We are all familiar with the slogan, Power to the People. Nevertheless, few of us can probably identify the origin of this phrase. Point in fact, Power to the People, became a battle cry of the populist movement in America, which came about during the 1880’s and 1890’s in the South and Midwest of the United States.

During this period, which is often referred to as the Gilded Age of America, industrial moguls accumulated massive stores of wealth as the American economy grew by leaps and bounds. Conversely, however, the incomes of the laboring classes in American material relations remained stagnant, as increasing portions of the American populace fell into abject poverty. It was not uncommon during this period to observe women and children, belonging to farming communities, in bare feet. This era of American history was marked by an intensified stratification between those who benefited from the American economy and those who suffered the pains of exploitation when toiling in the conditions that were dictated by the few, the rich, and the powerful; to sum, the elite.

Farmers during this period of American material history found themselves in a system of economic relations where they were forced to enter into credit agreements with local town agents, in which the farmers had excessive portions of their agricultural production excised under the dynamics of the credit lean. Since every year - in preparation of the next season’s agricultural production - the farmers were forced to go into debt in order to procure the necessary materials for planting and harvesting, the credit agreement with the local town agent, or clerk, was impossible to avoid; thus, rendering the farmers susceptible to the excessively one-sided terms imposed by the town clerk.

The agrarians who suffered under this condition were the subjects of constant humiliation – as a result of their poverty as well as their dependency upon the local town clerks who managed the farmers’ credit lines.  This degradation reinforced among those it negatively affected an understanding of life and their lots in society that was fatalistically destined to persist under the encumbrance of destitute poverty.  These conditions, which amounted to serfdom, seemed almost impassible, due to the inability of the farmer to ever escape the credit lean, which was a necessary accomplishment if the farmer was ever to negotiate more equitable arrangements with other economic interests, so that the farmer could demand a fair return for the agricultural commodities that he produced.

These desperate conditions, from which the individual agrarian could scarcely ever even conceive of escaping, however, created the necessary antecedents for collective mobilization on the parts of the Midwestern and Southern agriculturalists.  This – in and of itself – was an accomplishment; especially considering that the American ideology at the time considered the American agriculturalist to be a class distinct from workers who sold their labor in return for wages.  The American farmer – according to the Jeffersonian mythology of the citizen agriculturalist – possessed a stature that did not admit to its subservience to other sections in the economy and society. Therefore, the thought for the need of organizing in order to collectively bargain for the improvement of their situations was an alien interpretation.  Nevertheless, the downtrodden rural poor overcame this ideological obstacle