser's eyes was Dr. C. W. Mscone's subtreasury plan, a commodity credit scheme to be backed by the federal government, which recalled the tobacco-warehouse-receipt currency of seventeenth-century Virginia at the same time that it looked forward to such legislation as the Warehouse Act of 19 16. In essence the f arm era were asking the federal government to rig the marketplace in their favor by providing credit, so that they could hold their products off the market until the price was right. Perhaps just as obnoxious to the Advertiser was the joint pledge made by the Southern Alliance and the Knights of Labor that they would "support for office only such men as can be depended upon to enact these principles into statute law uninfluenced by party caucus." The Advertiser feared this was aimed at the South's one-party system. The resulting controversy illustrated a key point.
The Advertiser and the New-South-railroad-industrial complex for which it spoke were not interested merely in maintaining Democratic Party solidarity. The party could always have maintained its unity by acquiescing in the leadership of the Alliance. But this would have disturbed the intricate system that controlled political rewards and guarded the interests of the dig Mule–Black Belt partnership. Seen from within this established system of political obligations, Kolb was a threat for two reasons. Despite his disavowal of intentions to form a third party, Kolb was identified with forces within and without the state that were challenging party regulars. Alliance groups had already threatened to take over Bibb and Shelby Counties, for example. Despite Kolb's denial that he supported the St. Louis demands, and despite his efforts to keep his own appeals well within the accepted pattern, he was inevitably linked to leaders and groups that wanted to use politics to change existing conditions. When Kolb announced on December 22, 1889 that he would be a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, he presented himself as the best qualified leader of a classless community. In the succeeding campaign, however, some of his supporters talked of class conflict and radical reform. The Alliance was still led in 1890 by large planters, but it was clearly stirring up classes of men normally politically inactive—men who should defer to the leadership of those more qualified to rule.
The Advertiser thought Thomas Goode Jones was more qualified to rule than Kolb. Both Kolb and Jones came from families of impeccable Southern pedigree, yet both had had to achieve individual success without the aid of family wealth. The contrasting ways in which they did so are significant. Where Kolb's achievements in the army, farming, and politics were the accomplishments of an individual operating outside of the system's established procedures for advancement, Jones had risen within the system.
Entering the Civil War in 1861 at the age of 17 as a cadet from the Virginia Military Institute, Jones quickly caught the attention of his superiors and was given a commission and the position of aide-de-camp on the staff of Gen. John B. Gordon of the Army of Northern Virginia. Skill as a staff officer advanced him to the rank of major by the end of the war. Jones returned to Montgomery and tried farming, then editing a Democratic newspaper, before turning to the practice of law as so many ambitious young men did. In 1870 he again managed to earn the patronage of his superiors and was appointed Reporter of the Decisions of the Alabama Supreme Court, a thoroughly Republican institution at the time. Jones served the Court until 1884 when he was elected to the state legislature. He was undoubtedly aided in his political career by his position at the Court and by his military career with the state militia, where he won a statewide reputation for ferocity on riot duty. In his second term in the legislature, 1886 to 1888, he was Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives. By this time he had also followed his old commanding officer's example and joined the staff of the New South's economic high command, which in Alabama was the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (L & N).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Populism to Progressivism in Alabama by Sheldon Hackney Copyright © 2009 by Sheldon Hackney. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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