Isaac Newton Gresham
Isaac Newton Gresham, often referred to as Newt Gresham, was a significant agrarian organizer and the founder of the Farmers' Educational and Cooperative Union of America. Born in Alabama in 1858, he faced a challenging childhood marked by poverty and the early loss of both parents, which necessitated that he help raise his younger siblings. Despite his illiteracy at a young age, Gresham's determination led him to educate himself alongside children in a schoolhouse. After moving to Texas, he became actively involved in the Farmers' Alliance, advocating for farmers' rights against exploitative practices like the crop lien system.
In 1902, Gresham and a group of fellow farmers established the Farmers' Union, aiming to improve marketing strategies and secure better prices for agricultural products. The organization gained rapid membership growth and became influential across several Southern states, reflecting a diverse political makeup among its members. Gresham served in various leadership roles but faced challenges related to administrative practices and internal politics. He passed away in 1906, shortly after which the Farmers' Union honored his contributions by producing badges featuring his likeness, with proceeds benefiting his family. Although Gresham's legacy and impact on rural American life are recognized, no comprehensive biography exists, highlighting the need for further exploration into his significant yet underreported contributions.
Isaac Newton Gresham
- Isaac Newton Gresham
- Born: February 20, 1858
- Died: April 10, 1906
Agrarian organizer, founder of the Farmers’ Union, was born in Lauderdale County, Alabama, to Henry Gresham and Marcipia Narcissa (Wilcoxon) Gresham. His father was recorded as an overseer in 1850 and was later a farmer. In 1859 the family moved to Kaufman County, Texas, the state in which “Newt” Gresham was to reside for the rest of his life.
Gresham grew up in extreme poverty. Before he was twelve, both of his parents died, whereupon the eldest of the nine Gresham children were obliged to raise and support their younger siblings. He did not attend school as a child and was illiterate upon reaching maturity. As a young adult, however, so strong was his desire to learn how to read that he spent valuable working time inside a schoolhouse, learning alongside children.
In 1877, at age nineteen, Gresham moved to Hood County, where he labored as a hired farmhand. Three years later he wed Mattie King, who died soon after their marriage. In 1881 he married Ida May Cox; they had at least four children over the next nineteen years.
Gresham’s relocation to Hood County affected his life in other significant ways. The Farmers’ Alliance was founded in nearby Lampassas County the year he settled in the area, and over the next six years, Hood County was in the center of Alliance activity. Gresham joined the Alliance at an early date in its crusade to free farmers from the grip of the crop lien system, and he became increasingly involved in the organization as it grew in size and importance. He is said to have been an active member in 1881 and was also elected an organizer. Gresham spent some five years organizing for the Alliance across Texas, and in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, before returning to Hood County. Like his Alliance brethren, he followed the Alliance into the People’s party.
Upon the demise of the Alliance and the defeat of the Populists in 1896, Gresham began a career in newspapers. In 1897, he and Ashley Crockett—a grandson of Davy Crockett—purchased The Graphic Truth in Granbury. Gresham’s passionate interest in the paper soon became well known in Hood County. It is said that he never removed anyone from his mailing list and would accept vegetables and other farm produce as payment from his hard-pressed subscribers. His fervor notwithstanding, however, Gresham’s association with the Granbury paper ended in 1899, when he moved the family to Greenville, Hunt County, where he briefly operated another newspaper. One year later, the Greshams moved again, to Point, Rains County, where Gresham purchased The Point Times and rented a small farm.
Although now a rural editor, Gresham was still, at heart, an organizer, and he sought a rebirth of the farmers’ movement. He felt that one of the lessons of the 1890s was that if the movement was to succeed, it would have to steer clear of partisan politics. Gresham devoted much of the next two years to formulating plans on a borrowed typewriter—the only one in Point—for a new farm organization, one based on the old, “nonpolitical” Alliance model. Neither his ideas nor potential recruits came easily, however, and he ended by placing his family in severe economic jeopardy.
In 1902 Gresham’s efforts bore fruit. On August 28 of that year, he and nine others—mainly farmers—met in the nearby village of Emory and formed the Farmers’ Educational and Cooperative Union of America. The purpose of the organization was to assist its members in “marketing and obtaining better prices for their products . . . and to cooperate with them in the collection of their interest.” Gresham’s desire that the new organization be based on the Alliance model was quite evident, as even the official name of the Farmers’ Union closely resembled that of the Alliance (the National Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union). Furthermore, his wish that the new organization steer clear of partisan politics was given a good start, as was reflected in the political affiliations of the ten charter members: three Populists, five Democrats, one Socialist, and one Independent. Gresham was elected the union’s first general organizer, and five days later the first local was organized in the schoolhouse in the neighboring hamlet of Smyrna.
Although it had taken Newt Gresham two years to interest others in a “farmers’ union,” once the organization was founded, it grew at an amazing pace. Other organizers, many of them veterans of earlier Populist crusades, were obtained, and they fanned out across Texas and into the Oklahoma and Indian Territories, winning new recruits with calls for the establishment of farmer cooperatives, crop poolings, progressive legislation, and the end of the crop lien system. Nearby southern states were the next targets of the organizers, and at the first Farmers’ Union convention in Texas in 1904, it was claimed that membership had reached 50,-000. One year later, union officials asserted that there were 200,000 members in twelve states and territories, primarily in the South.
Even with the apparent success of the organization, Gresham’s stature within the Farmers’ Union during its first years was not completely secure. He became caught in the crossfire that raged during that period between a powerful Texas faction and the out-of-state membership over national control of the organization. As a newspaperman, he also suffered the criticism of some members who felt that the union was being controlled by “nonfarmers.”
Gresham’s greatest setback, however, was the result of his own lack of administrative expertise. In 1904 he was elected secretary-treasurer of the union, a position he held for several months. During this time, however, in his zeal for building up the organization at a rapid pace, Gresham avoided following anything vaguely resembling general accounting practices and instead carried out most of the union’s transactions unrecorded. When this was revealed at the August 1905 convention, he was not reelected to any union position—even though his honesty was never seriously in question.
He soon recovered from this rebuff. In December 1905 he was elected to the position of national organizer, and his standing within union ranks—even though he was thrown out of his position as chief organizer at a quasilegal union convention in March 1906—appeared to be on the upswing. How firm was his status is uncertain, however, for on April 10, 1906, Newt Gresham died, at forty-eight, after a five-day illness; he was never to know how significant a force in rural American life the Farmers’ Union was to become. A year after his death, the general convention of the union voted to honor him by producing official badges upon which his picture appeared. Profits from the sales of the badges went to Gresham’s family, left destitute by his death.
No collection of Gresham’s papers appears to exist in public archives, although a large collection of historic Farmers’ Union manuscript materials is housed at the University of Colorado. There is no full-length biography of Newt Gresham. The most helpful secondary sources on his life are R. L. Hunt, A History of Farmer Movements in the Southwest (1935); C. F. Barrett, The Mission, History and Times of the Farmers’ Union (1909); V. L. Gresham, A Family Named Gresham (cs. 1977), copies of which are located in the Library of Congress and the Alabama State Department of Archives and History; and C. B. Fisher, “The Farmers’ Union,” University of Kentucky Studies in Economics and Sociology, no. 2 (1920).