Are Not in Despair
A lot of talk going around these days about hard times, isn't there? Drouth, short crops, unemployment, stock market crashes, and so on. Threshing was completed in our vicinity without the shocks ever having felt a drop of rain. Fine quality grain we had, too -- what there was of it. And now we are all wondering whether the rain which is bound to come some time can possibly save the later crops -- corn and soy beans. Lots of talk, lots of figuring, lots of difficulty -- but in the main I believe our farmers, and I suppose it is about the same with all you readers, are by no means in despair. We are old friends with adversity. Now that other classes are beginning to feel the pinch, we can sympathize. Trouble isn't half so hard to bear when it is spread out among so many. In fact, when it begins to assume the proportions of a country-wide disaster, much of the sting is removed. A great calamity puts us on our mettle, binds us together for mutual protection and help. It may be that we Americans are destined to go through some grievous economic difficulties, but we are not likely to be oconfronted with such calamities like famine and earthquakes, as many sister-nations have gone through and survived.
Other classes are beginning to be bewildered by conditions. Crashes in values disturb them more than they do farmers, for they have nothing so tangible to hold on to. Wages fall, work lets up, business slackens, the wheels of industry hesitate, and what substantial footing is left? Values are in a turmoil. But farmers have their old stand-by -- work that needs to be done regardless of rates of interest and agitation at the pit. It is up to the farmers now to uphold the morale of the whole country. We are all in a slough of despond together, but we'll clamber out, and the first ones out must help to pull the rest. I dare say the farmers will be the first ones out.
Passed Prosperity On
Back in 1912, in those incredible years of prosperity before the great war, the editor of our paper described the "horn of plenty" of that season -- bumper crops and good feeling all around. He said, "Everybody looked to the farms rather than the politicians to give progress a little boost, and the farms have made good...Providence passed prosperity around to the farmers, and the farmers helped it along by putting in a busy season...Greater agricultural wealth will mean an era of unbounded general prosperity...Do not envy the farmer's affluence. He makes prosperity's wheels spin for all the people." Even in this year of threatened crop shortage, if the farmer is just a little better off than the rest he can start the wheel to moving. Let's try!
I have just been reading a new book called "Prosperity, Fact or Myth," by Stuart Chase. I was particularly interested in the chapter on farming prosperity, and was encouraged and cheered to read what the author had to say. After painting the darkest side of the picture by statics showing how little of the vaunted national prosperity had reached the farmers, he said:
Can Forget Rules
"In the face of this depressing testimony it is pertinent to inquire how farmers continue to exist at all. As a matter of fact many of them have ceased to exist -- as farmers.
"For agriculture to show a profit and loss account in red figures may be sad, even tragic, but it is not evidence of extermination...The farmer is carrying on a job far older than the money and credit system. He is handicapped seriously by its rules, but in a pinch he can still defy them. No penalty of sudden extermination hangs over him. If his books do not balance, if his debits exceed his credits, he can throw his books out of the window and go out and pick a mess of peas, or milk the cow. He has a roof over his head, food in his fields, fuel in the wood lot. He can stand a financial siege if he must.
"Farming is a career, not a business. Its roots are very ancient and run profoundly deep. In the face of plowed earth, flowing stream, hillside, meadow, orchard, woodland, all the figures which I have spread upon the record suddenly grow dim...Red figures or black figures, the farmers have gone on plowing and sowing and harvesting.
"Theoretically millions of them are bankrupt, actually most of them have not shared in American prosperity -- but they continue to exist, strong, hardworking, reasonably health. Because they are farmers. Their strength lies in the soil, not in engraved figures on pieces of paper.
"I am sorry for them, but I do not pity them -- sometimes indeed I envy them." --Hope.