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Handout B: National Grange Meeting Rocky Mountain Husbandman

“National Grange Meeting” Rocky Mountain Husbandman, Diamond City, Mont. 10 Jan. 1878

Background: The Granger movement of the 1860s and 70s focused on providing social activities to relieve the isolation often experienced by farm families and providing lecturers to help farmers educate themselves about effective agriculture techniques, but rejected any involvement in party politics.

National Grange Meeting

The National Grange met at Cincinnati on the 21st of November. An amendment to its constitution reducing the fees of admission, was proposed and will probably be unanimously ratified by the farmers over the whole country.

On the 23d the following resolution was passed:

The National Grange, representing as it does the agricultural sentiment of every part of the United States, without intending to infringe any feature of its organic law which forbids the discussion of any question of party politics, believes it to be not only its privilege, but its duty, to give expression to the universal voice of its membership, in condemnation of all such legislation either on the part of the general or State government, as tends to the injury of the great productive industries. In this spirit, and with no purpose to take part in the partisan politics of the country, we do hereby declare our disapprobation of the law demonetizing silver [the Coinage Act of 1873, which had discontinued coinage of the U.S. silver dollar]… and do, therefore, hereby express our sympathy with the effort now being made in Congress for the repeal of these obnoxious measures…

Rocky Mountain husbandman. (Diamond City, Mont.), 10 Jan. 1878. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025309/1878-01-10/ed-1/seq-6/

REVIEW QUESTIONS

  1. According to this newspaper report on the National Grange Meeting of 1878, what was the position of the Grange regarding partisan politics?
  2. What did the Grange mean by “the great productive industries”?
  3. What position did the Grange take with respect to the Coinage Act of 1873, and why?
  4. In what ways are constitutional principles and essential virtues demonstrated? In what aspects of the events are they decidedly absent?