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Ideas of reform are born in every generation like children, and like children, ideas need nurturing, education and time to mature. In time children become adults, reform ideas become movements, and each in their turn have offspring. The Progressive movement has an impressive genealogy. Its ancestry includes Jeffersonian Liberalism, pre-civil war social activists and abolitionists- Lincoln and emancipation.
After the war, reconstruction made way for expansion and further industrialization. The farmer, who had been encouraged to settle, grow and expand, fell on hard times. Faced with infestation, drought and debt the Midwest and Plains farmers came together under the Grange Movement. The traditionally conservative farmer appealed to the government against the railroads and the monopolistic control of pricing by merchants and suppliers. The Grange formed to lend support, information and provide a place to meet and discuss solutions. The focal point was the problem of economic depression. In the South and West the Farmer's Alliance did the same. The Declaration of the National Grange (1874) shows the movement advancing from support to reform in action. The self-sustaining Granger rally "buy less, produce more" turned into the Alliance's "less corn, more hell" (Mary Lease 1886). In 1889 "Agitation, education and cooperation…to overcome the impoverishment and bondage of so many" became the aims of the National Farmer's Alliance and Industrial Union established by Charles Macune and William Lamb. From these early attempts at organization of the agrarian society came the partisan politics of the Populist Movement.
The Populist Party was the product of the union between the Farmer's Alliance and the Knights of Labor. In 1890 they made their bid for power. They held the reins of the Kansas legislature and had their first senator, William Peffer, the Rustic Rasputin. Ignatius Donnelly, another colorful character, drafted the first Populist...