Populist Outline

I.                    The Farm Becomes A Factory

A.     background

1.      The situation of American farmers, once jacks and the jewels of all trades was rapidly changing

2.      They had raised their own food, fashion their own clothing, and bartered for other necessities with neighbors

3.      Now high prices persuaded farmers to concentrate on growing single “cache” crops, such as wheat or corn, and use their profits to buy foodstuffs at a general store and manufactured goods in town or by mail order

4.      The Chicago firm of Erin Montgomery Ward sent out its first cataloged a–single sheet– in 1872

B.     large scale farmers

1.      Large scale farmers, especially in the immense grain producing areas of the Mississippi Valley, where now both specialists and business people

2.      As cogs in the vast industrial machine, these farmers were immediately tied to banking, railroading, and manufacturing

3.      They had to buy expensive machinery in order to plant and harvest their crops

4.      A powerful steam engine could drag behind it simultaneously the plow, seeder, and harrow

5.      The speed of harvesting wheat was dramatically increased in the 1870s by the invention of the wind binder and then in the 1880s by the “combine” –the combined reaper-thresher, which was drawn by twenty to forty horses and which both reaped and bagged a grain

6.      Widespread use of such costly equipment naturally called for first-class management

7.      But the farmers, often unskilled as business people, we’re inclined to blame the banks and railroads or the volatility of the global marketplace, rather than their own shortcomings, for their losses

C.     Bonanza Farms

1.      The amazing mechanization of agriculture in the postwar years was almost as striking as the mechanization of industry

2.      In fact, agricultural modernization drove many marginal farmers off the land, thus swelling the ranks of the new industrial workforce

3.      As the rural population steadily decreased, those farmers who remained achieved miracles of production, making America the world’s breadbasket and butcher shop