The National Farmers’ Alliance was formed from a merger of regional Farmers’ Alliances in 1880. The national organization, as the regional ones had, aimed to further the interests of farmers through cooperative efforts and education.
A major labor organization in the 1880s, the Knights of Labor was founded in 1869 by an organization of garment workers in Philadelphia. Its membership was open to all workers, including African Americans and women. The Knights promoted cooperation and believed that workers were entitled “the full enjoyment of the wealth they create.”
Eugene V. Debs was a railway employee who worked to create the American Railway Union, an industrial union for railway workers. In 1893, the ARU orchestrated the Pullman car boycott in 1894, which led to Debs' arrest and the end of the ARU. Debs later served as a leader of the Socialist Party of America.
The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men; their greed and arrogance . . . and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in the popular mind, which shows itself in the great increase in the socialistic propaganda.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1906
Reading 2I think we are in a position, after the experience of the last 20 years, to state two things: in the first place, that a corporation may well be too...