We could move out in the suburbs for a hundred, maybe fifty, dollars a week, if we could pay that much rent. They should have just as clean buildins for $25 a week. For what we’re payin’ now, we should have clean homes and such. Not this. It’s hard livin’. Hard times.
The Farmer Is the Man
Oh, the farmer is the man, the farmer is the man
Lives on credit till the fall.
With the interest rate so high
It’s a wonder he don’t die
For the mortgage man’s the one
That gets it all.
—Populist song, 1896
His Quaker forebears moved westward early in the Nineteenth Century. A South Carolina ancestor was hanged by the British, following the Battle of Cowpens; he would not betray the guerrillas…. “But he wasn’t quite dead. His wife revived him, and he lived to a ripe old age to tell the tale.”
It is a rainy Saturday in Des Moines. As he recalls the late Twenties and early Thirties—in this plastic-oriented room of a large motel chain—he feels alien, though he has lived in this region all his life, seventy-seven years.
He had worked as a YMCA Secretary, but “I had naturally been a farmer, ’cause I never went off the farm until I went to college when I was twenty-two years old.”
320 ACRES of farm land, fine land, that my uncle owned and cleared, he lost it. ’Cause they foreclosed the mortgage. Some of the best in the state, and he couldn’t borrow a dime.
The farmers didn’t have anything they could borrow on. He came down here to see me, because he knew that a fellow that had a job could get credit. He wanted to borrow $850. I knew my banker would give it to me. So I told him I’d get it.
He said, “Harry, I want to give you a mortgage to support this loan.” I said I’d never take a mortgage from my mother’s brother. But here’s what he put up: a John Deere combine and tractor, about sixteen head of cattle, a team of mules and wagons and farm implements. For $850. So you can see how far this had gone. He couldn’t get a loan, a man who lived in this state from the time he was two years old.
I was born across the road from the farm of Herbert Hoover’s uncle. I knew the Hoover family, distant cousins of the President. My folks sold hogs for ‘em, thoroughbred, pure Chester White hogs at two cents a pound. Even people like them, they had times just like the rest of us. That’s the way it was going. Corn was going for eight cents a bushel. One county insisted on burning corn to heat the courthouse, ’cause it was cheaper than coal.
This was at the time that mortgaging of farms was getting home to us. So they was having ten cent sales. They’d put up a farmer’s property and have a sale and all the neighbors’d come in, and they got the idea of spending twenty-five cents for a horse. They was paying ten cents for a plow. And when it was all over, they’d all give it back to him. It was legal and anybody that bid against that thing, that was trying to get that man’s land, they would be dealt with seriously, as it were.
That infuriated all the people that wanted to carry on business as usual. It might be a bank or an implement dealer or a private elevator or something like that. They had their investments in this. The implement dealer, he was on the line, too. The only place he had of getting it was from the fellow who owed him. And they’d have a sheriff’s sale.
The people were desperate. They came very near hanging that judge. Because they caught this judge foreclosing farm mortgages, and they had no other way of stopping it. He had issued the whole bunch of foreclosures on his docket.
It all happened in Le Mars. They took the judge out of his court and took him to the fairgrounds and they had a rope around his neck, and they had the rope over the limb of a tree. They were gonna string him up in the old horse thief fashion. But somebody had sense enough to stop the thing before it got too far.
They had marches, just like we have the marches nowadays. They came from all over the state. That was the time of the Farm Holiday. There was
a picket line. The Farm Holiday movement was to hold the stuff off the market, to increase the price. It saw its violence, too.
They stopped milk wagons, dumped milk. They stopped farmers hauling their hay to market. They undertook to stop the whole agriculture process. They thought if they could block the highways and access to the packing plants, they couldn’t buy these hogs at two cents a pound.
They’d say: we’re gonna meet, just east of Cherokee, at the fork of the road, and so on. Now they spread it around the country that they were gonna stop everything from going through. And believe me, they stopped it. They had whatever was necessary to stop them with. Some of ’em had pitchforks. (Laughs.) You can fix the auto tire good with a pitchfork. There were blockades.
The country was getting up in arms about taking a man’s property away from him. It was his livelihood. When you took a man’s horses and his plow away, you denied him food, you just convicted his family to starvation. It was just that real.
I remember one man, as devout a man as I ever met, a Catholic. He was mixed up in it, too—the violence. His priest tried to cool him down. He says, “My God, Father, we’re desperate. We don’t know what to do.” He was the most old, established man you could find. He was in the state legislature.
I remember in court when they were going to indict a Norwegian Quaker, when they were offering them lighter sentences if they’d plead guilty, his wife said, “Simon, thee must go to jail.”
Did they ever talk about changing the society … ?
No, the nearer to the ground you get, the nearer you are to conservative. His land is his life. And he’s not for anything that might alter the situation. I never found anything in the Iowa farmer to indicate he would accept any form of government but his own. If my family, grandfather, great-grandfather, ever heard my political beliefs, why, they’d turn over in their graves. I don’t think that without the Depression this farm country would be anything but McKinley Republican.
You know, Hitler’s men were awfully interested that I’d been through a farm strike in northern Iowa. I was in Germany, with my wife, as a tourist in 1937. I had been to Geneva for a disarmament conference. I met Hitler’s agricultural attaché in Berlin. They were just putting controls on their farmers. He wanted to know how this violence was handled. He kept getting madder and madder. I said: “What do you do with these people?” He said: “They’ve got to come to terms with the government or we’ll just wipe them out.”
The New Deal came along …
The progress was very slow, though. Of course, Henry Wallace and his ever-normal granary was the man who saved the farmer. The farmer would have passed clear out of the picture. They took this corn and paid for it and stored it. They put a price on it that was above the miserable going price. It wasn’t allowed for no eight cents a bushel.
The farmers broke the laws, as a last resort. There was nothing else for them to do. To see these neighbors wiped out completely, and they would just drift into towns and they would have to be fed.
Oh, these towns are pathetic. Today, I mean. You’ll pass through towns and if you get off the highway a little ways, and went down the main street, it’s one vacant building after another. Little ghost towns with an elevator and a service station.
It’s an abject depression now for the small farmer. My brother-in-law still has the farm that his father took when he came out here as a young man. The reason he can stay in business is that he turns everything he got on that farm into cattle feed and turns it into beef. Beef prices are decent because beef is used by factory workers. But the grain farmer, the farmer who gets cash out of his crop, he’s feelin’ the pinch of poverty.
Many of the farm families can’t get any of their family to farm it. The children are goin’ to the cities. The farm is just going on the block and is added to some other big land holding in the community. The individual farmer is becoming a thing of the past. Larger and larger holdings, fewer and fewer people. Even a fellow farming eight hundred acres now, which he doesn’t own, is right up against the buzz saw.
The war economy is not helping the farmer … ?
No, it isn’t. Not the small farmer. He’s getting the worst of it all the time. You never see a war help the farmer, except temporarily. Much as I hate to say it, the Second World War
did
end the Great Depression. I think we solve our problems by killing our boys and others.
But I can see a Depression ahead right now. If we go to pot, it would make that one look like a Sunday school picnic. A Depression today would cut deep, quick. Today, in the machine age, like everything—it would be sudden.
In the Thirties, my sister’s family lived on their own production. They had gardens, they had eggs, they had flocks of chickens. Now the eggs are all produced in these large establishments. Machines turn out thousands of dozens. Then, they had their own and were more self-sufficient. Today, the milk is supplied by the same company that supplies this dining room here. They didn’t have money to buy new clothes or cars or machinery. But they had enough to keep body and soul together. Today, the money would be gone. They wouldn’t have the food….
People today have been taught violence, the denial of humanity under money pressure. People are going in that direction. I don’t think they’d
tolerate those conditions that we came through. The younger people wouldn’t take it, because they know it isn’t necessary. But you can’t have a lot of people in Congress that you got today.
Oscar Heline
For all his seventy-eight years, he has lived on this Iowa farm, which his father had cultivated almost a century ago. It is in the northwestern part of the state, near the South Dakota border. Marcus has a population of 1,263.
On this drizzly October Sunday afternoon, the main street is deserted. Not a window is open, nor a sound heard. Suddenly, rock music shatters the silence. From what appeared to be a years-long vacant store, two girls and a boy emerge. They are about thirteen, fourteen.
I ask directions. They are friendly, though somewhat bewildered. “An old man?” They are eager to help. One points north; another, south; the third, west. Each is certain “an old man” lives somewhere in the vicinity.
Along the gravel road, with a stop at each of three farmhouses; no sign, no knowledge of “an old man,” nor awareness of his name. At each is a tree bearing the identical sticker: “Beware The Dog.” One trots forth, pauses warily and eyes the stranger in the manner of Bull Connor and a black militant. The young farmers are friendly enough, but innocent of Oscar Heline’s existence.
At the fourth farm, an elderly woman, taken away from the telecast of of the Tigers—Cardinals World Series game, knows…. Several gravel roads back I find him.
THE STRUGGLES people had to go through are almost unbelievable. A man lived all his life on a given farm, it was taken away from him. One after the other. After the foreclosure, they got a deficiency judgment. Not only did he lose the farm, but it was impossible for him to get out of debt.
He recounts the first farm depression of the Twenties: “We give the land back to the mortgage holder and then we’re sued for the remainder—the deficiency judgment—which we have to pay.” After the land boom of the early Twenties, the values declined constantly, until the last years of the decade. “In ‘28, ’29, when it looked like we could see a little blue sky again, we’re just getting caught up with the back interest, the Thirties Depression hit… .”
The farmers became desperate. It got so a neighbor wouldn’t buy from a neighbor, because the farmer didn’t get any of it. It went to the creditors.
And it wasn’t enough to satisfy them. What’s the use of having a farm sale? Why do we permit them to go on? It doesn’t cover the debts, it doesn’t liquidate the obligation. He’s out of business, and it’s still hung over him. First, they’d take your farm, then they took your livestock, then your farm machinery. Even your household goods. And they’d move you off. The farmers were almost united. We had penny auction sales. Some neighbor would bid a penny and give it back to the owner.
Grain was being burned. It was cheaper than coal. Corn was being burned. A county just east of here, they burned corn in their courthouse all winter. ‘32, ’33. You couldn’t hardly buy groceries for corn. It couldn’t pay the transportation. In South Dakota, the county elevator listed corn as minus three cents.
Minus
three cents a bushel. If you wanted to sell ’em a bushel of corn, you had to bring in three cents. They couldn’t afford to handle it. Just think what happens when you can’t get out from under….
We had lots of trouble on the highway. People were determined to withhold produce from the market—livestock, cream, butter, eggs, what not. If they would dump the produce, they would force the market to a higher level. The farmers would man the highways, and cream cans were emptied in ditches and eggs dumped out. They burned the trestle bridge, so the trains wouldn’t be able to haul grain. Conservatives don’t like this kind of rebel attitude and aren’t very sympathetic. But something had to be done.
I spent most of my time in Des Moines as a lobbyist for the state cooperatives. Trying to get some legislation. I wasn’t out on the highway fighting this battle. Some of the farmers probably didn’t think I was friendly to their cause. They were so desperate. If you weren’t out there with them, you weren’t a friend, you must be a foe. I didn’t know from day to day whether somebody might come along and cause harm to my family. When you have bridges burned, accidents, violence, there may have been killings, I don’t know.
There were some pretty conservative ones, wouldn’t join this group. I didn’t want to particularly, because it wasn’t the answer. It took that kind of action, but what I mean is it took more than that to solve it. You had to do constructive things at the same time. But I never spoke harshly about those who were on the highway.