Hard Times (39 page)

The nurse came in and she slammed the door. Kind of pushed me all over, took the pillows out, and straightened the bed and went all over it. And went out.

One of these Guardsmen was an ex-army man. He was the only fella that talked to me. The next day he said, “Something funny happened here last night. One of the guys thought your wife had passed you a gun. The man who was supposed to come in here was afraid to. He wanted the nurse to go in. She said, ‘I’ll go in and find the gun.’ That’s why she came in.”

The next afternoon, she said, “Those damn cowards out there were afraid to come in. I told ‘em I’d come in. But I shut the door. If you would have had a gun on you, they would never a’ found it.”

 

 

It was about a ten-acre plot. They put picket fences around there and some barbed wire on top. They set-up camps and army cots. I was there before they set it up, on Sunday evening. They set it up on Monday. They interviewed the men there. It was a country club, that’s been sold and it’s all built up with modern homes now.

 

Any farmer that had any connection with the Farm Holiday. Just farmers. On the Sunday they picked me, two trucks came out to our farm, looked all over in the hay mound for me. They didn’t know that I had been picked up downtown. One truck came out with three men and left. A couple of hours later, another one came out, went into the basement of my house. My father told them I hadn’t been home since Wednesday. See, they had the names of all the members of the Association. This was all the result of the Bradley incident. I was the only one taken to Sioux City. I don’t know why.

 

Just a hearing before this judge and a county attorney. They tried to pin it on me, said that I had written a letter about stringing somebody up. They said a friend of mine told them this. Afterwards, he told me he never said that at all.

 

 

The Governor. He called out the militia. The insurance companies and the big farmers, they were behind it. And he was with them.

We had sixteen hundred members: picketing, stopping trucks, letting the livestock out. There was two Communists trying to get in with us. One of these was Mother Bloor. A very fine looking young man with her, always well-dressed. She was dressed in rags. She said this was her son-in-law. But whenever Mother Bloor would get any chance, she’d get up on some kind of box or something and try to talk to the farmers, and they would just boo her down. There was some rough stuff, sure. No injuries. No attempt at injury, like throwing things or hitting people on the head or anything like that. It’s strange: we had a lot of businessmen in with us, on the picket lines. We even had a couple of produce men. We had a doctor here in Le Mars out on the picket line all the time. This doctor, one night we stopped a truck, and he just went out behind the truck, opened it up and started kicking the cattle out. It’s so strange, because he was a very good doctor in town. But he was sympathetic to the farmers.

The majority were with us, but there were those farmers who were well fixed and making money off the conditions—buying up these farms and increasing their holdings.

I was at a couple of the auctions. Usually the auctioneer was sympathetic to the farmer. Only friends would bid. Somebody would bid five cents, ten cents, fifteen cents. And the auctioneer would say: Sold to so-and-so over there, ten cents an acre or something like that. And of course, that would be the end of it.

But many farmers did lose their farms. I had an uncle that owned three
farms. When the Depression come along, he couldn’t make it. Many would rent farms … the farm he once owned himself. Just one of those things….

 

 

Only the older people do.

 

THERE’S A SAYING: “Depressions are farm led and farm fed.” That was true in the Thirties. As farmers lost their purchasing power, the big tractors piled up at the Minneapolis-Moline plant in the Twin Cities. One day they closed their doors and turned their employees out to beg or starve. My cousin was one of them. I took my truck to Minneapolis and brought him and his family out to my farm for the duration. They stayed with us until the company opened up again, two or three years later.

During my first session in the state senate, in 1927, five hundred farmers came marching up Capitol Hill. It thrilled me. I didn’t know farmers were intelligent enough to organize. (Laughs.) They stayed there for two days. It was a strength I didn’t realize we had.

The day after they left, a Senator got up and attacked them as anarchists and bolsheviks. (Laughs.) They had a banner, he said, redder than anything in Moscow, Russia. What was this banner? It was a piece of muslin, hung up in the auditorium. It said: “We Buy Together, We Sell Together, We Vote Together.” This was the radical danger. (Laughs.) They’d been building cooperatives, which the farmers badly needed.

I was the first man to answer him from the senate floor. Eleven others took turns. He never got re-elected. In the lower house, we had about
thirty or forty members of the Farmer’s Union. It was quite an education for me.

Among the members of our Holiday Association were bankers, businessmen, the president of the Farm Bureau, of the Chamber of Commerce. (Laughs.) They didn’t stick their necks out very far, but the meetings were always jammed. People were hanging out of windows. Our slogan was: “Neither buy nor sell and let the taxes go to hell.” (Laughs.)

Oh, the militancy then! At Milbank, during a farm sale, they had a sheriff and sixteen deputies. One of them got a little trigger-happy. It was a mistake. The boys disarmed him so fast, he didn’t know what happened. They just yanked the belts off ‘em, didn’t even unbuckle ’em. They took their guns away from ’em. After that, we didn’t have much trouble stopping sales.

Thirteen highways to Sioux Falls were blocked. They emptied the stockyards there in a day or two. There was some violence, most of it accidental.

I’ll never forget a speech by a Catholic priest at a Salem meeting, straight south of here about forty miles. It was the most fiery I ever heard. He said, “If you men haven’t got the guts to picket the roads and stop this stuff from going to market, put on skirts and get in the kitchen and let your wives go out and do the job.” (Laughs.) The boys used the police stations as their headquarters. (Laughs.) The police couldn’t do much. The sheriffs and deputies just had to go along.

That judge situation in Iowa was a warning. In Brown County, farmers would crowd into the courtroom, five or six hundred, and make it impossible for the officers to carry out the sales. (Laughs.)

Deputies would come along with whole fleets of trucks and guns. One lone farmer had planks across the road. They ordered him to remove them. They came out with guns. He said, “Go ahead and shoot, but there isn’t one of you S.O.B.’s getting out of here alive.” There were about fifteen hundred farmers there in the woods. The trucks didn’t get through. It was close in spirit to the American Revolution.

One incident stands out in my memory. It was a mass meeting in the city park at Huron. Ten thousand farm folks were in attendance. I had invited Governor Warren Green to appear. He stressed law and order. He seemed frightened. Then came the surprise of the evening: John A. Simpson, president of the National Farmers Union. He electrified the crowd with his opening remarks, which I remember verbatim: “When constitutions, laws and court decisions stand in the way of human progress, it is time they be scrapped.” When the meeting was adjourned, the crowd did not move. In unison came a mighty roar: “We want Simpson! WE WANT SIMPSON!” They didn’t budge until he was called back to the platform.

The Holiday Association was fairly conservative. There was a United Farmers League that was leftist. In the northern part of the state. The
business community welcomed us to head off the extreme leftists, the Commies. We didn’t have anything to do with ’em.

The situation was tense in ten or eleven states. You could almost smell the powder. When Governor Herring of Iowa called out the militia, Milo Reno said, “Hold off. I’ll not have the blood of innocent people on my hands.” He suggested they picket the farmyards instead of highways. We had a heck of a time getting the farmers off Highway 75. There were probably a thousand of them out there. Reno called a meeting at Sioux City. About thirty thousand farmers showed up. We decided to go to Washington and settle for a farm program.

If Roosevelt hadn’t come in in ‘32, we’d a’ been in real trouble. I’ll never forget our meeting with him. He came to Pierre on a special train. He appeared on the rear platform. Next thing I know, we were ushered into a private room, some of us leaders of farm and labor. We had about an hour with the President.

He pointed to the Missouri River and said, “This is the greatest resource of your state. It’s got to be developed.” He told us how Sweden had developed their power resources for the benefit of the people—the low rates of electricity and so forth. He was extremely well informed.

I resigned from the state senate in 1934 to become president of the South Dakota Farmers Union. We had many battles. Before that, I’d introduced a bill to cut penalty interest in delinquency payments from twelve percent to six. So I was attacked. The local editor said my radical legislation would destroy the state. (Laughs.)

Reactionary forces have controlled South Dakota since statehood. Corporation interests like the gold mine out here. That’s the first time I heard the word “communist.” I stayed at the Waverly Hotel, so they called that a Communist headquarters. They started to use that word about everything they didn’t like. I had to look it up in the dictionary. (Laughs.)

We have the world’s richest gold mine out here, in the Black Hills. While in the legislature, I was one of the promoters of a tax on ore. The mine was owned by the Hearst interests. It was very difficult. We took the matter to the people by the route of a referendum. We won. We passed the tax. Our slogan was: “Tax gold, not Russian thistles.” These thistles, thorny, hateful things, were stacked, during the drought of ’33, and fed to our livestock. They have lots of proteins.

It was in ’35—we had this campaign to raise a million tax dollars. In the town of Phillips, one evening, during a blizzard, I was met by a crowd of miners. They were given the day off and a stake to attend this meeting. They surrounded me and said this tax would cost six hundred of them their jobs. They were busted farmers and fortunately found a job in these Home Stake mines. I went back home feeling worried. But the tax was passed, and not a single miner lost his job.

They had been stirred up by the mining interests. They made grants to
colleges all over the state. When the tax was on the verge of passing, they’d write the alumni, send along a check and a message: Wire your Senator to oppose this vicious, discriminatory tax. (Laughs.) Today, they’re in a squeeze like us farmers, because the price of gold is fixed and the cost is going up. But they get a moratorium on taxes. We don’t.

In 1938, I ran for Congress. I carried the votes in the cities and lost the straggling farm precincts. A week before election, Senator Case, Governor Bushfield and my opponent asked the Dies Committee to investigate me. A night or two before election, they put out a picture of me and the Farmers Union Board meeting with CIO people. Here was proof that I was a Communist.

After I lost the election, Senator Case apologized to me. He said his name was used without his consent. The papers also broke their neck apologizing—after the election. I had served papers on some of them. One said I had marched in a Communist parade. I’ve never seen a Communist parade.

 

 

Once in a while I’ll meet a farmer who’ll thank me. He’ll say: “You sure helped me out. I was busted, and I got that loan.” But it doesn’t happen too often. A lot of fellows that were rescued became Roosevelt-haters and extremely conservative.

Today, corporations are moving in. Agribusiness. Among their clients are movie stars and doctors. Good investments.

This cattle operation is like a crap game. They can write off their losses, charge depreciation…. The small farmer doesn’t stand a chance.

ONE TIME we were driving up to Aberdeen. It was during the grasshopper days in 1933. The sun was shining brightly when we left home. When we were about half way, it just turned dark. It was the grasshoppers that covered the sun.

We had a large garden. The chickens would go in there and pick what little grass which they’d find. Our neighbors said: “The grasshoppers have come in, they’d taken every leaf off our trees, they’re even starting to eat the fence posts.” I thought that was a joke. Well, the next day they moved
on here, and they did line up the fence posts. My faithful hen sort of kept them off the tomatoes (laughs), but they were moving in.