Henry Langford Loucks
Henry Langford Loucks was a notable Canadian-born populist organizer and political activist, primarily active in the late 19th century within the agricultural community of the Dakota Territory and later in Minnesota. Born in Hull, Canada, he moved to the Dakota Territory after marrying Florence McCraney and became heavily involved in the local farmers' struggles against economic challenges, such as falling crop prices and rising transportation costs. Loucks played a pivotal role in organizing farmers into cooperative movements, notably as president of the territory-wide Farmers Alliance, which established various cooperative ventures including warehouses and an insurance program.
His leadership extended into political realms as he became involved in the formation of the Independent Party and later the Southern Alliance, advocating for populist reforms like government ownership of railroads and a national income tax. Although he ran unsuccessfully for governor, Loucks made significant contributions to the political landscape, including support for James H. Kyle's successful senatorial campaign. A lifelong advocate for temperance and various political reforms, Loucks' influence waned after the peak of the populist movement in the 1890s. He continued to write and promote populist ideas until his death at the age of eighty-two in South Dakota. His legacy is preserved in historical accounts and archives related to the Farmers' Alliance and the broader populist movement.
Subject Terms
Henry Langford Loucks
- Henry Langford Loucks
- Born: May 24, 1846
- Died: December 29, 1928
Populist farm organizer and political activist, was born in Hull, Canada, near Ottawa. He was the son of William J. Loucks (or Lux), a merchant of Luxemburg-German origins, and Anna York, the daughter of Irish immigrants to Pennsylvania. After a public education, Henry Loucks engaged in business in Canada, Michigan, and Missouri for a number of years. In 1878 he married Florence McCraney, a Canadian woman of Irish decent; six years later they moved to the Dakota Territory to settle on a government land grant in Deuel County. They had seven children.
Upon his arrival in the Dakota Territory, Loucks became involved with the struggles of the local wheat farmers, who were caught between falling crop prices and rising costs for storage and transportation. Organizing the farmers into local groups to protest the “monopolistic practices” of the grain elevator companies and the excessive shipping rates of the railroads, he was soon elected president of the territory-wide Farmers Alliance, established by delegates from eleven counties in the spring of 1885. In addition to pressuring the legislature for reform of the grain elevator companies and railroads (a territorial railroad commission was set up that year), under Loucks’ energetic leadership, the Alliance established about thirty-five cooperative warehouses, which, although they were limited in their effectiveness, gave the farmers valuable commercial experience. Loucks also initiated an attempt to create an Alliance-controlled elevator company for the direct shipment of Dakota and Minnesota wheat to English millers, but the project was thwarted by the private grain elevator companies as well as by a shortage of capital.
Far more successful than these marketing ventures were the purchasing co-ops set up through the Dakota Farmers’ Alliance Company, a joint stock company chartered in 1887. Capitalized at $200,000 (each of the twenty thousand members paid ten dollars), the Alliance Company handled over $350,000 worth of merchandise in its first year, including binder twine (accounting for more than half the sales), coal, farm machinery, and barbed wire. The Alliance published its own newspaper, The Ruralist, and under Loucks’ leadership, began a cooperative insurance program that made hail insurance available to members at anywhere from one-half to nearly one-quarter the cost of commercial insurance. Cooperative life and fire insurance were subsequently offered as well, and soon nearly three hundred local agents were covering the Dakota Territory to sell policies while collecting Alliance dues and reporting on Alliance activities. Loucks and Alonzo Wardall, the Alliance business agent, then brought the insurance program to Minnesota; recognizing an opportunity to revive the lagging Minnesota Farmers’ Alliance, Loucks took temporary leave of his Dakota Territory duties in 1889 to become territorial manager of the Minnesota Alliance business office.
By that time, the success of local and regional Alliances had prompted a movement for a North-South merger. At an 1889 meeting held in St. Louis for that purpose, Loucks, supported by a large Dakota delegation, was elected president of the Northwest Alliance; when this group declined to join with the Southern Alliance, Loucks switched his own Dakota Alliance from the Northwest Alliance into the Southern Alliance, remained president of the Northwest Alliance, and was elected vice-president of the Southern Alliance as well.
Although the Alliances were initiated as nonpartisan organizations, the failure of their lobbying efforts within the two-party system led them into third-party politics. Loucks himself had dissuaded the Dakota Alliance from forming a third party in June 1889, but a year later he joined in the creation of the Independent Party and was nominated as its candidate for governor of the newly admitted state of South Dakota. Running on the Alliance platform of free and unlimited silver, abolition of national banks, imposition of a national income tax and real estate tax, government ownership and operation of railroads, and ballot reform, Loucks made an impressive, if uncussessful showing with forty percent of the vote; other Independent candidates won nearly seventy seats in the state legislature. In 1891 he was instrumental in fusing Independent and Democratic support for the winning senatorial campaign of James H. Kyle.
Within the Southern Alliance, Loucks became known as “an ardent third-party man,” and with the sudden death of Southern Alliance president L.S. Polk in 1892, he took over the leadership of that organization and worked to bring it in line with the newly formed National People’s Party. In July 1982 he led the South Dakota delegation to the People’s Party nominating convention in Omaha and was appointed permanent chairman. Following the election that fall, he was one of the charter members of the Industrial Union, formed by People’s Party leaders to work for the implementation of the Omaha platform. He then survived a serious challenge to his leadership of the Southern Alliance, now constituted as the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union, and was reelected president. The political movement declined after the 1892 election, however, and when Loucks presided over the final 1896 People’s Party convention, it was to accept the Democratic Party nominee, William Jennings Bryan, as their candidate. As late as 1924 Loucks himself ran as an independent senatorial candidate, but he polled less than fourteen hundred votes.
In addition to his work with the Farmers’ Alliance, Loucks was a lifelong temperance advocate. In 1898 he campaigned vigorously for the constitutional amendment introducing initiative and referendum in South Dakota and was largely credited with its success. In addition to editing the Dakota Ruralist for nearly twenty years, he wrote and privately published a number of populist works, including The New Monetary System (1893), Government Ownership of Railroads and Telegraphs (1894), The Great Conspiracy of the House of Morgan and How to Defeat It (1916), “Our Daily Bread” Must Be Freed from the Greed of Private Monopoly (1919), and How to Restore and Maintain Our Government Bonds (1921). He died at the age of eighty-two in Clearlake, South Dakota.
Letters from Loucks’ family and the the files of the Dakota Ruralist between 1888 and 1900 are kept in the archives of the South Dakota Department of History. Loucks receives some mention in the classic history of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, J. D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (1931, repr. 1961), as well as in two more recent studies, R. C. McMath, Jr., Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (1975), and L. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976). A brief obituary appears in The New York Times, December 30, 1928. See also D. Robinson’s entry in The Dictionary of American Biography (1933).