The Middle West Wants Facts

by HERBERT AGAR

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TODAY the British want to know everything about America: what our country feels like and looks like, how our government works, how our regions differ from one another, how long our children stay in school, what they learn. Above all, they want to know what we are thinking.

It is part of my job to meet the incessant questions of British audiences. So I come back occasionally to travel about America, to see as much as I can of what we are doing and planning.

In June, I made a trip through the Middle West, talking with three or four farm audiences a day. I saw ten states —from Ohio to South Dakota, from Missouri to the Canadian border.

It was a dramatic June in that part of the country, a discouraging June for farmers. They have tried this year to raise the biggest crop ever; but the fierce rains of April and May, and the consequent floods, set them back a month. It was a bad June to ask them to meet with an outsider whose one claim was that he could bring some facts about England. A surprising number came.

In July, I returned to the British Isles, where I have been trying to describe the mind and the mood of the Middle Western farmers as I saw them. I hope the men and women with whom I talked while at home will feel that my story, as here set down, is broadly true and that I am not misinforming our allies.

First, there is a solemn spirit among the people of the corn belt. They know that the world’s future may be determined by the behavior of Americans during the next ten years. They do not deny this responsibility, and they will not evade it. Also, they are worried about their own fate in an industrial society. They would be foolish if they were not worried. They want to understand that society; they want to find within it a place of dignity and of reasonable security for farmers.

They believe that a healthy America presupposes an agriculture that can stand on its own feet, without special favors. They think that they have been moving in the right direction, and they want to find ways of protecting themselves against a post-war relapse.

Their deepest interest, however, is not in thenprivate problems but in the nation’s policy. They want to understand our American duty in the midst of the threats and opportunities of our time. They are searching their minds, asking themselves what they should do as citizens and as members of the human race. They know we are the most fortunate, and for a time the most powerful, of nations. They are asking themselves how we should act so that America may justify her luck.

In the midst of their crop troubles they take time out to work on this primary question. In the little towns and the villages where I spoke, I was always told by the chairman that the farmers were in a hurry because they had to get back to their chores — that if I wanted questions and ideas from them I had better cut my talk short. I did so, telling a few facts about England to start the questions going. Every time, a large part of the audience stayed for hours — until I had to leave for the next meeting, or until midnight if the meeting was in the evening.

They stayed because they wanted facts. They didn’t care what I thought about their problems. They wanted facts on what men and women abroad were doing, feeling, thinking. They wanted facts which would help them to make the world story come alive in their minds. I have never met more intense, creative curiosity.

I was taken from meeting to meeting by the local county committeemen. These were the farmers who had been elected by their neighbors to represent them on the councils of the Triple A. Through ten states and an unremembered number of counties, every man who had me in charge was a man who made me more hopeful for the world’s future. They all know their own jobs thoroughly, and they ail know that free men cannot discharge their duties merely by doing one job well. They know that every man of good will must become an active working citizen or the world may revert to cruel anarchy. They have read the Old Testament as well as the news from Europe, and they know how close man lives to such disaster.

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MOST of my farm audiences would begin with questions on British agriculture. Did the British farmer expect to be sold out at the end of this war as he was at the end of the last? If not, why not? Did the British farmer approve of subsidies as a way of stabilizing prices? They all seemed to know that subsidies have been used in England, and that they have kept prices level since early in 1941. They wanted to know whether the farmers of England were afraid of them or welcomed them.

What about American food in England and among the armies of the Allies everywhere? Was it playing a big part? Did the world know what a production job the American farmer had done in 1941 and 1942? Here was a line pride in a fine accomplishment. No boastfulness. No niggling queries about why foreigners should be helped by our hard work. Only the decent hope that the men and women fighting on our side had the comfort of knowing that the American farmer was fighting too.

After the questions about agriculture — and the obvious questions about strikes in England, and why they are less menacing than in the United States — the farmers would turn to questions about the British mind and purposes. Have the British people plans for post-war reform? If so, are they merely plans for town prosperity or do they include the countryman as well? What about equality in England? What about religion? What about the British school system?

The questions were less important than the tone in which they were asked. There was not one cynical question in a hundred. The questions were an attempt to find a hope for the future. The farmers believe that the hope exists if they can dig it out and put it into words and then act accordingly.

There was no effort to play down the rest of the world in order to excuse ourselves for ignoring our world position. There was no apathy, no indifference, no selfish isolationism. But there was frustration. They want to know more. They want to make their own clear picture of the war and the possible post-war world. They want to discuss it with people to whom they can talk back, of whom they can ask more and more questions.

When they collect the facts they will make up their own minds. No one need delude himself that he can impose his thoughts on these farmers. No one need worry that their decisions will be unworthy if they are given the facts, the chance to judge wisely.

They get many facts from the radio, many from the press. But one weakness of the radio and the press is that you can’t answer back. You can’t hold a town meeting with a receiving set or an editorial. And the corn belt has grown up in the tradition of the town meeting — of neighbors coming together to exchange thoughts and to educate one another. They want to question all alleged facts and to look at them from all sides.

When they are satisfied that they know enough they will come to conclusions — slowly perhaps, skeptically perhaps, but in the light of a stern sense of duty to our country and to the world. At the end of the month of June I felt that I had been living for four weeks among people who cannot be less than magnanimous if they are given the facts which they desire.

These men and women of the corn belt do not intend to be defeated by this year’s weather. In Iowa some of the farmers were planting corn for the second time this season, and some for the third. The previous plantings were washed out by rain. In Illinois, after the first two days of dryness for weeks, I saw men and women out with their tractors — some plowing, some planting, some weeding — at three o’clock in the morning. Their cars were parked by the roadside, giving a precarious light.

They were not doing this for money. They were doing it for the war. Many of them were in the last war and many of their children are in this one. They believe that most of their grandchildren will be in the next one unless we take our religion and our country’s responsibilities more seriously. They believe it is a war duty to work themselves to the bone. To say they are working just for profits is as silly as to say that the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts in order to be comfortable.

That may sound like inflated language. We should not forget that many of the farmers of the corn belt are deeply religious people. They believe in moral responsibility, and they do not think man’s duty can be described solely in terms of self-interest. They represent the free men that Hitler cannot understand — not mobs, not self-seekers, but people who live as well as preach the democratic code.

They are surprised, and mildly resentful, when they hear from the outside world that they don’t know a war is taking place. One farm woman in Nebraska said to me: “What do they expect us to do? Cry in public because our children are at war? Complain in public because we are lonely? We work harder than we have ever worked because we take the war and the world hard. We try to learn what is happening and why it has happened. What more can we do?”

It was none of my business to tell them what to do. It was my business to bring them some facts, and to take some facts back to England. But I did suggest that they should make their mood known to a larger public. They are too busy to have time for proselytizing. Self-advertisement is not in the character of the corn belt.

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I HOPE T am not making an overcheerful report of what. I saw at home. Yet I cannot introduce gloom merely in order to sound more credible. So far as I could tell, the vast Middle West is not only working hard to win the war: it is working hard to think the war. It knows that a new moment has come in the old story of our planet. It knows that at such a moment America must bear a special burden because of her traditions, her strength, her opulence. It knows that neither selfishness nor world-flight will help us to bear this burden.

I feel that the British who want to understand the mind of the corn belt would do well to remember these lines from Walt Whitman: —

There is much of the Middle West in those words.

In trying to make an honest report, I have to remind British audiences to make allowance for the fact that the farmers who came to my meetings were obviously those most interested in the outside world. If the weather had been better in the early spring, my audiences would have been larger and perhaps less encouraging.

The farmers among whom I spent a month are well aware that the world has other peoples in it. They know that tears may be shed for centuries if we Americans behave badly — that the world might enter on a new hope if we and our allies behave well. So far as they can influence history, they will influence it for good.

They have not made a blueprint for tomorrow; but through the town meeting system which they have never abandoned, through the democratic method, they are building in their minds the foundation on which a decent tomorrow might rest. They may not use Walt Whitman’s words, or the words of the Bible, but they know the “old cause” when they see it. They want to place it in the new setting. They think it belongs there. They want to make sure.

I do not find it possible to believe that these people who have such a lively sense of moral responsibility in their own lives and communities will choose to set narrow limits upon their responsibility to their fellow men. They naturally want to know that other nations, also, are preparing to work hard for peace and for international security. They want to see some reasonable program for action before accepting for themselves the burdens of world power. They already appear to have decided that a policy of refusing those burdens can bring only wars and ruin. Yet there is a difference between abandoning a negative attitude and defining a positive one.

If the gap can be bridged, if the positive attitude can be defined, the time will have come at last when the great moral reserve which has built so vigorous a culture in the Middle West, so healthy a life, can become a source of vitality for a world community as well.

American farmers don’t want to be preached at. They want to know exactly how our allies are behaving, what our allies are thinking, planning. They are not suspicious or cynical. They don’t fear the worst. But they want to be shown that the men who are fighting with us are fighting for the “peerless, passionate, good cause. ”

They hope to be convinced, but no one can convince them except themselves. All an outsider can do is to bring them the truth as he has seen it, and to try to answer the solid good questions that they ask. Once they are self-convinced, once they know in their blood that this is again the “great war for thee,” no effort will be too heavy for these people, no pain will be refused.

And there will then be no placating them if any leaders anywhere should try to sidetrack the “old cause” when the war is won.