Charles William Macune was born on May 20, 1851, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and was the younger of two children and the only son of William and Mary Almira (McAfee) Macune.
His Scotch-Irish father had emigrated to Wisconsin from Canada; the McAfees were among the early settlers of Kentucky. William Macune, a blacksmith and a Methodist preacher, died when Charles was an infant, and his widow moved with her family to Freeport, Illinois.
The boy attended elementary school until Macune was about ten when he went to work on a farm to help support his mother. In San Saba center he studied medicine with a local doctor.
He passed his medical examination and practiced in Fredericksburg and Junction before moving eastward to Milam County, Texas, about 1885. Always versatile, he also found time to study law.
After the Civil War, Macune went to California, where he ranched briefly, then drifted east to Kansas, joined a circus for a short time, and became a cattle driver. By 1874, he had settled in Burnett, Texas, where he started a newspaper. Hearing that nearby Georgetown would be on a railroad, Macune leased a hotel there, but the depression of 1873-79 stopped railway construction, and he moved farther west to San Saba, the center of a growing agricultural region, where he supported his family by painting houses.
Meanwhile, Macune had joined the Farmers' Alliance, an organization founded about 1875 in his part of Texas. In 1886, when the Alliance had some 3, 000 lodges in the state, Macune was elected chairman of its executive committee. From the start, he showed organizing ability. Skillfully avoiding a threatened split in the Alliance that year over the adoption of a set of political demands, he sought to divert the Alliance's energies into other channels.
He outlined an extensive economic program embracing cooperative stores and cooperative marketing of the state's cotton and grain crops, and in 1887, he organized the Farmers' Alliance Exchange of Texas for this purpose. Though it brought some savings to farmers by wholesale purchases of supplies, the Exchange lacked adequate capital and soon overextended its credit, and in 1889 it collapsed.
Meanwhile, Macune had embarked on a program for expanding the Farmers' Alliance beyond the bounds of Texas. In 1887, he negotiated a merger of the Alliance with a similar body in Louisiana, the Farmers' Union, becoming president of the new organization. Securing a national charter, he at once sent out lecturers and organizers to build up membership throughout the cotton belt.
In a time of falling cotton prices, he met with a ready response. In 1888, he absorbed another rival group, the Agricultural Wheel of Arkansas. He even sought to bring about a merger of his organization and the Northern Farmers' Alliance, but though both groups held simultaneous conventions in St. Louis in December 1889, the plan fell through.
Still, the Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union, as Macune's organization was now called, attracted to its fold the state Alliances of several northern states and continued to grow in the South. By 1890 it had well over a million members, with some estimates running as high as three million.
Stepping down as president in favor of Leonidas L. Polk, Macune now devoted his time to editing the National Economist, the Alliance's weekly newspaper, in Washington, D. C. , and pressing the organization's legislative demands before Congress. Chief among these was a proposal of his own devising which the Alliance had adopted at its St. Louis session: the so-called "sub-treasury plan. "
This called on the federal government to set up in each county in which at least five hundred thousand dollars' worth of farm produce was sold annually a "sub-treasury" office, with warehouses or grain elevators.
Here the farmer would be able to store surplus crops and to borrow up to 80 per cent of their value for a period of a year at an interest rate of one per cent. The proposal for a time stirred up a good deal of attention, and bills to enact it were introduced in Congress, but adverse publicity and opposition within and without the Alliance movement soon overwhelmed this early farm-credit scheme.
Macune viewed with little sympathy the growth of third-party sentiment in the ranks of both the northern and southern Alliances, fearing that such a party would supplant the Alliance. When, however, the People's party took to the field in 1892, Macune as editor of the National Economist gave it at least outward support. But after the campaign it was charged that he had helped to get out a pamphlet, signed by a member of the Alliance executive board and widely circulated by the Democrats, urging Alliance men to vote for Cleveland, and that he had been well paid for his efforts.
True or not, the charges undermined Macune's reputation in Populist circles. At the convention of the Southern Alliance late in 1892, he was defeated in a bid for the presidency by H. L. Loucks of South Dakota, a strong Populist. In 1893, Macune dropped out of the Alliance movement. Returning to Texas, Macune started a newspaper at Cameron, and when it failed he moved to Beaumont and began a law practice.
In 1900, when almost fifty, he requested the Central Methodist Conference to appoint him a supply preacher, and for the next eighteen years he preached in a succession of small Texas towns. On his retirement in 1918, he joined his son, the Rev. Dennis Macune, a Methodist missionary, in Eagle Pass, Texas, and carried on volunteer medical work among the poor.
In 1921, he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where he lived until his death there at the age of eighty-nine. He was buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Fort Worth.
Charles William Macune was the leading figure in one of the country's major farm organizations. 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.
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.
On September 1, 1875, Macune married Sally Vickery, the daughter of a Salado, Texas, stonemason. His wife had died in 1927. They had five children: Charles William, John Wright, Mary, Sarah, and Dennis.
