During the latter part of the 19th century, even farmers outside the South had a difficult...

During the latter part of the 19th century, even farmers outside the South had a difficult time. Discuss the reasons for agrarian distress in this period. What factors did many farmers blame for their problems? In what ways did farmers attempt to address and correct some of these issues?

Expert Solution

Roughly a third of Americans worked in agriculture at the end of the 19th century, compared to only under four per cent today. Drought, grasshoppers plagues, boll weevils, raising costs, declining prices and high interest rates have made it extremely difficult to make a living as a farmer after the Civil War. In the West, tenants held a third of all the landholdings. Approximately 75 per cent of African American farmers and 25 per cent of white tilled farmers own somebody else's land.

The prices farmers got for their crops seemed to be dropping each year. In 1874, corn decreased from 41 cents a bushel to 30 cents by 1897. In 1894, farmers made less money planting 24 million hectares of cotton than they plant 9 million hectares in 1873. Faced with high interest rates above 10 per cent a year, many farmers find it difficult to pay off their debts. Farmers who could afford to mechanize their operations and buy additional land could compete effectively, but smaller, more underfunded farmers were struggling to survive, operating on small plots of marginal property.

Many farmers blamed their plight on railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures brokers, mortgage firms, retailers, banks, and farm equipment manufacturers. Many attributed their problems to discriminatory railway tariffs, monopoly rates paid for farm machinery and fertilizer, an oppressively high tariff, an unequal tax structure, an inflexible financial system, government corruption, companies buying up massive land tracks. They considered themselves loyal to the industrial Northeast, where there were three-quarters of the nation's industry. They opposed a gold standard-based deflationary monetary policy

The National Farmers 'Alliance and Industrial Union (the Southern Farmers Alliance), established in 1875 in Lampedusa County, Texas, and the Northwestern Farmers' Alliance, created in Chicago in 1880, gave rise to another wave of agitation. By the late 1880s, due to inadequate capitalization and mismanagement, the cooperative business enterprises created by the Farmers 'Alliances had begun to fail. The Farmers Unions had started to get into politics by 1890. In 1892 the People's or Nationalist Party founded the Alliance. The Populists funded, among other items, a commodity credit scheme that would have allowed farmers to store their crops in a federal warehouse in anticipation of favorable market prices.

Rahul Sunny answered 8 months ago

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