Why Farmers Fear the Peace

» Years ago we laughed at the farmer for taking subsidies. Now his dander is up and he won’t touch them. What is the reason?

by ARTHUR MOORE

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SENTRIES more powerful than military police kept the American farmer out of the United Nations food conference. They were his suspicions that the farmer’s lot in the post-war world will be that of indentured servant to industrial master.

Freedom from want was the conference keynote. Many American farmers will construe that to mean their poverty.

“Nobody should be denied enough to eat,” President Roosevelt wrote the delegates. “He’s going to end free farming with subsidies,” farmers will respond.

Improve the diets of low-income classes, said the delegates. Farmers will suspect that is labor’s cheapfood policy.

Expand international trade, the conference recommended. “That’s only for industry and foreign farmers” will be a common farm reaction.

The task of reporting on these attitudes is not altogether pleasant for one whose sympathy is with the farmer. But their implication for the post-war world is so significant that the job must be done. A majority of the United States Senate comes from states in which farmers are the strongest voting bloc. There is an absolute farm majority in four states, and in twenty-two more there are more farmers than factory workers, miners, and building workers combined. These states might conceivably produce fifty-two Senators who would oppose any peace or any post-war policy which would increase the farmer’s feeling of insecurity in an industrial world.

Only a few years ago the country was getting a bitter laugh from cartoons of the farmer asleep in the shade, a blissful smile on his lips, while all around fell a gentle rain of government checks; the farmer was being paid not to work. Many of the same people who had so much fun then at his expense are pleading with him now to take a little subsidy to help hold prices down. The farmer is ‘wondering why city people have found it so easy to remove the humorous label from subsidies and substitute a patriotic one. In answer, he has a theory of his own.

The farmer does not oppose subsidies because he would rather have inflation. If he were able to see subsidies as an anti-inflation device he would support them, for he has dreaded inflation since before Pearl Harbor. Like a man transfixed, he simply does not hear the inflation arguments. He sees subsidies, when they are used to cut prices, as a weapon to be used against him in a war for economic survival.

For a hundred years he has fought to keep a secure place for himself in the industrial age. It makes little difference to him whether the fight was against monopolies under the Grange or is against labor unions under the Farm Bureau. The robber barons who conspired to raise prices and freight rates merely have been replaced in his thinking by unions that conspire to raise wages. To the farmer, the purpose is the same: to further the subjugation of agriculture.

To arguments that subsidies are needed to halt the rise in living costs, farmers cite figures from their publications which show that wages have gone up faster than food. “The percentage of family income spent for food in 1942 was the lowest in history — 22 per cent,” the Farm Bureau magazine said in its May issue.

A. S. Goss, master of the National Grange, looks ahead: “If we refuse to pay production costs when we have a twenty-five billion dollar surplus income, what chances will there be of raising prices when income and employment start down?”

The heads of three national farm organizations listed subsidies as one of the elements threatening the nation’s food supply. “We warn that any country which does not pay its food bill will inevitably collapse,” they added.

“I would make it a jail offense to pay a subsidy,” growled “Cotton Ed” Smith, chairman of the Senate Agricultural Committee.

Despite their opposition, farmers who saw the Office of War Information pamphlet, Battle Stations for All, were not particularly surprised to find subsidies treated as a matter of settled national policy. The plain implication was that the farmer’s battle station was to accept them in a spirit of patriotism. This is the pamphlet which Elmer Davis, OWI director, said should not have been issued, and which Gardner Cowles, Jr., then director of domestic operations for the OWI, said probably contained the views of “certain political factions.” Farmers would be more precise. They would say it contained the views of organized labor and that it was no more than they expected from a government dominated by labor.

Farmers see subsidies as a labor-inspired campaign for cheap food. No other thought stirs them so deeply or strikes so surely to the heart of their fears. It reached into the food conference while it was in session. Murray D. Lincoln, one of the American delegates, admitted that many farmers thought the delegates were merely searching for ways to supply consumers with “plenty of cheap food.”

To the farmer, cheap food does not mean something written on price tags in a grocery store. It means the whole relationship between agriculture and industry, a relationship which the farmer believes has shifted steadily against his interests for three generations.

In ascribing a cheap-food campaign to the farmer’s enemies, Edward A. O’Neal, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, explained their motives like this in the March issue of the Farm Journal: “Over most of the world during all history the farmer has been considered a peasant, an ignorant individual of low social status who is not, by the nature of things, entitled to the rights and privileges and wealth that others consider themselves entitled to.”

“Most civilized nations exploit agriculture to keep labor costs down,” a farmer wrote in the Saturday Evening Post of January 30.

There are “rumblings of a battle for cheap food all about us,” the Illinois Agricultural Record told its readers last September, mentioning reporters, editorial writers, and radio commentators as being in the fight against farmers.

“This is a day of group action, every group fighting to get just a little more,” a county Farm Bureau publication told Illinois farmers, urging them to join up and get theirs. This impression of life in the United States was published five weeks before the American forces landed in North Africa.

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TOM LINDER is a fierce Georgian, a Democrat, agricultural commissioner of his state, a foe of reciprocal trade agreements, and a suspicious man. In his official publication he charges that industry is using the trade agreements against the farmer; that each one specializes in lowering agricultural imports rather than industrial imports.

He takes up the cheap-food theme. “There is an overall plan for a great industrial empire in the United States and Great Britain with high prices, this industrial empire to be matched with a rawmaterials empire of non-industrial countries with cheap prices on all agricultural products.”

Opposition to renewal of trade agreements was strongly agricultural in character within Congress. Even when its motive was partisan, it assumed a rural pose. Senator Harlan Bushfield of South Dakota described the agreements as opening American markets to foreign produce at the expense of the farmer. Similar charges were made again and again during the debates.

Here we can see the cheap-food fear of the farmer in operation. It makes the farmer an isolationist in the first instance within his own society. He feels that he is the victim of a divisionist economic policy. It is a natural step to transfer this feeling to foreign affairs.

This attitude is not necessarily a contradiction of the Gallup and Fortune polls which show an impressive majority of farm opinion favorable to joining world activities to suppress war. Isolation as a foreign policy, pure and simple, is getting little farm support. It never got it. The farmer’s Biblical and pacifist backgrounds prepared him long ago for international coöperation against war. The opinion polls show only that he does not respond to questionnaires like a paper isolationist. This difference will not be very important if, when it comes time to judge a peace, he reacts as many do to the reciprocal trade agreements.

Lend-Lease is regarded with the same fundamental distrust in some farm quarters. Representative James H. Morrison of Louisiana inserted in the Congressional Record his belief that, under the guise of Lend-Lease, the country lias agricultural missions in Latin America preparing areas to supply us with cheap food after the war.

“This would require huge quantities of almost everything produced in our factories,” Morrison added. “To complete the circle and give our new customers something to pay with, we would quit growing our food in the United States and buy from our neighbors.”

Worry about the future relation between workers of the United States and farmers of South America did not start with reciprocal trade or Lend-Lease. Farmers and farm spokesmen have thought and talked about it ever since the Good Neighbor policy was enunciated. Their conclusions are likely to fall somewhat short of openhanded neighborliness.

“South America produces many agricultural products for export which we already have on an export basis,” George E. Metzger, of the Illinois Agricultural Association, wrote in February of this year. “Certainly we cannot enter into trade agreements which will put much of our manufactured products into South America without taking in return some agricultural products which would be in direct competition with an ovcrsupply in this country.”

Mr. Metzger is in the business of signing farmers to membership in the Farm Bureau. When he writes this way about the Good Neighbor policy, under the title “A Look Ahead,” it is reasonably certain that he knows what is worrying his Illinois prospects and that he is suggesting to them what an alert farm organization might have to do in their behalf.

So far I have not actually answered the question, “Why do farmers fear the peace?” I have established only that they do fear the trends of policy which logically would lead to the post-war world. The words of their spokesmen show how this fear influences attitudes toward public issues.

These spokesmen do not, of course, always represent the precise views of six million farm owners. Farmers themselves disagree. Political loyalties are again divided. Cultural differences are deep. Because fifty per cent of the farmers get only twelve per cent of farm income, economic viewpoints vary widely. Each farm organization has a different set of roots into the past with resulting differences in the present.

Adding to the confusion is the overzealousness of professional farm spokesmen. They want either a membership fee or a vote. They find it easier to influence an unhappy or an envious man. In their fervor they sometimes misrepresent the farmer’s real desires. Lobbyists of the Farm Bureau and the Grange, for example, have maneuvered for higher prices and still higher prices in a way that is contrary to the corn-belt farmer’s earnest desire to control inflation. This tendency became so marked that the Iowa and Illinois state farm bureaus, usually pillars of the national federation, broke with it over the Pace bill, on the ground that it would raise prices.

From fragments such as I have quoted, farm opinion may seem incomprehensible. But it would be a grave error to allow fragments to divert attention from the fundamental unity.

Subsidies, trade agreements, Lend-Lease, the Good Neighbor policy — the list could be longer but it tells the story. A variety of agricultural points of view combine in a deep suspicion of current policies, including foreign relations. If these expressions of fear were unrelated, they might be disregarded as peevish trivialities. Clustered as they are around the single theme of cheap food, they reveal a solid core of farm obstruction to international coöperation and the possible starting point of a rigid economic, nationalism.

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THE Farm Bureau’s enemies say it represents the big farmers. (“Kulaks,” if you get mad enough out in the South Dakota wheatlands.) To its enemies the Farmers’ Union is composed of radicals and wreckers. (“Communists,” if you’re a Farm Bureau organizer.) Nobody would hurl names like these at the Grange; the worst its enemies would say is that it might do more for farmers if its petticoats weren’t in the way.

In all this sharp and bitter talk — much of it unfair, of course — it is notable that the greatest fault of all is practically never mentioned. Perhaps for the very reason that all are to blame, the organizations seldom are confronted with their failure to explain the industrial nature of our society in accurate terms. The farmer is not shown the facts about his relation to industry in sharp, clear outlines, but through a thicket of twisted statistics and outworn traditions, gnarled and crisscrossed in a blinding tangle. He catches only glimpses of what is really happening, and what he sees fleetingly is distorted.

Here is the real reason for the farmer’s fear of the peace: he does not understand the nature of the industrial society which will make the terms of that peace.

Because he does not see clearly, he can become angry over high wages and scorn to become a “chattel of industry” himself. He is capable of a deep anxiety over the declining number of farmers, yet earnest in his opposition to the Farm Security Administration whose duty it is to keep the weakest marginal farmers from leaving for the city. It is this lack of clarity which makes it possible for the farmer to fill out questionnaires like an interventionist, then act toward specific policies like an isolationist.

The farmer who prides himself on his “business” methods and attitudes would nevertheless join Representative Stephen Pace of Georgia in his wrath upon discovering that a canning factory in Missouri paid more for empty tin cans in 1942 than it paid for the produce that went into them. No auditor’s report, no study of the tin market, no comparison of the actual profits of the can makers compared with profits of the food growers. Just quick agreement that this was not right.

The business veneer, so easily cracked, disappears altogether in the honest agrarian protest of a cornbelt farmer who told fellow farmers in Peoria last winter: “It isn’t right to pay one man more for making weapons to kill people than another man gets for sustaining life by growing food.”

It is not “right” for tin cans to cost more than the food to fill them. It is not “right” to pay a war worker more than a farmer. The farmer’s rights, in this sense, are not based on worth to society or on the operation of any economic law.

The victims of this agrarian trance look back on the farmer of a hundred years ago as living in a rural idyl, producing one golden harvest after another in a state of pure agrarian blessedness. This is part of the deception. Actually, the American farmer of the period was the partner of British industry. His products were eaten by the workmen who established Britain’s industrial power. The agrarian hero, free and independent of industry, never existed. But this vision does not keep his worshipers from citing statistics in an effort to prove he was real.

“Agriculture received forty per cent of the national income in 1800 and twelve per cent in 1937.”

These figures, or their counterpart, are familiar to every farmer. They are used by farm spokesmen as a direct measure of agriculture’s fall. The next Step, logically, would be to hold up the miserable farmer of India as the prime agrarian of all time —on the ground that he gets eighty per cent of the national income.

The figures used to prove the decline of the farmer prove just the opposite. They show his increasing usefulness to society. His increased productive skill was needed to free other men from the land. These men made the automobiles, the radios, and the electric lights that disturbed the old income percentages but enriched the farmer’s life.

The agrarian tradition will not have it so. It looks with longing backward to the day when the farmer got forty per cent of a tallow-candle income.

In all the food industry, from field to grocery shelf, the greatest need for a forthright, honest grade label is on the farmer himself. If the farmer willingly is to join the rest of society in a peace which will make the war worth while, he must do so on a basis of trustful partnership. He must first understand himself. Then he must be understood.

In an industrial society the importance of farming increases enormously. We see this in frightening clarity during war when the whole nation begins to wonder about its next meal.

If the true relation of food to industry were understood, it would be the Congressman from the Bronx who would arise and address his colleagues on the need for a fair price for corn or the importance of soil conservation. Farmers will always eat. The real food problem is a city problem. It is the man who cannot raise his own who may go hungry.

There is reason for concern on his part, too. World population has increased more than food production in the past fifty years. The world has never had enough to eat. Nutritionists generally agree that double the present output is needed; some would triple it.

The careless exploitation of remaining food frontiers in a global cheap-food policy would be the suicide of civilization. To throw the farmer of the United States on an import market would, in a few years, gut the world’s greatest food-producing area of fertility and skills. We might not seem to suffer for a time. But when the last food frontiers were exploited, the nation, along with the rest of the world, would find itself in a new medieval age, a strange era of television, airplanes, and starvation.

After the war, agricultural resources, human and soil, must be restored, preserved, and expanded all over the world, in new farming areas and old. The underfed must be fed. But if the world is to obtain freedom from want, people must not be fed at the expense of food production or farm standards anywhere.

A sound, new agrarianism would remove the farmer’s fears of the peace and of the post-war world. He would understand then that the purpose of agriculture is not to provide a living for farmers but to grow food. When he could agree to that view without flinching, he would be free of the last trace of sentimental agrarianism. He would be at his full stature in an industrial society, proud in the consciousness of his usefulness, generous as only the fearless can be generous, the foremost farmer citizen of the world.