Americans increasingly understand ourselves and our country through the lens of an urban versus rural divide. ​​Yet this geographic framing, while politically potent, obscures a more fundamental fault line in our society: the division between the working class and the ruling class.

Working people have transcended false geographical divisions and united to take on concentrated wealth before. In Texas at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, farmers and industrial workers began organizing themselves into the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor, respectively. But the more advanced their struggle became, the more they recognized their common enemy, ultimately forging an alliance between working-class Texans from the cities to the countryside.

This rural-urban worker alliance would birth the nineteenth-century populist movement and shape American politics for generations to come. Today, with our nation’s politics dominated by geographical antagonism at the expense of working-class unity, we would do well to rebuild these links between the town and the country.

The Farmers’ Alliance

At the end of the 1800s, Texas was beginning to transform from a rugged frontier state into an economic powerhouse. Although the state was still impoverished following the Civil War, it had an abundance of land. This bounty brought with it extensive speculation by British and Northern capitalists and the Eastern railroads. Their interests often clashed with those of the existing residents, who fiercely resisted the parceling out and fencing in of the once-open range.

While there were plenty of opinions on what this new Texas meant, there was one thing everyone was certain of: cotton was still king. Of King Cotton’s subjects, the farmers were the worst off. Texas cotton farmers were trapped in a system of debt known as the crop lien system. The system allowed farmers to buy necessary goods on credit using their future harvest as collateral. It was rampant with abuse. The furnishing merchants sold goods to farmers at usurious markups, sometimes as high as 100 percent. On the purchasing side, cotton buyers colluded to keep prices low, and individual farmers had limited opportunities to negotiate higher prices. After selling their cotton, many farmers were still in debt, which would be carried over to the next year. Some debts became so large that farmers were forced to sell their land to the furnishing merchant, who would become their landlord.

Why is it that those “who work most get least, and those who work least get most?” This query was posed by S. O. Daws, one of the leaders of the Farmers’ Alliance, an organization founded to answer this question. Founded in Lampasas, Texas, in 1877, the Farmers’ Alliance began organizing farmers around their collective interests, advocating that they negotiate directly with merchants and establish cooperative stores, mills, and cotton gins. It would grow into one of the largest protest organizations in American history, boasting over a million members.