Why the Farmers Were Wrong
The period between 1880 and 1900 was a boom time for American politics. The country was for once free of the threat of war, and many of its citizens were living comfortably. However, as these two decades went by, the American farmer found it harder and harder to live comfortably. Crops such as cotton and wheat, once the bulwark of agriculture, were selling at prices so low that it was nearly impossible for farmers to make a profit off them. Furthermore, improvement in transportation allowed foreign competition to materialize, making it harder for American farmers to dispose of surplus crop. Finally, years of drought in the midwest and the downward spiral of business in the 1890's devastated many of the nation's farmers. As a result of the agricultural depression, many farm groups, most notably the Populist Party, arose to fight what farmers saw as the reasons for the decline in agriculture. During the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, many farmers in the United States saw monopolies and trusts, railroads, and money shortages and the demonetization of silver as threats to their way of life, though in many cases their complaints were not valid. The growth of the railroad was one of the most significant element
Near the end of the nineteenth century, business began to centralize, leading to the rise of monopolies and trusts. Falling prices, along with the need for better efficiency in industry, led to the rise of such companies as Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil, which controlled a majority of the nation's supply of raw steel and oil respectively. The rise of these monopolies and trusts concerned many farmers, for they felt that the disappearance of competition would lead to erratic and unreasonable price rises that would hurt consumers. James B. Weaver, the Populist party's presidential candidate in the 1892 election, summed up the feelings of many Americans of the period in his work, A Call to Action: An Interpretation of the Great Uprising. He wrote, "It is clear that trusts are...in conflict with the Common law. They are monopolies organized to destroy competition and restrain trade.... Once they secure control of a given line, they are master of the situation... They can limit the price of the raw material so as to impoverish the producer, drive him to a single market, reduce the price of every class of labor connected with the trade, throw out of employment large numbers persons...and finally...they increase the price to the consumer.... The main weapons of the trust are threats, intimidation, bribery, fraud, wreck, and pillage." However, the facts refute many of Weaver's charges against the monopolies. While it is true that many used questionable means to achieve their monopoly, many were not out to crush competitors. To the contrary, John D. Rockefeller, head of Standard Oil, competed ruthlessly not to crush other refiners but to persuade them to join Standard Oil and share the business so all could profit. Furthermore, the fear that the monopolies would raise prices unreasonably was never realized. Prices tended to fall during the latter part of the 1800's creating what some have called a "consumer's millennium". Thus, the agrarian complaints against monopolies were not incredibly valid, for the monopolies did very little harm to farmers of the time. The farmers of the late 1800's had many reasons for being dissatisfie
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1448
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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