The Agrarian Crusade | Page 6

Iowa. In September, the first permanent Grange in
Minnesota, the North Star Grange, was established at St. Paul with the
assistance of Colonel D. A. Robertson. This gentleman and his
associates interested themselves in spreading the order. They revised
the Grange circulars to appeal to the farmer's pocketbook, emphasizing
the fact that the order offered a means of protection against
corporations and opportunities for cooperative buying and selling. This
practical appeal was more effective than the previous idealistic
propaganda: two additional Granges were established before the end of
the year; a state Grange was constituted early in the next year; and by
the end of 1869 there were in Minnesota thirty-seven active Granges. In
the spring of 1869 Kelley went East and, after visiting the thriving
Grange in Fredonia, he made his report at Washington to the members
of the National Grange, who listened perfunctorily, passed a few laws,
and relapsed into indifference after this first regular annual session.
But however indifferent the members of the National Grange might be
as to the fate of the organization they had so irresponsibly fathered,
Kelley was zealous and untiring in its behalf. That the founders did not
deny their parenthood was enough for him; he returned to his home
with high hopes for the future. With the aid of his niece he carried on
an indefatigible correspondence which soon brought tangible returns. In
October, 1870, Kelley moved his headquarters to Washington. By the
end of the year the Order had penetrated nine States of the Union, and
correspondence looking to its establishment in seven more States was
well under way. Though Granges had been planted as far east as
Vermont and New Jersey and as far south as Mississippi and South
Carolina, the life of the order as yet centered in Minnesota, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. These were the only States in which,

in its four years of activity the Grange had really taken root; in other
States only sporadic local Granges sprang up. The method of
organization, however, had been found and tested. When a few active
subordinate Granges had been established in a State, they convened as
a temporary state Grange, the master of which appointed deputies to
organize other subordinate Granges throughout the State. The initiation
fees, generally three dollars for men and fifty cents for women, paid the
expenses of organization--fifteen dollars to the deputy, and not
infrequently a small sum to the state Grange. What was left went into
the treasury of the local Grange. Thus by the end of 1871 the ways and
means of spreading the Grange had been devised. All that was now
needed was some impelling motive which should urge the farmers to
enter and support the organization.

CHAPTER II.
THE RISING SPIRIT OF UNREST
The decade of the seventies witnessed the subsidence, if not the
solution, of a problem which had vexed American history for half a
century--the reconciliation of two incompatible social and economic
systems, the North and the South. It witnessed at the same time the rise
of another great problem, even yet unsolved--the preservation of
equality of opportunity, of democracy, economic as well as political, in
the face of the rising power and influence of great accumulations and
combinations of wealth. Almost before the battle smoke of the Civil
War had rolled away, dissatisfaction with prevailing conditions both
political and economic began to show itself.
The close of the war naturally found the Republican or Union party in
control throughout the North. Branded with the opprobrium of having
opposed the conduct of the war, the Democratic party remained
impotent for a number of years; and Ulysses S. Grant, the nation's
greatest military hero, was easily elected to the presidency on the
Republican ticket in 1868. In the latter part of Grant's first term,
however, hostility began to manifest itself among the Republicans
themselves toward the politicians in control at Washington. Several
causes tended to alienate from the President and his advisers the
sympathies of many of the less partisan and less prejudiced

Republicans throughout the North. Charges of corruption and
maladministration were rife and had much foundation in truth. Even if
Grant himself was not consciously dishonest in his application of the
spoils system and in his willingness to receive reward in return for
political favors, he certainly can be justly charged with the disposition
to trust too blindly in his friends and to choose men for public office
rather because of his personal preferences than because of their
qualifications for positions of trust.
Grant's enemies declared, moreover, with considerable truth that the
man was a military autocrat, unfit for the highest civil position in a
democracy. His high-handed policy in respect to Reconstruction in the
South evoked opposition from those
Northern Republicans whose critical sense was not entirely