hed in the Atlantic Monthly. He wrote, “the farmers, in all honesty, have attributed their misfortunes to the “constriction” in prices”, caused by lack of gold, not overproduction of their crops. He then went on to explain how that could not be possible, and we simply have produced too much wheat. Poet Vachel Lindsay wrote a poem concerning the subject, entitled, “BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN: The campaign of 1896 as viewed at the Time by a Sixteen Year Old, etc.” In it he mentioned the “Election at midnight; Boy Bryan’s defeat” which was when the Populists lost the election. He then wrote “Defeat of the wheat; victory of the letterfiles” and “Defeat…[of] the blue bells of the Rockies, and the blue bonnets of Texas, by the Pittsburgh alleys” He was simply saying that the city people had defeated them and would therefore get their way. As the amount of crops produced increased, the prices paid for them decreased. This is shown by the graphs, “Production and Prices, 1860-1895” In 1860, only 1000 million bushels of corn was produced, and the price per bushel was about $.65. By 1895 over 2500 million bushels were produced at less than $.25 per bushel. It was the same story for cotton and wheat. A farmer wrote a letter to the editor of a Populist newspaper that read, “We will get permanent relief only when the government owns the railroad and when we have government banks where we can get money at a small rate of interest.” All the problems and troubles of the farmers were caused by the invention of new farming machines. These machines were expensive and small farmers could not afford them. This forced them to be left behind when the lager farmers bought machines and increased crop yield. The overproduction caused a decrease in price, which in turn raised interest rates. The railroads were being greedy and had huge transportation fees. T...
