Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  Through a federal program we got a farm loan. A committee of twenty-five of us drafted the first farm legislation of this kind thirty-five years ago. We drew it up with Henry Wallace. New money was put in the farmers’ hands. The Federal Government changed the whole marketing program from burning 10-cent corn to 45-cent corn. People could now see daylight and hope. It was a whole transformation of attitude. You can just imagine … (He weeps.)

  It was Wallace who saved us, put us back on our feet. He understood our problems. When we went to visit him, after he was appointed Secretary, he made it clear to us he didn’t want to write the law. He wanted the farmers themselves to write it. “I will work with you,” he said, “but you’re the people who are suffering. It must be your program.” He would always give his counsel, but he never directed us. The program came from the farmers themselves, you betcha.

  Another thing happened: we had twice too many hogs because corn’d been so cheap. And we set up what people called Wallace’s Folly: killing the little pigs. Another farmer and I helped develop this. We couldn’t afford to feed 45-cents corn to a $3 hog. So we had to figure a way of getting rid of the surplus pigs. We went out and bought ‘em and killed ’em. This is how desperate it was. It was the only way to raise the price of pigs. Most of ’em were dumped down the river.

  The hard times put farmers’ families closer together. My wife was working for the county Farm Bureau. We had lessons in home economics, how to make underwear out of gunny sacks, out of flour sacks. It was cooperative labor. So some good things came out of this. Sympathy toward one another was manifest. There were personal values as well as terrible hardships.

  Mrs. Heline interjects: “They even took seat covers out of automobiles and re-used them for clothing or old chairs. We taught them how to make mattresses from surplus cotton. We had our freedom gardens and did much canning. We canned our own meat or cured it in some way. There was work to do and busy people are happy people.”

  The real boost came when we got into the Second World War. Everybody was paying on old debts and mortgages, but the land values were going down. It’s gone up now more than ever in the history of the country. The war…. (A long pause.)

  It does something to your country. It’s what’s making employment. It does something to the individual. I had a neighbor just as the war was beginning. We had a boy ready to go to service. This neighbor one day told me what we needed was a damn good war, and we’d solve our agricultural problems. And I said, “Yes, but I’d hate to pay with the price of my son.” Which we did. (He weeps.) It’s too much of a price to pay….

  In ’28 I was chairman of the farm delegation which met with Hoover. My family had always been Republican, and I supported him. To my disappointment. I don’t think the Depression was all his fault. He tried. But all his plans failed, because he didn’t have the Government involved. He depended on individual organizations.

  It’s a strange thing. This is only thirty-five years ago—Roosevelt, Wallace. We have a new generation in business today. Successful. It’s surprising how quickly they forget the assistance their fathers got from the Government. The Farm Bureau, which I helped organize in this state, didn’t help us in ’35. They take the same position today: we don’t need the Government. I’m just as sure as I’m sitting here, we can’t do it ourselves. Individuals have too many different interests. Who baled out the land banks when they were busted in the Thirties? It was the Federal Government.

  What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence. In Plymouth County—Le Mars— just west of us, a group met one morning and decided they were going to stop the judge from issuing any more deficiency judgments. This judge had a habit of very quickly O.K.’ing foreclosure sales. These farmers couldn’t stand it any more. They’d see their neighbors sold out.

  There were a few judges who would refuse to take the cases. They’d postpone it or turn it over to somebody else. But this one was pretty gruff and arrogant: “You do this, you do that, it’s my court.” When a bunch of farmers are going broke every day and the judge sits there very proudly and says: “This is my court …”; they say: “Who the hell are you?” He was just a fellow human being, same as they were.

  These farmers gathered this one particular day. I suppose some of ’em decided to have a little drink, and so they developed a little courage. They decided: we’ll go down and teach that judge a lesson. They marched into the courtroom, hats on, demanded to visit with him. He decided he would teach them a lesson. So he says: “Gentlemen, this is my court. Remove your hats and address the court properly.”

  They just laughed at him. They said, “We’re not concerned whose court this is. We came here to get redress from your actions. The things you’re doing, we can’t stand to have done to us any more.” The argument kept on, and got rougher. He wouldn’t listen. He threatened them. So they drug him from his chair, pulled him down the steps of the courthouse, and shook a rope in front of his face. Then, tarred and feathered him.

  The Governor called out the National Guard. And put these farmers behind barbed wire. Just imagine … (he weeps) … in this state. You don’t forget these things.

  Frank and Rome Hentges

  It is on the corner, the oldest house in Le Mars, Iowa. The decor is of another era. Frank is in the middle eighties; Rome is in the middle seventies. They had been clothing merchants before the Depression.

  FRANK: (Laughs.) Oh, gee whiz. The Great American Depression.

  ROME: The Holidays here.

  FRANK: Farmer’s Holidays, yeah. They marched up to the courthouse, where Judge Bradley was sitting on the bench. The farmers objected to, oh, let’s say, the losing of the farm. I think they were right. They had a just cause.

  ROME: That farm was probably worth seventy or eighty thousand dollars, and they’d foreclose on a $15,000 mortgage. That wasn’t fair.

  FRANK: That certainly wasn’t.

  ROME: I don’t blame ’em for taking the stand they did.

  FRANK: They took the judge off his seat and put a rope around his neck. ROME: They were gonna hang him.

  FRANK: Yeah, they took him out.

  ROME: He was frightened.

  FRANK: He was scared to death. Bradley was a very good friend of ours. We knew him very well. He later went to Des Moines.

  Did they tar and feather him?

  FRANK: No, not here.

  ROME: There was some of that, but not around here. But they had the tope around his neck, and he was pretty well frightened.

  FRANK: He was scared to death, because he couldn’t do anything. All he could do was carry out the law. Whatever the law was. And I don’t know….

  They put the rope around his neck … ?

  FRANK: I wasn’t there. I didn’t see it.

  ROME: They didn’t hang him. But it really ruined his life. He was never all right after that. I think he retired. He was not well at all. That’s quite a shock for an older man.

  FRANK: Oh yeah, when you’re within an inch of having your life took by the mob.

  ROME: This group of farmers—there were hundreds of them, I guess. And he was at their mercy. I don’t know how they finally decided not to do it. Just after this judge deal, they were all arrested, and the country club was on the south edge of town. That’s where they kept them, fenced in, in an enclosure there. There were hundreds of ’em.

  How did the Depression effect you?

  ROME: It was rough on us.

  FRANK: Those that had the money lost the money.

  ROME : Yeah, all those banks closed, you know.

  FRANK: I guess we’re about the only family left that lived here, aren’t we?

  ROME: We had several stores around in different towns. In Yankton and Watertown, South Dakota. And Mason City, Iowa. Carroll, Iowa. We just closed up the stores. About ’33.

  FRANK: We had about the best trade in the city.

  You reopened after … ?

  ROME: We never did reopen any
of ’em.

  What have you done since then?

  ROME: Sit around. (Laughs.)

  Orrin Kelly

  He’s been a salesman at the Plymouth Co-op in Le Mars since 1940. For the last eight years, he’s been doing odd jobs at the place. He now works two hours a day.

  IF THEY WAS GONNA CALL a farm sale, we would send a group there to stop the sale. There wasn’t any rioting like there is now. We would just go there, and they would see maybe several hundred of us. And they would just call the sale off. There wouldn’t be no demonstration. We’d just go there.

  The Judge Bradley deal came on quite unexpectedly. I wasn’t here at the time. I was in Des Moines the day it happened. They went up in Sioux City and stopped a farm sale up there. And the group came down to Le Mars, maybe a hundred or more farmers. They heard about this sale here. So they went up to the courthouse and tried to interview Judge Bradley. He was belligerent and defiant. And they took him out, not intending any more than just talk to him. But as things went on, they took him out in the country and threatened to lynch him, which they wouldn’t have done, of course.

  Of course, that brought in the militia. That was on a Thursday. Saturday morning, the militia came to Le Mars. I came home Saturday midnight. Sunday morning, the militia picked me up because I was chairman of the Council for Defense. I was in jail for lacking-two-days-of-being two weeks.

  I had been to church and walked downtown. The editor of the Globe-Post , he came running out and said: “You’d better get out of town, Orrin. The militia’s looking for you, in connection with the Judge Bradley deal.” I said, “I have nothing to run for. I’m not going.” He said, “I’ll call a lawyer and have him defend you.” So I walked up the street where the lawyer’s office was. As I went up the stairs, the National Guard followed me. They said, “We’re taking Kelly out of here.” He tried to defend me: “You have to have a warrant. You can’t pick Mr. Kelly up just like that.” But they said, “We’re taking him with us.” So they took me down and put me in a patrol wagon and took me to a camp, the south part of town. And kept me there that afternoon.

  I asked them if I could call my wife. They said, “You can’t call your wife.” Someone did call her. They allowed her to come in. Searched her.

  That night, about six o’clock, a patrol wagon came around and took me to Sioux City. I was in the police station there till Wednesday evening. There weren’t any seats in the wagon, and I had to kind of stoop down all the way to Sioux City. This was the thing that brought on this back ailment. A colored boy came into the cell. He looked at me and said, “What’s the matter, boy? You’re in pain. We better get you out of here.” So he went out and started hollering at the top of his voice: “There’s a man here dying.”

  So they put me in an ambulance and took me up to St. Vincent’s Hospital. I had three men guarding me all the time. Two policemen from ten at night until seven the next morning. Then the National Guard came in. There was one man there all the time.

  A funny incident took place, one of the first days I was there. There were two beds in the room. Two guards slept and one was awake all the time. This nurse said, “I want to take care of Mr. Kelly. Will you leave the room?” They said, “We can’t leave the room.” She said, “I don’t want you here.” So they had a little conference and finally went out.

  The next day, my wife came down. We were expecting a baby at that time. That was 1932. When she got ready to go, she put her arms around me and cried a little bit. She had a package which was a prayer book and a rosary. As she stepped over to the door, she kind of tossed it over on the bed. I just kind of shoved it under the pillow. The three guards were talking outside.

  The nurse came in and she slammed the door. Kind of pushed me all over, took the pillows out, and straightened the bed and went all over it. And went out.

  One of these Guardsmen was an ex-army man. He was the only fella that talked to me. The next day he said, “Something funny happened here last night. One of the guys thought your wife had passed you a gun. The man who was supposed to come in here was afraid to. He wanted the nurse to go in. She said, ‘I’ll go in and find the gun.’ That’s why she came in.”

  The next afternoon, she said, “Those damn cowards out there were afraid to come in. I told ‘em I’d come in. But I shut the door. If you would have had a gun on you, they would never a’ found it.”

  On Sunday, when they first arrested you, where were you taken?

  It was about a ten-acre plot. They put picket fences around there and some barbed wire on top. They set-up camps and army cots. I was there before they set it up, on Sunday evening. They set it up on Monday. They interviewed the men there. It was a country club, that’s been sold and it’s all built up with modern homes now.

  Who were the people arrested?

  Any farmer that had any connection with the Farm Holiday. Just farmers. On the Sunday they picked me, two trucks came out to our farm, looked all over in the hay mound for me. They didn’t know that I had been picked up downtown. One truck came out with three men and left. A couple of hours later, another one came out, went into the basement of my house. My father told them I hadn’t been home since Wednesday. See, they had the names of all the members of the Association. This was all the result of the Bradley incident. I was the only one taken to Sioux City. I don’t know why.

  Were any of you brought to trial?

  Just a hearing before this judge and a county attorney. They tried to pin it on me, said that I had written a letter about stringing somebody up. They said a friend of mine told them this. Afterwards, he told me he never said that at all.

  Who do you think was behind this?

  The Governor. He called out the militia. The insurance companies and the big farmers, they were behind it. And he was with them.

  We had sixteen hundred members: picketing, stopping trucks, letting the livestock out. There was two Communists trying to get in with us. One of these was Mother Bloor. A very fine looking young man with her, always well-dressed. She was dressed in rags. She said this was her son-in-law. But whenever Mother Bloor would get any chance, she’d get up on some kind of box or something and try to talk to the farmers, and they would just boo her down. There was some rough stuff, sure. No injuries. No attempt at injury, like throwing things or hitting people on the head or anything like that. It’s strange: we had a lot of businessmen in with us, on the picket lines. We even had a couple of produce men. We had a doctor here in Le Mars out on the picket line all the time. This doctor, one night we stopped a truck, and he just went out behind the truck, opened it up and started kicking the cattle out. It’s so strange, because he was a very good doctor in town. But he was sympathetic to the farmers.

  The majority were with us, but there were those farmers who were well fixed and making money off the conditions—buying up these farms and increasing their holdings.

  I was at a couple of the auctions. Usually the auctioneer was sympathetic to the farmer. Only friends would bid. Somebody would bid five cents, ten cents, fifteen cents. And the auctioneer would say: Sold to so-and-so over there, ten cents an acre or something like that. And of course, that would be the end of it.

  But many farmers did lose their farms. I had an uncle that owned three farms. When the Depression come along, he couldn’t make it. Many would rent farms … the farm he once owned himself. Just one of those things….

  Do people living in Le Mars today know of this period … of the Judge Bradley incident … ?

  Only the older people do.

  Emil Loriks

  On a farm in Arlington, South Dakota. He had served in the state senate from 1927 through 1934.

  “In 1924, our grain elevator went broke. Farm prices collapsed. I remember signing a personal note, guaranteeing the commission company against loss. I didn’t sleep very good those nights. The banks were failing all over the state. The squeeze was beginning to be felt. The stock market panic didn’t come as any surprise to us. Our government had systematically d
one everything wrong…. We were going to take the profits out of war. The only thing we did was put a ceiling on wheat. We passed high protective tariffs, other countries retaliated… .”

  THERE’S A SAYING: “Depressions are farm led and farm fed.” That was true in the Thirties. As farmers lost their purchasing power, the big tractors piled up at the Minneapolis-Moline plant in the Twin Cities. One day they closed their doors and turned their employees out to beg or starve. My cousin was one of them. I took my truck to Minneapolis and brought him and his family out to my farm for the duration. They stayed with us until the company opened up again, two or three years later.

  During my first session in the state senate, in 1927, five hundred farmers came marching up Capitol Hill. It thrilled me. I didn’t know farmers were intelligent enough to organize. (Laughs.) They stayed there for two days. It was a strength I didn’t realize we had.

  The day after they left, a Senator got up and attacked them as anarchists and bolsheviks. (Laughs.) They had a banner, he said, redder than anything in Moscow, Russia. What was this banner? It was a piece of muslin, hung up in the auditorium. It said: “We Buy Together, We Sell Together, We Vote Together.” This was the radical danger. (Laughs.) They’d been building cooperatives, which the farmers badly needed.

  I was the first man to answer him from the senate floor. Eleven others took turns. He never got reelected. In the lower house, we had about thirty or forty members of the Farmer’s Union. It was quite an education for me.

  Among the members of our Holiday Association were bankers, businessmen, the president of the Farm Bureau, of the Chamber of Commerce. (Laughs.) They didn’t stick their necks out very far, but the meetings were always jammed. People were hanging out of windows. Our slogan was: “Neither buy nor sell and let the taxes go to hell.” (Laughs.)

  Oh, the militancy then! At Milbank, during a farm sale, they had a sheriff and sixteen deputies. One of them got a little trigger-happy. It was a mistake. The boys disarmed him so fast, he didn’t know what happened. They just yanked the belts off ‘em, didn’t even unbuckle ’em. They took their guns away from ’em. After that, we didn’t have much trouble stopping sales.