Charles Macune

Charles William Macune (May 20, 1851 – November 3, 1940) was the head of the Southern Farmers' Alliance from 1886 to December 1889 and editor of its official organ, the National Economist, until 1892. He is remembered as the father of a failed cooperative enterprise by the Farmers' Alliance in Dallas, Texas, and as the creator of the Sub-Treasury Plan, an effort to provide low-cost credit to farmers through a network of government-owned commodity warehouses. This plan "called for federally operated storage facilities for non-perishable agricultural products, where farmers could deposit their produce, receive up to 80 per cent of their local market price, and have the privilege of selling their produce within one year. The cost of storage, insurance, and handling as well as 1 per cent interest were to be charged against the farmer. If the farmer did not sell his product within one year, it was to be forfeited to the government. Behind the scheme was the idea of greater market flexibility, a revolution in farm credit, as well as the end of the vicious southern crop-lien and sharecrop systems" as Martin Ridge summarizes (Ignatius Donnelly, The Portrait of a Politician, University of Chicago, 1962 p. 284).

A Democrat, Macune opposed both the formation of the People's Party as well as the nostrum of free silver which served as the basis of the 1896 fusion of the Democratic and Populist parties. Both a doctor and a lawyer in his earlier years, although he received formal training in neither profession, Macune ended his life as a Methodist minister, serving in pastorates in various towns of the Southwestern United States.