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Talking Texas History
Talking Texas History
Texas Documents, Part 4: The Cleburne Demands
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In this episode, we look at an 1886 newspaper article that captures a moment when Texas farmers stop grumbling and start drafting demands. From the small town of Cleburne, the Farmers Alliance lays out an early blueprint for American populism, and we use that document to follow rural life in the late nineteenth century.
If you like primary sources, Texas political history, or the roots of the People’s Party and the Populist movement, hit play, share the episode with a history friend, and leave a review. What part of the Cleburne platform feels most familiar today?
Disclaimer And Show Premise
SPEAKER_01This podcast is not sponsored by and does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas based upon our professional training and study of the past.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it. And of course, all of us who live it and love it. I'm Scott Susby.
SPEAKER_01I am Scott Susby. Gene, I guess we're carrying on our uh little series we've got going on here about looking at documents and key documents from periods in Texas. So what do we got today? What are we introducing today?
SPEAKER_00Well, we're gonna go right to the heart of Texas. Actually, where is the heart of Texas? I mean, is it Brady? That's what the people in Brady will tell you. That's what the people in Brady will tell you. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Although it's really not. It's the little town outside of Brady in northern McCullough County.
SPEAKER_00Well, we're gonna look at kind of north central Texas. And we're gonna go to a little town called Cleburne. Have you ever been to Cleburne?
SPEAKER_01I have been to Cleburn. I've been to Cleburne State Park one time when I was in the seventh grade, and we spent a couple of nights there in our camper and fished at their little lake and everything. It's kind of cool.
SPEAKER_00You know, it's not far from Stephenville. It's on the way to Stevenville, um, Grandbury, uh a lot of a lot of neat places. It's right just south of Fort Worth. Um and as uh Fort Worth expands, it's uh getting closer and closer to Fort Worth every day, I think.
SPEAKER_01I don't know if is that a good thing?
SPEAKER_00Well, I I I don't know. It depends.
SPEAKER_01People in Cleveland might not think it's a good thing.
SPEAKER_00They they've also got a seminary there. Um they've got uh it's uh uh you know, it's it's it's it's a nice place to go. Um but what happens there, Cleveland actually gets on the map and it's talked about in history books, American history books. If for no other reason than in 1886, it was the site of the Farmers Alliance Convention. And at that convention, they issued a list of demands that they wanted the federal government to adopt. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna look at this the farmers' demands from the Cleveland Alliance. Now, this is reported in the Dallas Morning News, August the 8th, 1886.
Origins Of The Farmers Alliance
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, and I think it's good. I think, Gene, maybe before you even get into that, let me get them. Maybe, you know, we don't know what people know as they listen to us, you know. I don't think anybody tunes into us to learn anything, but they might, right? Uh it was accidentally learned surprise, right? As we go on. But you know, the Farmers Alliance, uh, when they meet here in 1886, is already been in, depending on what date you use of when they were formed, 1874, 1875, or 1877, uh, but I use the 1874 one, uh, had formed in Lampasas, not that far from Cleaver, in 1874, about this. And a result, and as we go through this document and we look at uh what the farmers uh wanted, and that was what the farmers demand is the news uh paper headline about the Cleveland uh meeting said, that why they felt like they needed a form at that time and why they needed to get together, uh I mean they were you know, I guess the way to say it is you know agriculture was the way of life in Texas. That's how people actually made a living. And the major and while we think of agriculture in Texas in the pre- and post-Civil War era as being this plantation agriculture, and of course, that's the ones who made a lot of money. In Texas, small farmers were the majority of the people, and that's how they did it. However, by the time you get into the 1870s, people are not owning land, they're having to share crop, they're having to have tenant farms, and the small holding areas are uh decreasing at the same time. Railroad mileage is piling up, you have the rise of large industrialism in the north that is increasingly making money, and farmers are looking at that and saying, you know, we're getting ripped off here. We're supposed to be the backbone of the nation, and we see railroads charging exorbitant freight rates, we see these powerful industries dominating politics and everything. And they seem to say, we've lost our way. This is not the American way, and they form to find a you know why people do form in groups to try to gain power, right? To try to have some sort of power over their lives. So the Farmers Alliance in this meeting, right, is a meeting of the Farmers Alliance preceding a national meeting coming up.
Postwar Change And The Broken Ladder
SPEAKER_00Well, I I would I would go even further, and this is this is what I tell my students. I, you know, everything you said, but the Civil War radically changed the American South. And Texas at that time was really identified with the American South because it was we had seceded from the Union in 1862. We had left the Union, we had we were a slave state. And cotton planters, as you said, were a large part of the economic um powerhouses. However, with the Civil War, with the end of slavery, you know, that that meant that you were gonna have to start paying labor. But the other thing and I th something that we that we sometimes forget in Texas was that Texas began expanding further and further into the western part of the state. And I I tell students, I said, you know, look, where is West Texas? Where is West Texas? And I'll say, oh, the panhandle, El Paso. And so I'll pull up a map and I will go just above Waco to a little town named West Texas.
SPEAKER_01We're gonna get calachis now.
SPEAKER_00You can get calachis there. And I say, why in the world did anybody call this West Texas? Because at one point it was. And it was after the Civil War. You know, during during the Civil War across, you know, we teach this in our Western history classes, Native Americans, indigenous people pushed the boundary back about a hundred miles across the Western part, right? Because you didn't have the army. And so after the Civil War, when the Army goes back, re-establishes the forts, you have more and more people moving westward. Also, as you brought out, the railroads contribute to this as well, sending people west. So you had people who had predominantly grown up in and around and made their livings or eked out a living, even uh, small farmers eked out a living growing cotton because that was the predominant crop, right? And if you were gonna get a loan, if you were going to try to make a business, you had to do it in the in in the money-making industry, and that was cotton. But western Texas, west of I-35, is not good cotton growing land. And yet the emphasis was the wisdom was the wisdom of the day was if you want to make money, it's gonna be in cotton.
SPEAKER_01Well, and of course, they were getting frozen out of land east of that line because they were expensive or in the hands of large railroad companies, large landowners, large plantations, and that's where the land was. You know, and you had the whole thing too, I think that when you look at the farmers and what they're looking at, is that you know there was this idea of the agricultural ladder, right? It's this this is the way you made it. And you might start off when you're a single man, very small, right? And you get a small plot that you can sharecrop or tenant farm. I don't know, thirty or thirty-five acres, and you can raise the crop and you can sell it, and you can save some money. And you finally you get married, and maybe you have enough, you can you can start tenant farming a larger plot and start saving more money. Then you can buy some of your land, and before long you move up, you know, the rungs of the ladder. Well, the reality was nobody's moving up the rungs of the ladder. They're getting completely shut out. And when people get shut out, they look for somebody to blame. And when they looked around, who could they blame? The railroads, the wealthy landowners, the large end numbers, and eventually the politicians that they controlled. Uh and that brings us to, I think, the the the Cleaver meeting that's called. I mean, the Farmers Alliance, when it first started, they were into things like the, you know, the cooperatives uh and actions to manage straight livestock and things like that. Her cattle theft, because ranchers joined in on that. Uh they were able to get together and buy seed and other supplies in bulk by using the power of this. That was their idea. To, you know, that was their let's let's let's have enough concentrated power to fight the concentrated powers. By the time you get to the eight late 1880s, when this meeting is in 1886, they realize the only way we're going to combat this is if we can control the politicians. And if we can change policy and change the way the nation is formulated. And so when you look at these resolutions that they adopt at this in this document, you what you this platform of principles that they come up with, these are the ideas that will eventually coalesce into the populist party, the people's party, right? Uh formed in 1892 in Omaha, on the Omaha platform, uh, when a lot of these groups came to the Northern, the Southern Alliance, and the Greenbackers come together. But it's interesting to us, the driving force of this in the center of it come from Texas and then the rest of the South, letting you know just how bad things were in the South.
SPEAKER_00So let's look at these. There's what, 15, 16 demands that they had. And I'm gonna, I'll I'll go down and read them. We demand first the recognition by incorporation of trade unions, cooperative stores, and such other associations as may be organized by the industrial classes to improve their financial conditions or promote their general welfare.
SPEAKER_01So that's what they're doing.
SPEAKER_00Co-ops.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But also who they make an appeal to trade unionists, industrial workers. Essentially, this is their attempt. Let's get the small agricultural workers and the guys working in factories all together. And think of the power we can have if we get them all together.
SPEAKER_00The the little this is a teaming up of the little guys against the big guys, as you were saying, you know, association to combat associations to combat monopolies. So we're gonna have these cooperative stores. And look, we we have I we used to go in my hometown, you brothel's there was a co-op. And so uh, you know, this was the start of this cooperative stores where farmers get together, run their own stores. All right, so we demand, number two, that all public school land public and school lands be sold in small bodies, not exceeding 320 acres to each purchaser for actual settlers on easy terms of payment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, what was going on in Texas, of course, in the starting in the late 1870s and into the 1880s, Texas had set aside, of course, all this land for schools in its early, even starts way back in the Republic period, right? And so these were school lands, and it was to to to fund schools because the legislature, just like they are today, didn't like to spend money, uh, and didn't like to appropriate money, right? So let's find some other way to do this, right? So instead of starting a lottery, you know, that let's do this. So they were selling school lands. But what was happening, particularly way out west, West Texas, as we're expanding in these school lands, but it had been the pattern, large ranchers were coming in and buying huge swaths of this land. Plantation owners were buying large swaths of this land, which meant the small guys were not getting to get in on the deal. A lot of these people were speculators. They buy up, you know, a thousand, fifteen hundred acres of school land, divide it into small plots, let them sell it for exorbitant prices, way above what they sold. This is simply them the small farmers saying, This is our only way to get back on that agricultural ladder. You got to let us buy small farmers. We don't let these large ant landowners get involved.
SPEAKER_00Of course, to modern people, you say, uh, you know, I just want to buy 320 acres. That sounds like a lot, but for but it but it wasn't for somebody in involved in agriculture.
SPEAKER_01Uh and especially in the west of the west of the 98th meridian where it stopped raining.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Number three, large bodies of land held by private individuals or corporations for speculative purposes shall be assessed for taxation at such rates as they are offered to the purchasers on credit of one, two, or three years in bodies of one hundred and sixty acres or less. That's a lot of language. What does it mean?
SPEAKER_01Somewhat reinforcing the one before. Again. Exactly. If these large speculators are going to come in and buy all this land, tax them at the right rate. Well, because they were getting tax breaks, they weren't paying tax breaks poor value. They just had this un you know unproductive, you know, um that's not the word. The word is what? Non-improved land, because they hadn't planted. And so they were getting taxed at that very low rate, which just drove prices up for everyone.
Foreign Ownership And Market Speculation
SPEAKER_00Well, and and so the people who were paying the taxes, usually the smaller landowners, they had a greater burden because the larger ones weren't. And we still see this in cities, right? Where cities give breaks to, you know, stores that are coming in or businesses they're trying to attract. Well, that's gonna everybody else is paying their taxes, and these other people get breaks, and that causes people to get upset. And sometimes we have protests over that. Right. Or at least, you know, certainly uh we've had uh in various counties and whatnot, uh we've had turnovers in elections due to that because people get mad about that. Number four, we demand that measures be taken to prevent aliens from acquiring uh titles uh to land in the United States of America and to force titles already acquired by aliens to be relinquished by sale to actual settlers and citizens of the United States. Now, it's easy to uh say, oh, well, you know, they were anti-immigrant, that they're and confuse what we see in politics and in protest today with this because it's the same language. But they're actually talking about something else in the late 1800s.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00And and and yes, it was people who were not Americans, but it was corporations and wealthy individuals who were not Americans who were coming in buying up land.
SPEAKER_01For example, uh in West Texas, in the in the areas of the South Plains, what you had happening beginning in the late 1870s and early 1880s, this school land, a lot of this school land that's out there, you have Scottish syndicates coming in and buying hundreds of thousands of acres to set up these large corporate syndicate ranches. Uh and all those, they look what what these things are saying, they're saying, look, they're taking potential productive land away from small Texas farmers. And where's the money going? Those ranches were making, I mean, back this is back when it really meant they're making millions of dollars. And where are they sending all that money? Going back to Dundee, Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland, London, England, where these syndicate.
SPEAKER_00Dublin, Ireland.
SPEAKER_01Yes, Dublin, all these things. So that's that's what this is about.
SPEAKER_00Number five, the law-making power, take early action upon such measures as shall effectively prevent the dealing in futures to all agricultural products, prescribing such procedures in trial as shall secure prompt convictions, and imposing such penalties as shall secure the most perfect compliance with the law. Now, that is some flowery legal. All right. So the lawmaking power. So they're talking about the legislature, right? The legislature shall take measures to prevent dealing in futures of all agricultural products. Now, what are futures? Dabbling in the stock market, betting, right? And you know, I you know, growing up in when I grew up with the on the radio, they we would have the futures report. Well, you know, sow bellies are going for well, what is it? What is that? In it's the stock market for agricultural products, and it's on futures. I think that next year I'm gonna have a bumper crop, and I predict I'm gonna make this much money selling this much, right?
SPEAKER_01You know, here's the explanation, Gene. You ever watch the movie Trading Places with Eddie Murphy? There you go. They explained this is the commodities market.
SPEAKER_00It's the commodities market.
SPEAKER_01This is the middlemen dealing in these commodities, and it's these middlemen that they buy these the products from the farmers, but they're speculating, and they're the ones who make the prices go up. The farmers are getting ripped off. If the price of cotton in 1884 that the people sold to the cotton factors uh from their farms, the farmers went to the owner gym, they gendered up, and it was. I'm just making things up because I'm not a mathematician, it was 10 cents a pound, right? That they had. That's what those middlemen bought it on. But then they're the ones who sold it to the textile people. A lot of those were in again in Scotland, by the way, uh, where all the and Glasgow becomes the largest dealer in cotton, a lot of cotton from the fabric. They might pay then those factors 20 cents a pound or 25 cents a pound. Well, that's these people making more money than the people who actually grew it, and they're dealing in these features especially. And that rubbed these farmers the wrong way. That they were getting cut out of the price. Off their own products. That's what that this is against speculation and things like that.
SPEAKER_00Number six, that all lands forfeited by the railroads or other corporations immediately revert to the government and be declared open for purchase by actual settlers on the same terms as other public or school lands. This is where I like this because I think this is this is a juicy topic here. So who was the largest landowner in the West, Scott?
SPEAKER_01In the very far west, it's the it's the federal government.
SPEAKER_00Federal government. And who was the largest land grants given to?
SPEAKER_01The railroad. The railroad Continental Railroad.
SPEAKER_00Now we say, well, in Texas there weren't any federal lands, granted. But the state legislature was giving away large swaths of land to railroad developers as well, just like the federal government had been doing. And all the states were doing that as well. So they were getting this law, and a lot of railroads didn't make it. So who got the land that these now defunct railroad companies had or they hadn't sold in a number of years? Well, that's land that they they've cornered the market on. So let it go back to the people, let it go back to the government, and then the government sells it at a cheap rate so that small farmers could buy it.
SPEAKER_01And of course the government. Government in the state of Texas doing this. They were granting a whole lot more land than it takes to build a railroad. And the railroad companies were making more money off of land sales than they were off of actually, you know, railroad revenues. And so this essentially, we don't let's let make this, it's it just goes back to some of the other. Let's make this available for false small farmers.
SPEAKER_00Number seven, we demand that all fences be removed by force if necessary from public or school lands unlawfully fenced by cattle companies, syndicates, or any other form of monopoly. Now this is 1886. Three years before that, the so-called fence cutting wars had claimed some lives. In fact, uh most people probably don't know it, but one of the biggest fence cutting war casualties happened just in the next state over in New Mexico, and you may have heard of a a man named Billy the Kid.
SPEAKER_01I've heard of him. That's right. In the Lincoln County War. A lot of that was over those types of things and the fencing of the land. Who who has access to land that is a lot of these people saw this as communal, right? But if you fence it all, not everybody has access. They don't have passage. You can't go through, you know, and on your way somewhere. You have to go around it all the time. These fence wars were were very they were very important to this because these fences actually closed off land. It's just part of the whole thing. It's just magnifies how these large corporations and large landowners are bringing so much land under their control.
SPEAKER_00Well, it also uh another thing, another issue is Texas, we have riparian water rights, which means that the water is owned by the public. It's not you cannot own a river. Right? And so if you were fencing off access to water, you were essentially exerting ownership of the river, which was against the law. And this was another issue that they were fighting about.
SPEAKER_01Think about almost every Western Saw made from the 1940s through the 1970s and did the cattle baron tried to fence off where the water was, right? And so that that's that's what this is.
SPEAKER_00Number eight, we demand that the statues of the state of Texas be rigidly enforced by the Attorney General of the State to compel corporations to pay the taxes due to the state and county.
SPEAKER_01Are you telling me, Gene, that big corporations are not paying their fair share of taxes?
SPEAKER_00That's what it sounds like.
SPEAKER_01Well, uh that was happening even back then, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was. Number nine, the railroad property shall be assessed to the full normal value of stock on which the railroad seeks to declare dividends.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh, a corporation's cooking the books again, right?
SPEAKER_00Cooking the books saying that well, well, you know, and this happens in the news from time to time. Is that saying like you undervalued what your property is worth, so you have to pay less taxes. And in these days, it was still a lot of times businesses and individuals, they're the ones who said, This is what my land's worth. This is uh, you know, they place their own valuation on it. So was it always what we would say fair market price? Well, not necessarily.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely not. And the and again, it's the railroads are the biggest you know, they're the biggest people doing these things.
Silver Paper Money And Populism
SPEAKER_00So number 10. We demand the rapid extinguishment of the public debt of the United States by operating the mints to their fullest capacity in coining silver and gold, and in the tender uh the tendering, the same without discrimination to the public creditors of the nations according to contract.
SPEAKER_01This is one of those things, Gene, that is an interesting thing that comes up at this time. Uh this is the whole concept of somewhat of the Greenback Party. The what farmers want essentially is to inflate the currency.
SPEAKER_00Cheap money.
SPEAKER_01Cheap money and to inflate the currency, and then so they can sell goods high but uh to make their most on this. This is let's use all we're this is the same time as there's a lot of mining going on in the West. We're digging a lot of silver and gold out of the ground. They're saying, hey, United States government, you buy all this stuff and make it into coins and dump it into the money supply, which actually makes money cheaper. Which is kind of what's happening today if you've looked at the US dollar uh these days. That's what they want. For farmers, this is a big thing. Because a tight money supply and a small credit was tight, banks didn't loan money, and prices were high. In their mind, this would have would ease a lot of them. Now, it's kind of economically short-sighted, really, but for them, this was another, and it was another way to get back into big corporations.
SPEAKER_00Right. You know, and I I gotta tell you this, I gotta tell you this little story. I I was talking to uh to students, I was explaining this, and I said, You know what the crime of 73 was. Have you heard of the crime of 73? And one student, one one wag in the back of the room one day said, disco.
SPEAKER_01You know what? That student is not wrong.
SPEAKER_00Um so the crime of 73 is that the federal government had stopped coining gold and silver. And remember, as Scott just said, uh the Comstock load brought in and discovered more gold in California than had ever been discovered in the world up to that point in history. Think about that. Think about that. And then, you know, no well, we we had already stopped coining gold and silver when all that was well, we stopped coining silver when all that was found. And so there was a conspiracy to keep the little man from getting access to inexpensive money. And in those days, money was based on gold and silver.
SPEAKER_01If they had three coins of silver, it would have cost deinflation. You know, we don't we don't even think about deflation now, but that's what it would cost, and that's what they wanted. Make their prices lower. I mean, it doesn't cost as much to buy a plow and things to that. That's and so that's what they're asking for.
SPEAKER_00Number 11. We demand the substitution of legal tender treasury notes for the issue of national banks that the Congress of the United States shall regulate to the amount of such issue by giving to the country a per capita circulation that shall increase as the population and business interests of the country expand. Now that was a mouthful, Scott.
SPEAKER_01Let's break that down into what's a treasury note, first off, but people might not realize what's a treasury note. I have I very rarely have any, so I don't have yeah, I have I'm married, so I don't have very money either. It's it's paper money, paper money. It's paper money. So this is all about paper money and who gets to make it, who gets to issue it, and how much of it is issued is what this is.
SPEAKER_00And what it goes back to that idea of at this point, money was based on actual gold and silver, right? A dollar's worth, a dollar bill was worth a dollar's worth of silver. That's not the way we not since 1973.
SPEAKER_01No, we have fiat money.
SPEAKER_00We have fiat money. It's it's a dollar because the federal government says it is. So that's a whole nother class on the but it's what they want is.
SPEAKER_01It's the same thing, it's inflation. It's the same what they do at the coinage of silver. It's the same principle.
SPEAKER_00Scott, we're running out of time and we don't haven't run out of issues yet.
SPEAKER_01So why don't we make this another? Why don't we make another episode, G? We can just call an audible, right? It's Super Bowl week when we're recording this. Just call it audible. And we'll make this two episodes, and we'll have another episode and pick this up. So, folks, we'll end this one and say goodbye to everybody, and then we will be back with our next episode that will start about populism as well.
SPEAKER_00Very good. Thanks everybody for listening. Thank you.
