Charles William Macune

• Charles William Macune
• Born: May 20, 1851
• Died: November 3, 1940

Agrarian and monetary reformer, was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the younger child and only son of William Macune, a Scotch-Irish blacksmith and Methodist preacher, and Mary Almira (McAfee) Macune. At the time of his birth the family was migrating to California. In 1852 his father died of cholera, and the family was forced to turn back. Macune received a limited common-school education in Freeport, Illinois, before going to work on a farm at the age of ten. He went to California in 1869, to Kansas in 1870, and in 1871 to Texas, where he settled down. In 1876 he married Sally Vickery, with whom he had five children: Charles William, John Wright, Mary, Sarah, and Dennis. He read law and medicine, qualified as a physician, and opened a practice. He lived in frontier obscurity until 1885, when the Alliance movement, then spreading across Texas, engulfed him.

If irony is the handmaiden of American radicalism, surely some of the sharpest ironies of all befell C. W. Macune. In the world of economic radicalism that characterized the antimonopoly greenback movements of the late nineteenth century, Macune was, in terms of greenback economic theory, one of the most radical of all. Within the world of cooperative utopianism that paralleled and overlapped the antimonopoly tradition, Macune was arguably the most creative single practitioner and theorist of cooperation in nineteenth-century America. And there can be little dispute at all that he was the most successful single architect and builder of mass movements in American history, for he was the chief organizer and guiding ideologue of the largest citizen movement of nineteeth-century America: the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union.

In practical as well as theoretical terms, Macune, in short, made more sustained contributions, and a greater variety of contributions, to the theory and practice of mass democratic movement-building than any other single political activist of his time. Yet, though he did more than any other American to bring into existence the organized mass of agrarians who were to constitute the foot troops of America’s largest third-party movement—the People’s party—Macune himself never became a Populist. Indeed, the very creation of the People’s party in 1892 marked the end of his leadership within the agrarian movement. To summarize these complexities in one sentence, the movement Macune was instrumental in building overwhelmed him and brought “populism” into the American political vocabulary.

The central irony of his life lay in the fact that Charles Macune’s analysis of early industrial capitalism propelled him to a radical economic position that could only be achieved by political means he regarded as hopeless. To the consternation of his radical comrades in the Alliance movement, and to the complete bafflement of his critics in mainstream America, Macune remained committed to the two-party system throughout his long life. He thus experienced a public career of rare complexity and tension—as an advocate of structural alteration of the economic system that somehow was to be achieved within the framework of the existing political structure. His public actions, taken in the aggregate, violated most of the canons of the traditional left and right and, historically, have left him with few admirers. Yet it is impossible to visualize how American populism could have happened at all had he not played the central role that he did. Irony, indeed, was his handmaiden.

By the time Macune joined it, the Alliance movement, building upon the inherited Grange organizing tradition of cash cooperative stores as an aid for middle-class farmers, had experimented for eight years in new modes of cooperative marketing as well as purchasing. These techniques had a broad class appeal; penniless smallholders and tenants could profit from successful cooperative marketing techniques even when they lacked the funds to participate in and benefit from cooperative purchasing schemes. The momentum generated by these years of cooperative experimentation had welded a discernible internal organizational cohesion as well as a certain restless political energy among the leadership. Macune, elected chairman of the Texas Alliance’s executive committee in 1886, created an organizational formula that gave coherent and expansive expression to both.

From long exposure to the underlying conditions of commerce along the agricultural frontier, Macune knew intimately the pattern of usurious credit that yoked small landowners and tenants to supply merchants in a “crop lien” system that produced widespread peonage. His initial innovation was grounded in a dramatic extension of the early cooperative marketing experiments of the Farmers’ Alliance into the world’s first large-scale working-class credit cooperative. Deeply impressed by the elaborate internal organization of the Texas Alliance (over a thousand local “lecturers” conveyed the Alliance organizing message in 1886), Macune mobilized this edifice of internal communication into a statewide cotton-marketing cooperative capped by a centralized state exchange to deal with cotton buyers in New England and England. The “big store of the Alliance” was an idea Alliance lecturers knew how to explain, and farmers across the South and West quickly understood what they needed. The national organizing campaign of the Alliance, begun in the South in 1887, had by 1892 reached into forty-three states and recruited some two million of the nation’s most hard-pressed agriculturalists.

Macune, as the national organization’s president, managed this continent-wide expansion with remarkable poise and skill, absorbing local groups and deflecting potentially divisive controversy by avoiding personal recriminations and ceding positions of authority and decisionmaking to regional representatives. He did this with some confidence, for he understood that the controlling dynamics of cooperation precluded much variety in terms of tactics. Early on—by 1889, the year that the Farmers’ Alliance Exchange of Texas collapsed—Macune understood that the basic dilemma confronting the centralized Alliance exchange was the same one that haunted the individual farmers who joined the Alliance—the absence of nonusurious credit. The economic and, ultimately, the organizational crises that this circumstance visited upon the agrarian movement bore most heavily upon Macune himself, and in 1889—shortly before he left his post to become editor of the Alliance’s newspaper the National Economist, in Washington, DC.—he offered his solution in the form of the innovative Sub-Treasury Land and Loan System.

Macune’s subtreasury plan was essentially a monetary system providing an alternative to the private banking system that had emerged during the development of early industrial capitalism. The power to issue currency and the control of interest rates were to be lodged not on Wall Street but rather in a U.S. Treasury-based central bank and in thousands of subtreasuries through which the nation’s agricultural staples would be marketed. Though necessarily elaborate, given its purposes, the subtreasury system was also workable, for it was grounded in an understanding of the relation of the money supply to population growth and national productivity that was truly “modern.” The plan was intended to provide the American economy with a flexible monetary system some two generations before John Maynard Keynes finally succeeded in legitimating the concept in the midst of a worldwide depression.

In the 1890s those who most directly influenced commerce, finance, public education, and public opinion were not so shaken by this idea as their counterparts would be in the chaos of the 1930s; they were easily able to discredit the Alliance financial program as a “funny-money” scheme of crackpots. The denunciation of the subtreasury plan by both major parties left Alliance partisans—and seemingly Macune himself—with no option but to create their own political institution: a mass-based farmer-labor third party. Alliance greenbackers in every echelon of the national agrarian movement pressed for just such a “final step” in the movement’s political evolution. But Macune resisted, for the simple reason that he thought party loyalties, grounded in Civil War loyalties and deeply ingrained family voting traditions, were too much for a new party to overcome. On the eve of the creation of the People’s party, the tension within the Alliance was between radical greenbackers who wanted a new party, such as Henry Vincent in Kansas and William Lamb in Texas, and the consummate greenbacker of them all, Charles Macune, who did not.

Perhaps the supreme irony of Macune’s career was the fact that his subtreasury system became the basis of radical agitation within the Alliance lecturing system: Since both “old parties” opposed it, the new third party was said to be absolutely necessary. Macune’s plan, as advanced by his rivals, defeated Macune and brought populism into national politics. The third-party effort was a struggle the radicals felt had to be waged and one Macune felt could not be won.

The ideological underpinnings of the People’s party’s culminating political statement—the Omaha Platform of 1892—represented Macune’s deepest organization and theoretical contributions to the agrarian movement, but it was carried into political combat without him. Supplanted by the new third party, the Alliance movement withered. Its cooperative ideas could bear fruit only if the new party came to power and provided the necessary national credit by legislating the subtreasury system.

Macune returned to Texas, where he practiced law and became a Methodist preacher and missionary to the poor. His wife died in 1927. He voted Democratic throughout the turbulent 1890s and thereafter, and took no significant part in politics prior to his death in Fort Worth, Texas, at the age of eighty-nine, at the height of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. He was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Fort Worth. His legacy was his carefully crafted speeches, steeped in earnest economic arguments, and the testimony of his contemporaries that he was an effective public speaker whose reasoned appeals for justice brought confidence to intimidated people. His career offers subtle instruction to all who think “changing things” is easy.

A manuscript of Macune’s memoirs, “The Texas Alliance” (1921), is at the University of Texas Library. Macune’s writings and speeches have never been collected, and he has never been the subject of an extensive biography. A sketch of his life can be found in W. S. Morgan, History of the Wheel and Alliance, and Impending Revolution (1891). His Alliance and Populist career is detailed in L. C. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976). An obituary appeared in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, November 3, 1940.