ecuring new chapters quickly, did not make for
stability and permanence. The Grange deputy, as the organizer was
termed, did not do enough of what the salesman calls "follow-up work."
He went into a town, persuaded an influential farmer to go about with
him in a house-to-house canvass, talked to the other farmers of the
vicinity, stirred them up to interest and excitement, organized a
Grange, and then left the town. If he happened to choose the right
material, the chapter became an active and flourishing organization; if
he did not choose wisely, it might drag along in a perfunctory existence
or even lapse entirely. Then, too, the deputy's ignorance of local
conditions sometimes led him to open the door to the farmers' enemies.
There can be little doubt that insidious harm was worked through the
admission into the Grange of men who were farmers only incidentally and
whose "interest in agriculture" was limited to making profits from the
farmer rather than from the farm. As D. Wyatt Aiken, deputy for
the Grange in the Southern States and later member of the executive
committee of the National Grange, shrewdly commented, "Everybody wanted
to join the Grange then; lawyers, to get clients; doctors, to get
customers; Shylocks, to get their pound of flesh; and sharpers, to catch
the babes in the woods."

Not only the members who managed thus to insinuate themselves into the
order but also the legitimate members proved hard to control. With that
hostility to concentrated authority which so often and so lamentably
manifests itself in a democratic body, the rank and file looked with
suspicion upon the few men who constituted the National Grange. The
average farmer was interested mainly in local issues, conditions, and
problems, and looked upon the National Grange not as a means of helping
him in local affairs, but as a combination of monopolists who had taken
out a patent on the local grange and forced him to pay a royalty in
order to enjoy its privileges. The demand for reduction in the power of
the National Grange led to frequent attempts to revise the constitution
in the direction of decentralization; and the revisions were such as
merely to impair the power of the National Grange without satisfying the
discontented members.

Of all the causes of the rapid collapse of the Granger movement, the
unfortunate experience which the farmers had in their attempts at
business cooperation was probably chief. Their hatred of the middlem