Farmers' Alliance

The Farmers' Alliance was an organized agrarian economic movement among American farmers that developed and flourished in the 1870s and 1880s. The movement included several parallel but independent political organizations — the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union among the white farmers of the South, the National Farmers' Alliance among the white and black farmers of the Midwest and High Plains, where the Granger movement had been strong, and the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union, consisting of the African American farmers of the South.

One of the goals of the organization was to end the adverse effects of the crop-lien system on farmers in the period following the American Civil War. The Alliance also generally supported the government regulation of the transportation industry, establishment of an income tax to restrict speculative profits, and the adoption of an inflationary relaxation of the nation's money supply as a means of easing the burden of repayment of loans by debtors. The Farmers' Alliance moved into politics in the early 1890s under the banner of the People's Party, commonly known as the "Populists."

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