Letters of Two Women Farmers, Ii

HOWELL’S POINT FARM BETTERTON, MARYLAND
June 15, 1932
MY DEAR CAROLINE,
I thought of you this morning when I bought a box of Cream of Wheat at a ‘reduced price’ of 23 cents — just about what you are getting for a whole bushel. There is our problem in a nutshell — the difference between the farm dollar and the city dollar.
And I cannot see that the plan of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to advance money to local banks on the notes and mortgages of farmers will help us very much. In this part of the country, farm mortgages are usually not held by the local banks. When money was plentiful our bankers persuaded us to go for loans to the federal land banks, the small-town bankers preferring to use their funds for speculation. The result is that our mortgages are held by the government, and, however inefficient it may be in other matters, it demands that obligations be met when they fall due. To the remote officials who have the final word in directing the land banks, we farmers are not individuals; each of us is simply a number in a filing cabinet.
Besides, even if the pressure for repayment of the principal is relaxed, interest charges will go on just the same. Like every other farmer I know, I don’t see where I am going to get the money to pay the interest on my debts.
But what can we do? Milk checks that used to average $400 a month have dropped to $100, and every item of the farmer’s income has shrunk in the same way. Long ago, when the rest of the country was heady with prosperity and we as a class were being forced to curtail our purchasing, I knew that something would happen. And now it has happened. Another bonus to the exsoldiers will do very little for the country as a whole, for most of the money will go into the pockets of automobile dealers. The only thing that will do us any good is an equalization of wages. The adjustment that is needed is one which will make an hour’s work on the farm worth as much as an hour’s work in the city.
I had intended to make this a long letter, but I can’t go on — I am too wrought up over the injustice of present conditions.
EVELYN

WAYSIDE FARM
EVA, OKLAHOMA
June 21, 1932
MY DEAR EVELYN,
Will and I were both interested in what you wrote about farm relief. We, fortunately, have managed to keep out of debt, but otherwise the shoe pinches us in the same place it pinches you. We do not need credit so much as we need some reasonable ratio of exchange between our farm products and the things we must buy. At present, the proportions are all against us: sixteen dozen eggs for a pair of overalls, more than a bushel of wheat for a wick for the oil stove, two pounds of butter for a small felt washer for the tractor, and so on indefinitely.
I do not know how or when a fairer system of exchange can be brought about. A professor of sociology at one of our Western state universities says that it will take ten thousand years to secure any general acceptance of the idea that the good of each is dependent on the good of all. It’s a long time to wait.
As a grower of pears, you may be interested to know that, we have just bought two No. 10 cans of Bartlett pears raised in one of the Pacific Coast states and distributed through a wholesale house in Chicago. They were labeled:‘Below U. S. Standard. Low Quality But Not Illegal.’ We were glad to be reassured on that point, and found them better than one would have expected. And the price of this inferior but much-traveled fruit? Twenty-nine cents a can, thank you.
Out here on the plains we arc hedged about with such difficulties as we have never before known. We cannot see our way ahead, but still we hope. Doubtless you remember the artist’s conception of Hope— blindfolded, with a broken lyre. That is a symbol of our state of mind. Our hopes may prove to be what your neighbor, Mr. Cabell, would call ‘dynamic illusions,’ yet they serve to spur us on to continued endeavor.
A few specific things have tended, of late, to make us more cheerful. We have once more paid our taxes, and were grateful to find, instead of the expected increase, a decrease of about 40 per cent. There has been widespread indignation throughout the West over governmental waste and official laziness, and apparently it has had some effect. In our county a citizens’ petition recently brought about a saving of $12,000 in the allowance for deputies, and some of the candidates for office are promising, if elected, to do their work themselves. Taxpayers’ leagues have sprung up all over the state, and they seem to be getting results.
Even more cheering than our tax receipt was the life-restoring rain. The growing season here has been unusually late because of the dry spring. On this, the longest day of the year, many of the planted fields are still bare and brown. For days two lines of Masefield had been in my mind: —

And then the rain came at last, gently and graciously, and it seemed as if the earth breathed a great sigh of relief. The buffalo grass has now started in the pastures; the yard is gay with wild flowers, starred all over with brilliant, rose-colored cactus blossoms; the trumpet vine is trumpeting, and even the garden, so badly damaged by hail, has recovered more than at first seemed possible.
Our daughter Eleanor has just come home from the University where she has been combining the work of a student with that of a laboratory assistant. She tells of a plan that was carried out at Commencement time. On the south slope of the campus, overlooking a broad valley, lies a plot of ground never yet disturbed by plough or spade, green and flowering with the coming of each new spring. It was beautiful again this year with spiderwort and poppy, wild roses and geraniums, dotted about among the tall grasses. A group of the older alumnæ arranged for the dedication of this spot as ‘The Prairie Acre,’and marked it with a tablet set in a block of native limestone. Through the years to come that acre will retain its untouched natural beauty — a reminder of pioneer days, whose difficult problems called for resolute action like those of our own time.
Our children still have pioneering work to do. For you and for them I pass on the parting word of the whitehaired Chancellor at Commencement, a quotation from Whitman: ‘Let your soul stand cool and calm.’
CAROLINE

BETTERTON, MARYLAND
July 12, 1932
MY DEAR CAROLINE,
This spring I felt really hopeful about our prospects. We had had so many bad years one after another that I thought the mere mathematical chances of a change were ground enough for optimism. But I was wrong. All summer we have had rain, rain, rain. Hardly a night has gone by without a drenching shower, followed by log which lasts far into the morning; then the hot sun comes out and everything literally boils in its own juice. Consequently my peaches are almost a total loss. A two-day windstorm stripped much of the fruit from the trees, and when the rest was picked it was too soft for shipment and rotted overnight because of excess water.
Worse still, the combination of wet weather and hot sun has been the most favorable possible for the bugs. I have sprayed and sprayed, but the rain washes off the poison and the bugs simply thrive. Each little plantlet has its own disease and pest. My mother-in-law used to pay me a ceremonial visit every time I had a new baby, and when she looked at the little creature she always said; ‘My, my, baby — the things that will have to be done for you before you’ll amount to anything!’ I have thought of that many times as I have walked around inspecting the growing plants on the farm. I have done for them everything i could think of, but I fear they won’t amount to much. Is it any wonder that farmers are pugnacious? Our whole life is fight, fight, fight.
During the past month we have begun picking tomatoes, and now have our packing house running on half time. To-day there are eight automobiles parked in our front yard; they belong to unemployed men in this vicinity who are helping us in grading and wrapping green tomatoes for the city markets. But prices are so low that we shall be doing well if we get back what we spend on labor costs. Last week carload after carload of Southern tomatoes was shipped north and sold at from one to three cents a pound. The consumer, however, is paying from ten to thirteen cents a pound.
I asked the manager of one of the large chain stores why he did not cut his prices in view of what he was paying, and he said he had orders to keep retail prices up. Then I questioned a wholesale merchant who sells to the chain st ores and he stated emphatically that the chain stores do not help the farmer, for they keep wholesale prices down. When they buy, they insist on a low price, with discounts for cash and for large purchases. This figure then sets the market for the day, and no grower can hope to get from any commission man a better price than the chain-store buyer has paid.
Do you wonder that my hopes are blasted ?
EVELYN

EVA, OKLAHOMA
July 19, 1932
MY DEAR EVELYN,
I am sure you know enough about the uncertainties of farming not to have been unduly elated over my last more hopeful letter. It. had hardly been mailed before trouble began. One of our neighbors was trying to cut down tractor expenses by using horses to cultivate his crop. He lacked one team, so we let him have Ned and Star. Since we bought our tractor they have not had much to do, but Will has always said that the horses made for us the little we have, and that they were welcome to live out their old age in peace, helping us now and then in the lighter tasks. They worked well enough for a week, and our friend said they seemed all right when he turned them into the pasture Sunday evening. Monday morning Star lay there dead.
Some people say that animals do not suffer keenly and have no dread of death. I hope it is so, and certainly I am glad for gentle, faithful Star that there can be for her no more sweat and dust and tugging at loads the importance of which she could not understand. But horses hate to leave their homes; they know their friends; and I suppose it will always hurt me to think that perhaps Star wondered why we did n’t come in her hour of need. I am afraid she will always seem a sacrifice to the demands of this cruel time.
How we should welcome a small part of your surplus rain! We have had none in a month. The extreme heat and almost constant high winds have destroyed all hope of a satisfying return from the garden. The potatoes were set back seriously by the early hail, and, though the vines grew out, they are now dying down, with little potatoes like marbles half cooked in the parched ground. Canada field peas, which we hoped would provide a late crop after the earlier peas were gone, blossomed fully, but, like the tomatoes, were blighted by the withering winds. Cowpeas and peanuts are standing the heat the best of anything, and, along with the field crops, may hold out until rain comes. No one knows. The cattle still have suflicient pasturage on the weeds and grasses among the ruined wheat, but the prairie grass is brown again and crackles under one’s feet.
This has been another long day of wild wind and blistering heat. Tonight I am quite alone — a mile and a half from anybody. The wind has gone down and the quietness makes me think of Will’s memories of his old cowboy days, of silences out on the open plains so intense that one’s ears would ache with listening.
Will and Eleanor, with a neighbor’s boy to help them, have gone with truck, car, tractor, combine, and oil wagon to harvest a half section of wheat for some people out in the adjoining county, seventeen miles from home. Money is scarcer than ever with us, and they are taking their pay in wheat at three bushels for the acre. Whether they will make anything to compensate for their exhausting effort and for the expense and depreciation of the machinery depends on the future wheat market.
The wheat yield is disheartening all through this part of the country; there is hardly one stalk where three or four grew last year. The man for whom our folks are harvesting counted on about twelve bushels to the acre and is getting less than five. It puzzles everyone to know how to manage these poor crops. They will not pay handling expenses, but they ought to be harvested, not only to avoid the dishonor of ‘willful waste,’ but also to escape the later expense of getting rid of a heavy growth of volunteer wheat. Each farmer is trying in his own way to make his losses as light as possible. Many fields will not be cut at all. On three sides of our own home farm are 330 acres left for the birds — potentially something like a thousand sacks of flour poured out on the ground in a hungry world!
People still toil amazingly and make a conscious effort to keep cheerful. But it seems to me that the effort grows more apparent. Behind the characteristic American nonchalance one detects a growing anxiety, especially about the coming winter. People speak openly of their dread of cold weather. I am told by a man who is familiar with neighborhood conditions that many farmers once regarded as well-to-do will not be able to put in another crop on their own resources. City folk talk lightly of the obvious remedy. ‘Let the farmers stop producing if they can market their stuff only at a loss,’ they say. But the thing is not as simple as that. When all of one’s investment is in land and equipment for working it, there is nothing else to depend on for taxes, repairs, the upkeep of buildings and fences, and the maintenance and education of a family.
But it is useless to tackle that problem to-night. It is already late, and day comes soon. To-morrow I must care for the new shorthorn I found this evening when I went for the cows; look over the winter-squash vines for bugs; go around a mile and a half of fence and put in missing staples; finish hoeing and working the ground around the small trees which we are trying to save through the drought. Why do people speak of ‘the monotony of farm life’?
CAROLINE

BETTERTON, MARYLAND
September 9, 1932
MY DEAR CAROLINE,
Since I last wrote I have made two trips to New York, once by train and the second time by truck.
Toward the middle of August our little packing house, which is built on to the old summer kitchen, was in full operation. Sixty men and women of the neighborhood, who would otherwise have been on the unemployed list, were busily at work there, sorting, wrapping, and packing tomatoes. But the returns from our shipments were so low and we were losing money so fast that I decided to run up to New York and see if I could find out what was wrong. So I went, but I cannot say that I learned anything, except that the bottom has fallen out of the market — which I knew already.
The big wholesale market in New York opens at eight o’clock in the evening and continues until nine in the morning. I spent a night there, strolling around and asking questions. The only explanation of the prevailing low prices that I was able to get was volunteered by one of the commission men. ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘when we have green tomatoes they want ’em red, and when we have ’em red they want ’em green.’ At all events, there they were, — row upon row of tomato crates piled high, and my shipment among them, — but buyers were scarce. Along about 3 A.M. a buyer became interested in part of my shipment, and eventually he bought half a car — each tomato wrapped in tissue paper. And what do you suppose he paid? A cent a pound. I wish I could have found his place of business and discovered what he sold them for. A cent a pound barely paid for the container, the freight, and the labor of wrapping, leaving me nothing for the tomatoes themselves and for the paper they were wrapped in. And while I was there that is all that was sold. The rest was left until the next day’s market. I returned home no wiser than when I left and out of pocket the amount of my train fare.
I have just now come back from my second trip. In order to reduce freight bills and handling costs, my son Arthur bought a large truck and has been driving our produce to market. He can leave here at noon and be at the commission merchant’s door in time for the opening of the market that evening. One day when we got an order for two hundred bushels of our fanciest pears for export, I decided that I would go along with Arthur and find out how such things are managed.
When a women is getting on toward fifty years of age, an expedition of two hundred miles in a heavy truck and back again is not one to be undertaken lightly. Still I am glad I went. It was a revelation to me to see the steady stream of trucks on the roads, almost all of them carrying farm stuff into the cities. No wonder the railroads are complaining about the loss of traffic!
In New York we drove directly on to the pier and pulled up beside the steamer that was to take our load of pears to Glasgow. When our fruit had been duly inspected and passed, Arthur asked several men who were standing about to help him stow the baskets as he took them from the truck, but they all said they were too busy. Then I went down to the end of the pier and asked a policeman where I could find a man for half an hour’s work and what it would cost. He replied that all the men on the pier were union men, but that he could get me a ‘shenanigan’ for 60 cents an hour. By the time I returned to the truck with my ‘shenanigan,’ one of the union men had begun to help Arthur, and just then another came over and stated emphatically that ‘two always works on dese jobs.’ So two it was, and my man had to leave.
Within twenty-five minutes the load of two hundred baskets was on the dock. Arthur asked what the charge was, and the men said we owed them $6.00. It made my blood boil to have these fellows demand for less than half an hour’s work the week’s wages of a farm hand laboring ten hours a day. We simply refused to pay it, whereupon the men became very threatening. In the end we gave them $1.25, and we were warned not to come on the dock again. The very next day I read in the paper that the longshoremen had gone on a strike for shorter hours and higher pay!
So much for New York. And now my last crop is harvested and shipped out, and what do I have to show for it? As I look over my accounts I can see that I have kept more than twenty families in this immediate neighborhood from starving to death. In other neighborhoods I have helped sustain many other families that are dependent on basket and box factories, on fertilizer and bag factories, on the railroads and truck makers and the gasoline and oil companies. I have contributed to the income of longshoremen and stevedores and the men who go out to sea. All these in turn have made business for clothing manufacturers, electric-light companies, moving-picture producers, and countless others. But I, as an individual farmer, have made only a bare living, and have only managed to do that by going deeper into debt. I owe more money than I did a year ago, and have less clothing and fewer implements. I really don’t know what to do.
I see in the papers that the ‘farmers’ holiday’ is spreading throughout the West. In Iowa the highways are being picketed to prevent the marketing of food until better prices can be obtained. If such a movement were started here in the East, I am in just the mood to join it with all my heart.
EVELYN

EVA, OKLAHOMA
September 17, 1932
MY DEAREVELYN,
You and your responsibilities have been much in my thoughts as the season’s work draws to a close. All about us, in maturing seeds, in asters and goldenrod and yellowing leaves, in some indefinable, lingering, caressing quality in the sunlight, we sec reminders that ‘ the harvest is past, the summer is ended.’ And we, like you, have little enough to show for it. Judging by any standards that the world would recognize, we should have been further ahead if we could have spent the year in sleep.
The harvesting away from home was at last completed. Of the wheat received in payment we sold several loads to cover repairs and other expenses, and we have left 400 bushels, worth to-day 33 cents. Will and I gleaned by ourselves the small amount of wheat that was spared for our own harvest by the hailstorm and the cutworms. From the hundred-acre field which yielded 1800 bushels last year we salvaged about 215 bushels, most of it of poor quality.
Lest you think that we are the sole darlings of misfortune, I might mention the neighboring farmer who sold his crop from 75 acres at 30 cents and had $12 left above combining expenses to pay for his seed, for the use of his land, for the labor of preparing the ground, drilling the wheat, marketing the crop, and for board for the combine hands; or another neighbor who sold $49 worth of wheat from 250 acres and owed one fourth of it for rent. Sadder still, I might tell of the man who kept on persistently trying to raise wheat before anyone else here thought it practicable. He did at last succeed in showing that over a series of years wheat is probably our most dependable crop. But troubles in his family, some years of short crops, and the low prices of the past three seasons have broken him. He has lost his 960 acres of land and most of his stock. He is now trying desperately, and I think without much chance of success, to get a government loan to buy back a few of his cattle and start all over again — old, half-blind, almost barehanded — in a Texas valley, where, as he told us, he hopes to avoid the mistakes he has made here.
The rain for which we were hoping so eagerly when I wrote last has never come. Indeed, we have had no effective moisture since early in June. One good rain during the summer would have given us at least roughage for our stock. As it is, the sowed cane and Sudan grass died down when it was six inches high, and our crops of maize and Kafir corn are little better — hardly a start on what we shall require for winter feed. I really do not know what we shall do. Our choice seems to lie between sacrificing the cattle at the ruinous prices now prevailing — we recently sold five well-grown young steers for $122.50 — or trying in some as yet unthought-of way to get roughage for them through the winter.
The situation throughout the country is much more serious, I believe, than many people suppose. Think of the loss of homes, the decrease in land values, the idle shops and idle men, the closed banks, delinquent taxes, rents hopelessly overdue, children deprived of school privileges, thousands of young men and women roaming over the country freed from the normal restraints of orderly social conditions. A neighbor recently told us that he had counted eighty-five such wanderers on one freight train in northern Texas. Just a few days ago I talked with a merchant who was elated because, as he said, even the most destitute folk in St. Louis are making no complaints about their condition. He regarded this as a hopeful sign, but it seems to me a sign of lethargy unworthy of a people with the history and traditions of America behind them.
I, too, have been interested in the farmers’ movement in Iowa, both for its own sake and because it centres around the vicinity of my girlhood home. In these days, when canned fruits and vegetables and condensed milk and supplies of all sorts can so easily be transported, if not in one way, then in several others, the farmers’ holiday plan, if I understand it, seems doomed to failure as a practical measure for securing any widespread or permanent increase in prices. It may have some value in directing attention to the crisis in the farming situation in general.
If there are any definite reasons for farmers to be hopeful, they would seem to lie in their habitual capacity for keeping at work in spite of failure and loss, their lifelong training in facing hard facts, their comparative adaptability, and their opportunities under normal conditions to produce at least a great part of their own necessities of life. These are all characteristics favorable to survival. At best, however, agricultural recovery must, I think, be slow, variable in rate and method, ‘here a little, there a little,’ depending largely on individual planning and initiative to meet local conditions. Permanent gains will require an awakened spirit of fair play, passion for the common welfare, sympathy and coöperation, both among farmers themselves and among the American people as a whole. In creating and expressing this spirit, everyone, whether of town or country, may have a share.
As for us, you must not feel unduly anxious. We have traveled rough roads before. Many cherished plans have failed. Not only radio and telephone, but running water in the house, furnace heat, modern lighting and refrigeration, have all passed beyond our dreaming. Even the three-cent postage is a burden. Obviously the national budget had to be balanced, but I could use the new stamps more cheerfully if they would print on each one the old Scotch proverb, ‘Willful waste makes woeful want.’ Estimates at our state school of agriculture show that it took ten times as much wheat to pay the 1931 taxes as it did to pay the average tax in the years between 1916 and 1921! The road ahead seems blocked. All sense of security for our old age has vanished. But we have not given up.
In some way — I hardly see how myself — we have managed to keep out of debt. We can still eat home-ground wheat cereal. The spring pullets are beginning to lay and the fall calves to arrive. We plan to gather driftwood from the distant river and ‘cow chips’ from our pastures to help out on the winter’s fuel supply. We take courage from thinking that, while we rarely have two good seasons together here, we have never had two as disheartening as this in direct succession. I believe that the experiences of the past two years have made us somewhat more sensitive to ‘the still, sad music of humanity.’ Above all, we have shining memories to brighten gloomy days, and friendships beyond our deserving.
Perhaps, in what many people would count ignoble poverty, we are rich after all.
CAROLINE