Answer:
The correct answer is C. Frustrated with artifically high prices, many farmers joined the Populist Party.
Explanation:
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, small and medium-sized landowners became impoverished, mainly due to the fall in the prices of agricultural products as a result of the increase in national production and the growing international competition resulting from the cultivation of new lands in Argentina, Australia, Canada and Russia and the drop in the price of transport. With the collapse of agricultural prices, there was an increase in production and transport costs by rail, which led them to borrow heavily. In 1890, more than a quarter of the family farms were mortgaged, a percentage that was close to 50% in the Midwestern states- and many owners became tenants of their own lands. That is why railroads, bankers and merchants were identified as the enemies of the impoverished peasants. They also felt prejudiced by the tariff policy of the federal government to protect the industry and by the restrictive monetary policy that contributed to keeping prices low and making loans more expensive. That is why, as an alternative, they proposed bimetallism and the free minting of money, putting an end to the "Crime of 73", referring to the year 1873 when the free minting of silver coins was ended through the Coinage Act.
The plight of the peasantry of the south and the midwest led them to organize. In 1867 Oliver H. Kelley, a farmer from Minnesota, founded in the south The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, better known by its abbreviated name The Grange. Eight years later, in 1875, the Greenback Party was constituted, which had as its main point of its program, hence its name, the increase in the issuance of banknotes (popularly known as greenback) to stop the fall in agricultural prices - but the party dissolved in the late 1880s. In 1877, the Farmers' Alliance was born in Texas, which soon spread to other southern and mid-western states. When in 1890 Congress rejected their proposal that the Treasury grant credits to farmers at 1% interest - and that they be allowed to store their grain in government silos - the Alliance members organized themselves politically to defend their interests and helped to found the Populist Party.
