In Essentials, Unity. Jenny Bourne
Figure 1.1. Grangers versus Grasshoppers, 1880. Source: Minnesota Historical Society
Financial turmoil and monetary policy took its toll on postbellum agriculture as well. Many farmers experienced setbacks during the massive financial panic of 1873. What is more, the nation’s return to the gold standard after its experiment with greenbacks during the war meant precipitous price declines and financial uncertainty, which affected numerous farmers adversely.5
Even as farmers suffered, they observed others amassing enormous amounts of wealth. Extensive inequality existed in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, but it increased markedly between 1870 and the early twentieth century.6 Some of the richest men in American history built their fortunes starting during this time, including John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner satirized the greed of this period—and bestowed its name—in 1873 in their coauthored book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
In short, the time was ripe for farmers to find an outlet to express their discontent. The Grange provided it.
Figure 1.2. Oliver Kelley, 1875. Source: Minnesota Historical Society
Oliver Kelley and the Founding of the Grange
Kelley’s Early Years
Oliver Kelley (fig. 1.2) is generally acknowledged as the principal founder of the Grange, with his talent appearing to lie more in organizing than in actual farming. He grew up in Boston but moved to St. Paul in 1849, where he joined Minnesota’s first Masonic Lodge. Kelley’s connection with the Masons proved critical in helping him shape the Grange.7
Town life did not satisfy Kelley. After reading a number of books on agriculture, he bought land in Itasca—at the headwaters of the Mississippi River—in hopes that the territorial capital would move there and Kelley could benefit from a ready market for his crops. Unfortunately for him, a split vote in the legislature kept the capital in St. Paul. Kelley then established the first Minnesota agricultural society in 1852. His personal farm operation collapsed shortly thereafter, in part because Kelley tied up his cash in a real estate venture called “Northwood” that went bust in the Panic of 1857. Portentously, volatility in railroad stock prices contributed to this financial crisis.8
After drought destroyed much of the rest of his holdings, Kelley moved to Washington in 1864 to serve as a correspondent for the St. Paul Pioneer Press as well as a clerk in the Department of Agriculture. There, he struck up friendships with men who later joined him to organize the Grange. These included William Saunders, who headed the division of gardens in the Bureau of Agriculture and designed the military cemetery at Gettysburg; William Ireland, a clerk in the Post Office and a fellow Mason; and John Trimble, a Treasury Department clerk and an Episcopalian clergyman. In December 1867, Kelley and his colleagues formally elected the first officers of the Grange in Washington, DC.9
Organizational Growth, Methods, and Structure: The Heady Beginning
Membership in the Grange was never larger than shortly after its birth in late 1867, although it came close to its original size again in about 1950 (fig 1.3). Grange membership swelled considerably before the financial panic of 1873 began.10 But the panic made the Grange even more relevant: transportation-cost worries and financial irregularities (particularly among railroad enterprises) that surfaced as the panic spread encouraged the new farmer association to focus on collaborative enterprises and rate regulation. A number of financial institutions—including Jay Cooke & Company, which had helped the federal government with innovative financing techniques during the Civil War—failed during the panic due to railroad loans gone bad. This added steam to the budding farmer movement.
The founders of the Grange set up a temporary national organization, but they intended its structure to grow from the ground up, with the fundamental building block being a subordinate Grange made up of at least thirteen initial members.11 Each subordinate was to have at its helm a “Worthy Master,” along with other officers. Kelley and his companions envisioned an eventual web of subordinates spun across the nation, woven together to form larger county- and statewide Granges.
Figure 1.3. Grange Membership, 1875–1960. Source: Tontz (1964, table 1)
The beginning was rocky, as Kelley’s initial attempts to inaugurate subordinates on his own mostly failed. Kelley organized the first permanent subordinate in Fredonia, NY, in April 1868 but was unsuccessful in establishing others as he traveled from Washington back to his Minnesota home. By 1871, four years after the inception of the National Grange, only 180 subordinate Granges existed across the country, with three-quarters seated in Iowa and Minnesota. These were arranged concentrically by date of creation around Oliver Kelley’s farm (fig. 1.4). Only three State Granges had formed by 1871, with Minnesota leading the way in 1869, followed soon by Iowa and Wisconsin.12
Kelley then hit upon a surefire formula: send a paid recruiter to obtain an introduction to a leading farmer, win over the farmer by stressing the practical benefits of the Grange, and enlist the farmer’s help in signing up his neighbors. Colonel D. A. Robertson, a fruit grower, journalist, legislator, and sheriff, spearheaded much of the early recruitment effort. By choosing respected men in the community to lead the charge, particularly in the South, Kelley’s army of recruiters soon met with considerable success. A. J. Rose, a rancher, farmer, and education reformer, was a prime example in Texas. Rose reassured wary farmers that the organization was fundamentally conservative in nature and pointed to its refusal to ally itself with the Knights of Labor (one of the largest and most influential labor unions of the 1870s and ’80s) as proof.13
Figure 1.4. Oliver Kelley Farm, 2013. Source: Photograph by Austin Wahl
In Minnesota, many people organized a single subordinate Grange, but a few organized huge numbers of them. Among all those involved, 65 individuals organized only one subordinate each and 49 organized between two and four subordinates. An early success was T. A. Thompson, a State Worthy Master and a Worthy Lecturer for the National Grange, who organized 37 subordinates in the period 1870–73. Even more prolific was State Worthy Master George I. Parsons, a Winona farmer and lawyer who organized 87 subordinates, all in 1873. After his initial failures, Oliver Kelley rallied during the early ’70s to organize 20 Minnesota subordinates single-handedly and cofound another.14
Recruiters changed the face of the Grange dramatically in the early 1870s. At one point, the rate of increase in new subordinates nationally was 2,000 per month. By 1874, the number of subordinates had climbed to 21,687, and only Rhode Island had no State Grange. Total Grange membership was 858,050 by 1875, with nearly half of all members residing in the Midwest. Iowa led the pack with 1,994 subordinates. Indiana had two Granges for each of the 984 townships in the state. Missouri had 80,000 members, encompassing more than 25 percent of farm families; and Kansas Grangers included at least three-quarters of all those eligible for membership. Out of a total of 834 subordinates ever formed in Minnesota, an astonishing 304 opened their doors in 1873, with 126 joining them the following year. The Grange spread into Canada as well.15
Small chapters proliferated initially whereas later chapters boasted much larger enrollment, although the pace of formation slowed. The average number of original members in Minnesota subordinate Granges chartered between