nopoly ticket
for lesser offices hesitated to vote for strangers for state office.

Other Middle Western States at this time also felt the uneasy stirring
of radical political thought and saw the birth of third parties,
short-lived, most of them, but throughout their brief existence crying
loudly and persistently for reforms of all description. The tariff, the
civil service system, and the currency, all came in for their share of
criticism and of suggestions for revision, but the dominant note was
a strident demand for railroad regulation. Heirs of the Liberal
Republicans and precursors of the Greenbackers and Populists, these
independent parties were as voices crying in the wilderness, preparing
the way for national parties of reform. The notable achievement of the
independent parties in the domain of legislation was the enactment
of laws to regulate railroads in five States of the upper Mississippi
Valley.* When these laws were passed, the parties had done their work.
By 1876 they had disappeared or, in a few instances, had merged with the
Greenbackers. Their temporary successes had demonstrated, however, to
both farmers and professional politicians that if once solidarity could
be obtained among the agricultural class, that class would become the
controlling element in the politics of the Middle Western States. It is
not surprising, therefore, that wave after wave of reform swept over the
West in the succeeding decades.

* See Chapter IV.

The independent parties of the middle seventies were distinctly
spontaneous uprisings of the people and especially of the farmers,
rather than movements instigated by politicians for personal ends or by
professional reformers. This circumstance was a source both of strength
and weakness. As the movements began to develop unexpected power,
politicians often attempted to take control but, where they
succeeded, the movement was checked by the farmers' distrust of these
self-appointed leaders. On the other hand, the new parties suffered from
the lack of skillful and experienced leaders. The men who managed their
campaigns and headed their tickets were usually well-to-do farmers
drafted from the ranks, with no more political experience than perhaps
a term or two in the state legislature. Such were Willard C. Flagg,
president of the Illinois State Farmers' Association, Jacob G. Vale,
candidate for governor in Iowa, and William R. Taylor, the Granger
governor of Wisconsin.

Tayl