"IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE" IN OREGON - Southern Oregon Digital ...

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That Medford is truly the business center of this
great Rogue river valley cannot be made more
apparent than by... the great number of teams seen
tied to the several hitching places about town.
last Saturday... Eighth Street was lined with teams
on either side... [the main streets] wore the
appearance of Wall street, only ours were peopled
with silver advocates instead of gold bugs. 14
The Rise of the People's Party
During 1891-92, the newly founded Farmers' Alliance
organization of Jackson County rapidly transformed itself
into the People's party, challenging the two old parties for
control of the courthouse.
The Jackson County campaign was
one small part of a widespread Populist insurgency then
sweeping the South and the West.
Despite widely differing
historical interpretations of the "Populist Revolt" of the
1890s, there is substantial agreement as to its origins and
aims.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed
tremendous acceleration in the transformation of America
from an agricultural to an industrial nation.
A time of
economic prosperity for some segments of American society,
the period also brought severe economic distress to others,
particularly to the farmers of the South and Great Plains.
The former, composed of both white and black sharecroppers,
were prisoners of the pernicious "crop-lien" system; the
grain farmers of the Plains States likewise found themselves
1 4 "That Medford.... ," Medford Mail (hereinafter cited as
MM), 15 Sept. 1893, 2.