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

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During the early months of 1890, the front pages of the
Democratic Times and the Tidinas increasingly included news
from the South and the Great Plains about the activities of
the Farmers' Alliance.
The Alliance movement's "St. Louis
Platform," its "Ocala Demands," and other political
developments counted as newsworthy if distant events that
year.
By mid-year, however, Farmers' Alliance "lecturers"
had begun to arrive in the Far West to spread the gospel of
grass-roots organization, economic cooperation, and
political reform.
In March 1891, southern Oregon's first
Farmers' Alliance chapter formed in Jackson County under the
leadership of Phoenix resident Samuel Holt.
Although Holt,
Talent farmer William Breese, and Holt's Phoenix neighbor
the Reverend Ira Wakefield were among the primary
organizers, female "lecturers" Jessie Beeson and Stella
Duclose encouraged participation by women in Alliance
activities as well.
As in the Great Plains, southern Oregon
farm women were highly important in the grass-roots
development of the Alliance movement. 21
2 1 Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, 67. "Alliance Lecture
at Ashland," AT, 11 Sept. 1891, 3; "Farmers' Alliance," DT,
24 Apr. 1891, 3; "Farmers' Alliance," DT, 29 May 1891, 3;
"County Alliance," DT, 12 June 1891, 3.
Both Holt and Breese had been active in the local
branch of Oregon's short-lived Union Party. The Union Party
formed in 1889 as an alliance of the state's Prohibitionist,
Knights of Labor, Grange, and women's suffrage
organizations. In 1890, the party platform had a strong
prohibition plank, and it called for a "Greenback"-like
monetary system, anti-trust regulation, the Australian
ballot, "equal pay for equal work for both sexes," and other
reforms. None of the Union Party's candidates received more