Explanation:
American farmers have often expressed dissatisfaction with their lot but the decades after the Civil War were extraordinary in this regard. The period was one of persistent and acute political unrest. The specific concerns of farmers were varied, but at their core was what farmers perceived to be their deteriorating political and economic status.
The defining feature of farm unrest was the efforts of farmers to join together for mutual gain. Farmers formed cooperatives, interest groups, and political parties to protest their declining fortunes and to increase their political and economic power. The first such group to appear was The Grange or Patrons of Husbandry, founded in the 1860s to address farmers’ grievances against the railroads and desire for greater cooperation in business matters. The agrarian-dominated Greenback Party followed in the 1870s. Its main goal was to increase the amount of money in circulation and thus to lower the costs of credit to farmers. The Farmers’ Alliance appeared in the 1880s. Its members practiced cooperative marketing and lobbied the government for various kinds of business and banking regulation. In the 1890s, aggrieved farmers took their most ambitious steps yet, forming the independent People’s or Populist Party to challenge the dominance of the unsympathetic Republican and Democratic parties.
Although farmers in every region of the country had cause for agitation, unrest was probably greatest in the northern prairie and Plains states. A series of droughts there between 1870 and 1900 created recurring hardships, and Midwestern grain farmers faced growing price competition from producers abroad. Farmers in the South also revolted, but their protests were muted by racism. Black farmers were excluded from most farm groups, and many white farmers were reluctant to join the attack on established politics and business for fear of undermining the system of social control that kept blacks inferior to whites (Goodwyn, 1978). follow me nice plz follow
