ABSTRACT
Farmers' clubs in Illinois inaugurated a movement for railroad regulation, some years before the Grange became prominent in that state. As on all preceding agricultural frontiers, the Western farmers of the late decades of the nineteenth century were generally poor, but in this era of commercialized farming they were all the worse because of this fact. As soon as depression began to settle down on the farm, after the Civil War, farmers' clubs began to appear in many states of the Middle West and South. Though the Grange dropped out of sight as a political force after the late 1870's, farmers' clubs continued their activities and tended to coalesce into alliances. The Iowa Farmers' Protective Association, founded in 1881, is a good example of organized efforts to combat the patent monopolists. Farmers out of debt could stand the money and credit situation.
