journey, hope was rekindled and these poorest of farmers scraped together their dues, or as much of them as they could. “We are in a drouth-stricken district and find it hard work to keep the wolf from our doors,” wrote Mrs. Emma Eppes of Blanco County. “But we have a prospect for good crops this season. … some have paid up while others have been found wanting the means, but all will pay just as soon as possible.”
At first, the hope was embodied in cooperatives: Alliance warehouses to which all the farmers of a district would bring their bales and pool them in a single lot on which bids would be taken not only from the local buyers who previously had been able to bid without competition but from cotton buyers all over the South; Alliance purchasing agents who could deal directly with manufacturers of plows and other farm implements and sell them directly to individual farmers, thereby eliminating not only the middleman’s profits but also the enormously high interest the manufacturers charged for selling on credit. Although it proved impossible, even after warehouses and purchasing centers had been established throughout the rest of Texas, to establish them in the Hill Country—one mass sale that was held at Fredericksburg proved a disaster; without a railroad, the buyers said, the cotton could be shipped out only at prohibitive cost—the Hill Country farmers brought their cotton in long caravans of wagons sixty, seventy, a hundred, miles to Austin, and when their bales brought at the Alliance warehouse there prices a dollar or two above what they had expected, they rode home with their empty wagons flying the blue flags that had became the symbol of victory in the Texas Alliance. (In Fort Worth and Dallas, too, the blue flags were flying. By 1885, the Texas Alliance had 50,000 members; by 1886, 100,000; by 1890, 200,000. A spokesman exulted that the Alliance had become “a power in the land.” Alliance lecturers began to fan out from Texas to farm counties in other states with a simple message: Join the Alliance, build a county cooperative, a county general store if need be, and get free of the credit merchant. Observers in a dozen farm states echoed the words of one in Mississippi, who said the Alliance has “swept across” that state “like a cyclone.”)
Outside forces broke the cooperatives. The big Eastern manufacturinghouses refused to sell to them, insisting on retaining their middlemen. Not only Eastern manufacturers and banks but local merchants and banks refused credit to members of cooperatives. Railroads and grain-elevator companies used all their power against the farmers—and won, because farmers could not escape the simple fact that they could not sell their crop if they did not own it; and it was the furnishing merchant who owned it. The Alliance then attempted to free the farmer from the merchant by establishing a central state exchange in Texas to market the state’s entire cotton crop from one central point while giving the farmers the money they needed for the next year at bearable rates. (The Southern Exchange planned to get the money from banks, using notes given by the farmers as collateral.) The Exchange opened in Dallas in September, 1887, and the bankers tried to break it by refusing to accept the notes as collateral—by refusing, in fact, to give the Exchange money “upon any terms or any security.” And when the Alliance, in desperation, was forced to turn to its own members for money, the Hill Country gave all it could—the thirty-four members of the New Chapel Alliance of Blanco County assessed each of its members a dollar; the assessment would be paid, the secretary wrote Alliance headquarters, “as soon as the cotton comes in.” The Hill Country Alliance men stood firm behind their leaders. The banks, and the press they dominated in Texas, tried to smear the head of the Exchange, Charles W. Macune, by blaming its financial crisis on him; the farmers of Hays County in
At first, the hope was embodied in cooperatives: Alliance warehouses to which all the farmers of a district would bring their bales and pool them in a single lot on which bids would be taken not only from the local buyers who previously had been able to bid without competition but from cotton buyers all over the South; Alliance purchasing agents who could deal directly with manufacturers of plows and other farm implements and sell them directly to individual farmers, thereby eliminating not only the middleman’s profits but also the enormously high interest the manufacturers charged for selling on credit. Although it proved impossible, even after warehouses and purchasing centers had been established throughout the rest of Texas, to establish them in the Hill Country—one mass sale that was held at Fredericksburg proved a disaster; without a railroad, the buyers said, the cotton could be shipped out only at prohibitive cost—the Hill Country farmers brought their cotton in long caravans of wagons sixty, seventy, a hundred, miles to Austin, and when their bales brought at the Alliance warehouse there prices a dollar or two above what they had expected, they rode home with their empty wagons flying the blue flags that had became the symbol of victory in the Texas Alliance. (In Fort Worth and Dallas, too, the blue flags were flying. By 1885, the Texas Alliance had 50,000 members; by 1886, 100,000; by 1890, 200,000. A spokesman exulted that the Alliance had become “a power in the land.” Alliance lecturers began to fan out from Texas to farm counties in other states with a simple message: Join the Alliance, build a county cooperative, a county general store if need be, and get free of the credit merchant. Observers in a dozen farm states echoed the words of one in Mississippi, who said the Alliance has “swept across” that state “like a cyclone.”)
Outside forces broke the cooperatives. The big Eastern manufacturinghouses refused to sell to them, insisting on retaining their middlemen. Not only Eastern manufacturers and banks but local merchants and banks refused credit to members of cooperatives. Railroads and grain-elevator companies used all their power against the farmers—and won, because farmers could not escape the simple fact that they could not sell their crop if they did not own it; and it was the furnishing merchant who owned it. The Alliance then attempted to free the farmer from the merchant by establishing a central state exchange in Texas to market the state’s entire cotton crop from one central point while giving the farmers the money they needed for the next year at bearable rates. (The Southern Exchange planned to get the money from banks, using notes given by the farmers as collateral.) The Exchange opened in Dallas in September, 1887, and the bankers tried to break it by refusing to accept the notes as collateral—by refusing, in fact, to give the Exchange money “upon any terms or any security.” And when the Alliance, in desperation, was forced to turn to its own members for money, the Hill Country gave all it could—the thirty-four members of the New Chapel Alliance of Blanco County assessed each of its members a dollar; the assessment would be paid, the secretary wrote Alliance headquarters, “as soon as the cotton comes in.” The Hill Country Alliance men stood firm behind their leaders. The banks, and the press they dominated in Texas, tried to smear the head of the Exchange, Charles W. Macune, by blaming its financial crisis on him; the farmers of Hays County in
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