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Persistent Progressives
The Rocky Mountain Farmers Union
By John F. Freeman University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-433-1
CHAPTER 1
The Setting
IDEOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL
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At first glimpse, Crystola seems an unlikely birthplace of the Farmers' Cooperative and Educational Union of Colorado, later known as the Colorado Farmers Union and, more recently, as the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. In general, when we think of farmers, we envision men and women cultivating the soil, growing commodity crops such as wheat and corn or market produce such as carrots and lettuce. In that sense, Crystola was not a farming community. In the 1860s stock growers had settled the area, sometimes called Trout Park because it was intersected by a mountain stream and surrounded by forest, a few miles north of Pikes Peak and less than a day's horseback ride from the Cripple Creek–Victor mining district.
Crystola attracted what might be described politely as religious and political eccentrics. Henry Clay Childs and his wife, Catherine, originally from Vermont, moved to the area in 1876 and established a small livestock and sawmill operation. Known locally as spiritualists, they consulted their own crystal ball and sponsored séances with like-minded clairvoyants said to be in touch with the spirits of the deceased. A visiting psychic and self-styled professor named "Wizard" Kimball claimed he had located a gold lode by using his witching stick; that likely encouraged Childs to organize the Brotherhood Gold Mining and Milling Company. The company began by selling psychic location services to prospectors and launched a successful nationwide campaign to attract stockholders, which enabled Childs and his fellow spiritualists to build an ore-processing mill, purchase and develop a town site, and add a general store, school, post office, railroad station, and communal water system. Reorganized in 1899 as the Crystola Brotherhood Town, Mine and Milling Company, the company town attracted about 150 inhabitants, mostly from Boston and the East Coast. It remains unclear whether these newcomers were drawn by the lure of gold, the prospect of joining some sort of utopian colony, or both.
Among those attracted to Crystola was George B. Lang, the future first president of the Farmers' Cooperative and Educational Union of Colorado. He was born in 1864 on a farm in Greene County, Pennsylvania, a region known for its wool production; as a child he left with his family for Iowa well before the beginning of the boom in coal mining. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six, he taught school and worked as a newspaper reporter in Missouri and then returned to Iowa as state organizer for the National Farmers' Alliance. How he learned about Crystola and what drew him there with his wife and son in 1906 is unknown. We can only speculate that, with the demise of the farmers' alliance, he sought to continue his work as a farm or labor organizer and saw an opportunity in mining country. Presumably, his political and social outlook aligned with that of the Crystola brotherhood.
We also do not know the background of T. W. Woodrow. He is credited with inviting a small group of men to meet at Lang's home on May 17, 1907, to form the first Colorado chapter of the Farmers' Cooperative and Educational Union. We can assume that at least some of the invitees were farmers or ranchers, as they would hold offices in the new organization. During the eleven months leading up to the first state convention of the farmers' union, Woodrow organized local chapters in the rural settlements of Calhan, Falcon, Fondis, Ramah, Surber, and Yoder in El Paso County, Keyser in Elbert County, and La Junta and Vroman in Otero County. His successes as an organizer suggests that both the farmers' union's message and its grassroots organizational structure appealed to Colorado farmers and ranchers, though to how many is unknown. Neither the message nor the structure, however, was original with the farmers' union.
Without going too far back in time, it is worth noting that, following the Civil War, the United States entered an era of vast and rapid economic expansion made possible in part by technological advances such as Cyrus McCormick's mechanical reaper and John Deere's steel ploughshares. The federal government provided financial incentives for big corporations, most notably the railroads, as it did for individuals and families through various preemption acts. The intent of the Homestead Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, was laudable — to enable any citizen to obtain title to unappropriated public land by residing on or cultivating that land for a period of five years and paying modest filing fees — but its actual impact on the settlement of the West proved not entirely positive. Most immediately, land promoters argued unscrupulously that one could sustain a family and produce surplus food for the market on 160 acres of arid land. Loopholes in the act combined with the US Congress's inaction led to wild land speculation.
In opposition to land speculators and corporate monopolists and distrusting the intermediaries between their produce and their customers, farmers had entered into associations for mutual benefit that went beyond the role of traditional social and religious confraternities. The first such general farm group was the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry (the Grange). Founded as a secret fraternal organization in upstate New York in 1867, the Grange sought improvements in farm life and fought the perceived evils of modernism. Organizers started the first Colorado branch in Boulder in 1874 and quickly established sixty-nine other branches throughout the South Platte valley. The Grange declined almost as rapidly as it had begun, in part because of competition from the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union.
Similar to the Grange, the farmers' alliance began as a fraternal organization. Founded by a group of farmers and ranchers in central Texas during the 1870s, the alliance spread through the South and the Midwest, all the while expanding its mission. It sought to establish member-owned cooperatives as practical vehicles for eliminating intermediaries, controlling prices received for farm produce and prices paid for farm supplies, and providing farmers with their own mutual fire insurance company. By the time of its national convention in Cleburne near Dallas in 1886, the farmers' alliance had become the leading farm organization in the nation. The Cleburne convention issued a series of demands to the federal government, among them to regulate railroad rates, impose heavy taxes on land speculators, and increase the availability of farm credit.
Using the Cleburne platform, alliance organizers recruited irrigators in southern Colorado in 1888 and then moved to organize eastern Colorado just as farmers were turning from conventional to dry-land farming. By advocating stringent federal regulation of the economy, the farmers' alliance national organization soon alienated the very farmers who sought more control over their products by banding together in cooperatives. The alliance platform became an integral part of the 1892 platform of the People's Party, also known as the populists. In Colorado, the farmers' alliance helped elect David H. Waite governor; but his support from industrial workers, his promotion of their economic and social agenda, and his ineptitude in governing — a characteristic of those in perennial opposition — alienated both farm and business interests. Close association with the People's Party would lead to the alliance's eventual demise.
Just as the farmers' alliance overtook the Grange, the Farmers' Cooperative and Educational Union succeeded the alliance. The farmers' union was formed in 1902 in the cotton country of northeast Texas, after a shadowy eccentric named Isaac Newton Gresham brought together nine men to charter the organization and to hire him as membership recruiter. Gresham had grown up on a tenant farm in Alabama and served as an organizer for the farmers' alliance in Louisiana and Texas during the 1880s. When the alliance began to unravel, he became editor and publisher of the Point (Rains County), Texas, newspaper. Gresham's nine recruits consisted of six Rains County "dirt farmers," a tenant farmer/schoolteacher, a landowner and county clerk, and a country doctor.
Like the Grange, the farmers' union began as a secret society and spread rapidly. At the first statewide convention in February 1904, the ten men who had chartered the organization allowed delegates to draw up their own bylaws and elect their own officers, which meant the organization had two sets of governance documents. Six months later a group of Texas delegates purchased the charter from the incorporators for $3,000, about $75,000 in today's dollars; the group made an initial $1,000 payment but for reasons unknown never paid the remainder. As the farmers' union spread into other states, mostly in the South, each state group sought autonomy from the Texas chartered corporation. At a December 1905 meeting in Texarkana, delegates agreed to form the National Farmers Union (at some point the apostrophe was dropped), with each state division having an equal voice in the national organization.
Meanwhile, delegates to the 1915 Texas Farmers Union convention in Waco had accused Isaac Newton Gresham, the corporation's secretary-treasurer, of fraud and dishonesty. An audit had shown no misdeeds, but suspicions remained. Gresham was sent to organize Tennessee, where he died in 1906 as the result of a ruptured appendix. By then membership, which had spread to at least fourteen states, had risen to an estimated half million to 4 million — a wide range explained not only by the spontaneity of the organization but by the irregular payment of dues and the lack of bureaucratic processes. After four years of considerable turmoil, the national organization came into responsible hands by electing Charles S. Barrett its president. Letting bygones be bygones, Barrett asked, and delegates to the 1907 convention agreed, to declare the recently deceased Gresham the official founder of the National Farmers Union.
A member of a prominent Georgia farm family, Charles Barrett had farmed and taught school. He served as the first president of the Upson County, Georgia, chapter of the National Farmers Union. From there, he was elected, apparently without opposition, to national office, which he held for twenty-two years. Barrett failed to reach his immediate goal, reducing cotton production to keep prices up; he did succeed, however, in firmly establishing the farmers union as the leading national organization supporting farmers. After participating in a conference on cooperative enterprises in Topeka, he set forth what would become the three instruments of all future farmers union programs and activities: education, cooperation, and legislation.
Having learned from the policies and tactical missteps of the Grange, the farmers' alliance, and the Populist Party, the National Farmers Union established its own platform based on the notion of the classical freeholder, the farmer who owns a small landed property and whose moral and ethical values are considered indispensable to popular self-government. The National Farmers Union would consistently argue for the economic and social advantages of preserving and enhancing family farming and would invoke Thomas Jefferson as the quintessential citizen-farmer, though perhaps not taking into account that Jefferson had been a plantation owner as well as an experimental farmer. He happened to live in a place where, and at a time when, most people were engaged in farming.
That was still the case in the late nineteenth century, but with notable differences in the arid West. Colorado "is not a farming country, in the sense that Kansas [or Jefferson's Virginia] is," wrote the Denver publicist William E. Pabor in 1883. "But farming can be done in Colorado, and money made at it." He warned that "those who reach Colorado with certain ideas of society, soil, climate, and country, based upon what they have left behind, are likely to be disappointed." He might have added that, in addition to being different from the eastern states, Colorado's topography, climate, and hydrologic features vary dramatically within the state. From the beginning, then, the Colorado Farmers Union as a general farm organization would have to address the overarching aspirations of farmers and ranchers and, at the same time, meet local needs determined by the nature of the land and the relative scarcity of water.
Because present-day visitors to the state spend most of their time in Denver and the mountain communities, they may fail to appreciate that mountains cover less than one-third of the state. In an eminently readable book on Colorado water law, attorney P. Andrew Jones and water conservation district manager Tom Cech divided the state into three regions: the eastern High Plains, the central mountains, and the western plateaus (commonly referred to as the Western Slope) — a useful division for our purposes here.
Stretching from the Kansas state line to the Front Range foothills and from the Wyoming state line to the New Mexico state line, the eastern High Plains of Colorado rise from about 3,300 feet to 5,000 feet in elevation and make up about 40 percent, or 40,000 square miles, of the state's total land mass. Annual precipitation ranges from eighteen inches along the Kansas border to twelve inches or less along the Front Range foothills, though there is no such thing as an average year and drought is more common than not. At the time the farmers union took root in Colorado, the eastern High Plains could best be described as divided according to farming techniques: irrigated farming in the South Platte and Arkansas River valleys and non-irrigated or dry-land farming beyond those valleys. Along the Front Range were hundreds of market gardens supplying Denver, population around 130,000 in 1900, with vegetables and fruits. Farmers shipped their produce by wagon and by a network of railroads that linked the various farm communities to the city.
In addition to market gardening, farmers along the Front Range sold dairy products to forty-one creameries and cheese factories. In 1902 farmers began to sell raw milk to the first condensery in the South Platte valley, located at Fort Lupton. Before the advent of common refrigeration, condensed or evaporated milk kept longer and posed fewer health risks than fresh milk. Many farmers around Greeley, meanwhile, had discovered the value of alfalfa as a soil restorative; they abandoned market gardening in favor of alternatively planting alfalfa and potatoes, primarily the late-season red potato known as the Greeley spud. Use of alfalfa would lead to the development of livestock-fattening operations, with feeder lots in Larimer County alone annually finishing more than 200,000 lambs for market, at the time the highest lamb production volume of any county in the nation.
The use of alfalfa as a rotation crop combined with a favorable growing climate of hot days and cool nights, semi-aridity to mitigate disease, and the availability of irrigation water to make the Arkansas valley a center of seed production. Valley farmers supplied growers in the southern states and large national seed houses with seeds of melons, squashes, beans, peas, and other marketable vegetables, as well as onion sets and seed potatoes. Arkansas valley farmers produced and shipped rail cars filled with the Netted Gem melon, a cultivar of cantaloupe created by two Rocky Ford farmers in the 1880s.
Thanks to the advent of new technology and federal protective tariffs against cane sugar, farmers in the South Platte and Arkansas valleys and to a lesser extent on the western plateaus had adopted the sugar beet as a major cash crop that could produce higher profits than corn or wheat. As a lengthy and complex process involving many steps, both the growing of sugar beets and the extraction of their sucrose posed significant social and economic challenges. Farmers found that they needed to attract long-term farmworkers, which ushered in, most famously, Germans from Russia, many of whom would settle permanently in Colorado and eventually own their own farms. Meanwhile, Charles Boettcher and his partners had invested some of their mining fortunes in sugar beet factories. They, too, needed workers, starting with the first processing plant in Grand Junction and then with two factories in the Arkansas valley and nine in the South Platte valley. By 1907, sugar beet farmers and migrant workers would find themselves subject to managers of two large corporations: Great Western Sugar and Holly Sugar.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Persistent Progressives by John F. Freeman. Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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