Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  The early pioneer farmers raised their sheep to supply meat for their tables and wool for their spinning-wheels. We had a flock of sheep which was sold at a loss, the best part for us, and the only profit, being some wool Charley clipped from their backs, which the good old Russian-German beet-thinning mother lye-cleaned for half of it to keep for herself. Out of my share I made four splendid quilts—but not until I was teaching and could get the money to buy material for covers.

  During the World War, while most of the people of the earth were suffering privation, if not actual famine, three-fourths of Idaho’s potatoes were left unharvested, to rot in the field or freeze in the ground, the price being too low to pay for the labor of handling. At that time Idaho had a law requiring farmers to grade potatoes so as to exclude all but the big bakers, such as you see on the menus of railroad dining-cars. These potatoes brought forty-five cents for a hundred-pound sack, and they were sold wholesale at Chicago for six dollars and fifty cents a hundred-pound sack.

  I am rendered speechless with indignation when I think of the waste of food, and the waste of human labor, which means human life, and the starving people in the cities, who would have been glad of those smaller potatoes which the farmers were forced to leave to freeze in the ground or to rot in cellars, in cases where they had not enough hogs to consume them. How we can call this a civilized nation and allow such a criminal waste of food and life, I cannot see.

  The year we went into the war, we sagebrush folks sold our hay for fifteen dollars a ton. During the war, sheepmen, who were making big profits from wool and meat, refused to pay more than twelve dollars a ton, measured their own way, which, according to the Government, meant only ten dollars a ton. Yet wages were twenty per cent higher than before the war, when we raised fifteen-dollar hay at a scant profit. Charley refused to sell, and so there our haystack stood, four great monuments commemorating agricultural injustice.

  During the war, while we were all eating corn-meal and oat-meal and barley and rye and what-not, refraining from using wheat flour in order that the soldiers Over There might have it, the price of wheat was so depressed that Eb Hall remarked to me, “Mrs. Greenwood, I see by the paper that wheat is a drudge on the market.” His expression seemed to suit the situation. If the law of supply and demand had been left to operate, as it was in every other business during the war, even though we American farmers had refrained from using the wheat flour ourselves, we might have had a profit that would have helped us to pay off our mortgages. There was scarcely a farmer on the whole project without a mortgage, and the war just made the mortgages grow, instead of lightening them. We farm folks in the sagebrush were drafted to shed our life’s blood just as surely as were the soldiers on the field of battle. When you steal a man’s labor, you steal his life.

  The Government saw to it that the farmer could have no profit on the foodstuffs he raised, but did nothing about lowering the cost of the things the farmer had to buy and the labor he had to hire. Who paid highest for the World War, and had to live on and on, and pay and pay, and still pays? The American farmer! There is no other great nation with the degree of ignorance and indifference toward its farming class that we have. The Government, during the war, was careful to fix an arbitrary price for wheat, governed by what those who bought thought they ought to pay, and not by the actual cost of production. Are we going to commit such an unintelligent folly again?

  Success on the farm is a sad kind of failure, for it means the acceptance of injustice for your portion and conforming to the sacrifice with resignation. What did our Government do for us sagebrush farmers—and all other farmers—while I was on the farm? Besides setting a price on wheat to our disadvantage, it sent county agents to tell our husbands how to poison jack-rabbits, so they would not eat our crops—a valuable service if the crops had been worth anything to the farmer in profits. How much more practical and valuable to the whole country those agricultural experts would have been had the Government instructed them to market the farmer’s crops by means of food zones! Good Old Grandma Government sent home-economics experts to teach us women how to make underwear and aprons out of flour sacks, when we were already making everything possible out of them, from table-cloths to sheets. The salaries those women earned would have been put to better account had they been paid to assist the county agents in translating the farmers’ crops to the poor city folks at a reasonable profit. The poor fed at a reasonable cost, the farmer given a reasonable profit.

  The Government also spent a large sum of money having experts make diagrams of iceless refrigerators and home-made screens (in competition with legitimate business), and spent more money having these diagrams printed, and spent more money sending them broadcast to poor, overworked farm women, who were expected to be tickled to get something more from the hands of the Government that would make them content with their unjust poverty. Spent to take the farmer’s crop off his hands and market it, without selfish designs on his labor and life, that same money, with the rest that was similarly wasted, would have enabled the farmer to buy efficient manufactured refrigerators and screens for his windows, would have given more time to the farmer’s wife, and would have put more money in the pocket of business. Were the manufacturers of screens and refrigerators asleep that they let the Government pull one on them like that?

  Those window-screen diagrams fascinated me, probably because I had only two window screens in my whole house and wanted some more so badly. I carefully read the directions, and the following is all the overworked farm woman would have to do to equip her home with screens. In the first place, she would have to get some money to buy the screening. There being little or no market for the sagebrush woman’s butter and eggs, and whatever there was being needed at once to answer the immediate necessities of the family, we shall have to assume a special act of God in the getting of the raw screening. Next, all the farm woman has to do is to wangle the wire cutting shears from her husband, read the bulletin carefully, and cut the screen according to directions. She must also work big buttonholes in a strip of cloth cut from beet-seed sacking, that being the strongest on hand. Then she must bind the screening all around with the sacking, sewing the buttonhole strip to all four sides. Next she must drive hooked screws, also provided by the special act of God, into the window-frames. On these hooked screws she now buttons her screen. This same operation must be repeated for every window. The result—hours of the overworked woman’s life turned into screens which cannot compare with the manufactured articles. The Government has spent large sums of money to keep the farmer contented without legitimate profit and to rob the business man of a customer. Talk about the Government going into business! Why are the farmer and his wife and children to be degraded to such poverty? Because they feed the world!

  Our Government, whose basic shibboleth is that all men are equal, has spent untold millions of dollars to degrade one class of its citizens. It has wasted good tax-money, some of it coming from the farmers themselves, to maintain county agents and home-economics experts and others in their jobs of showing farm families how to endure failure, rather than helping them to make a success by assisting in the disinterested marketing of their crops. Farming is one business, and marketing is another, and no man has time for both. It has been proved by the experience of thousands of years that self-interested men are not to be trusted in the marketing of farm crops. If a correct value were placed upon the crop as it left the farm, and there were no means by which this could be meddled with, all might be well; but that would require the omniscience of God to operate. Honesty is the rarest attribute of the human animal, and it is the foundation of character. Deliver the middlemen from temptation by making it impossible. Middlemen should be abolished from the marketing of farm crops. Surely, if anything is legitimate government work, it is the distribution of the food-supply. A thousand years from now, people such as you and I—they will be like us—will be amazed that anything of such universal and vital importance as the distribution and marketing of the
food-supply of a nation was ever left to chance and graft.

  It is not right for men to endure failure. A fine rebellion is evidence of the godlike spark in man. The Government of the United States of America, from the beginning of its history until the present day, without malice aforethought and with the kindliest feeling toward all, has been occupied in the deadly business of pauperizing, and allowing any one sufficiently predatory enough to pauperize, its agricultural class. Credit is not what agriculture needs, but justice.

  NOTHING WHATEVER that is vital has so far been done to relieve agriculture. Credit is simply legalized charity which must be paid back, with interest; those who accept it are thereby rendered just as poor after its receipt as they were before. Nay, poorer, for with a false sense of security they go on, getting deeper and deeper into debt. Too much credit for everybody was the first step toward the present financial depression, say what they will about the gold standard or any other concomitant factor.

  The Government cannot set the price of wheat arbitrarily without making conditions worse than they are, and that is hard to conceive. The actual cost of a sack of wheat is at the heart of the cost of everything. It should be reckoned by the average cost of operation among the farmers who produce wheat. It must take into account the cost of the seed, plus the taxes on the land where it is grown, plus the cost of water (in the West), plus the cost of the farmer’s labor, plus that of his farm hand, plus that of his sons, plus that of his wife and daughter at threshing or other special boarding times, plus board for threshers, etc., plus wear and upkeep of machinery and horses (they must be replaced some time), plus feed for horses, plus threshing bill, plus sacks and binder-twine, plus wages of help and teams in hauling to elevators, plus a reasonable profit. Of course it is easier to set the price by guess and by gosh, but it is more expensive, in the end, to paralyze a whole country with financial need, and that is the actual result of not paying the farmer what is coming to him.

  Because this is not justice just to one enterprise in the United States, but to all, it must be a government project, in co-operation with men who know from all industries. The cost of wheat would be but the beginning. The costs of all commodities are affected by the cost of wheat, and it should, therefore, be the business of the Government to watch all along the line. What should the sacks and binder-twine cost? And then we must go on estimating for the cotton farmers, beginning again with the seed and working outward. And so on throughout agriculture.

  When we find the real instead of the speculative values of all commodities, it is not going to matter whether we have a dollar of silver or of tin, or whether we have an ounce of gold in the Treasury. I see monetary experts throwing fits at this statement. If I carefully compute the cost to me of a piece of embroidery, from the flaxseed to the finished article, and my neighbor does the same with a wool muffler, she having raised the sheep and spun the wool, we can trade with some certainty that our market is right. There are many factors, of course, unmentioned here, to be dealt with in the same spirit of intelligence. But the basis of everything is what the average producer can produce in a certain time for a certain cost—fluctuations of money can mean nothing: the cost is the cost. If the cost is high, the price of wheat is high. It is self-stabilizing, being price based upon actual cost, low or high. We should need no money at all, except as a matter of convenience. A sack of wheat would have an actual value which could be exchanged for other products at a fair profit, because their values also had been rendered actual.

  Such real values must be re-estimated every year. This should be the regular business of the Government, beyond the chance of politics, just as it is the business of every self-respecting individual to get up in the morning and prepare himself to meet the public, or just to be with himself, in a cleanly, decent manner. Until such a course of yearly establishing of actual values occurs, there will be nothing but fluctuating guess-prices, at the mercy of speculators and an eternally seesawing dollar. As long as we continue to pay guess-prices, we shall be paying either too little or too much, and both these courses must lead to recurring periods of depression, a confession of failure on the part of the citizens of the world. Let’s look at this thing straight! Everything costs something in human life and natural materials. What is that cost?

  I here quote from an article I casually picked up just now, attracted by the title. It is by Bernard M. Baruch. I read only what I shall quote, it seeming to leap to my eye, and I do not know how Mr. Baruch applied it to his topic, but I do know that it speaks the truth for agriculture: “The human factor is of enormous importance in the consideration of any economic problem. This human factor, with its wide variations, keeps economics from ever becoming an exact science. It must always be empiric—that is, guided by experience, rather than by hard, impersonal science.”

  Farmers would gladly keep books on their wheat crops if they thought that thereby they could lift the mortgages, but no farmer likes to keep track of how far he is going into the hole. When real prices are set, there will no longer be any farm mortgages. Farm families are not extravagant. Far from it. They almost never have debts of folly.

  The farmer has been given the credit which he does not want, and has been refused the justice which he so needs. It rankles in his heart that his government loan is to cover what he is having stolen from him by the marketers of his crops, if not with the sanction of the Government, yet without its prohibition. The farm woman’s salary is as yet a thing undreamed, but can you doubt its justice when you see your pretty daughter, dressed in her fur coat, go to her few hours of work, while the farm woman and her daughter work from dawn to dark to keep you and your family from starving? If jobs must be underpaid, or paid not at all, let them be those without which we could sustain existence. The cost of wheat, to be just, must take into consideration the world’s greatest, as yet unfreed slave, the farm woman.

  It is a crime of no small proportions to restrict crops while there are any hungry people left in the world. There must be no consideration as to who will pay for the food those people need. If the Government cannot open the way for them to pay themselves, by means of training and, perhaps, supplying jobs, then it should be the business of an enlightened Government to invite those poor people to its table as its guests.

  A century ago, the Owenists, in England, first proposed political representation according to industrial interests. Mussolini and Soviet Russia are now putting similar principles into practice. I declare that it is a step toward enlightened government. It is always the new-born governments that must point the way to change, crude though their methods may seem to the older nations, sunk in the ruts of custom. What I advocate in the way of accurate estimation of the real values of crops goes one step further toward prosperity for the people.

  When we can make our politicians and lawmakers really represent the industries of the United States instead of the businesses that prey upon those industries, we shall have solved the economic question that confronts us, and in no other way can it be done. What a senseless thing it is to keep juggling the dollar and the tariff, winning enemies at home and abroad, when the simple plan of finding out what a tiling is worth and paying for it accordingly would win friends and antagonize nobody but commercial racketeers. The new tariff would be the required submission of the actual cost value of the article that desired admission to the United States. It is absurd to encourage any home industry to manufacture something at a loss to the consumer if he can obtain it at lower cost from abroad. Let us have the practical international brotherhood of exchange. Give the other nations a chance to earn a living, too.

  Where ever did we get the idea that the United States of America has to manufacture within its confines everything that is manufactured anywhere else in the world, at a loss to the great consuming public? Why should I be allowed to set my heart on the making of caviar from cat’s whiskers to the loss of every one else in my home town, Russian caviar having a tariff on it too high for the town folks to enjoy? Let me go out and
scrub steps, like other honest women! There are too many American industries trying to fill the rôle of God’s little pet lambs.

  If we cannot grow tiddle-de-winks as economically as can the Republic of Nosuchplace, then let Nosuchplace have a chance at a living wage by supplying us, while we, because of a more favorable rainy season, raise door-knobs to supply the folks of Nosuchplace, who are able to buy from us because we are buying tiddle-de-winks from them. For heaven’s sake, let the nations grow up and quit squabbling like a lot of naughty boys playing marbles for keeps! Don’t they know that there is a brutal schoolmaster about to pounce on them and lick the life out of them? His name is WAR. Did it never occur to our statesmen that one of the surest causes of war is unintelligent and dishonest economics?

  Now I hear some of those university-professor economics experts asking me, “What unit of exchange will you use in your utopian plan, if you have no gold standard, or what-not?”

  (I have taken some dirty whacks at professors, ministers, and what-nots in this book, and I want to say right here that one of my best friends...two of my best friends were a splendid minister and his splendid wife. Also, I look hopefully toward economics experts of whatever stripe. They are at least thinking, while the rest of us United Staters are mostly vegetating.)

  While I was writing that parenthetic paragraph, I was thinking up my answer to the professors. Every plan that has advanced the world in justice and humanitarianism has been condemned by folks in high places. There is no unchangeable unit of value for exchange, and never has been, and never can be. Certainly not silver and gold. Bryan was righter than he was thinking when he startled that convention with, his glorious voice chilling every one’s bones, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”