The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 90, July 1986 - April, 1987 Page: 142
492 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
After organizing the National Farmers' Alliance, Charles Macune
also founded and edited its influential weekly, the National Economist, in
Washington, D.C., pioneered the Texas Farmers' Alliance Exchange ex-
periment in statewide cooperative buying and selling, and authored and
lobbied for innovative solutions to farm problems, including the noto-
rious "sub-treasury plan." To historian Lawrence Goodwyn, Charles W.
Macune was "America's foremost agrarian monetary theorist of the
nineteenth century, the father of large-scale cooperation, commodity
credit, delayed commodity marketing, and, thus, of a number of even-
tual doctrines of farm parity." He was, continues Goodwyn, "in eco-
nomic terms, one of the most creative public men of Gilded Age
America."
But, while the Farmers' Alliance, the Populist party, and Dr. C. W.
Macune's role in both have been ably noted by historians, no full-length
biography of this figure has been produced. According to historian
McMath, Charles W. Macune, "more than any other Alliance leader of
national standing . . . remains an enigma." And that is partially due,
writes McMath, to the fact that Macune "left no personal papers."6
Not quite. In his possession since 1976, as Charles W. Macune's great-
grandson, are what the author believes to be all of Charles's extant per-
sonal papers and those of his parents dating from the 183os and 184os
in upstate New York and Ontario. Charles himself, itinerant soul that
he was, did not collect and save his papers, so what we have are those
preserved by his mother and his youngest daughter, Katharine Macune
(1892-1976). And even few of these materials before the late 188os
were written by Dr. Macune. It is, therefore, a fragmentary collection,
obviously a fraction of the enormous amount of material he generated.
But these have never before been examined by a historian. The first
phase of exploration in these new materials is represented by the pres-
ent paper. It covers his family background and life prior to his 1886
entry into the National Farmers' Alliance tempest.
Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York, 1976), 264-267, 316-350, 546-548; Hous-
ton Post-Dispatch, Aug. 23, 1925 (3rd quotation).
5McMath, Populist Vanguard, 29-31, 88, 91; Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, 90, 146, 150 (1st
quotation), 153, 166-169, 564 (3rd quotation), 567 (2nd quotation). Theodore Saloutos,
"Large-Scale Cooperative Advocate: Charles W. Macune," Joseph G. Knapp et al. (eds.), Great
American Cooperators: Profiles of iox Cooperative Pacemakers (Washington, D.C., 1967), 10-12;
Ralph A. Smith, "'Macuneism' or the Farmers of Texas in Business," Journal of Southern History,
XIII (May, 1947), 22o-244; A. W. Hall, "Rev. Charles W. Macune," G. A. Brown (ed.), Journal
of the Central Texas Conference of the Methodist Church: Seventy-fifth Annual Session at Fort Worth,
x940 (Ennis, Tex., 1940), 127.
6McMath, Populist Vanguard, 145, 146 (quotations).142
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 90, July 1986 - April, 1987, periodical, 1986/1987; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117152/m1/180/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.