the farm, and his mustache cut in a
straight line over a large straight mouth. He wore clerical eyeglasses
and unclerical clothes. His opponents called him clownish; his friends
declared him Lincolnesque. Failing to make headway against him by
ridicule, the Republicans arranged a series of joint debates between
the candidates; but the audience at the first meeting was so obviously
partial to Simpson that Hallowell refused to meet him again. The
supporters of the "sockless" statesman, though less influential and
less prosperous than those of Hallowell, proved more numerous and
triumphantly elected him to Congress. In Washington he acquitted himself
creditably and was perhaps disappointingly conventional in speech and
attire.

The outcome of this misery, disgust, anger, and hatred on the part of
the people of Kansas focused by shrewd common sense and rank demagogism,
was the election of five Populist Congressmen and a large Populist
majority in the lower house of the state legislature; the Republican
state officers were elected by greatly reduced majorities. In Nebraska,
the People's Independent party obtained a majority of the members of the
legislature and reduced the Republican party to third place in the
vote for governor, the victory going to the Democrats by a very small
plurality. The South Dakota Independent party, with the president of
the state Alliance as its standard bearer, was unable to defeat the
Republican candidates for state offices but obtained the balance of
power in the legislature. In Indiana, Michigan, and Minnesota, the new
party movement manifested considerable strength, but, with the exception
of one Alliance Congressman from Minnesota and a number of legislators,
the fruits of its activity were gathered by the Democrats.

Among the results of the new party movements in the Western States in
1890 should be included the election of two United States Senators,
neither of whom was a farmer, although both were ardent advocates of the
farmers' cause. In South Dakota, where no one of the three parties had a
majority in the legislature, the Reverend James H. Kyle, the Independent
candidate, was elected to the United State Senate, when, after
thirty-nine ballots, the Democrats gave him their votes. Kyle, who was
only thirty-seven years old at this time, was a Congregational minister,
a graduate of Oberlin College and of Alleghany Theological Seminary. He
had held pastorates in Colorado and South Dakota