“Oh, you betcha,” George whispered.
“The Sun has been pretty good about printing the releases I’ve passed on from Washington.” There was a tinge of importance in his voice. “But I know how it is, when you’re getting in a harvest.”
You do, do you? thought George.
“You sometimes can’t keep up with the paper when you’re working sixteen hours a day [Oh, you know all about it, don’t you, down there in your little easy chair?], and if you’ll bear with me I’d like to summarize for you, as briefly as I can, some things that have happened in the last couple of months that concern you and your plans for the future. [My plans for the future are to stay alive, damn you.]
George thought it, but somebody else said it—“Just tell me what to pay my rent with, will you? I can’t seem to plan no further ahead than that!”
Finnegan trotted out a chuckle from somewhere. “That’s all right, we want it nice and informal,” he said, “and if you’ll just go along with me I think I can show you how you’ll have a better chance to pay your rent next year, anyhow. The government wants to help you get a fair price for your wheat but we can’t help you unless you’ll do something about planning ahead. Now you know this summer at the meeting in London all the big wheat-producing countries agreed on export allotments.”
“All except the Roosians,” George said to Stuart.
“The allotment for this country is forty-seven million bushels for this year and ninety million for the next two years combined. Now let me remind you that in 1920, which certainly was a golden year for a lot of you men, we exported three hundred and seventy million bushels. Last year we exported forty-one million. In other words, last year we exported less than thirteen per cent of what we exported twelve years ago. For over a decade, now, wheat has been building up into more and more of a surplus problem—by far the biggest surplus problem of any farm item—or any other item, for that matter. [Except for the item of hungry people, you jackass.] Now it stands to reason you’ll never get a decent price for wheat with more than half a year’s supply in storage. It’s just common sense that the millers aren’t going to pay you anything for your crops so long as that extra wheat is just sitting there. And we can’t sell it abroad, that’s all there is to it. Nobody has any dollars over there.”
[Nobody has any dollars over in Europe because big business won’t let any imports in over here, you hypocritical son-of-a-bitch.]
“We simply have way too much acreage in wheat,” Finnegan repeated. “During the war all you heard was ‘Wheat Will Win the War,’ and we admit it, the government did everything it could to get you to expand your operations. And you sure did. Do you realize that wheat acreage went from fifty-three million acres in 1914 to seventy-three million in 1919? That’s almost a forty per cent increase in five years. Now the main reason that the parity years of 1910 through 1914 were such good years for farmers is that we didn’t have so many acres in wheat and there was no surplus to contend with. Europe wanted everything we could produce and the prices were good. Then during the war, of course, we actually had a scarcity. Now it’s true that acreage has dropped again since 1920, but not enough. The government wants to help you cut back enough so that you’ll get a fair price.”
“A fair price from who?” somebody said loudly. “Even if wheat was scarce again, what difference would it make? Who’s got any money? You just said yourself there’s no dollars over there in Europe any more.”
Finnegan had no answer, of course, but that didn’t stop him from talking. “Well, things are going to pick up a lot. There’ll be money in circulation again. [That’s not what fourteen million men out of a job think.] And when there’s money, there’ll be money for you, too, if we can just empty the elevators and storage bins and barges so the millers won’t be able to offer whatever price they want and know that somebody will sell. And this brings me to the business for tonight.” He stopped and read his notes and when he spoke again, he sounded just like another newspaper release from the mass of publications flowing from Washington desks to country mailboxes.
“This is a matter which requires the cooperation of every single one of you—and not only the cooperation, but the good faith and the solemn promises. This country was built on the words and deeds of honorable men like you, and it will endure on those same words and deeds. Now you know I’ve been to see some of you individually, but tonight I wanted to get you all together. I want you to look around at your neighbors and realize that you’ve got to work together if you want to save your own skins. I know you can say competition is what made this country great—but so did cooperation. And now you’ve got to work together or the competition between you will ruin all of you. Six million farmers are competing against each other. How are you going to get anywhere that way? I brought you together so you could look around at each other and see just who it is that’s ruining you at the markets in Chicago and Minneapolis and Liverpool.”
“B.S.!” A red-faced man jumped up and began to talk. It was Lester Zimmerman, and he could make quite a speech if he felt like it. “We all know damn well who’s wrecking those markets. For one thing it’s the Guardian Trust Company in Jimtown that’s foreclosed on at least ten thousand acres in this county and plants every last one of them to wheat with great big tractors. And I’ll bet you that the damned Guardian Trust Company owns six combines—that’s what I’ll bet! And that’s the kind of outfit that’s wrecking the wheat markets, mister! Don’t you try and tell me it’s my little two hundred acres that’s doing it!”
“Yeah,” said somebody else, “what’s the government going to do about these banks and insurance companies?”
“Everything will be done on a percentage basis. There’s no other fair way to do it,” Finnegan argued. “Everybody has got to cut down. A lot of people thought the crops would be poor enough this year so as to eliminate the wheat surplus. But it just hasn’t worked out that way, has it? A third of the Kansas winter wheat acreage was abandoned at harvest time last May and the rest of the acreage yielded very poorly too. Kansas this year produced only forty-seven per cent of what they produced last year, and—listen to this—only twenty-three per cent of what they produced in 1931 when the moisture was anywhere near normal. And you don’t have to be told what happened in South Dakota this summer, because we got enough of it ourselves up here. The worst damage came from the hoppers, but what with the drought and rust and smut, South Dakota harvested ten per cent of what they got last year. And still we have a surplus that’s ruining your prices. You’ve got to see that it is the two-hundred acre farms that have to cut back. It’s everybody.”
Another man stood up. “How can I plant less? What am I going to do for cash? You tell me what to use instead of cash and I’ll go along with you.” He sat down, then added, “Maybe it’s time to get us a printing press and make our own.”
“The government understands that you can’t survive without a certain minimum of cash. [Minimum!] I’m here to try to show you how you can get your hands on that minimum and still work toward a better balance between the supply and demand in your market. The government knows that you also don’t like relief. Why should you? You’ve lived independently all your lives and your fathers before you were independent. The government is proud that men like you keep struggling to stay independent. [And also the government doesn’t like making relief payments, does it?] I have the contracts here with me tonight that will guarantee you a certain benefit payment next summer in addition to whatever cash you get from the acreage you leave in production. Shall we get down to business? ["Benefit payment” They do their best to make it sound like relief!]
“What happens if we sign and then wheat prices go way up? If the Kansas wheat crop is even worse next spring?” somebody asked. “Your measly checks ain’t going to look like a heck of a lot next to what we could get next fall.”
“Let me outline this program for you and then we’ll have all your questions. How’s that?” The county agent plowed ahead. “But i
n regard to your question, let me say that any man who signs an agreement to take a certain amount of acreage out of production and then reneges on his agreement is certainly being a poor neighbor, besides being dishonest. [Do you think we’ll fall for this grade-school sermon? Especially from a politician?] Now, first of all, for sixty or seventy years the farmers have been complaining about how the middlemen get too much of the food dollar. The railroads’ rates were always too high, their land grants were exorbitant —”
“Well they were!” somebody shouted. “They are!”
“All right, so they were. So the most important thing about this acreage-control plan is that the middleman gets soaked for it. These Triple A payments are coming out of the processing taxes the government levies on all refiners and bakers. This is so the wheat farmer can get more for his work without passing the cost on to the consumer. We all agree that the consumer cannot consume enough to keep you in business. Right?”
“Oh, George!” Lester called. “Did you bring a shovel? I clean forgot mine, and it’s gettin’ so thick in here! Do you realize the price of bread went up two months ago and this fella hasn’t heard about it yet?”
“All right, now!” Finnegan cried. “You just let me give you some estimates here. We expect to take in at least five hundred million dollars a year from these middlemen, and it’s all going to come back to you! Now just let me read you part of a bulletin I have in my hand here. I just got a shipment of these”—Lester stood up, made a few shoveling motions, and sat down—“and I hope you’ll all pick one up when we get down to the business of filling out these contracts, but I’d like to just pick out some high points here: ‘One, the total volume of wheat production in the United States must be reduced and kept within effective demand.’ And … let’s see here—‘Three, the farmers who cooperate in the program must, by reason of their cooperating, be given advantages which noncooperators would not have.’”
“There he’s got us!” George boomed out. He couldn’t see letting Lester grab the floor all the time. “Your well goes dry or your feed runs out and you either sell your stock to the government or shoot it for coyote food. So you go to your county agent, and he says, ‘You didn’t buy my acreage contract; I don’t buy your cows.’ Or you tell your kindly county agent, ‘I hear the government’s helping us fellows to dig new wells.’ ‘I don’t find your name here on my list,’ says Mr. Agent. ‘You go dig your own hole.’”
“For Christ’s sake, let’s hear the man out!” Stuart hissed.
So Rachel’s drunkard baby brother was going to act pious and embarrassed, was he? George would have to clean his clock for him one of these days. He knew it.
Finnegan went on as though there had been no interruptions at all. He had decided to pretend their unanswerable questions did not exist. What allegiance did a man owe to a government that sent him a donkey like this?
“I’m skipping along here …” said the county agent. “ ‘Five, production control should be accomplished through acreage control. Seven, the purchasing power of the United States wheat grower’s wheat must be restored to where it was in the base period, or parity period, of the prewar years of nineteen-oh-nine to nineteen-fourteen.’
“Now, there you have the outlines of the thinking and planning we’ve done since the new President took over. At least you’ll have to admit that we’ve been getting some action started. I know this has all been in the newspapers, but this bulletin pulls it together for you, and you really ought to take one. It’s your tax money that printed it. If you know a neighbor who didn’t come tonight, I wish you’d take one for him.
“Now of course you will be expected to sign a three-year contract. That’s partly to enable the government to plan ahead and not to exceed the production that will take care of our domestic needs and our export quota. But it’s also partly to encourage you to do something with the acreage you take out of wheat. If you take it out for that long, perhaps you’ll build it up for good pasture or hay. That will be good for you and good for the land.
“Supposing you averaged a hundred and thirty acres in wheat for the last three years. We’ll take the three-year average, from 1929 to 1932—be glad we don’t include this year’s bad crop—and we’ll base your payments on that. Around here, the average for those three good years is ten point five bushels to the acre—last year it was only six point eight, as you know too well. So—if you withheld thirty acres, figuring at roughly ten bushels to the acre, you’d be paid for three hundred bushels that you never lifted a finger nor spent a dime to produce. We’re going to soak the millers thirty cents a bushel and twenty-eight of that will come to you. Three hundred times twenty-eight cents is eighty-four dollars you’d get in a government check after I’d been out to verify your acreage for you. Eighty-four dollars is almost as much as some of you netted this year from your entire crop, isn’t it? And twenty-eight cents a bushel is more than you netted this year, isn’t it?”
“You know all the answers!” somebody yelled. “Tell them to my landlord!”
“We know that’s a problem. We hope we can convince you to try to show your landlords that this is the best approach for all of you.”
“You’re right down there next-door neighbor to my landlord,” George said. “You tell him! You send your little booklets on over to him.”
Finnegan was trying to shout over them all. “Now that I’ve given you this outline and this example, are we ready to get down to a real study of the contracts? I’ll pass them out to you so you can follow along with me.”
As he came down the aisle, Lester started in on him again. “I want to know how much acreage the Guardian Trust Company is going to cut and why they ought to get any tax money at all for running a bunch of farmers off their land.”
“Let’s not worry about the Cuardian Trust any more tonight,” Finnegan snapped. “The Guardian Trust is not coming to the government for relief checks and free groceries, and the Guardian Trust does not have any bologna-grade cattle it might have to sell in a hurry!”
He was letting them have it now, after he had ignored George saying the same thing. This was what the little bulletin meant by “cooperating” farmers getting “advantages” not available to “noncooperators.” This was what every man who read the newspapers already knew—and they all read the newspapers. Furthermore, they all knew that County Agent Finnegan, like every other county agent in seventeen hundred other wheat counties, had his finger in up to the elbow in the administration of practically any government money. So just who was the county agent trying to kid, anyway?
“I almost forgot,” said Finnegan. He had retreated to the stage after handing out his forms. “I wanted to mention some other important items. Maybe you can give me half an ear while you look over those papers. I have another bulletin here.” He held it up and patted a pile on the long table beside him. “It’s of interest to everybody, but particularly to the ladies. I hope you men will all take a copy home. I want to read you just a short paragraph here: ‘In far too many instances the farmhouse provides only meager facilities for sheltering and feeding the family. It contributes little toward making home life pleasant. Heretofore, farm savings have largely gone back into the farm to increase production. It would be sound economy to put an increased proportion into the home. Such a course, besides raising the farm standard of living, would harmonize with the need for controlling production.’ Now that’s why I’m sorry not to see more ladies here tonight,” he shouted over the hoots in the hall. “I’m sorry that more ladies aren’t here to pick up these bulletins I have on how to brighten up your house. There are lots of little tricks here that use relatively inexpensive materials.”
“Like flour sacks?” somebody called.
“And,” Finnegan went on, “there are some tricks here for the men, too. I especially want to point out this little three-page booklet on an economy bathroom that you can install yourself for as little as a hundred and fifty dollars.” There were more hoots.
“A hundred and
fifty dollars and some labor, and you would be rid of your privy—no more of those long cold walks in your nightshirt through six feet of snow on a chilly winter’s night.” There was no laughter. No city man with nice inside plumbing had any right to make jokes about those walks. And besides, they weren’t really so funny.
He hurried on. “And a hundred and fifty dollars and the labor put into improving your house instead of producing wheat that nobody wants would help raise the price of wheat and raise the value of your property at the same time.”
“Then the taxes and rent would go up! Every time I fix up my place, the government soaks my landlord and he soaks me!” somebody said.
Another man observed, “By golly, I’d have to lay a new floor before I put in any of that heavy stuff. I can just see the old woman now, fixture and all, falling through into the storm-cellar.”
“If I had a hundred and fifty dollars to spend on a bathroom, I’d buy a car that’d run, and get out of here,” the other replied.
“Hell,” the first argued, “if you had a hundred and fifty dollars to spend on a bathroom, you’d be so rich you wouldn’t want to get out.”
Finnegan had lost his audience again—this time because they were speculating on how they would use that much cash left over after simple survival. George was digging another well and installing a windmill so he could stop pumping by hand every drop of water he used. Then with the next hundred and fifty dollars he’d put in a power pump to get the water up to the house and back to the garden. Then, when he had water flowing to the house, perhaps it would be time to think about putting in a bathroom. But the water would not flow to the house unless the fine free-enterprise power company would string a line out his road. There sat Will, with his house wired for electricity ever since he’d built it almost thirty years ago. Will was still waiting, and it looked like he was going to wait a long time yet. So perhaps the second hundred and fifty dollars had just better be applied toward a tractor, after all.
The Bones of Plenty Page 33
