Day 47

Granger Laws

(GC) , Grangers state legislatures in 1874 passed law fixing maximum rates for freight shipments. The railroads responded by appealing to the Supreme Court to declare these laws unconstitutional; - a series of laws passed in Southern states of the United States after the American Civil War to regulate grain, railroad freight rates and to address long- and short-haul discrimination. They were passed through political agitation both by merchants' associations and by so-called Granger parties, which were third parties formed most often by members of the Patrons of Husbandry, an organization for farmers commonly called the Grange. The Granger Laws were an issue in two important court cases in the late 19th century, Munn v. Illinois and Wabash v. Illinois. From 1869 to 1875, a series of laws was enacted in the Granger states, establishing public regulation of railroad rates and operating practices. The railroads, appalled by this development, immediately started lawsuits against these commission- enforced rates. Their main argument was that such regulation constituted, in effect, confiscation of their property in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment - which had been intended to protect black people against discriminatory treatment by providing that no state could "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.[76]"

Grange

A cooperative venture created by farmers in the Great Plains in 1867. They offered information, emotional support, and fellowship, but their central concern was farmers' economic plight. Founded in 1867 by seven individuals with varied agendas, the Grange has grown to be a conglomeration of interests; a shared vision to empower and improve the opportunities of agricultural people by offering a formal support group to address agricultural concerns and to reinforce family values in the context of religious heritage. While emphasizing the relationship between agricultural life and moral development, the Grange employs fraternal rituals based upon symbols relevant to the art of farming.

Las Gorras Blancas 1889

From February 1889 until the summer of 1891 a clandestine organization of night riders known as Las Gorras Blancas cut the fences and burned the barns of ranchers enclosing the Las Vegas Land Grant commons and destroyed railroad ties and burned bridges in a related effort to disrupt the railroad—the foundation of commercial development of the land grant. Historians of New Mexico have viewed the clash between Las Gorras Blancas and commercial elites in racial and class terms. The fence cutters in New Mexico engaged in a conscious and extralegal challenge to the newly emerging economic order in New Mexico; an order founded on the coercive power of the range enclosures to establish durable private property rights buttressed by the power of the railroad to concentrate commercial power. The goal of Las Gorras Blancas was not merely the eradication of barbed wire fences, but the destruction of the underlying logic and ideology that fueled the commercial and industrial transformation of New Mexico. Las Gorras Blancas sought to develop a class-based consciousness among local people through the everyday tactics of resistance to the economic and social order confronting common property land grant communities. In reaction to the "White Cap Outrages", as the group's campaign of fence cutting came to be referred, local economic and political elites engaged in a retaliatory pattern of widespread rural repression.

Farmer's Alliance

In 1873 the Grangers founded this. Their goals promote social gatherings/education opportunities, organize against abuse, form cooperative/women played a significant role, and wanted political pressure. This later led to the founding of the populist party. A Farmers' organization founded in late 1870s; worked for lower railroad freight rates, lower interest rates, and a change in the governments tight money policy. A fraternal organization of white farmers and other rural southerners, including teachers, ministers, and physicians, the Farmers' Alliance began in Texas in the mid-1870s and swept across the entire South during the late 1880s. The organization attempted to solve the mounting financial problems of southern farmers by forming cooperative purchasing and marketing enterprises. It advocated a federal farm-credit and marketing scheme called the subtreasury plan. When these efforts failed, the Alliance played a leading role in establishing a national third party, the People's or Populist Party, in the early 1890s. This bold entry into partisan politics, however, split the Alliance's membership and contributed to the organization's rapid demise.

Colored farmer's Alliance 1886

In the 1880s black farmers in the South, like white farmers, faced economic problems resulting from falling commodity prices, rising farm costs, and high interest rates. Since the Southern Farmers' Alliance (see FARMERS' ALLIANCE) barred blacks from membership, a small group of black farmers organized the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union in Houston County, Texas, on December 11, 1886. They elected J. J. Shuffer president and H. S. Spencer secretary. Richard Manning Humphrey, a white, accepted the position of general superintendent. After the alliance received a charter from the federal government in 1888, Humphrey began organizing chapters throughout the South. For a while he faced competition from a rival group, the National Colored Alliance, which appeared in Texas about the same time as the Colored Farmers' Alliance and was led by Andrew J. Carothers. In 1890 the two groups merged, and the next year the Colored Alliance claimed to have a membership of 1,200,000. More than 1 million southern black farmers organized and shared complaints with poor white farmers. By 1890 membership numbered more than 250,000. The history of racial division in the South, made it hard for white and black farmers to work together in the same org.