Farmers essays

Farmers essays At the beginning of American history, agriculture was the main economic foundation. Profits gained from crops such as tobacco helped the country to prosper. Though by the late nineteenth century, new technology and the famous industrial revolution shifted the economic foundation of the United States. America was passing through a lot of political and economic changes, and the population boomed due to a massive immigration from Europeans. Still, one half of the U.S. population still consisted of farmers. As industries expanded with every decade, the situation of the farmers became harder and harder. Crops such as wheat and cotton were selling at very low prices, and this meant fewer profits for farmers. Furthermore, foreign competition, droughts, grass hopper plagues made the toiling farmers miserable and poor. During the last years of the century, all this problems caused farmers to unite and fight for what they thought was threatening their way of life such as monopolies, shortage o f money, and railroad companies. Some of their complaints were valid and well supported while others were not. The boomed of industries in the late nineteenth century, led monopolies and trusts to appear. People like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller became the first millionaires of the nation through their companies in steel and oil, respectively. However, the constantly increased of monopolies worried the farmers. In the cartoon The Farmers Voice the industries are the masters and the farmers are the slaves. Farmers worried that without competition, prices would dramatically increase, and consumption would decrease. Farmers feared the impact on their economic gains by the industrial decisions. James B. Weaver wrote in his A Call to Action: An Interpretation of the Great Uprising, Monopolies limit the price of raw material so as to impoverish the producer, drive him to a single market, and reduce the price of every class...