Agenda and Achievements
As a widespread movement consisting of three independent branches and existing for more than two decades, reduction of the Farmers' Alliance to a few universal objectives is problematic. As Southern Alliance leader C.W. Macune noted in 1891, the agenda of the organization was both amorphous and dynamic, a response to local problems and conditions:
"No man...can give a perfect definition of the purposes of the Farmers' Alliance; and he who attempts a definition simply gives his own personal conception of the subject, which may be more or less valuable, according as his field of observation and his accuracy of judgment are good or otherwise.
"In a broad sense, the purposes of the Farmers' Alliance...cover today a remedy for every evil known to exist and afflict farmers and other producers, and in the future should cover every contingency that may arise, presenting evil to be combatted by means of organization; they are accumulative and ever changing, as the enemy assumes a new guise."
Included among these concerns to greater or lesser extent were the question of exploitative terms of credit, insufficient money supply to sustain the economic needs of society, super-profits extracted by merchants, millers, and other middlemen, systemically unfavorable terms of trade levied upon small-scale agricultural shippers by the railroad industry, negative impacts on land prices caused by speculation.
The accomplishments of the Farmers’ Alliance are numerous. For example, many Alliance chapters all set up their own cooperative stores, which bought directly from wholesalers and sold their goods to farmers at a lower rate, at times 20 to 30 percent below the regular retail price. Such stores achieved only limited success, however, since they faced the hostility of wholesale merchants who sometimes retaliated by temporarily lowering their prices in order to drive the Alliance stores out of business.
Additionally, the Farmer's Alliance established its own mills for flour, cottonseed oil, and corn, as well as its own cotton gin. Such facilities allowed debt-laden farmers, who often had little cash to pay third-party mills, to bring their goods to markets at a lower cost.
Read more about this topic: Farmers' Alliance
Famous quotes containing the words agenda and/or achievements:
“The first full-fledged generation of women in the professions did not talk about their overbooked agenda or the toll it took on them and their families. They knew that their position in the office was shaky at best. . . . If they suffered self-doubt or frustration . . . they blamed themselves—either for expecting too much or for doing too little.”
—Deborah J. Swiss (20th century)
“When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)