During the late 1800s,
Midwestern farmers
were able to grow more
crops than ever thanks
to an abundance of land
and new farming
technology. But the
farmers had to get their
crops to the big cities in
Troy Banks
the eastern United
States where people
would buy them. To get their crops to the eastern cities,
Midwestern farmers would ship their crops across the country
by train. Below Troy Banks tells the story of the farmers’ struggle
against the railroads.
We all need to ship our crops to
the people who will buy them,
but those darn railroads are
determined to rip us off and put
us out of business. They
overcharge us to store our grain
and they overcharge us to ship
our grain. The other farmers and
I can barely afford to survive. But
now we’re going to do
something. We’re going to stand
up to those bullies. If they think
they are going to rip us off
forever, they have another thing
coming. The farmers have a plan
William Jennings Bryan
to stand up to the railroad.
Almost every single farmer is part of a group called the Grange.
The Grange is coming together to form cooperatives throughout
the Midwest. A cooperative is a group of people that pool their
resources. We’re taking our money, and we’re going to buy silos
to store our grain, so we don’t have to pay the railroads to store
it. We’re going to make sure that not one farmer in all of the
Midwest is going to get ripped off! But even the cooperatives
aren’t enough. We’re going to make our own political party: a
political party that looks out for the interests of average farmers,
and not just the wealthy. We’re going to call it the Populist Party.
We even have a man that
we are going to nominate
to run for president in
1896. His name is William
Jennings Bryan, and he is
committed to fighting for
the common man. With
the support of all of our
nation’s farmers, I would
say the Populist Party is
going to be around for a
long time!
William Jennings Bryan giving one of his
famous speeches