The Wheel promoted a radical agenda including currency expansion through free silver; closing all national banks; regulation or nationalization of the railroads, the telephones and the telegraph; allow only Americans to purchase public lands; impose an income tax on high incomes; and elect senators by popular election instead of by state legislatures.
The Wheel's early platform reflected the prior work of The Grange, an earlier agricultural organization supporting producerism who had largely faded by 1882.
[4] In 1882, a separate but similar organization, known as the Brothers of Freedom was formed in Johnson County, Arkansas also seeking to increase the economic power of small farmers in opposition to monopolists and big business.
[5] Over time, the organization grew to attract former Grange and Greenback Party members in a sixteen-county area of northwestern Arkansas, where the rocky soil and hills was not conducive to cotton farming.
By the time of the 1887 meeting, the membership of the national organization was over 500,000 farmers from Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Indian Territory, and Wisconsin.
The growing political clout of the organization led it to promulgate a platform consisting of the following demands:[10] In 1888 at the national meeting in Meridian, Mississippi a merger between the Wheel and the Farmers' Alliance was proposed.
Besides the similarity of their political goals the Agricultural Wheel and the other farm protest organization shared the same organizational structure.