The election of 1890 stunned and bewildered both old parties. The Republicans lost their control of the Lower House, while the Democrats paid for their victory the price of a partial alliance with a new movement whose weight they could only estimate. Populism was engendered by local troubles in the West and South, but its name now acquired a national usage and its leaders were encouraged to attempt a national organization. In a series of conventions, held between 1889 and 1892, the People's Party developed into a finished organization with state delegations and a national committee. At St. Louis, in December, 1889, the Farmers' Alliance held a national convention and considered the basis for wider growth. The outcome was an attempt to combine in one party organized labor, organized agriculture, and believers in the single tax. The leaders of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor were not averse to such common action, although the latter preferred their own Federation to any party. The dangers of political action, seen in the decline of the National Labor Union of 1866, did not check the desires of the Knights in 1889, although the leaders found it easier then, as later, to promise the support of organized labor than to deliver it at the polls. After the St. Louis Convention the name Farmers' Alliance merged into the broader name of the People's Party, though the attempt to win the rank and file of the unions failed. In December, 1890, the farmers met at Ocala, Florida, to rejoice over the congressional victory and to plan for 1892. Since each of the great parties was believed to be indifferent to the people and corrupt, a permanent third party was a matter of conviction, and in May, 1891, this party was formally created in a mass convention at Cincinnati. Miscellaneous reforms were insisted upon here, but were overshadowed by the demands of the inflationists. James B. Weaver, of Iowa, the old presidential candidate of the Greenbackers, was a leading spirit at Cincinnati. His best-known aide was Ignatius Donnelly, of Minnesota, a devotee of the Baconian theory and of the "Lost Atlantis," who was now devoting his active mind to the support of free silver. A national committee was created after another meeting, at St. Louis in February, 1892, and on July 2, 1892, the party met in that city in its first national nominating convention. The platform of the People's Party was based on calamity. "We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin," it declared. "Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislature, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized.... The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated; our homes covered with mortgages; labor impoverished; and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists."