Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1978 | Volume 29, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1978 | Volume 29, Issue 2
In late November of 1890, a newspaperman named Louis Post, who had just come west from New York to see what was going on in Kansas, heard a terrible story. He had been eating in the Union Station restaurant in Kansas City when an agitated man came over and told him about “a political episode of unprecedented degradation.” It seemed a prairie buffoon had been elected to Congress.“Why,” the unhappy man exclaimed,“they’ve elected a man … who doesn’t wear socks.” As the fellow rattled on, Post said, “there rose up in my imagination … a picture of a ragged and barefooted tramp, steeped in ignorance as well as poverty, ‘beating’ his way to Washington to take a seat in Congress. Such a Congressman seemed impossible. But my informant assured me that what he said was true, and that the man’s name was Jerry Simpson.”
Startled, Post investigated and soon heard a somewhat different story. Simpson, he was told, was “a very adaptable man,” who would be “as much at home with a swallow-tail coat in a Washington drawing room as he was … without socks on a Kansas prairie.” By the time he reached Topeka, Post found that Simpson had “grown larger” and that “anyone who had picked him … for a fool would make a mistake.”
That last was true; when Simpson got to Washington, many men treated him as a fool, and all of them did it to their sorrow. For Simpson was a canny, witty, able man who helped spearhead a powerful revolt of Western farmers against the money men of the East.
In 1887 and ’88 droughts burned away the Kansas corn crop, and helpless farmers watched the banks snatch up their land. In 1889 the crop did well, but the corn brought little money, and the railroads charged piratical rates to carry it to market. That winter, farmers found it more economical to burn the corn for fuel than sell it.
The next spring, angry Kansans joined together in a political movement that seemed almost a crusade. One observer saw it as “a religious revival … a pentecost … in which a tongue of flame sat upon every man, and each spake as the spirit gave him utterance.” Out of hundreds of tumultuous town meetings was born the Kansas People’s party, a populist group ready to do battle with the Republicans who had held the state since the Civil War. The time had come, said a vigorous fellow campaigner, Mary Ellen Lease, to “raise less corn and more Hell.”
Jerry Simpson was a good man to raise some hell. He knew farmers, had been one himself, and now he, too, had gotten angry. Born in Canada in 1842, Simpson had signed on as a deckhand on a Great Lakes steamship before he reached his teens. He eventually rose to captain, but in the late 1870’s, with a wife and a