Sunflower Justice: A New History of the Kansas Supreme Court

3. The Populist Interlude

3. The Populist Interlude The Political Scene The Industrial Revolution and its new social order brought sea-changes to the farmer’s world as it did to that of the wage earner. From the Civil War to 1894 America moved from number four in world industrial production to number one, metamorphosing a rural culture to an urban nation dominated by capitalists. This small class appropriated the nation ’s wealth through the assistance of national, state, and local governments , which the capitalists controlled. A Jacksonian democratic economic system was replaced by a Hamiltonian centralized laissez-faire economy that the capitalist class could control. The Populist movement that sought to change this system at the end of the nineteenth century had a major impact on Kansas history and its legal organization. The reform efforts of the Populists also had a long-range positive effect on later Progressive reforms.¹ Farmers and laborers of a more primitive agrarian culture still thought of themselves as “producers,” but in reality they now found themselves as replaceable cogs in a new mechanized world that they considered controlled by nonproducing parasites living off the labor of others. Workers , both urban and rural, began demanding a return to a truly republican society where there would be “equal rights to all, special privileges to none.” Agrarian reformers emerged to celebrate these ideas of a simpler age that had been irretrievably lost.² These prophets were assisted in their quest by the writing of Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward of 1888 proclaimed a new Utopia in the future. This novel projected a socialist economy into the twenty- 88 Populist Interlude first century operated by a powerful central government and dominated by the technological elite. Everyone worked, and everyone shared in the production. Looking Backward remained a best seller for years and was widely read on the farms and in the cities, giving succor to the downtrodden during their tribulations of searching for their niche in the new system. The new order included great changes in money and banking. To help finance the Civil War the National Banking Act of 1864 established a new system of banks and currency. The statute required banks receiving a national charter to invest at least one-third of their capital in national securities. In turn, they were authorized to issue a new type of currency, called United States Notes, up to 90 percent of the value of these bond holdings. The law further taxed state currency out of existence , thus creating a system of uniform national currency that proved to be of inestimable value to capitalists. The US Supreme Court approved this unique use of the taxing power on the basis that the judiciary could not question the purpose of a tax. But this sound or “dear” money plan significantly hurt the debtor classes, who wanted a cheap system of money to help pay their obligations.³ Financiers and speculators created a national system of transportation . While railroads provided a national market for their goods, the lines posed problems of monopoly for reaching those markets. The elevators that purchased farm produce often were controlled by the railroads , but in any case they constituted a monopoly that determined the price farmers would receive for crops. While a railroad was a vital necessity to a community in the new order and often resulted in the death of a town that did not attract a line, it could, and did, charge monopolistic prices for services. Farmers also mechanized in this new age of machines in order to compete with other producers, thus adding another cost to the agrarian mix. Farmers considered International Harvester to be a trust that could charge unreasonable prices for its products. The term “trust” took on such evil connotations in the minds of farmers that they often believed there was a trust when none existed, except in the minds of hard- Populist Interlude 89 pressed farmers who saw economic forces combining to deprive them further of a meager livelihood they were extracting from their hardscrabble farms. Interestingly, though, the farmers hardest hit during the 1880s were not the poorest nor the richest but those in the middle who had daringly acquired debts to buy more land and more machinery in the increasingly competitive system.4 When farmers in the Gilded Age switched to commercial farming with machinery and began specializing in cash crops, they raised their standard of living but increased their dependence on money...