I have moved the dates of several actual but minor events by as much as three months, but there are no other conscious deviations from historical truth in the book. If I say that the price of spring wheat went from two dollars and seventy-six cents in 1920 to twenty-six cents in 1932, that is exactly what it did. If I say that in 1925 a farmer got thirty cents a dozen for eggs and in 1933 he got thirteen, these are exactly the prices he and millions of other farmers were paid. Seven thousand American banks, most of them rural, failed between 1920 and 1930 — before the final three years of panic liquidated another seven thousand. In 1933 alone, three hundred and fifty thousand farmers lost their farms. The Great Depression began for farmers in 1921, almost a full decade before it began for the rest of the nation. And for the lower half of the farm families in the United States today, who produce only ten per cent of the nation’s agricultural wealth, the Great Depression has never ended.
Nor have the other farm problems I try to deal with in this book. On the contrary, almost all of those problems have become worse, and new problems have been added to the old ones. The price supports instituted by Herbert Hoover in 1929 helped to create, one year later, a surplus that horrified his administration. Yet today our wheat surplus makes that surplus of 1930 seem small indeed. Wheat acreage has been cut by a third since those days, but the surplus has swollen until the storage costs for it run to well over a million and a half dollars a day. Now as then the wheat nobody can buy is our most troublesome surplus. And now even more than in 1933 technological advances create surpluses at the same time that they put farmers out of work.
The accuracy I have insisted upon is the minimum of respect I would pay to the people I write about. It is hard for us now to believe that these things ever happened; even while they were being annihilated, the farmers themselves could not believe what was happening. They kept on believing that things would be better soon. There was a time within their own memories when “one good year in seven” would see them through. For three times seven years they waited for that one good year with the nearly indestructible faith of the most dedicated gamblers.
If a tenant farmer included in the value of his wheat the most menial wages for the work of himself and his family, it cost him a dollar and eighteen cents to produce a bushel of wheat in 1933. But he was lucky to sell that wheat for eighty-five cents in the fall of 1933. A man who owned his farm could pay himself these wages and just break even. But for the tenant, the deficit ate into the sinking fund of his strength and faith more deeply every year. And every year more owners became tenants again, after struggling half a lifetime to become owners. When a farmer finally discovered that he was living on faith and nothing else, then faith could sustain him no longer. Too proud to admit fear even to himself, a farmer ran ahead of disaster till he lost the race, and then he went down to defeat in silence and isolation.
Each farmer believed that the combination of wars, booms, famines, crops, weather, prices, and six million other farmers would operate like a vast game — a game too complex to outguess, but too reasonable to cut him out on every single play. But it happened that the world did not function with the vigorous, harsh logic of a planetary gaming house after all; instead, it simply endured, as indifferent as that world the psalmist looked down upon from his dry hillside….
As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
Table of Contents
Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
I
Friday, February 17, 1933
Saturday, February 18
Monday, February 20
Saturday, March 4
Sunday, March 12
Thursday, March 23
Wednesday, April 12
Monday, April 17
Sunday, April 30
Monday, May 1
Sunday, May 14
Saturday, May 27
Saturday, June 17
Tuesday, July 4
Friday, July 14
Saturday, July 15
II
Tuesday, July 18
Monday, July 31
Monday, August 14
Wednesday, September 27
Friday, October 20
Friday, November 10
Saturday, November 11
Tuesday, December 5
Monday, December 25
Monday, January 1, 1934
Monday, January 8
Friday, February 9
III
Monday, February 12
Tuesday, March 13
Monday, April 16
Wednesday, April 18
Friday, May 25
Saturday, May 26
Author’s Note
The Bones of Plenty Page 52
