The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, April 8, 1918, Page 4

[ i land. owned by foreign capitalists who had bought it from the rail- roads, or who owned stock in the railroads through having furnish- ed the money with which to build them, and these American farmers said: “Let’s have American land for American farm- ers and prohibit alien ownership of land.”- Nebraska was ‘pain- fully aware of the part railroads played in her affairs, for did she not possess J. Sterling Mor- ton as one of her most prominent citizens? Or rather, did not J. Ster- ling Morton possess Ne- braska as one of his most powerful assets? Nebraskans still remem- ber Morton with all the vim and keenness that went with the Populist fight. He came to the state in 1854 and was in- timately associated with its very life until his death a few short years ago. NEBRASKA HAD RAILROAD BOSS He is the father of “Arbor Day.” He loved trees and farming and his advanced knowledge of that art made him one of the earliest champions of better farming and fruit culture in Nebraska. He was connected with the state department of agriculture, and when Cleveland was elected to his second term, he became United States secretary of agriculture and served in that high office through- out Cleveland’s administration. He gave direction to that Nebraska love for trees that dotted the wild prairies with man-made groves, that is still struggling to people the shifting “sand hill region” with northern pines. His birthday became a red- letter day in Nebraska’s agricultural life. They loved him for his zeal in farming—but not his zeal in politics. For years it was a common saying that “J. Ster-’ ling Morton and George L. Miller always carried the Democratic party of Nebraska in their pockets. Morton named the politicians who should have favors from the Burlington, and Miller named them for the othersc and when Bill Dech, as a member of a legislative investigating committee, questioned him, J. Sterling Morton defended his political services to the railroads by saying “that was the way things were done.” Just so, some 20 years later, J. Sterling Morton’s son, a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet, defended the granting of rebates. But ° things had changed in those intervening yeras. J. Sterling Morton brazenly told the committee of his loyalty to the railroads and was afterward re- warded by being put into a president’s cabinet— but when Paul Morton was exposed in serving the railroads under cover of politics, he was forced to resign from Roosevelt’s cabinet because of en- lightened public opinion, ‘and it still. makes poli- ticians wince to mention it. That public opinion grew out of the farmers’ movement. It was things like that, and myriads more that many Nebraskans re- member, that put life into the small “Alli- ances” that formed here and there in all the west- ern states, and found their richest soil in Ne- braska and Kansas. Ne- braska is just across the Missouri river from Iowa, and Iowa, older in development - than - Ne- braska, and ‘denser in her population, had gone through her ' trials and had put a number of pro- gressive laws on her statute books during the late 70s and the' early ’80s. . She had' fought it A typical view on the Platte river, and one of Nebrash' out with the railroads: a mile wnde," is the Nebrnska way: of speaking of it. . / R T R R e R S A A e e Along the Nemaha river in Nebraska, showing that, while Nebraska is essentlally a prairie state and has no navigable rivers, there a.re spots of sylvan beauty. and put them in leash while Nebraska farmers were still afraid to threaten railroads with legis- lation, for fear the railroads would quit extending their lines. NEBRASKANS LONGED TO FOLLOW IOWA’S EXAMPLE But when she came to herself, and looked across the MisSouri to the eastward, there she saw Iowa farmers, many of them prosperous, having a meas- ure of contrcl over their own affairs, and Iowa’s achievements became a goal for Nebraskans to strive for. They wanted a railroad law like Iowa had, they wanted 'an insurance law like that of Iowa, where farmers, through “anti-monopoly” parties, through the Alliamce of that state, and through various “independent” movements had somehow managed to control their legislature at different times /during the decade or two before. In Iowa the farmers had secured a pretty good co-operative insurance law and these companies were doing about one-third of the business at an .enormous saving to the farmers. The blood of -the Nebraskans tingled to do the same for themselves, and the Alliance movement spread like wildfire after its first year or two of struggles. By 1890 there were 50,000 members in the state, the largest membership that any farmer movement ever had in Nebraska. But these Alliances were not organized on a state basis. They were county units, sometimes much smaller neighborhood affairs. Some of them talked about whether to plow cornstalks under or rake them ‘ ‘. PAGE NN AR cliaraéterisfic_ scenes. together and take them off. They discussed vari- ous methods of cropping wheat and the breeds of livestock. » They held de- bates on old-time ques- little reference to their welfare, and they held schoolhouse socials, pic- nics and recitals of vari- ous kinds, much as the old Grange had done be- fore them. The Alliances were the farmers’ only chance for social recre- ation and they used them for that purpose. They differed almost as much as individual persons differ. If the strong man of the neighborhood or the county had a turn for the game of making two blades grow where only one grew before, why then that Alliance was very likely to have a leaning that way; but - if he was full of fire, and if he had been watching what Iowa organized farmers had done, and was studying farm con- ditions in Nebraska, he was quite likely to swing that particular Alliance toward a political frame of mind. So in the summer of 1890 there was a great gathering of Farmers’ alliance delegates at Grand Island, Neb. By that time the political frame of mind was gaining headway. There was a paper published in Alliance interests and the 2;000 dele- gates who gathered thébe were the largest similar gathering that had ever come together in Nebraska up to that time, and they decided for political ac- tion as a state organization. They were-spurred on to take this action because the year before that there had been a general call to all kinds of farm- ers’ organizations for a big powwow in St. Louis, . and there it was decided that the time had come to organize a new party in the interest of the farm- ers and the organized und unorganized laboring people. FARMERS AND LABORERS FIND EACH OTHER What part did the laboring people have in this? That is a painful point with all enemies of a de- mocracy that starts at the grass roots and grows up instead of being handéd down in packages from above. farmers of the ’'80s than to join hands with the workers. The Knights of Labor had spread from Pennsylvania during the 10 or 15 years before that, very slowly at first, more rapidly as it reached the edges of the West, and it engulfed farmers as well as carpenters and railroad trainmen and other _trade workers. They saw clearly that the laborers could never control their affairs so-long as they held off from united action with farmers and let organized wealth hold the balance of power. The Knights of Labor spread through many rural communities, and the gray-headed farmers of the Nebraska, Iowa day are in many cases old-time “Knights.” Bill Dech was state organizer for the Knights of Labor and in 189Q, when he joined 2,000 other farm- ers - in the big Grand Island convention, he was’state master of the Knights of Labor and state lecturer for the Farmers’ alliance at the same time! Talk about - farmers and workers having op- posite interests! It’s only farmers’ and workers’ enemies who talk that. The big interests double- cross - themselves: and f‘{\_n iuch_ deep and how tions that sometimes had ° Why, nothing was more natural to those. and Kansas prairies to-. don’t know -it, for they = are always ‘preac] i “labor ‘and: capw ik