Stephen McLallin

• Stephen McLallin
• Born: June 22, 1837
• Died: March 4, 1897

Populist editor and party worker, was born in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, to James McLallin and Lydia McLallin. He attended common schools and the academy at Meadville, Pennsylvania. In November 1858 he married Maria Holman, they had a son, who died at the age of four, and three daughters, Ellen, Lenore, and Grace. In 1861 McLallin enlisted in Berdan’s Sharpshooters, Company 1, First New York Regiment, and served throughout the Civil War. In 1868 he was graduated from Albany Medical School and the following year moved to Meriden, Kansas. He practiced medicine until 1888, when he became editor of The Meriden Tribune, which was merged with the Advocate in 1889.

Under McLallin’s direction, the Advocate soon became one of the most influential voices in the rapidly growing rural protest movement in Kansas, and soon after the paper moved to Topeka in 1890 it was named the official newspaper of the Kansas Farmers’ Alliance. Although McLallin was a scholarly humanist of an austere and undemonstrative bent, he became deeply involved in the hurly-burly of Kansas politics and did as much as any individual to determine the course of partisan events in the heyday of the Populist crusade.

Although the farmers’ organizations that were formed throughout the country during the depression of the 1880s were in agreement on the issues of absentee landlords, railroad and mortgage rates, and the need for an expanded currency, the southern and northern alliances differed in tactics, structure, and criteria for membership. By 1889 these differences had been largely settled, and the style of the southern Alliance, which favored a strong central organization, secret rituals and oaths, and the exclusion of lawyers and businessmen, had become dominant in Kansas and in the northern states. State alliances were affiliated with the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union and maintained contact with other reform elements through the State Reform Association.

The great question agitating the Farmers’ Alliance in the late 1880s was whether to continue as a pressure group, endorsing whichever major party candidate appeared more friendly to its interests, or to join with other reform groups and form a third party. McLallin’s Advocate led the way in calling for third-party action, repeatedly pointing out that “boring from within” the major parties had been tried for nearly twenty years without altering the caliber of party leadership and that ancient partisan animosities, particularly those connected with the Civil War, made it impossible for the farmers’ movement as a whole to cooperate with either major party.

The State Reform Association was also in favor of a third party; apparently acting on its advice, the state president of the Kansas Farmers’ Alliance called a meeting of county Alliance presidents in Topeka in March 1890 “to consult about matters of vital importance to our order and farmers and laborers in general.” As McLallin later revealed, this meant taking preliminary steps to form a third party. At this meeting the Alliance stated that its members would no longer be divided along party lines, called on the Knights of Labor and other reform organizations to join it, and directed the president to appoint a member from each congressional district to constitute a central committee.

In response to this call, delegates from the Farmers’ Alliance, the Knights of Labor, the National Benefit Association, the Grange, and the Single-Tax Clubs met and issued a call for still another convention, which nominated a full slate of candidates for state offices in the election of 1890. The Alliance party entered tickets in several other southern and western states that year, and nowhere was it more successful than in Kansas, where, with the help of the urban-oriented Citizens’ Alliance, it elected five representatives to Congress and a senator, William A. Peffer, editor of another farm paper.

McLallin and other Kansas Alliance activists then stepped up their pressure for a national third party. McLallin headed the Kansas delegation to the December 1890 meeting of the southern Alliance in Ocala, Florida, where the case against cooperating with the Democrats was argued. He was a delegate to the convention of the Confederation of Industrial Organizations—including Knights of Labor, greenbackers, single taxers, prohibitionists, and other reform groups—that met in St. Louis on Washington’s Birthday, 1892, to organize the national People’s party. McLallin was then elected chairman of the Kansas delegation to the party’s first convention, which nominated General James A. Weaver for president and issued the famous Omaha Platform of 1892, embodying the reform proposals of the previous two decades. He was active in the 1892 Kansas convention of the People’s party, whose nominees swept the state, and was honored at the state inaugural ceremonies in 1893.

During this period McLallin and his able young associate editor, Annie L. Diggs, who like him believed that the function of journalism was to educate, were turning the Advocate into a leading Populist weekly with a circulation of 80,000 and a readership that stretched far beyond the borders of Kansas. The Advocate provided its readers with well-informed and thoughtful discussions of political philosophy and personalities and with a running commentary on such national events as the Homestead and Pullman strikes, the arrest of Coxey’s army, and Supreme Court decisions on the income tax and the trusts. In addition to being a good stylist, McLallin was a meticulous fact-checker, and it was the Advocate’s reputation for honesty and accuracy that inspired the loyalty of so many readers. In the early days of populism, Diggs later said, a frequent response to political rumor and debate was, “We do not know what we think of this or that. We will wait until the Advocate comes. Dr. McLallin will give us the truth.”

Of equal significance were McLallin’s editorials on such issues as free silver—which he, like many Populists, thought was dominating and distorting the reform movement; greenbackism, of which he was one of the most persuasive exponents; and socialism, which by the early 1890s he was discussing sympathetically, pointing out that the most successful operations of American society—the Post Office, the public school system, and municipally owned electric plants—were socialistic. When, after a brief period of ownership by Senator Peffer, the renamed Advocate and News announced itself to be a socialist paper in 1898, it added that in this policy it was following in McLallin’s footsteps.

McLallin retired from the Advocate in 1896 and died thirteen months later. He was fifty-nine. In a memorial address to the Kansas State Historical Association, of which McLallin had been an officer and director for years, Annie Diggs said he would want to be remembered “as one who strove to aid in bringing about a state of social and individual order which would admit of a fair chance in life for every man, woman, and child in the nation and the world.” Along with many other Populists of intellectual and scholarly stamp, however, McLallin was for many years neglected by historians who emphasized the bizarre and eccentric aspects of populism. Recent state-level studies have done much to correct this, and McLallin’s restoration to his rightful place as a significant figure in the history of American reform has been greatly helped by the large proportion of selections from the Advocate in Norman Pollack’s The Populist Mind.

The files of the Advocate are in the Kansas State Historical Society. For biographical data see A. L. Diggs, Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society, vol. 6 (1897-1900), and her article in The Arena, April 1892. G. Clanton’s excellent Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (1969) puts McLallin’s achievements in historical context. See also L. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976).