tempting to fit into
the patchwork the diverse and frequently clashing shades of opinion
represented in the party. In 1888, Streeter, ex-president of the
Northwestern Alliance, was nominated for President on the Union Labor
ticket and received 146,935 votes in 27 of the 38 States. Despite
its name and some support from the Eastern workers, the new party was
predominantly Western: more than half of its total vote was polled in
Kansas, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas. In the local elections of 1889
and 1890 the party still appeared but was obviously passing off the
stage to make way for a greater attraction.

The meager vote for Streeter in 1888 demonstrated that the organized
farmers were yet far from accepting the idea of separate political
action. President Macune of the Southern Alliance probably voiced the
sentiments of most of that order when he said in his address to the
delegates at Shreveport in 1887: "Let the Alliance be a business
organization for business purposes, and as such, necessarily secret, and
as secret, necessarily nonpolitical."* Even the Northwestern Alliance
had given no sign of official approval to the political party in which
so many of its own members played a conspicuous part.

* At the next annual meeting, in December, 1888, no change
in policy was enunciated: the plan for a national organ,
unanimously adopted by the Alliance, provided that it should
be "strictly non-partisan in politics and non-sectarian in
religion."

But after the election of 1888, those who had continued to put their
trust in non-political organizations gradually awoke to the fact that
neither fulminations against transportation abuses, monopolies, and
the protective tariff, nor the lobbying of the Southern Alliance in
Washington had produced reforms. Even Macune was moved to say at the
St. Louis session in December, 1889: "We have reached a period in the
history of our Government when confidence in our political leaders and
great political organizations is almost destroyed, and estrangement
between them and the people is becoming more manifest everyday." Yet the
formation of a new party under the auspices of the Alliance was probably
not contemplated at this time, except possibly as a last resort, for the
Alliance agreed to "support for office only such men as can be depended
upon to enact these principles into statute laws, uninfluenced by party
caucus." Although the demands framed at this St. L