Facing dispossession, farmers formed alliances and set up cooperatives to extend credit to one another and market crops themselves. As one Populist editorialist remarked, this was the way “mortgage-burdened farmers can assert their freedom from the tyranny of organized capital.” But when they found that these groupings couldn’t survive the competitive pressure of the banking establishment, politics beckoned.

From one presidential election to the next, and in state contests throughout the South and West, irate grain and cotton growers demanded that the government either expand the paper currency supply (“greenbacks,” also known as “the people’s money”) or monetize silver (again, to enlarge the money supply), or that it set up public institutions to finance farmers during the growing season. With a passion hard for us to imagine, they railed against the “gold standard,” which, Democratic Party presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan famously cried, should no longer be allowed to “crucify mankind on a cross of gold.” Should that cross stay fixed in place, one Alabama physician prophesied, it would “reduce the American yeomanry to menials and paupers, to be driven by monopolies like cattle and swine.” As Election Day approached, Populist editors and speakers warned of an approaching war with the money power, and they meant it: “The fight will come and let it come!”