Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  In the first place, I saw them so seldom that they could not know my dress was new, and in the second place, not one of those men knew anything about my personality; and when they read this book, as they will, for we always read what is written about ourselves, they will say to each other, or to their wives, or to themselves, “Well, I’ll be damned! So that’s who she was!” But they knew me as well as the farmers of the Greenwood District did. For that matter, I did not know myself then any more than they knew me. It is so strange that a woman could be there in that sagebrush country for years and years and nobody know her, not even her husband, not even herself. But it is true. And it is not important.

  “Did you come to vote?” asked the beautifully smiling Charley Barlow.

  “I am looking for the Progressive Primary headquarters,” I answered, smiling just as beautifully. I even modulated my rich contralto voice so that no windows were broken when I spoke.

  And then,...brothers!...sisters!...did you ever watch the moon blot out the sun? No, that is not rapid enough. Did you ever see all the blinds in a brilliantly lighted house pulled down at the same moment, leaving you out on the lawn staring up at blank blackness? No, nobody ever did. But that was the effect of what instantly followed my words. Lights out! A frigid voice—I have forgotten whose—answered, very courteously, though like the cold sound of ice crackling from the eaves, “You will find it farther up the street.” It was really very nice of them only to freeze me. They might have kicked me out.

  Some day I shall probably walk up to Mr. Hitler and ask him if he is the Relativity Einstein. I should have known better than to ask for the Progressive Party Primary at the Republican Primary headquarters. I slipped out of the hotel door and walked east, snickering inside myself. I ought to be embarrassed on such occasions, but I never am. They simply strike me as funny. There are people who are silly like that, you know. Well, live and let live, I hope is your motto. Such people as I come in handy for door-stops, magazine-racks, mops, and other domestic purposes.

  I should have known that the Republican Party would be in the big hotel and the Progressive Primary in a little runt of a vacant shop. Two booths had been arranged by erecting one partition and covering the fronts with some sort of curtain. I knew that inside would be a shelf on which to mark the ballot, and a pencil on a string with which to do it. A little table was pushed against one wall, close to the door, and at this was sitting a farmer—unmistakably a farmer, according to Steve Drake, whose definition I give here as he said it to me: “If you see a man, and he’s got a fairly good suit and coat, why, that’s a tramp; if you see a man in a ragged coat and worn-out overhalls, that’s a farmer!”

  I never saw this farmer before. He was from Russell Lane, a portion of the farm country so designated because of a man of that name, as Greenwood was named after me. The Progressive farmer had opened a big journal of some kind on the very little table—such a little table when I remembered the Republican table. There was supposed to be another Judge of Election, but no one coming to claim that office, the farmer and I solemnly swore each other in. I felt the responsibility keenly, for this was my first active venture into politics, though, even as I had an ardent ambition to revolutionize education, so I had long wanted to put my spoon into the kettle of political soup. It did not smell right to me. I thought maybe I could taste it up.

  I had not even voted after my first vote, having made my home in seven different states since that day, though not all since my marriage. My first vote was really notable because, out of regard for my father’s politics, I being at that time one of the Pa voters, I checked every name on the Democratic ballot except one, and for that one I substituted the name of a man whom I saw constantly in our home when I was a child—along with George Sutherland and Will King and a number of other fine men who never became Senators and Supreme Court Justices, but remained our substantial small-town backbone: Banker John Twelves, Judge Dusenberry, Major (U.S.A., retired) Berry, and numbers of others, with wives whom I remember with emotions of affection.

  I voted for Reed Smoot in a booth erected in half of a livery-stable. My father would not much have minded that Republican dereliction from Democratic righteousness. But there was no disguising from myself that my father would not have been delighted with my embracing so enthusiastically this Progressive Party. The year 1932, in his name, and also my own, I voted the Democratic ticket in one instance—for my dear friend Elbert Thomas, known to his family and friends as “Tommy.” I was practically certain my vote was what had kept Reed Smoot in the Senate, and maybe it was my vote that put him out. Well, nobody pays any attention to a woman so flabby and brainless as to skitter around from party to party, voting in her Pa’s friends, and finally voting them out in order to vote in her own friends. Politics is something you must make up your mind about as soon as possible, and you must then stick to that same opinion the rest of your life, as though fixed to it with airplane glue.

  In that little runt of a shop, there we sat facing each other, Judge of Election and Clerk of Election, all day long. At noon, one after the other, we went over to Mrs. Reynolds’ eating-house, where I, at least, received my full money’s worth, in food and conversation. Some one had told me that whenever she overcooked anything, she served it just the same, with the cheerful remark, “Just a nice Portland brown...just a nice Portland brown....” She liked me, and after the three other little tables were provided with steaming food on thick china, she seated herself on the other side of my table and entertained me all the rest of the time I was there. Little, dark, chipper, stories concerning her marital ventures were floating about, but all she told me were of having been a servant in the home of former President Taft. At least she knew the members of the family by name, and she related in detail circumstantial anecdotes which were either the invention of a genius or the experience of a close observer. She could neither read nor write, but she was a keen little business woman, and a good cook, generally.

  When I had voted for Reed Smoot in that livery-stable, there was the smell of manure and the stamping of hoofs and whinnyings from horse to horse. In that tiny shop where the Progressives were to vote for their nominees, there was only the flat, lonesome odor of pine boards, which seems to ooze out of long-vacant stores, and there was no sound anywhere but the occasional whirring of a car, going in the direction of the Republican headquarters.

  At the rattle and bang of a farm wagon, great hope was aroused in the perfectly silent Clerk of Election, and also in the perfectly silent (but not naturally) Judge of Election. I was sure it was the beginning of a full day when the wagon stopped in front of our bird-house, and a great farmer, in ragged clothes, entered, gave us his name, and went into a booth to vote his nomination of a candidate. I could have hugged him. I felt very important. For this was my first voter, I who was a Judge of Election.

  We sat and sat and sat. The farmer smoked. I knew he was in misery because he was refraining from chewing on my account, a noble tribute, of which I hereby make acknowledgment. After all, I think the pretty dress did have some effect. Certainly I had no chance whatever to exercise any personality, my variety not being of the deaf-mute kind.

  We had one voter. That night I was quite crestfallen, riding home in the cart on the Lincoln Highway, dust and all, in just as dumb depression as I had sat in dumb hope facing that good, dumb farmer. But a little thought kept running around in my head like a mouse hunting for a piece of cheese it could smell somewhere. At last the cheese was found. It was this: Of course the farmers did not come to vote at the Progressive Primary. All sorts of unfarmery folks had rushed to the Democratic and Republican primaries. That was because there was some contest as to which men the members of those parties wanted. With us it was different. Our committeemen had chosen candidates, and the farmers were satisfied.

  Still, I did not feel so much better when, the next day, Charley returned from Hazelton and remarked, “Your Progressive Primary is the laughing-stock of the town.”

  “
Let them laugh!” I challenged valiantly. Well, maybe they had a right to laugh...and, on the other hand, the Baron had Junker blood, and he had also been a farmer many years. It may be that he did not like his wife spending the day with another man in that bird-house. I have an idea that there are a good many men who would have felt that way. If he had only known how I sat there suffering to be talking, and the poor farmer sat there suffering to be chawing....

  The Progressive Party had a platform totally different from that of the Republicans and the Democrats. Remembering that this was in 1922, it may interest you to know what we then advocated, and to see how much, or how little, has been accomplished along those lines since then, not by farmers, of course, but by any agency.

  1. Abolishment of economic advantage by possession of which a small group controls our natural resources, transportation, industry, and credit; stifles competition; prevents equal opportunities of development for all; and thus dictates the conditions under which we live.

  2. A state-wide open-primary law and a sound, workable initiative, referendum, and recall.

  3. Public control of natural resources; just taxation of all land values, including land containing coal, oil, mineral deposits, large water-powers, and large timber-tracts, in order to prevent monopoly. We favor the gradual exemption from taxation of the products of labor and industry.

  4. Public ownership and operation of railroads, and enough public utilities to compete with monopoly.

  5. Equal rights for all citizens: free speech, free press, and free assembly for all lawful purposes, as guaranteed in the Constitution.

  6. State efficiency and tax reduction, by the abolishment of the State constabulary, the cabinet form of government, and other tax-eating, useless commissions; the reformation of the State highway and game departments, and the election of the State utilities commission.

  7. A State graduated inheritance tax and income tax on incomes over $5,000—like the Wisconsin law.

  8. A guarantee of bank deposits law.

  9. The well-known and just demands of labor, including an exclusive State-fund compensation act similar to the Ohio law.

  10. An impartial enforcement of all laws, including the prohibition law.

  11. Laws to protect individual and cooperative enterprise from monopoly.

  12. A national soldier bonus, paid for by tax on excess profits.

  13. Money control to be taken from the private monopoly of the Federal Reserve System and restored to the National Government.

  14. We pledge ourselves to take the judiciary out of politics.

  Those were all, and had they been the Republican platform of 1932, and had Hoover stood upon it, he might have been in the White House yet. For there used to be excess profits, and there would then have been no opposition votes of non-bonus-angered veterans. As for the guarantee of bank deposits law and money control in the Government itself, it looks as though President Roosevelt has stolen that old thunder of ours. As it stands, had there been wise officials to operate it, I dare to say here that that despised farmer platform might have prevented the depression in these United States. Did you lose money in banks? Nothing of the kind could have occurred had the Progressive Party gained national power. But then, it has always been the little also-rans who have advocated the measures that finally move the world when adopted by the big powers. The members of the minority rule the world—after they are dead.

  H. F. Samuels headed our ticket as nominee for the office of Governor. Like Norman Thomas, who heads the Socialist Party, Samuels was a gentleman. Not a born farmer, nor even a city dreamer farmer, he got into the game through patriotism. Having made a fortune by perfecting a process for the extraction of zinc from low-grade ore, he bought logged-off land in northern Idaho and put thousands of acres into the service of raising food for the Government. A lawyer by profession, he was a deep thinker, a wide reader, and a broad-minded man. Through his agricultural interests he came in contact with the Non-Partisan League, and he became so deeply interested in what it proposed that he made a journey to North Dakota in order to interview its staunch supporter, Governor Lynn Frazier. Back he came to Idaho, a complete convert to the farmers’ party. Not an ordinary person, this H. F. Samuels: well-educated, cultured, and successful in his chosen career; acquainted with politics, having been elected on the ticket of one of the old parties as a county attorney; not, therefore, a disgruntled, defeated politician; a rather handsome man, with sincere and courteous manner, and a good public speaker. We were very fortunate in having at the head of the ticket such a splendid character to represent us farm people.

  Following the primaries came the rallies, ours, of course, being held in the Greenwood school-house. There we had funeraled the syphilitic babe; holied the building by groaning, and praying for our little peanut souls, and singing hymns to poor Jesus. And there we had danced, some of us ragging, and some of us fighting, and some of us, such as Mrs. Greenwood, from the house on the hill, just yearning to do both and keeping it bottled up, with the danger of a psycho-release in murder or something.

  I was not allowed to rag, being the wife of one of the chief ragging-abhorrers, nor was it permissible for me to fight, but I would not be denied my politics. I distinguished myself by being the only woman in the district to attend those rallies. Even Old Lady Babcock had the decency to stay home in her tar-paper shack and allow her lord to represent the Babcock family. Brilliant as I knew the Baron to be, I would not allow him to think for me, strange though it may seem; nor would I vote any ticket just because he voted it, or because Pa voted it, or because we always voted that way in our family.

  There I sat in a child’s desk, in the Greenwood school-house, the only woman among a roomful of mackinaws and sheepskin jackets covering work shirts and overalls. Shaggy-haired from home barbering, or lack of it, with an occasional bald head, fingers thick and stiff from hard outdoor labor, my farmer friends were not the dumb-bells they looked. The Baron was moving about from place to place, always the born leader. My presence was not questioned by him as other than perfectly acceptable. That seems to me a remarkable thing in either farm or city man, considering all the circumstances.

  The first rally was of our own Progressive Party. Our own men, led by Charley, got up and expressed their opinions. Until that night I had been extremely sensitive to their—to me—frightful lapses in English. Having spent my entire childhood under the pedagogical care of Boston schoolma’ams, it was not until long years after I was a woman that I was able to shed the awful accuracy of my speech. I had not then learned that speech and writing spark to life only as we are able to reflect our own time. It is a vicious mistake for teachers of English to plug away at trying to make twentieth-century students write like those of any other century. Pathfinders, that’s what we need, those who dare to loosen up the language, not afraid to adopt some of the gorgeous slang invented through the genius of the people who live. I myself have no doubt that one of the greatest reasons why Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other writers have survived their own ages is because they were able, and courageous enough, to express their own ages. I believe we should know our English so well that we can violate the rules in the manner most pleasurable to other people, as well as to ourselves.

  That night of the Progressive rally I was able to hear the I dones and I seens and he has cames and he has wents without flinching, and maybe throwing a fit, or passing into a state of merciful unconsciousness. I was glad that night that those farmers had a language of their own. I looked at the weather-beaten, earnest visages of our speakers, and they appeared to me to shine like the Shekinah.

  Said one speaker: “The Republicans and the Democrats have both of them a sure remedy for curing what ails us farmers. The Republicans say that all that is the matter with you is that you are overburdened with taxes, and that when you no longer have to pay these, you will be in a prosperous condition. How many of you men here tonight have paid your taxes?”

  Not a hand went up.

  “The
n,” continued the speaker, “if you have not paid your taxes, you should be prosperous, but since you are not prosperous, the taxes cannot be the big problem. Now the Democrats,” he said, “say that all that is the matter with the farmer is that he should quit raising so much hay and grain and raise more cows and hogs. If we did this, there would be bound to come a crash, none of us raising enough hay and grain, and all of us going in for raising hogs and cows in a big way. And when the crash came, the Democrats would say that all we farmers need to do is to stop raising so many cows and hogs and raise more hay and grain.”

  One speaker appealed to us to vote the Progressive ticket straight. I felt a little shaky about the men on our ticket. Except, of course, my own man. Charley was running for the office of State Senator from Jerome County. But most of the other men were such little men indeed. Why must all big things begin with little men? Is it because only the crushed and unsuccessful can feel enough discontent to fight for justice? The advance guard of every reform is composed of more or less undesirables. But that is not what damns the cause. It is the indifference of the great body of people. Whenever the politicians see that the people are bound to bring something to pass, after the pariahs have sacrificed their lives to the fight, then one or the other of the big parties adopts the cause for a plank in its platform, a sort of spring-board for diving into office. They stand on it, but sometimes when they get the votes because they are standing on it and appear, ready for action, they fail to make the dive. The people do not forget.