Marching for Freedom

DESCRIPTION: "The farmers of Nebraska now are in a fearful plight, For years they have been worse than slaves... But now they are marching for freedom.... Hurrah for Powers, a farmer true and grand." Banks, speculators, railroads cannot defeat the farmers
AUTHOR: Words: Luna E. (Mrs. J. T.) Kellie (1857-1940)
EARLIEST DATE: 1890 (Farmer's Alliance, August 23, 1890 edition, according to Welsch-NebraskaPioneerLore)
KEYWORDS: farming poverty hardtimes derivative political
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1889 - John H Powers elected president of the Farmer's Alliance
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Welsch-NebraskaPioneerLore, pp. 60-61, "Marching for Freedom" (1 text, tune referenced)
ADDITIONAL: Nebraska Folklore, Pamphlet Eighteen, "Farmers' Alliance Songs of the 1890's," Federal Writers' Project, 1938, p. 3, "Marching for Freedom" (1 text)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Marching through Georgia" (tune) and references there
NOTES [3842 words]: According to Hicks, p. vii, in the late nineteenth century, the cheap land that had always given farmers someplace to migrate started to dry up; all the land was taken In the aftermath, the farmers started to organize. First came The Grange, then the Greenback Party, then the Farmers' Alliance -- a group with a much more sophisticated program than the single-issue Greenbackers.
The railroads made it worse, both because they had permitted the land stampede and because they were the means by which farm products were moved, at rates they decided (Hicks, pp. 2-4) -- plus they had been given vast quantities of land themselves, which they advertised and sold, charging interest rates of up to 10% (Hicks, p. 7).
The banks weren't much better -- few were based in the farming areas; rather, they hired local loan officers -- and paid them like the old Roman tax farmers: the bank required a certain interest rate, and the local agents made their profit based on however much more than that interest rate they could get (Hicks, p. 22). Thus many farmers took loans at rates that they could not possibly afford, with no one having any incentive to engage in responsible lending. The situation was so bad that in five states, including Nebraska, the total number of outstanding mortgages exceeded the number of households! (Hicks, p. 24).
And that was when the weather was good, which had generally been the case in the years up to 1886, "But from 1887 to 1897 there were only two years in which the central and western areas had enough rainfall to insure a full crop, and for five seasons out of ten they had practically no crops at all" (Hicks, p. 30). Particularly since hot winds sucked away what little moisture there was.
What's more, crop yields per acre weren't going up (Glad, p. 46), and would not start to rise until the invention of nitrogen fertilizer. The increase in production was due entirely to increased mechanization, which allowed one person to manage about five times as many acres -- but that meant more loans, both to buy the land and to buy the machinery!
Ignorance perhaps contributed -- the new residents were mostly younger people who didn't have all the farming experience of their elders, and so could make bad mistakes in their planning -- Kellie/Nelsen, pp. 94-95, describes a bunch of fruit plantings which failed because they couldn't tell good plants from bad.
To make things still worse, the elevator operators (who often had a monopoly in particular areas), at their sole discretion, graded the crops the farmers brought in -- and often graded them below their actual quality in order to increase their profits (Hicks, pp. 76-79). And, because production was going up much faster than the gold supply, it was a time of substantial deflation (Hicks, p. 88). Indeed, the money supply was actually declining as the government paid off its debts and banks were retiring their notes based on those bonds -- a disaster for farmers whose lands were mortgaged to the hilt with fixed rate mortgages; they had to pay off loans on large sums with smaller income from their farming. (The Free Silver movement was right that the United States needed more currency; it's just that their mechanism was wrong.) The stage was set for a farming depression.
Creigh, pp. 124-126, tells much the same story. The movement for help for farmers arose out of bad weather and bad harvests in the 1880s (plus probably mis-management; the years from 1879-1886 had been unusually wet, so people didn't realize that their lands were arid in normal years, and settled where they should not have; Hicks, p. 18), combined with a feeling that Nebraska's politics was dominated by the railroad interests (Nebraska had two major railroads, the Union Pacific and the Burlington, and of course they were absolutely necessary to get Nebraska crops to the markets in the east).
"To make their voices heard, the farmers organized various groups; the first Nebraska chapter of the Farmers' Alliance began in 1880, and before long, the Nebraska state organization was the largest in the country. By the late 1880s, the Nebraska newspaper, the Farmers' Alliance, a powerful political organ, began urging that the organization take political action. Nebraska members of other groups, including some which had been founded as political parties, joined the coalition -- the Greenback Party, the Anti-Monopoly League, later the Knights of Labor. In early 1890,a scorching hot season, the combined forces circulated petitions, and in less than thirty days, collected fifteen thousand signatures, calling for a People's State Independent Convention" (Creigh, p. 125). They formed a party, variously known a the People's Independent State Party, the People's Party, the Independent Party, or the Populist Party. "They nominated as governor the president of the Nebraska Alliance, John Power, a white-bearded man who lived in a sod house on his homestead in Hitchcock county; he headed the slate that included candidates for the state legislature as well as for Congress" (Creigh, p. 125).
Similarly Hicks, pp. 98-101; local Alliance chapters were common by 1880, but it was harder to form state organizations. Nebraska's was the first, but the national organization didn't do much in the mid-1880s; the farmers were doing relatively well (Hicks, pp. 100-101). Then the rain stopped.
In 1887, the national organization really took shape (Hicks, p. 102). "By 1890 the secretary's office reported new members coming in at the rate of a thousand a week, and with pardonable exaggeration predicted a total of two million members in the immediate future. Kansas alone claimed a hundred and thirty thousand [almost 10% of the state's population!], and the other frontier states where times were hard, especially Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, did not lag far behind" (Hicks, p. 103).
(To be sure, Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America, Oxford University Press, 1976, is cited by Kellie/Nelsen, p. 160, that "'real' Populism never existed in Nebraska" -- but Nelsen argues that this is ignoring the faction to which Luna Kellie belonged, and quotes Goodwyn about Kellie and the people in her area, "From [the counties around Custer County] came authentic greenbackers, a tireless reform editor and -- a sure sign of the culture of Populism -- movement songs." A major history of Nebraska, Addison Sheldon's Nebraska: The Land and the People, 1931, also mentions several of Kellie's songs, according to Kellie/Nelsen, p. 161, although not the ones in the Index.)
There were actually two "Alliances," one northern, one southern, with similar goals -- they remained separate because the northern organization admitted Blacks, which was anathema to the southern (Hicks, p.108). The southern organization was also more secretive -- the leadership made plans without telling the membership (Hicks, p.120). In 1889, they held a joint convention in St. Louis, with other groups such as the Knights of Labor also showing up (Hicks, p. 115), but the attempts at union failed over the same old problems (Hicks, p. 119). Still, they informally supported many of the same goals: Inflationist monetary policy, government control of railroads and other means of transport, regulation of who owned the land (Hicks, p. 124).
The Northern Alliance was not strong geographically, but it believed in education, and it published its viewpoints in various local newspapers, including "the Farmers' Alliance (originally the Alliance), published at Lincoln, Nebraska, by Jay Burrows, for a time president of the Northern Alliance. This was the source of most of the Kellie songs reprinted by Welsh and the Federal Writers Project pamphlet.
By this time, the Alliance was becoming overtly political -- it had supported individual politicians all along, its attempts to bring about reforms had so often failed that many members felt they simply had to give up on simply working with regular politicians who made promises then forgot them (Hicks, p. 151. In Nebraska, for instance, the Alliance's big anti-railroad measure, the "Newberry Bill," passed the legislature but was vetoed, and they couldn't override the veto; Hicks, pp. 183-184). In 1890, various Alliance factions and allies gathered to build a party. "The convention... met in Lincoln on July 29, 1890; and, with the support of such Grangers, Knights of Labor, and Union Laborites as cared to cooperate, it nominated a People's Independent ticket, headed by John H. Powers, president of the state Alliance, as candidate for governor."
Thousands gathered for rallies -- with their crops dead of drought, they had nothing else to do. And they sang -- Creigh, p. 126, mentions songs, "The Mortgage Has Taken the Farm, Mary," and "Good-bye, Old Party, Good-bye." They won two of Nebraska's three house seats (William Jennings Bryan took the third), and control of the legislature; they just missed taking the governor's mansion. In 1892, they lost control of the state legislature but retained enough votes that no party controlled; the Democrats and Populists entered an uneasy alliance that passed at least some reformist legislation.
The movement was at least somewhat open to female participation -- e.g. in Kansas one of their candidates was Mary Elizabeth Lease, a lawyer and mother of four who gave us the slogan, "What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more Hell" (Hicks, pp. 159-160).
Into this stew entered Luna E. Sanford Kellie (Mrs. J. T. Kellie), was a prolific creator of poems about the Farmers' Alliance. She operated in the Joe Hill mode of setting her lyrics to well-known tunes.
There is a short biography of Kellie on the Nebraska Historical Society web site as well as material in the memoirs listed below. Luna Elizabeth Stanford was born on June 9, 1857 in Pipestone, Minnesota, she was the eldest of five children of James Manley "J. M." Sanford and Martha Lois Smith Sanford (Kellie/Nelsen, p.148). Her father was a railroad worker and farmer.
She married James Thompson "J. T." Kellie (died 1918/9) on the last day of 1874. A few years later, along with several relatives, they settled in Kearney County, Nebraska (Kellie/Nelsen, p. xv). That's in south-central Nebraska, rough south of Grand Island. It wasn't the worst part of Nebraska -- generally speaking, the state gets drier as you move west -- but neither was it the most fertile.
They lived a difficult life on the Nebraska prairie; she bore eleven children (two of whom died young; Kellie/Nelsen, p. xvii. They were her second boy and first girl, so she lost two of her first three children; Kellie/Nelsen, pp. 96-97). If I understand her statement, they were so poor when they came to Nebraska that they didn't even try to get store credit (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 32); it was a year and a half before Luna Kellie first went to the local store (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 54). In their first years in Nebraska, they lived mostly on potatoes and just "got along" (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 32).
Kellie's memoir almost never includes any dates or references to datable events, but they seem to have done reasonably well after those first hard years; for several years, there are references to improvements to their land and increasing material goods (although they were still working very long, hard days). But then came a year (Kellie doesn't say which year, but Nelsen on p. 159 of the Afterword says it was 1884 when they lost their land) when the cost of raising an acre of wheat was $5.00, and the price of the wheat from that acre was just $4.50 (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 121). It was an immediate crisis that had the Kellies discussing leaving their land. In the end, they did move, but not far -- they traded their parcel of land to Luna's father for a plot of his that was not as convenient for the father (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 121; Nelsen on p. 159 says that this resulted in a move to Adams County, and regards it as a "loss of their homestead").
Of this decision, Kellie wrote, "We realized that the best 7 years of our lives had been given to enrich the B. & M. R. R." (That is, I believe, the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad.) It's not hard to understand why she became an activist! Her "personal memoir" ends shortly after that.
Her first political activity, probably in the 1880s although she does not give a date, was a campaign to allow women to participate in local schools and school boards -- at least widows whose children were in school and who had no husband to speak for them (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 110). She didn't even attend the Farmers' Alliance meetings at first; it was her husband who was involved (Kellie/Nelsen, p.115). But that changed as they became more involved in the school board (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 125, says that one or the other of them was involved with the board almost constantly up to the time the memoir was written).
Although she had written a few items for them prior to 1894, she had never even been to an event of the statewide Farmers' Alliance until she and her husband decided to attend one in nearby Hastings, Nebraska in that year. Republicans had accused the Alliance of defaming Nebraska, and calling on people to "Stand up for Nebraska" -- so she took that as her text, and wrote a speech by that name. This earned her so much attention -- at the conference and in the newspapers -- that it earned her an on-the-spot nomination to be the Alliance secretary (Kellie/Nelsen, p.135). The first ballot was divided among several counties' own candidates, but the second ballot was "almost unanimous" in electing her (Kelle/Nelsen, pp. 135-136). It had been a paid position, and they wanted her to move to Lincoln, but she did not feel up to that, so she convinced them to let her set aside a small room in her house to maintain the Alliance's records (Kellie/Nelsen, pp. 136-137). Just as well she didn't move, since she was never paid (Nelsen, on p. 168 of Kellie/Nelsen, thinks that this was prejudice against women, but it seemed to me that there was just no money. Whatever the explanation, she certainly worked long hours without pay.)
She was not an obvious candidate to support a third party: "I had always been raised a strict republican and taught that by freeing the slaves and saving the nation that [Lincoln? the Republican party?] had done a wonderful and God-led work in spite of the wicked democrats" (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 104). But her husband had disagreed, so perhaps a third party was a good marital compromise. Kellie became what was apparently called a "Middle-of-the-road Populist" (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 163, meaning one who didn't want to try to convert the existing parties; she even softened her stand on women's suffrage to avoid raising an issue that could divide the new party. Kellie/Nelsen, p. 166, seems to say that her "Stand for Nebraska" speech was also in support of this position.
Her tenure as an Alliance official was not a happy one. She had to learn the job by doing it (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 168), and there was apparently a dispute about what she was authorized to do, and pay for, in her role. And no one had trained her in proper bookkeeping (Kellie/Nelsen, pp. 138-139). What perhaps hurt more was the steady decline in membership from 1890 to 1894. The organization felt that it needed more communication with its members, so they started a newspaper, initially called Wealth Makers but soon renamed the Prairie Home (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 171), that would be delivered free to the members. At first, they hired a typesetter, but this proved to require too much traveling, so they bought a second-hand printing press. For a while, they paid a typesetter, but eventually Kellie took over the job of editing and printing the paper (Kellie/Nelsen, pp. 140-142). The whole family took part (one 1899 issue recorded, "This is strictly a woman's or rather a girl's paper this week.... The editor [Luna Kellie herself] inks this week, so you know who to blame if you can hardly read your paper. Jessie runs the Washington press, Edith, Luna, and Lois (aged 10, 8, and 6) take turns 'jogging' folding and wrapping" -- Kellie/Nelsen, p. 171. The lack of punctuation is typical of Luna Kellie).
It's not hard to see why they had to scrimp. By this time the Nebraska alliance was so broke that it couldn't pay its national dues. (How much of this is the failure of their third party in 1892, and how much due to the poverty of the farmers, is not clear.) In 1896, the organization had total income for the year of just $143.03. (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 142. No wonder Kellie wasn't getting paid for her newspaper work!). By 1898, receipts were down to $56.38 and the Alliance was not able to pay its bills (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 143). It effectively ceased to exist after that.
In 1900, she was nominated as "Populist Candidate of Public Instruction," whatever that is. But Asa Taylor, the leader of the Union Reform movement died soon after -- of overwork, Kellie claimed -- in 1901, and "both daughter Jessie and myself felt our last chance was gone. Hardly a reform paper remained alive and the abuse was hard to bear. Jessie[,] now 19[,] had given the largest part of 5 years to the paper work with hardly a cent of pay and no time for pleasure" (Kellie/Nelson,, p. 144). Luna Kellie herself had seen her health badly affected. They gave up the paper, selling it (on credit) for half of what they felt the equipment was worth. "And so I never vote [... I] did not for years hardly look at a political paper. I feel that nothing is likely to be done to benefit the farming class in my lifetime. So I busy myself with my garden and chickens and have given up all hope of making the world any better" (Kellie/Nelsen, p. 145. The preceding sentences are the close of her "political memoir"; this was written before her family autobiography but covers later events).
The cover of the last issue of "The Prairie Home" (October 25, 1901) is shown on p. 178 of Kellie/Nelsen. Her constant striving had pretty clearly caused her to burn out, and the paper wasn't making money. According to Kellie/Nelsen, pp. 176-177, the paper had gradually become more of an actual paper, and less of a political organ, over the years, as Kellie bounced around from one quixotic political group to another over the years, but it remained a tremendous amount of work that didn't seem to accomplish anything.
Luna Kellie doesn't talk much about her music (the first time she mentions singing is 101 pages into her 124 page personal memoir), but after her fourth child was born, she wrote "I was able to resume my singing, something always did unconsciously unless too unhappy" (Kellie/Nelsen, pp. 103-104).
In addition to her time in the Nebraska Farmers' Alliance, she served in the Temperance movement as well as being active in the Methodist Church. Her efforts met little success and she spent her later years in Arizona.
The memoir I have cited as Kellie/Nelsen is now apparently available as a free download. It contains her political memoir, a text of "Stand Up for Nebraska" (pp. 127-132 of Kellie/Nelsen) and a long biographical sketch that she wrote for one of her daughters. It does not contain her songs; it is not intended to be a complete examination of her work -- it was Nelsen's undergraduate thesis topic. Thus there is actually much more that might be done in the way of a Kellie biography.
The Afterword of Kellie/Nelsen (p. 147) tells us that "Her writing reveals her living conditions, familial networks, the division of labor in her home, and women's roles in the Farmers' Alliance and the Populist party. Her accounts help explain what motivated women to become involved in politics. Furthermore, they illustrate how the Middle-of-the-Road Alliance movement -- so-called because members took a middle ground between the Republican and Democratic parties -- evolved, prospered, and then died when 'fusion' proponents pushed for major-party alignment."
Despite all this activity, I can find no evidence that any of her works actually went into tradition. The list of Kellie compositions cited by Welsch-NebraskaPioneerLore includes:
Marching for Freedom ("The farmers of Nebraska now are in a fearful plight"; tune: Marching Through Georgia)
The Donkey's Song ("Oh, Thomas Benton is his name, Yonc huh, yonc huh"; tune: When Johnny Comes Marching Home)
Who Has Managed ("I've traveled through the state, dear Tom"; tune: Twenty Years Ago)
The Independent Broom ("Oh, say did you ever in years long gone by"; tune: The Star-Spangled Banner)
Dear Prairie Home ("There's a dear old homestead on Nebraska's fertile plain"; tune: Darling Nellie Gray)
The Pauper's Cowhides ("Say, Richards, have you seen the paupers"; tune: Kingdom Coming)
A Song of the Times ("There's a deep and growing murmur Going up through all the land"; tune: John Brown's Body)
Poking around the Internet turns up these other Farmers' Alliance items by Kellie (mostly found in WPA Nebraska Writers' Project pamphlets from the 1930s):
Good-bye, Oh Tommy, Good-Bye ("Tom Benton is on the G. O. P.")
Vote for Me ("Oh father, dear father, come vote for me now"; tune: Father Come Home)
Our John ("John Thurston is a railroad man, As such he is a dandy"; tune: Yankee Doodle)
Spread the News ("Oh, the farmers have united, And their actions will be cited"; tune: Sweet Memorie)
The Independent Man ("I was a party man one time, The party would not mind me"; tune: The Girl I Left Behind Me; two verses of this are quoted on p. 168 of Hicks)
Senator Paddock's Sentiments ("Oh, bankers, come and give me credit"; tune Kingdom Coming [this time listed as "The Year of Jubilo"])
Lament of the G. O. P. ("Up in congress now forever Will be many a vacant chair"; tune: "The Vacant Chair")
Man the Pumps ("At the railroad's late convention They observed at last"; tune: Hold the Fort)
Queen Victoria's Lackey ("There is a man at Buzzard's Bay To whom the goldbugs daily pray")
Good-Bye, My Party, Good-Bye ("It was no more than a year ago, Good-bye, my party, good-bye"; tune: "Goodbye, My Lover, Goodbye"; quoted in full on pp. 169-170 of Hicks, so this was perhaps her most noteworthy song).
"Stand Up for Nebraska" contained a poem beginning
There's a land where the toiler is free,
Where no robber of labor can come,
Where wealth gives not power to oppress,
Nor another man's labor to own.
The whole address is on pp. 127-132 of Kellie/Nelsen, with this poem on p. 128. If this was meant to be sung -- there is no indication that it was -- I suspect it was meant to be sung to "Sweet By and By."
The poem "Stand Up for Nebraska" ("Stand up for Nebraska! from the hand of her God She came forth, bright and pure as her own golden rod"; Kellie/Nelsen, pp. 131-132) which concludes the address does not have such an obvious melody, even though it seems to be her anthem.
Kellie wasn't in the same league as Mary Elizabeth Lease in terms of fame, but it's noteworthy that Hicks, pp. 168-170, quotes one of her songs in full and another in part; apparently her work was relatively well-known. - RBW
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