The Agrarian Populist Movement was the largest people's struggle for democracy in U.S. history. After the Civil War, with the demise of the Slave State and the rise of the Corporate State, capital became increasingly concentrated and farmers across the continent were being divested of their land at a rapid pace. The consolidation of land ownership into fewer and fewer hands was the result of the draconian Crop Lien System. In the absence of banks throughout rural America following the war, privateering Furnishing Agents extended credit to farmers at usurious rates of interest. Purchasing goods, farm tools and seeds at 100% - 200% interest from Furnishing Agents, who sold materials on consignment from Northern merchants, left farmers with mounting debts at the end of each season.

The Populists responded by creating Cooperative Warehouses. They attempted to command a better price for their crops by bulking their harvests. At one point, they sent over 40,000 lecturers thoughout the South, Plains States, Northwest, and as far Norteast as New York State, spreading not only their message of cooperative self-help against the empire of finance, but creating a new community-oriented system for governing commerce among themselves. In the end, Northern banks conspired with the profiteering Furnishing Agents to cut off direct loans to Populist cooperatives and the Exchanges which they set-up to offer lower rates to household farmers. With ownership of their farmland being transferred to a wealthy minority and their attemps at self-reliant solutions to the assault of capital on their way of life, the Agrarian Populists were radicalized, and formed their own political party, with the intention of taking over the American government from within. They succeeded in taking over a number of state legislatures, electing members of Congress, and had their sights set on the White House. But in the end they were crushed by the ascendency of the Corporate State, ushered in by the Court's "finding" of corporations within the meaning of the 14th Amendment's reference to "Persons," the subsequent wrapping of corporations in the Constitution's legal protections, and the validation of the corporate model of "scientific efficiency" and "economies of scale" by the Progressives as the best model for the governance of an industrialized society. By 1900, it was all over. The last gasp of popular aspirations for democratic control was snuffed out with the defeat of the Populist Movement.

Read here a few samples of powerful testimony to this largest of American People's Movements for Democracy, a movement that has been all but erased from common knowledge.

The Populist Moment -- Introduction to Lawrence Goodwyn's book

The Populist Party Platform, 1892

The Populist Party Platform, 1896

1892 Populist Presidential Candidate on Corporate Piracy