by Studs Terkel
Thirteen highways to Sioux Falls were blocked. They emptied the stockyards there in a day or two. There was some violence, most of it accidental.
I’ll never forget a speech by a Catholic priest at a Salem meeting, straight south of here about forty miles. It was the most fiery I ever heard. He said, “If you men haven’t got the guts to picket the roads and stop this stuff from going to market, put on skirts and get in the kitchen and let your wives go out and do the job.” (Laughs.) The boys used the police stations as their headquarters. (Laughs.) The police couldn’t do much. The sheriffs and deputies just had to go along.
That judge situation in Iowa was a warning. In Brown County, farmers would crowd into the courtroom, five or six hundred, and make it impossible for the officers to carry out the sales. (Laughs.)
Deputies would come along with whole fleets of trucks and guns. One lone farmer had planks across the road. They ordered him to remove them. They came out with guns. He said, “Go ahead and shoot, but there isn’t one of you S.O.B.’s getting out of here alive.” There were about fifteen hundred farmers there in the woods. The trucks didn’t get through. It was close in spirit to the American Revolution.
One incident stands out in my memory. It was a mass meeting in the city park at Huron. Ten thousand farm folks were in attendance. I had invited Governor Warren Green to appear. He stressed law and order. He seemed frightened. Then came the surprise of the evening: John A. Simpson, president of the National Farmers Union. He electrified the crowd with his opening remarks, which I remember verbatim: “When constitutions, laws and court decisions stand in the way of human progress, it is time they be scrapped.” When the meeting was adjourned, the crowd did not move. In unison came a mighty roar: “We want Simpson! WE WANT SIMPSON!” They didn’t budge until he was called back to the platform.
The Holiday Association was fairly conservative. There was a United Farmers League that was leftist. In the northern part of the state. The business community welcomed us to head off the extreme leftists, the Commies. We didn’t have anything to do with ’em.
The situation was tense in ten or eleven states. You could almost smell the powder. When Governor Herring of Iowa called out the militia, Milo Reno said, “Hold off. I’ll not have the blood of innocent people on my hands.” He suggested they picket the farmyards instead of highways. We had a heck of a time getting the farmers off Highway 75. There were probably a thousand of them out there. Reno called a meeting at Sioux City. About thirty thousand farmers showed up. We decided to go to Washington and settle for a farm program.
If Roosevelt hadn’t come in in ‘32, we’d a’ been in real trouble. I’ll never forget our meeting with him. He came to Pierre on a special train. He appeared on the rear platform. Next thing I know, we were ushered into a private room, some of us leaders of farm and labor. We had about an hour with the President.
He pointed to the Missouri River and said, “This is the greatest resource of your state. It’s got to be developed.” He told us how Sweden had developed their power resources for the benefit of the people—the low rates of electricity and so forth. He was extremely well informed.
I resigned from the state senate in 1934 to become president of the South Dakota Farmers Union. We had many battles. Before that, I’d introduced a bill to cut penalty interest in delinquency payments from twelve percent to six. So I was attacked. The local editor said my radical legislation would destroy the state. (Laughs.)
Reactionary forces have controlled South Dakota since statehood. Corporation interests like the gold mine out here. That’s the first time I heard the word “communist.” I stayed at the Waverly Hotel, so they called that a Communist headquarters. They started to use that word about everything they didn’t like. I had to look it up in the dictionary. (Laughs.)
We have the world’s richest gold mine out here, in the Black Hills. While in the legislature, I was one of the promoters of a tax on ore. The mine was owned by the Hearst interests. It was very difficult. We took the matter to the people by the route of a referendum. We won. We passed the tax. Our slogan was: “Tax gold, not Russian thistles.” These thistles, thorny, hateful things, were stacked, during the drought of ’33, and fed to our livestock. They have lots of proteins.
It was in ’35—we had this campaign to raise a million tax dollars. In the town of Phillips, one evening, during a blizzard, I was met by a crowd of miners. They were given the day off and a stake to attend this meeting. They surrounded me and said this tax would cost six hundred of them their jobs. They were busted farmers and fortunately found a job in these Home Stake mines. I went back home feeling worried. But the tax was passed, and not a single miner lost his job.
They had been stirred up by the mining interests. They made grants to colleges all over the state. When the tax was on the verge of passing, they’d write the alumni, send along a check and a message: Wire your Senator to oppose this vicious, discriminatory tax. (Laughs.) Today, they’re in a squeeze like us farmers, because the price of gold is fixed and the cost is going up. But they get a moratorium on taxes. We don’t.
In 1938, I ran for Congress. I carried the votes in the cities and lost the straggling farm precincts. A week before election, Senator Case, Governor Bushfield and my opponent asked the Dies Committee to investigate me. A night or two before election, they put out a picture of me and the Farmers Union Board meeting with CIO people. Here was proof that I was a Communist.
After I lost the election, Senator Case apologized to me. He said his name was used without his consent. The papers also broke their neck apologizing—after the election. I had served papers on some of them. One said I had marched in a Communist parade. I’ve never seen a Communist parade.
Whimsically, he recalls the names of prominent and wealthy Dakotans, big grain men, who were members of the Holiday Association in the Thirties. “They’re millionaires today and a lot of these have gone reactionary.”
Once in a while I’ll meet a farmer who’ll thank me. He’ll say: “You sure helped me out. I was busted, and I got that loan.” But it doesn’t happen too often. A lot of fellows that were rescued became Roosevelt-haters and extremely conservative.
Today, corporations are moving in. Agribusiness. Among their clients are movie stars and doctors. Good investments.
This cattle operation is like a crap game. They can write off their losses, charge depreciation…. The small farmer doesn’t stand a chance.
Ruth Loriks, His Wife
ONE TIME we were driving up to Aberdeen. It was during the grasshopper days in 1933. The sun was shining brightly when we left home. When we were about half way, it just turned dark. It was the grasshoppers that covered the sun.
We had a large garden. The chickens would go in there and pick what little grass which they’d find. Our neighbors said: “The grasshoppers have come in, they’d taken every leaf off our trees, they’re even starting to eat the fence posts.” I thought that was a joke. Well, the next day they moved on here, and they did line up the fence posts. My faithful hen sort of kept them off the tomatoes (laughs), but they were moving in.
One day at noon, we had one of our worst dust storms. I never want to see one again! The air was so filled. We could just see it float in, and we had good, heavy storm windows. A year before, we heard of the dust storms to the south. They were collecting wheat to send down there by the carloads. Some of the good folks said, “Better share, because we never know when we may have a drought.” The next year, we finally did. I’m surprised to think we lived through it.
This neighbor woman lost her husband, and, of course, he was owing in the bank. So the auctioneers come out there, and she served lunch, and she stood weeping in the windows. “There goes our last cow….” And the horses. She called ’em by names. It just pretty near broke our hearts. They didn’t give her a chance to take care of her bills. They never gave her an offer. They just came and cleared it out. She just stood there crying.
Clyde T. Ellis
Forme
r Congressman from Arkansas. For twenty-five years, he was general manager of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.
THE DIRTY THIRTIES—the phrase was coined where we had the dust storms. My people came from Arkansas, where the years of drought coincided with the hard years of the Depression. Even the one good year was no good. Everything dried up … the springs, the wells, the ponds, the creeks, the rivers.
We saw bank failures everywhere. In my county, all but three of perhaps a dozen failed. The most valuable thing we lost was hope. A man can endure a lot if he still has hope.
Mountain people are more rigorous than others. We lived a harder life. We had to grow or make most of the things we needed. The country never did lend itself to mechanization … still doesn’t. Rock. We had relatives who just gave up. Broke up homes, scattered to different states. From down in my county, many would go to what we called Detroit. Then they started to go to California, any way they could. Thumbing rides … I thumbed rides when I was peddling Bibles. It was during a summer, while still in high school.
I became a schoolteacher. It didn’t pay much, but it was decent work. I taught in a one-room country school. By the time Roosevelt was elected, I’d been to law school. A group of us there decided if we were going to hell, we might just as well get active in it. We ran for office ourselves.
I ran for the state legislature. I didn’t ask the machine. So I was viciously attacked at county meetings. The political and economic establishment were one. But I was elected. The majority in the House were new fellows who had beaten the sitting candidates. We called it the Revolution of 1932, and organized ourselves as Young Turks.
I’d been talking about electricity for the people. The little towns hardly had any—just a putt-putt plant that wasn’t reliable. The rural people had nothing. We could see the fogs rise over the White River, and when the river was up big, we heard the roar. We knew there was tremendous power going to waste. We had read about hydroelectric plants elsewhere in the world. We talked about it, but there wasn’t much we could do. The power companies were against it. Arkansas is probably the state most completely dominated by a power company.
We tried to do something about flood control—and in the process do something about electrification—because the TVA had come to be and it was multi-purpose: flood control and power.
We set to form electric co-ops, hoping to buy power from the companies. It would be too long to wait on the dams. They demanded an outrageous price. They were determined to fight the cooperatives all the way.
In 1934, I was elected to the state senate, and introduced another rural electrification bill. It was passed in ’35, but it was still a struggle. It became a model for the REA93 and other states used it around the country. In 1936, we got some electric co-ops organized.
Today, there are dams up and down the White River, and others along the Arkansas. Industry has come into the state and development is encouraged. And yet, there are some areas that have never recovered from the Depression.
“What I’m about to tell you is related to poverty. In 1942, I ran for the U.S. Senate on the issue of rural electrification—but just at that time, Bataan fell. There was only one thing our people were interested in—the lives of our boys. Almost all the boys were in National Guard units. These were the children of the poor, who joined immediately because it gave them a few dollars. My baby brother, Harold, had no work. He quit school, volunteered. He was killed… .
“They were the first to go. Our whole county was cleaned out of young boys in Corregidor… .”
I wanted to be at my parents’ house when electricity came. It was in 1940. We’d all go around flipping the switch, to make sure it hadn’t come on yet. We didn’t want to miss it. When they finally came on, the lights just barely glowed. I remember my mother smiling. When they came on full, tears started to run down her cheeks. After a while, she said: “Oh, if we only had it when you children were growing up.” We had lots of illness. Anyone who’s never been in a family without electricity—with illness—can’ t imagine the difference.
From there, I went to my grandmother’s house. It was a day of celebration. They had all kinds of parties—mountain people getting light for the first time.
There are still areas without electricity. Coal oil lamps are used, with the always dirty chimneys. But there are more and more electric co-ops, which first sprang out of the New Deal. And the power companies are still fighting us….
Emma Tiller
Her father had a small farm in western Texas. The first depression she recalls began in 1914. “We were almost starvin’ to death. Papa had some very rich land, but those worms came like showers. The cotton was huge, you never seen nothin’ like it. You could just sit in the house and hear the worms eatin’ that cotton. You had to check all the cracks in the doors because the kids were scared and the worms would get in the house… .”
IN 1929, me and my husband were sharecroppers. We made a crop that year, the owner takin’ all of the crop.
This horrible way of livin’ with almost nothin’ lasted up until Roosevelt. There was another strangest thing, I didn’t suffer for food through the Thirties, because there was plenty of people that really suffered much worse. When you go through a lot, you in better condition to survive through all these kinds of things.
I picked cotton. We weren’t getting but thirty-five cents a hundred, but I was able to make it. ’Cause I also worked people’s homes, where they give you old clothes and shoes.
At this time, I worked in private homes a lot and when the white people kill hogs, they always get the Negroes to help. The cleanin’ of the insides and clean up the mess afterwards. And then they would give you a lot of scraps. A pretty adequate amount of meat for the whole family. The majority of the Negroes on the farm were in the same shape we were in. The crops were eaten by these worms. And they had no other jobs except farming.
In 1934, in this Texas town, the farmers was all out of food. The government gave us a slip, where you could pick up food. For a week, they had people who would come and stand in line, and they couldn’t get waited on. This was a small town, mostly white. Only five of us in that line were Negroes, the rest was white. We would stand all day and wait and wait and wait. And get nothin’ or if you did, it was spoiled meat.
We’d been standin’ there two days, when these three men walked in. They had three shotguns and a belt of shells. They said, lookin’ up and down that line, “You all just take it easy. Today we’ll see that everybody goes home, they have food.” Three white men.
One of ’em goes to the counter, lays his slip down and says he wants meat. He had brought some back that was spoiled. He said to the boss, “Would you give this meat for your dog?” So he got good meat. He just stood there. So the next person gets waited on. It was a Negro man. He picked up the meat the white man brought back. So the white guy said, “Don’t take that. I’m gonna take it for my dog.” So the boss said, “I’m gonna call the police.”
So the other reaches across the counter and catches this guy by the tie and chokes him. The Negro man had to cut the tie so the man wouldn’t choke to death. When he got up his eyes was leakin’ water. The other two with guns was standin’ there quietly. So he said, “Can I wait on you gentlemen?” And they said, “We’ve been here for three days. And we’ve watched these people fall like flies in the hot sun, and they go home and come back the next day and no food. Today we purpose to see that everybody in line gets their food and then we gonna get out.” They didn’t point the guns directly at him. They just pointed ‘em at the ceiling. They said, “No foolin’ around, no reachin’ for the telephone. Wait on the people. We’re gonna stand here until every person out there is waited on. When you gets them all served, serve us.”
The man tried to get the phone off the counter. One of the guys said, “I hope you don’t force me to use the gun, because we have no intentions of getting nobody but you. And I wouldn’t miss you. It wouldn’t do you any good to call the po
lice, because we stop ’em at the door. Everybody’s gonna get food today.” And everybody did.
The Government sent two men out there to find out why the trouble. They found out this man and a couple others had rented a huge warehouse and was stackin’ that food and sellin’ it. The food that was supposed to be issued to these people. These three men was sent to the pen.
When the WPA came in, we soon got to work. The people, their own selves, as they would get jobs on WPA, they quit goin’ to the relief station. They just didn’t want the food. They’d go in and say, “You know, this is my last week, ’cause I go to work next week.” The Negro and white would do this, and it sort of simmered down until the only people who were on relief were people who were disabled. Or families where there weren’t no man or no one to go out and work on the WPA.
I remember in this Texas place, they had twenty-five people came in that day saying they wouldn’t be back any more ‘cause they signed up and they was gonna work on the WPA the next week. Some of ’em had to sort of stretch things to make pay day ’cause it really didn’t come to what they thought it would. But they didn’t go back after any more help.
You sort of like to know to feel independent the way you earn your own living. And when you hear people criticize people of things like this today it gets under your skin.
What bothered me about the Roosevelt time was when they come out with this business that you had to plow up a certain amount of your crop, especially cotton. I didn’t understand, ’cause it was good cotton.
And seein’ all this cattle killed. Bein’ raised with stock, to me it was kind of a human feelin’ we had toward them. We had this cow and calf raised with us. I’d see these farmers, terrible big cattle raisers and they didn’t have the food to feed these cattle, and there was drought, so they had these cattle drove up and killed by the hundreds of head.
