In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Grange emerged as the largest and most powerful voluntary association that the country had ever experienced. Within a decade of its founding in 1867, the Grange, also known as the Patrons of Husbandry, had organized more than 850,000 farmers, reshaped the contours of agricultural commerce, and provided a model for the large-scale organization for farmers, workers, women, and other constituencies. Yet, despite the Grange’s significance for understanding post-Civil War developments, the literature on its history remains sparse. It is often referred to in passing, but there is a dearth of research on the Grange itself. Jenny Bourne has offered a welcome contribution to Grange scholarship. Arranged in five chapters, her book covers a lot of territory from the founding of the organization down to the present.

The first chapter is on the early years, purposes, and structure of the Grange. It locates its origins and growth in the inequities that farmers faced in the post-Civil War agricultural boom. In the early 1870s, hundreds of thousands of men and women joined the organization, with 2,000 new local granges formed every month. They organized on fraternal lines, borrowing much from the Masons and similar societies. But they also confronted the scissors of low prices for their farm products and high costs, especially the cost of transportation.

The Granger railway laws are the subject of the second chapter. Starting in Illinois in 1869, and then spreading across the Midwest and West, states adopted laws regulating railroads, grain elevators, and other essential points of farm commerce. Bourne notes that these laws were mainly not the direct work of the Grange, but it was part of a movement that made them possible. She returns to these issues in the concluding fifth chapter, where she has a useful summary of the influence and legacy of the Grange on American law.

The third chapter is devoted to Grange experiments with cooperation. Farmers searched for ways to obtain services by pooling their resources and by cutting the middlemen from the rural economy. They launched ambitious plans for cooperative marketing, purchasing, insurance, banking, and manufacturing. Some of these plans involved local grocery purchases, and some were continental and transatlantic in scope. Most of them collapsed rapidly, although Grange insurance and other coops lasted deep into the twentieth century.

Much of the material in the first chapters has been drawn from a widely dispersed secondary literature, but in the fourth chapter Bourne breaks ground with her explorations in the minute books of a local Grange on the outskirts of Minneapolis. The minutes of the Minnehaha Grange extend from 1873 until 1978, and they tell a valuable story about the ebb and flow of the movement, from its sharp decline beginning in the mid-1870s, to an early twentieth century revival, to another precipitous decline post-WWII. They also reveal the wide array of cultural, educational, and fraternal functions that the Grange served over the decades, from raising funds for grasshopper relief, to renting a TV and charging viewers to watch Minnesota and Wisconsin football games.

Each chapter in this slim volume has its virtues, but it is not exactly “an economic history” as indicated by the title. Its most innovative and important chapter is the case study of the Minnehaha minutes, which is as much a cultural study as an economic one. The book’s treatment of the Grange’s impact on legal history is its other focus. Meanwhile, important topics are missing from an economic history. For example, in the 1870s the Grange’s anti-monopoly critique extended beyond the question of railway regulation, yet the question of monopoly does not receive the attention it might. Similarly, after the crisis of 1873, the movement became deeply involved in the money question, making Greenbackism another side of the Grange’s economic history that that the book leaves unexplored.

The most striking omissions, however, are shared by most of the extant literature on the Grange. As with other treatments of the Grange, Bourne focuses on the Midwest. However, at the movement’s height in the 1870s, the state Granges in South Carolina, Mississippi, and other southern places were among the organization’s strongest. Across the former Confederacy the Grange served as an auxiliary of the Democratic Party and the Ku Klux Klan in the struggle to overthrow the bi-racial Reconstruction governments. In economic terms, white planters and farm owners wielded the Grange as an instrument for subjugating and disciplining black labor. In doing so they had the support of Grangers across the North and West, who demanded the restoration of the planter class to power in the name of equity and national unity. There is still much research to be done to explore these and related dimensions of Grange history.

In her concluding thoughts, Bourne writes that the Grange was no flash in the pan, but a movement “that created a template for all subsequent American agricultural organizations and supplied inspiration for other types of groups as well”(p. 106). As her book demonstrates, from legal history to patterns of organization, the Grange was a movement of enormous consequences in the post-Civil War decades and beyond. It turns out, however, that these consequences tended to be more fraught than our historical treatments to this point have allowed.