s'
Alliance undermined them in the West. In Kansas and Nebraska the
Alliance controlled the result, sent their own men to Washington, and
secured the Kansas Legislature which returned the first Populist
Senator. In several States fusion tickets were successful with
Democratic and Alliance support. In the South, Democrats found it aided
them in winning nomination--for the real Southern election was within
this party and not at the polls--to assert that they were and had been
farmers.

When the votes were counted the extent of the reaction was realized. The
last Congress had contained a safe majority of Republicans in each
house. The new Congress, the Fifty-second, chosen in 1890, had lost the
high-tariff majority in the lower body. Only 88 Republicans were
elected, against 236 Democrats and 8 of the Alliance. The Republicans
retained the Senate partly because of the "rotten borough" States, Idaho
and Wyoming, which they had just admitted.

The greatest factor in the landslide was the tariff, but this was,
largely, only the occasion for an outburst of discontent that had been
piling up for a decade. The dominant party was punished because things
went wrong, because the trusts throve and labor was uneasy, because
prices declined, because there were scandals in the Public Lands and
Pension Bureaus, and because the rainfall had diminished on the plains.
The new House elected a Georgian, Crisp, as Speaker, and the second half
of Harrison's term passed quietly. Among the people, however, there was
much conjecture upon the future of the Farmers' Alliance. A convention
at Cincinnati, six months after the election, tried to unite the new
element and form a third party of importance.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Union between the Knights of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance for
political purposes was the aim of the promoters of the People's Party, a
party that was to right all the wrongs from which the plain people
suffered and restore the Government to their hands. Until the next
presidential election they had time to organize for the crusade.

The United States, by 1890, had begun to feel the influence of the
agencies of communication in breaking down sectionalism and letting in
the light of comparative experience. Men who survived from the
generation that flourished before the war found their cherished ideas
undermined or shattered. In public life, administration, literature, and
religion the old order was being swept