Battling Abuses in the 1800s, A Series, #1

One of Isaac's favorite authors

Among the first things that appealed to me about Isaac was his love for books.  I have written about that in this blog before, but this series goes beyond prior posts.  A good place to start is to understand Isaac's (and the populist movement's) belief that education was essential.  

As a young druggist Isaac had read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but when he read the book as a homesteader trying to make a living breaking sod for farming, he realized that what he had learned from reading Smith as a merchant had been interpreted differently from his reading as a struggling farmer. 

I have discovered from observing quotes posted online that words I interpreted to mean one thing are sometimes construed to mean just the opposite by someone else.  We all respond to information based on our own experience and the bias we have.  As  Carlow Ruiz Zafon wrote in The Shadows of the Wind, "Books are mirrors:  You only see in them what you already have inside you."

Isaac was a serious scholar and own this title

Another book that Isaac read was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, the story of a wealthy young man struggling with insomnia, who is hypnotized to help him sleep, but like Rip VanWinkle, the young man awakens years later to a completely different world.  I had read the book years ago because it remains on many reading lists as a classic.  At that time, I read superficially, seeing it simply as an interesting tale about awakening in a changed society.  However, when it was originally published, people struggling to survive economically read it as a sort of guide to what could be a more equitable society if social changes were made.  The book was so popular during Isaac's time that Bellamy Clubs were formed around the world to encourage the sort of changes represented in the novel.

Edward Bellamy, author

Isaac also read Henry George, most famous for writing Progress and Poverty, which advocated Land Rents rather than taxes on land.  It would have eliminated owning land for speculation or investment, prohibiting the wealthy from acquiring and holding land to manipulate prices.  Collecting the land rents would, according to George, have been simpler than collecting taxes on production from the land, and would not have penalize successful farmers.

Farmers believed in the importance of learning, and they pooled their money to buy books.  Isaac gifted many of his books to their common library and built a cupboard at the school house where their books were stored.  I agree with Zafon that we see in books what we have inside us, but I also believe reading lets new light into our minds.  If we only read books and other material that reinforce what we already believe, we shut out the illumination of new perspectives.

Next week's blog will look at other books of that period with a different focus more aligned with urban issues.

The Union Labor Party in Kansas

Because so many Union Soldiers claimed homesteads and began farming in Kansas, the party of their old commander, Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, led many of them to adhere strictly to the Republican political party.  However, in the late 1800s laborers, including farmers, began to feel that the wealthy exerted more power in Washington.  They felt that too much legislation favored the wealthy and neglected or took unfair advantage of working class people.  

Laborers began forming political organizations, and the activity was initially stronger among employed laborers, such as factory workers and railroad workers.  Farmers tended to come together to find non-political ways to better their situation, their perspective as land owners working for themselves seeming to distinguish their issues from hired laborers.

Some of the early organizations attempted to influence government through lobbying rather than by forming political parties.  However, eventually political parties were organized.  The Prohibition Party chose candidates at the national level, but had greater success electing their candidates at local levels.  The Greenback Party also chose candidates at all levels, their focus being on the economy.  Yet, the Republicans and the Democrats remained the dominant political parties.

The Union Labor Party was originally organized by non-farming laborers, but in the 1880s they began to organize farmers as well.  Briefly, they recruited many voters from central Kansas.  However, it was about that time that the membership of the Union Labor Party nationally began to decline.  The Populist Movement in which Kansas and Texas played such important roles joined with other states, largely agricultural and ranching areas but not exclusively so, and created the People's Party, which reached its peak in the late 1880s and early to mid-1890s.

Union Labor Temple in Hutchinson, KS

When I saw the Union Labor Temple in Hutchinson, KS, I naturally but wrongly jumped to the conclusion that it might have been some early structure having to do with the Union Labor Party.  A little research informed me otherwise!

The old Union Labor Party that enjoyed a very brief popularity in Kansas among farmers prior to the creation of the People's Party was only one among many "Labor Parties."  Among them were the United Labor Party, the Industrial Labor Party, the Labor Reform Party, and even a coalition called the Greenback Labor Party. 

Among the books in Isaac's library were two by Henry George, including the one for which he was most famous, Progress and Poverty.  Georgisms were highly regarded, and his book sold around the world.  In 1886 he ran for mayor of New York City on the United Labor Party ticket.  He received 68,000 votes, primarily votes against corporate capitalism as much as for a particular party.

None of these Labor Parties survived as separate parties.  Their members were swept up into the other parties, either the two major parties, or in the case of many in our central Kansas region who briefly voted Union Labor, into the People's Party.

Yet, for one brief voting season, many of the male voters of this region turned away from the two old parties to vote the Union Labor ticket.  (Women did not yet have the vote.)  That is just a bit of our generally forgotten history.

Isaac's Library

I immediately formed a kinship with Isaac because of our common love for books. When Isaac's Journal begins in December of 1870, he is a druggist in Rossville, Illinois, in his mid-twenties. He is prospering, with every bit of money he can set aside spent on books, views for his stereoscope, and portrait cards of famous people that he kept in albums. He had a curious mind that he wanted to fill with the writings of great authors, pictures of the world, and images of important people, and he was determined to build his collections, despite being criticized by some of his less literary friends. About the money he spent, he wrote in his Journal: "Some get rid of a good deal [of money] in horses and buggies, great many in whisky, and how many on women? Ike [Isaac] fools good deal away in Books and Views and Pictures." That is not to suggest that Isaac wasn't keeping his eyes open for a well-educated young lady. He tried charming one young miss by loaning her some of his art books, and he paid particular attention to a bright young bookkeeper at Henderson & Lee's store, the first female employed in that position in town. He was also quite interested in a young woman who played chess and appreciated music, but unfortunately for Isaac, none of these relationships matured into a romance.

From his successful business he had assets he could have invested or loaned at profitable rates of interest, but instead he continued to buy books, explaining in his Journal: "How interesting and delightful such reading is and the daily increase in familiarity with such noble literary monuments. When I think back over all my best investments yet made, what I done [sic] in good Books I must consider the Master stroke of all. What a permanent and ever increasing value does such an investment bring..."

These words were written when he was young, but even during the hard times as a homesteader on the Kansas prairie, he treasured his books and added to his library occasionally. Most of the later additions were of a practical nature and often pamphlets rather than beautifully bound volumes, but he never doubted the value of books. Isaac would have agreed completely with Barbara Tuchman, who wrote, "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."

Many of the books in Isaac's library are still read today--Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, Gibbon's History of the Roman Empire, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Cervantes's Don Quixote, monthly issues of "Scientific American" which he had bound. He also collected books of art, philosophy, engineering, law, economics, political theory, logic, travel, and languages. He had reference books about Shakespeare, the Bible, and Dictionaries of words, authors, and artists. Among them all, he seemed to love Shakespeare best. I can picture Isaac sitting in his early dugout, before he had built his house and still lacking a horse to ride to the nearest town, reading Shakespeare by lamplight.

I was so curious about the books Isaac read that I went to some of my favorite used book websites and ordered the oldest editions I could find of titles he had mentioned. I guess you might say that Isaac and I formed a book club! Pictured are the following: Progress & Poverty by Henry George, Twain's Innocents Abroad, A Comprehensive Dictionary of Organ Stops, Classical Antiquities, Cuba with Pen & Pencil, Theory of Spencerian Penmanship, Bain's Logic: Deductive & Inductive, Cooper's Justinian, and The Culture Demanded by Modern Life. The books on art and travel that I would have particularly enjoyed could not be found, but the sampling I read impressed me with Isaac's thirst for knowledge. Surely you can understand why I must tell the story of this remarkable man!

[The stereoscope and views in the photograph belonged to my ancestors. I do know from Isaac's Journal, however, that he visited my great grandparents, Aaron & Susan Beck, and shared his stereoscope views with them.