take from "land, railroad, money, and other gigantic
corporate monopolies ... the powers they have so corruptly and unjustly
usurped"; popular or direct election of United States Senators; woman
suffrage; and a graduated income tax, "placing the burden of government
on those who can best afford to pay instead of laying it on the farmers
and producers."

=Criticism of the Old Parties.=--To this long program of measures the
reformers added harsh and acrid criticism of the old parties and
sometimes, it must be said, of established institutions of government.
"We denounce," exclaimed the Labor party in 1888, "the Democratic and
Republican parties as hopelessly and shamelessly corrupt and by reason
of their affiliation with monopolies equally unworthy of the suffrages
of those who do not live upon public plunder." "The United States
Senate," insisted the Greenbackers, "is a body composed largely of
aristocratic millionaires who according to their own party papers
generally purchased their elections in order to protect the great
monopolies which they represent." Indeed, if their platforms are to be
accepted at face value, the Greenbackers believed that the entire
government had passed out of the hands of the people.

=The Grangers.=--This unsparing, not to say revolutionary, criticism of
American political life, appealed, it seems, mainly to farmers in the
Middle West. Always active in politics, they had, before the Civil War,
cast their lot as a rule with one or the other of the leading parties.
In 1867, however, there grew up among them an association known as the
"Patrons of Husbandry," which was destined to play a large role in the
partisan contests of the succeeding decades. This society, which
organized local lodges or "granges" on principles of secrecy and
fraternity, was originally designed to promote in a general way the
interests of the farmers. Its political bearings were apparently not
grasped at first by its promoters. Yet, appealing as it did to the most
active and independent spirits among the farmers and gathering to itself
the strength that always comes from organization, it soon found itself
in the hands of leaders more or less involved in politics. Where a few
votes are marshaled together in a democracy, there is power.

=The Greenback Party.=--The first extensive activity of the Grangers was
connected with the attack on the railways in the Middle West which
forced several state legislatures to reduce fr