The Meaning of Munn v. Illinois, or How the Grange Wanted Stronger Regulations
A Supreme Court decision that redefined the public and the private
Sometime during the last millennium, when I started driving, I joined the Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange. This organization had roots in the mid-19th century as a fraternal organization for farmers. Our family had our insurance through the Grange, so I became a member. (At least that’s my recollection.) I rarely considered it again, except when I encountered the Grange in history books.
However, I’ve been working on a reported story about local Granges and decided to dig in a bit deeper for The Classroom about one of its most visible achievements that remains prominent in many history books and most constitutional law texts. Read on!
Origins
Americans in the 19th century loved secret societies. Such associations developed rituals that solidified group identity through camaraderie. They also gathered people with shared interests—sometimes for simple sociability, sometimes for political action.
The Patrons of Husbandry started by a handful of people who worked in the US Department of Agriculture, one of them a Mason. Known more commonly as the Grange, the organization spread in the early 1870s. One Grange picnic in Iowa attracted 10,000 people. The same year counted 5,000 local Granges across the countryside. By 1875, more than 800,000 members had joined.1
The Grange helped combat rural isolation, provided education about agricultural techniques, and organized against monopolies. Its motto then was Cooperation, Association, Education.2 (Today, it is: "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.")
Although one of its signal contributions was to build social ties—symbolized by the still-standing Grange halls that dot rural places—the Grange’s political organizing is what most often finds its way to history books.
Into Political Action
Midwestern farmers were exasperated. Isolated on the prairies and dependent on railroad corporations, operators of grain elevators, and bankers back east, they organized for several reasons, including to purchase and market cooperatively to gain better prices. Farmers felt pinched by intermediaries, who they believed profited unfairly from the labor of farmers. So, the Grange pressured state legislatures to pass laws to protect their interests. It was successful in passing what were known as the Granger laws. (The degree to which the Grange was responsible for individual laws differed from place to place, and sometimes the “Granger” adjective was inaccurate as merchants bore greater responsibility.)
The main targets were railroads and grain elevator operators. In 1871, Illinois passed several laws to regulate these businesses, ostensibly to help farmers. Such laws were the first serious attempt to regulate corporate America. One law limited the rates a grain elevator operator could charge farmers to store grain. Munn, a rather unethical operator, became a target and challenged the law.
In 1876, the Supreme Court heard Munn v. Illinois to determine whether states had the constitutional power to regulate certain businesses.
Disliking Dependency
Farmers disliked railroads and businesses that served as unavoidable intermediaries. For one, farmers could not bypass them. There was no effective alternative to get their wheat or corn to the market. This put farmers in a dependent position, and those corporations accrued monopoly power. So, another reason farmers disliked them is because the businesses could charge pretty much whatever rate they wanted. The Granger laws were meant to reduce that power. Last, in cases like grain elevators, the operators did not produce anything themselves but could profit from farmers’ work. Deep in rural Americans’ culture throughout American history is a strong strain of producerism, the belief that people who produce things should have full control over the fruits of that labor.3
Munn, and others like him, represented much of what farmers detested, in part because he revealed and took advantage of farmers’ dependency.
The Supreme Court and Capitalism
The Supreme Court, of course, is not meant to sit in judgment to assuage the feelings or grievances of any citizen or class of citizens. That is, the justices were not meant to judge whether farmers’ feelings of dependence deserved legal protection. Instead, justices weighed in on matters concerning how the public and the private were intermingling as the 19th century rushed toward its conclusion.
The Court determined that the grain elevators constituted a virtual monopoly. According to historian Richard White, the Court called out a failure of competition. A common tenet of capitalism is that competing businesses would drive prices down and service and quality up. In this case, railroads and grain elevators colluded or eliminated competition, giving them free rein to reign over farmers. The free market ideal disadvantaged the farmers (not to mention others).4
The Supreme Court accepted the actions by the Illinois legislature, staking out a little power for legislatures to regulate commerce—a precedent that held for a decade before the Court began chipping away such regulatory strength.
Public Interest in Private Property
But for that moment, an important set of principles was set forward by the chief justice, Morrison Waite, drawing on common law:
Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence and affect the community at large. When, therefore, one devotes his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has thus created. He may withdraw his grant by discontinuing the use, but, so long as he maintains the use, he must submit to the control. [emphasis added]
Imagine yourself a farmer in western Illinois in 1875. To sell your corn in Chicago, you have to rely on a railroad to transport and a grain elevator to store your crop. There is no other option.
Private property when used for public purposes is no longer only private, the Court determined. And in the 19th century, railroads and grain elevators functioned as such entrenched infrastructure they could not be cordoned off as strictly private bodies, unresponsive to the public or unregulated by the public’s representatives.
This was both commensensical and radical.
Implications
A story of a Supreme Court decision about grain elevators might seem an odd and irrelevant digression for Taking Bearings. Yet questions about the public interest and the common good strike me as fundamental to democratic governance and are central themes to my historical work—because they are central to American history and life. My study of ecology and politics has taught me to consider connections and to suspect that few things are sharply separated. Instead, they are entwined.
The Court’s recognition of that intermingling of private and public functions seems important. While the specific details about grain storage rates may not be germane to what drives your sense of citizenship, the more abstract principles at stake are what beats in the heart of democracy.
Closing Words
Relevant Reruns
Although I have not written about agricultural organizations before and the Supreme Court does not appear often, some previous newsletters do touch on this private-public theme. Here is one about elk and property. Another one is about property, birds, and wetlands. As a bonus, here is one when we set our clocks back.
New Writing
My story about local Granges is out today with Salish Current. Have a look!
As always, you can find my books, and books where some of my work is included, at my Bookshop affiliate page (where, if you order, I get a small benefit).
Taking Bearings Next Week
On Friday, March 15, my monthly interview for paid subscribers will be available. It’s a great one with an outstanding writer (and former student). I hope you enjoy it and consider becoming a paid subscriber to be able to read the whole conversation.
Next week is The Field Trip. Check back in to see where I go—on the ground or in my head. Stay tuned!
Statistics from Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 162.
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 361.
On producerism, see Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 363.
Interesting. As always.
Very cool. I have seen granges in many smaller towns in the PNW and down into Northern California, but this is the first I’ve understood of their history. I like that so many of them are still in use as community meeting places, live music venues, market halls, etc.