The Agrarian Crusade: A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics

In the decades after the Civil War, American farmers found themselves trapped in a system that seemed designed to destroy them. Railroads charged ruinous rates to ship grain, merchants controlled the prices, and bankers held the notes on their land. TheAgrarian Crusade tells the story of how these men and women fought back, building the first mass political movement of the American working class. Solon J. Buck traces the Grange from its improbable origins in 1867 through the explosive Granger laws, the Greenback crusade, and the final flowering of the Populist movement in the 1890s. This is history told from the ground up: the desperate conventions, the fiery orators, the alliances between black and white farmers in the South, and the ultimate betrayal at the polls in 1896. Buck, writing in the 1920s with access to primary sources now lost, captures both the grandeur and the tragedy of Americans who believed democracy should belong to them. The book remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where the political struggles of today came from.