by Studs Terkel
With Reagan’s breaking of the air controllers’ strike during his first year in office, to the thunderous applause of most Americans, including union members, things changed. (Mystery: For all the worried headlines of air crashes and near misses, with more than occasional references to understaffed, overworked, and unseasoned air controllers, hardly any mention has ever been made of the non-persons: 11,000 blacklisted seasoned air controllers. It appears that even our priorities have taken a necrophilic turn.)
The pert file clerk across the hall lets me know of her disdain for unions. Her immediate boss, a young accountant, who describes himself as “management,” nods solemnly. They put in eight hours a day. When I ask them how their eight-hour day came to be, their fresh faces are pure Mondrian: the absence of any human detail—the furrowed brow, the thoughtful squint.
It was unfair of me. After all, the Haymarket Affair took place in 1886, a good hundred years before I asked the impertinent question. I hadn’t the heart to ask them about life before the minimum wage—and that came about a good fifty years ago. Labor unions, along with Big Guv’ment, which my two young friends also abhor, may have brought it forth, but that’s ancient history. And we know what Henry Ford said about history.
The old-timer understands why so many of the bright-eyed band feel that way. “Notice something about the media? They always refer to labor as a special interest. Unions, minorities, women. Ever hear of corporations referred to as special interests? How many papers have reporters that cover the labor beat? Or TV stations? What the hell, they’ve got whole sections on business and finance. Is it any wonder that the young are so ignorant?”
The locked-out steelworker in the country’s biggest ghost town, Youngstown (although Gary could give it a run for its money), says with a newly honed sense of irony, “My son is listed among the newly employed. He lost his $13-an-hour job and is now pumping gas at $3.50.”
At the day of this writing, the headline in the local paper reads: Jobless Rate Lowest in 8 Years. It is also the lead on the six o’clock news.
His son, an ex-marine who served time in Vietnam, says, “This is the first time in four generations that I have it worse than my father.” He stares at his two small boys. “How will it be for them?”
As we pass over the Monongahela River, the defrocked Lutheran pastor points toward the dark waters. “A twenty-three-year-old guy drowned this week, after drinking heavily. Where should he have been Tuesday morning? He should have been at work. At Christmastime, we had one weekend of fourteen suicides. All laid-off steelworkers. I guess they’ll never make government statistics, will they?”
The old-timer is in a constant state of disbelief. “For the first time in the history of the country, a new generation is coming of age that will have a lower standard of living than their parents. Before, they could anticipate going beyond. What happened to the American dream?”
The compass is broken.
In the old badman song, Duncan hollers a challenge: Brady, where is you at?72 That’s the question we ask one another: Where are we at? What had presumably been our God-anointed patch of green appears to be, for millions of us, a frozen tundra. We race higgledy-piggledy, first one way, and a thirty-second commercial later we’re headed elsewhere: all for a piece of the afternoon sun.
In De Sica’s post-World War Two Italian movie Miracle in Milan, there is an indelible moment. The wretched homeless of the jungle camp shove, push, elbow one another out of the way for a sliver of the sun that comes and goes. An instant later, as the North Italian cold overcomes, all is forgotten save a bruise or two, the legacy of an equally miserable peer. Nothing has been learned, other than it is good to have sharp elbows. It is the lesson we have been taught, especially during this past decade. In authoritative quarters, it has been called entrepreneurialism. Ivan Boesky had his own word for it and may have been much closer to the truth.
Yet something is happening out there, across the Divide, often in unexpected quarters; something of an old American tradition, with new twists. Grass-roots movements, with techniques learned from the sixties, have never been more flourishing. Most of their foot soldiers had nothing to do with anti-Vietnam War protests, yet now challenge the Big Boys.
A bantam housewife in Chicago leads her blue-collar neighbors in a challenge to the Waste Management Corporation, a powerful multinational. She beats the outfit: there will be no toxic-waste dump in the neighborhood. A local, Bob Bagley, let Congress know about Somebody’s spray trucks hauling dioxin through his forgotten town in the Ozark foothills. He won the battle. Name a place, a big-city block or a village square, and you’ll find corporate dumpers with tigers by the tails. “Ordinary people, quiet in our disturbance” are the first bubbles in what has most of this decade been a tepid kettle.
The movements, remarkably disparate in issue, ranging from local grievances—utility hikes, tax inequities, developers’ transgressions—to matters more encompassing—Sanctuary, Pentagon spending, threats to Social Security—have been both secular and sacred in impulse. (A young computer wizard has determined there are more than six thousand peace groups in business.) In most of these instances, the participants are unaware of the others’ works. They are a movement awaiting coalescence.
It is what my two young acquaintances, the fifteen-year-old middle-class boy and the nineteen-year-old blue-collar girl, were intimating earlier in this essay. And reaching out for. It is what the newer students in that journalism class were curious about. It is what the old South Dakota Swede was awaiting in those bleak days of the Great Depression: something trickling up.
In spite of these hopeful signs, it’s still clear that things can go either way. There may be a shaft of awareness sifting through. There are such signs. Or there may be a sharpening of elbows. There are such signs. There was a phrase in vogue during World War Two, shortly before the Normandy invasion: Situation Fluid. It is so now as it was then.
Nowhere has the Great Divide been as deep as in our religious conflicts today. It is in this sphere that the issues have been most dramatically joined.
Consider the case of Gary C. and his father. Both are Christian evangelicals. Both interpret Scripture literally. The son, who had done missionary work in El Salvador, reads the Bible “the same way the campesinos do. The Bible tells them of today, oppressors and oppressed, word for word. My father also believes in it, word for word. But he doesn’t read it the same way they do. Or the way I do. He believes in this administration’s Central American policy wholeheartedly. The same Book we both love is on the table we sit at, yet we’re worlds apart.”
CARROLL NEARMYER
A farm in Iowa, twenty-four miles southeast of Des Moines.
Instantly, you sense hard times. It isn’t that the place is neglected; it’s precisely the other way around: the farm’s well-kept appearance evokes the image of the proud working poor, tatteredly neat and clean. It is the old house itself that gives away what is now an open secret: the desperate circumstances of the farmer.
It is an especially soft and easy twilight in May. His wife Carolyn is preparing a meal: not a farm supper of tradition and legend, but a bit of this, a dab of that, and more of something else. Thanks to her skill and care, it turns out to be wholly satisfying and filling—hunger, of course, being the best sauce. It will be ready by the time their son Chris gets home from his factory job in Des Moines. Eight-year-old Cary, a good talker, is ready any time.
This kitchen is part of the old house. My great-grandparents bought the place around 1895 or somewhere in there. I’m fourth-generation. Chris is not about to be the fifth. Just like all kids that lived on the farm, he followed me around quite a bit and was driving a tractor at, oh gosh, what age? Eight or nine, just old enough to touch the brakes and the clutch. The reason he’s not working at that, I could not help him get started in farming.
It does look like the beginning of the end. I can go up and down the road and point you out the neighbors that is in the same predicament that their so
ns won’t farm and that means the end of the family farm.
Dad was always telling me about it, and I didn’t listen to him. The older I get now, the smarter my dad gets, even after he has passed away. “Don’t trust a bank.” He says they’ll do anything when things are going good, but the minute it turns around and starts going bad, they’ll jerk the rug from out under you.
The particular bank I dealt with was in Newton, Iowa. The Prairie City Bank, right by here, closed just eleven months ago. It went belly-up. I believe about three hundred here in the state of Iowa that has went down.
Oh, the bigger banks are getting bigger. You want to go in there and borrow $50,000, they won’t talk to you. But if you wanted to borrow 2 or 3 million, then they’ll talk to you.
When problems started coming up, I went to talk to my banker. I knew him personally and he knew me. But he had pressure from up above and so he was putting the pressure on me. He was trying to convince me I was a bad manager and for me to come home and write up a sale bill, list everything, and sell out. If I did that, I could pay them off and they, therefore, would not have had the pressure from up above. Being’s as I’m a fourth-generation farmer, I wasn’t about to just come home and sell out.
They come at us with, You gotta have a cash flow, you gotta do a better job on your bookkeeping, a better job on your farming. But still when you sell that bushel of corn for less money than you produce it, you can only cut so far. Our taxes kept going up, interests kept going up on us. At one time, I was paying eighteen percent interest on my farm notes. I came up more short on payments. If I don’t make a go of it now, the Newton National Bank will take it. They’ll turn around and sell it to someone else. It will probably be a corporation. We call ’em vultures.
I’ve been involved in farm activism for three years. There is less people now than there were then, involved. They just gradually fall by the way. It’s just like a cancer. Pretty soon one goes, then there’s another one gone. I would say in three years’ time, we lost somewhere around forty percent of them. Some of them don’t have the money to come. It takes gas to go somewhere. If it comes to the choice of feeding your family and buying gas, you’re going to feed the family.
Jerry Streit, a farmer from West Bend, Iowa: “We had a son playing baseball. We quit going to his away games because we didn’t have gas for the car. I told him it wasn’t because I didn’t want to see him play. I loved it, but we just couldn’t afford the gas.”
When I was really down and out, I couldn’t find a job. You talk about prime of life, I’m forty-six years old. That went against me. I was already too old. If we’re forced off the farms, we’ll have to take jobs like ridin’ on the outside of the garbage truck. Carrying garbage for a minimum wage. What we’ll really become is white slaves and just barely livin’. When they’re coming down here after ya, you really feel what happens to a person on the inside. When you realize you’re losing everything and be forced out of your home, you get mad. Damn mad.
I kept the whole problem to myself. She didn’t know and the kids didn’t know that I was having problems. There was times that I got suicidal. I would be driving and didn’t know how I got there. There was several times that I had the gun to my head and she didn’t know that. And then I got damn mad. I got to thinkin’ about it and I got madder. These people don’t have the right to do this to me! I have worked, I have sweated, and I have bled. I have tried out there to keep this place goin’. And then they tried to take it away from me! I worked out there to keep food on the table for the people over this whole nation. Nobody has the right to keep me from doin’ that! I got so damn mad that I would have picked up arms to protect myself and the family. I would have shot somebody.
Then I got involved with this farm group, and there is people just like me. They get tagged as radicals right away. ‘Cause we’re supposed to be civilized now. It’s all right for some S.O.B. in a white shirt and tie to come along and take our farms away from us on paper. But it’s not all right for us to try to keep him from doin’ that. The minute we say we’re not gonna let him do that, we become radicals.
We have went to farm sales and helped farmers that was being sold out, to keep their machinery and stop the sale. Again we get tagged as radicals. I’ve helped organize farm sales to stop the sheriff’s sale. Most of the time it’s in winter. He stands out in the cold, the farmer being sold out. Sheriff comes. If you shout him down he still knocks off the farm to the bank. The farmer’s sold out and they they try to put the guilt on you.
My banker even suggested, “You don’t want to let your neighbors know that you’re having financial trouble, ‘cause you’re the only one that’s having trouble.” I know several other farmers he’s told that to. There’s a neighbor down here two miles, we was meetin’ each other on the road, we’d wave at each other but we wouldn’t stop to talk to each other. He thought I was doin’ all right and he was wonderin’ how come, and I was wonderin’ the same thing about him.
There is a neighbor across the road. He’s a lot bigger than I am, but last summer when the Prairie City Bank foreclosed, they took his son down, too. The only thing his son saved was his wife and his kids. But they won’t come and speak out. I don’t know why they don’t.
The next neighbor down the road is just a young guy. Him and his wife both work in town. He farms evenings, after he gets home. Just to survive.
There’s another neighbor down the road, he was borrowing money from FHA. They turned him every which way but loose and he still hasn’t said anything. There’s one here last winter, wasn’t able to put any food on the table, and he still hasn’t ever said anything.
I’ve had some farmers argue with you that they have the right to go broke. When our administration is ruling out what we can get for our product, then we don’t have that right. There ain’t one farmer in the state of Iowa that says he voted for Reagan. They just won’t admit it!
FHA was supposed to loan you money and stretch it out to ten or fifteen years or however long it took. When people started having trouble, first thing we heard from FHA was that they were running out of funds. They accelerated some notes on farmers, even if they was keeping up on their payments. Demanded payment in full. They would call it high-risk, so they would raise the interest two percent each time.
There’s a big bunch of money the Pentagon has, unspent, unobligated. All they’d have to do is transfer just a very small percentage of it to FHA, and it would save thousands of small farmers.
I’ve got a reputation of talking. I’m trying to get them to understand. They will listen a little better than they did six months ago. I have been called crazy: “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” I’ve even been told if I get to talking about Reagan or the Federal Reserve, I am not an American any more. Yes, I’m a troublemaker.
A year ago last winter the governor of Iowa was to give his state speech. We wasn’t allowed to go in there and listen to him, but we could be in the rotunda. We decided to do a demonstration there, 250 of us farmers. As he come off the legislative floor, I stopped him. I asked him to listen to us and we would tell him the real state of the state. He refused, of course.
Slowly, real slowly, we got the American Ag Movement started in Iowa. You will get people that will say, “I’m supportin’ what you’re doing, but I can’t afford to join.” It costs one hundred dollars a year to be a member. To a lot of people, it is a difference between putting food on the table and spending money for something like that.
I can see support coming faster and faster. Knowing what the administration has planned for us, we’re going to see more people finally stand up and say, Enough is enough. Let’s change this thing.
How much can a man take? I’ve seen it cause a lot of divorces. I can name you family after family that have split up. It has caused problems between me and my wife. Sometimes I take off and travel from one state to the other and she accuses me, and rightly so, of putting this ahead of the family. I’ve got an older daughter—is
she twenty?—that no longer lives with us. She couldn’t stand the stress. As soon as she was out of school, she moved to Des Moines. Me and my son have at times exchanged words. I know fathers and sons where the son has took off on account of the stress. You bet it affects families.
Our youngest, who is eight—when they had the sheriff looking for me to give me a repossession notice on the machinery—she stood out there on the deck as a lookout. He come down on me after dark, we started moving and hiding the machinery. Anytime she saw car lights, she told us and we scattered. We caught her one time hiding her tricycle. She said she didn’t want the sheriff to find it. That’s the kind of stuff families go through.
Take this situation here in Iowa, with a banker shot by a farmer. I knew this man. This particular farmer had two days before deposited money into his checking account. His wife told me that day they didn’t have groceries in the house. He was going to write a check at the bank for sixty dollars so they could have food on the table. You understand, if a guy is going to bounce a check, he doesn’t go into the bank to write a check. He handed the check to the teller and she told him she couldn’t cash it. There wasn’t any money in the account. He said he just deposited two days ago. She told him it had been seized by the banker—the guy that he shot—put on the note that “you owed here at the bank.” That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. That story has not been told publicly. How come?
If we don’t stand up as citizens and as farmers, we’re going to become second-class citizens. We’re going to be fighting over jobs. At the same time, prices in the grocery store are going to skyrocket as soon as the corporations take over. Even the people that’s got good jobs now are going to be struggling just to keep food on the table. It’s not only what’s gonna happen to us farmers, it’s gonna happen to us as a nation and a world.
