A Nebraska Populist and Her Times

A Prairie Populist: The Memoirs of Luna Kellie (University of Iowa Press, 1992).  Edited by Jane Taylor Nelsen, Foreword by Albert E. Stone.

Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2007)

About 1925, Luna Kellie sat down and wrote:

Secretary, Historical Society of Nebraska

In turning the records of the old State Alliance into your hands, I wish to give a little account of my stewardship.

What follows is the account of a life in Nebraska from 1876 to about 1901.  She wrote 160 pages, longhand, on the backs of unused National Farmers’ Alliance membership certificates.  She started with a relatively short political memoir covering her time as secretary of the Populist Nebraska Farmers’ Alliance from 1894.  She then looped back to tell the story of the earlier part of her life, starting with her marriage to J.T. Kellie on the last day of 1874.

Luna’s father, J.M. Sanford, filed on a homestead and timber claim in Kearney County, Nebraska, in 1875.  The next year, Luna and her husband took a homestead claim in nearby Adams County.  The personal memoir concentrates on the seven years they lived on the homestead.

Life was incredibly hard.  They lived in a dirt floor soddy.  Their first “house” was a dugout with an earthen roof that leaked.  A later, thicker, roof collapsed and they spend a couple days digging out their possessions.  Locusts destroyed everything in their first year.  They lost two little toddlers.  They worked constantly and had no money.  Yet, Luna remembered the time fondly.

As we had no kerosene nor fat enough to make a light with a rag as many did (what they called a slut) I would get the table set out by the south door where the light would strike it and gather old corn stalks and old grass, anything that would make a light fire.  Then having set the table with such green stuff as I could gather from the garden as soon as he came I would light the fire and make the shorts [into] pancake and we would sit in the moonlight and eat our supper….  After supper we would sit on the doorstep in the moonlight.  I would have my head on his shoulder with his arm around me and Willie likely on his lap.  We would be very tired for we never worked less than 18 hours a day, but even so he used to say he thought he was the happiest man in the world with his family all in his arms and indeed I would not have changed places with anyone on earth.  Sitting now in the sunset glow of life I realize that those summer evenings were the best of life.  We had youth, love, and hope.  What more could anyone want?

Yet no matter how hard they worked, they seemed unable to get ahead.  They were boxed in by banks and railroads.  High railroad freight rates increased the cost of materials and reduced what farmers could get for their grain.  The banks charged usurious interest rates. 

Here was a typical grain farmer’s situation.  He would borrow money in the spring for seed at 6% per month.  The first three months’ interest was deducted in advance, so the farmer would receive $82 of a $100 loan.  On selling his crop, the farmer would pay off the remaining principal plus any additional interest that had accrued.  Typically, he couldn’t, so the loan would be rolled over to the next year.  Eventually the loan would be called and the farmer would lose the land.

What money the Kellies did make came mostly from Luna’s side-hustles.  Until a railroad spur was built, they ran a hostel for freight drivers.  She also earned good money selling eggs and excess chickens.  But after an 1883 harvest failure, J.T. did the math and realized it cost him $5 an acre to raise $4.50 worth of wheat.  The more sod he broke, the more money he would lose.  The Kellies had a softer landing than most.  They sold their homestead to Luna’s father for his timber claim and some cash.  In March, 1884 they moved to the timber claim.

Life looked dark only I was glad to be relieved of the mortgage.  We both realized that in leaving our first home we had left not only our youth but most of our hope there.  While one has youth and hope or either of life, life is not a burden, work is not drudgery but without them it becomes almost unbearable.  We realized that the best 7 years of our lives had been given to enrich the B & M R.R.  That they had cleared annually more from our toil than had been wrung in old times from the colored slaves.  The R.R. reports showed a clear profit of over 2 million dollars a month after all expenses just and unjust had been discounted.  We know full well that then as now most of the so-called “expenses” were simply money squandered much of it to keep corrupt men in office and to influence legislation.

The personal memoir covers the beginning of Kellie’s political awakening.  It started with schools.

School meetings came on this year without much thought from me till one day Mrs. Manzer said “I wish Mr. Kellie would vote for as much winter school as we can get as my boys are getting so big now they will not go much more and all the Boody outfit are trying to get the school cut down to just the 3 months we are obliged to have to get the state apportionment.  They none of them have any children….

Well that started me thinking.  Her husband had died when the youngest was in long dresses leaving her with 8 children 4 boys and 4 girls.  It would never be possible for them to go anywhere but to our district school….  And she had no vote and no one to represent her….  Right then I saw for the first time that a woman might be interested in politics and want nay need a vote.  I had been taught it was unwomanly to concern oneself with politics and that only the worst class of woman would ever vote if they had the chance etc. etc. but now I saw where a decent mother might wish very much to vote on local affairs at least.

Kellie’s experience was typical of a national trend.  Richardson notes in West from Appomattox that in this period the argument for woman suffrage morphed from a rights argument to an argument that women needed the vote to help protect middle class families.  It started with schools and local institutions, but ultimately morphed into national causes, including sex trafficking (The Mann Act, 1910) and temperance.

The move to the timber claim marked the beginning of Luna’s serious support of the Farmers’ Alliance.  By 1889 she was writing articles and songs for Alliance publications.  When the Alliance decided to back the Populist Party, she jumped in with both feet.

Kellie represented the ironically named “Mid-Road” populism, ironic because it was the radical wing.  The Mid-Roaders rejected “fusion” with either major party, and regarded William Jennings Bryan as a sell-out for accepting the presidential nomination of both the Populist and Democratic parties in 1896.

Kellie became the secretary of the Nebraska Farmer’s Alliance in 1894 and was shocked to discover how far and fast the Alliance had declined from its peak in the ‘80s, as it had continued strong in her corner of the state.  In an effort to shore up support, she became the editor, publisher, and eventually printer of the Prairie Home newspaper.  It was no use.  The finances of the Alliance and the circulation of the newspaper declined every year.  In 1901, she gave up and sold the printing press.

When she wrote her memoirs a quarter-century later, she was still bitter and demoralized.

I never vote [and] did not for years hardly look at a political paper.  I feel that nothing is likely to be done to benefit the farming class in my lifetime.  So I busy myself with my garden and chickens and have given up all hope of making the world any better.

Richardson provides context for the ultimate failure of 19^th century Populism.  Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College who specializes in the Civil War and the history of the Republican Party.  West From Appomattox “explains why today’s political map looks like a map of the 1860s.  It argues that in the years between 1865 and 1901, a new definition of what it meant to be an American developed from a heated debate over the proper relationship of the government to its citizens.”

One of the issues of the Civil War was the role of the Federal government.  The South had always supported a small central government because they feared a strong one would interfere with slavery.  The North and West favored a strong, activist government for a variety of reasons: supporting manufacturing and commerce, supporting small-holding white farmers, taming the West.  The war partially settled the issue: the government would be activist, but to what end?

The synthesis that ultimately arose combined ideas from all sections.  The North contributed the idea of equality of opportunity, the South the idea that not all could rise (which found new life in Social Darwinism), and the West the idea of individualism (and its corollary that poverty was a moral failing).

The rise of individualism coincided with the rise of the middle class.  The combination of the two led to the view that any group seeking government protection was a “special interest”.  These groups included blacks, labor unions, monopolistic big business, and Populist farmers.  In an irony of history, the individualistic middle class became reliant on government to suppress any threats to it.

Richardson’s books tend to overwhelm the reader with detail.  I enjoyed West from Appomattox more than her How the South Won the Civil War because Richardson weaves in the stories of individuals.  West from Appomattox includes excerpts from the memoirs of union organizer Samuel Gompers, reformer Jane Addams, abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe, black educator Booker T. Washington, South Carolina’s Wade Hampton, freed slave and western cowboy Nat Love, black journalist Ida B. Wells, conservationist John Muir, showman Buffalo Bill Cody, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, and, you guessed it, Luna Kellie.  West of Appomattox is available in bookstores everywhere and well worth your time.

The University of Iowa’s edition of Kellie’s memoirs evolved from Jane Taylor Nelsen’s undergraduate honors thesis.  It includes a short foreword by Albert E. Stone that provides a little context.  There is also an excellent afterword by Nelsen that provides much more context, as well as an analysis of Kellie’s memoir.  Kellie herself is a natural storyteller.  The short political memoir is dry, but in the personal memoir you can really hear Luna’s voice.  I borrowed the book through inter-library loan, and I highly recommend you do the same.