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Article: Farmers' Alliance
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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FARMERS' ALLIANCE
FARMERS' ALLIANCE
was an umbrella term for several grassroots farmers organizations active between 1877 and 1892, most prominently in the South and the Plains states. These groups sought to ameliorate debt, poverty, and low crop prices by educating and mobilizing rural men and women, engaging in cooperative economic organizing, and asserting their power in electoral politics.
Formation of the Alliances
The Alliance hadits roots in the severe depression of the 1870s. The so-called Southern Alliance was founded in 1877 in Lampasas County, Texas, as the Knights of Reliance. The so-called Northern Alliance hadits roots in New York in the same year; founder Milton George, ...