4 shows that these features of the Grange helped sustain it as a fraternal organization into the twentieth century and today.
Regrettably, the morals of the early Grange did not extend to welcoming African Americans into the fold, particularly in the South. Given that half of the people engaged in southern agriculture were black, this excluded a large swath of farmers. The first subordinate Grange in Louisiana—a state firmly under control of the Radical Republicans since before the end of the Civil War—reportedly let all join without regard to color, but this was not true elsewhere. A reporter at the New Orleans Times-Picayune asked National Master Dudley Adams in October 1873 whether a subordinate Grange would admit “colored” members, and he replied that this was a question best left to local interests. Some white southern Grangers organized blacks into a Council of Laborers, primarily in an attempt to groom blacks to be reliable farmhands rather than to offer them any sort of equal voice or treatment. The later Farmers’ Alliance did not admit blacks, either. The Colored Farmers’ National Alliance, the first massive black organization in the United States, finally emerged near the end of the 1880s.49
Race wasn’t the only possible excluding factor. Article 12 of the Granger Constitution states that no religious tests for memberships would be applied. But the activities of the Minnehaha subordinate certainly exhibit a strong mainstream Protestant Christian influence. An entry from 6 April 1883 states that “A member of our order—when joining he confessed he was astonished to find so much of the teachings of the [N]ew [T]estament in our lessons—and when he was called south to organize a church where its members were composed of many denominations, advised them to organize a Grange instead, to avoid sectarianism and quarreling.” Each meeting closed with a hymn, with favorites including “Blest Be the Tie that Binds,” “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Church in the Wildwood,” “Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow,” “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Members were exhorted each year (as least as late as 1962) to observe “Go to Church” Sunday in honor of Oliver Kelley’s birthday. The chapter contributed funds to local Lutheran and Evangelical churches. These practices undoubtedly created a less-than-welcoming atmosphere for people who were not white Protestants.
Political Voice (But No Political Party)
The Declaration of Purposes emphasizes that the Grange is not a political or party organization, and Grangers could not talk about partisan politics, call political conventions, or nominate or discuss political candidates in their meetings. In the 1950s, for instance, the Minnehaha Grange refused to rent its hall for a political meeting, even though its treasury was in major need of funds. Nor would it allow the hall to be used as a polling place if doing so entailed the storage of voting machines.50
Refusing to align themselves with a political party did not mean that the Grangers failed to participate in the political process. Grange members in the Missouri legislature determined that they would “act as a unit on all questions of financial policy and political reforms, without regard to their former political associations, and that they [would] introduce bills providing for cheaper railroad rates.”51 Texas Grangers joined with Republicans at the 1875 Texas constitutional convention to defeat a poll tax, fearing that it would disenfranchise poor whites. And the first resolution by Washington Grangers in September 1889 was to object to the new state constitution because they considered public-servant salaries fixed at too high a rate. They also opposed its apparent welcoming of foreign purchasers of state land and industries.52
But the professed apolitical nature of the Grangers would come to haunt them. The 1870 census reports that 47 percent of the population identified themselves as farmers, yet only 7 percent of the members of the 43rd Congress (1873–75) were farmers.53 One reason for the inability of the Grange to continue its initial success was the greater willingness of other farm organizations to align themselves with powerful political allies and to engage in party politics to obtain preferential treatment. Chapter 3 explores this more fully.
2
The Granger Railroad Laws
We adopt it as our fixed purpose to “open out the channels in nature’s great arteries, that the life-blood of commerce may flow freely. . . .” We are not enemies to capital, but we oppose the tyranny of monopolies.
—Declaration of Purposes of the Patrons of Husbandry
For some, familiarity with the Grange comes from awareness of postbellum laws concerning railroads. Yet the so-called “Granger legislation” and related court cases had little to do with direct Grange influence on the political and legal processes.1 Still, if only by virtue of the nomenclature, a discussion of these laws belongs in any book about the Grange. Contemporaneous newspapers and commentators linked the Granger laws with the Grange. And the connection to the Patrons of Husbandry is strong, if not direct. The laws arose in states that had significant Grange membership. What is more, they dealt with transportation and grain storage issues and raised questions about the nature of public goods, both of which deeply concerned early Grangers.
The Granger cases are fascinating from a broader historical perspective as well, because they exhibit the first major invocation of the due process clause of the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment. More typically associated with lawsuits involving civil rights, the Fourteenth Amendment formed the foundation of the argument made by corporations in the Granger cases.
The holdings in the Granger cases—issued mere months before the great railroad strike of 1877—mark a turning point in American law, because they held that the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment did not interfere with the right of the states to regulate private enterprises that were “clothed with” a public interest. In essence, these cases blessed the new Granger statutes. Some view the outcome in these cases as preventing industrial enterprises from exploiting ordinary citizens, whereas others see it as a fundamental encroachment on private property rights.2 Despite their significance in legal history, however, the Granger laws were short-lived and did little to affect railroad rates, returns, or construction patterns in the late nineteenth century.
Common Carriers: Are They a Public Good?
To economists, a pure public good is one that is nonexclusive and nonrival in consumption. In other words, no one is prevented from using the good, and my “consumption” of it does not affect your “consumption” of it. Few goods are purely public or purely private in nature but instead fall somewhere in between. A piece of cake is a private good (if I eat it, you can’t); a streetlight is closer to being a public good (I can’t prevent your benefiting from it, and my use of it does not fundamentally impair your use of it).3 Complicating the concept of a “public” good is the fact that the public sector spends money on things that may not be pure public goods. Professional sports stadiums constitute one controversial example today. Many cities and states have chosen to use public funds or borrowing capability to finance these, although most economists consider them essentially private goods.4
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