Federal Farmer Quotes

Doesn't the Federal Farm bill help out all these poor farmers? No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare ... It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families. But those family-owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer chemicals. In other words, they're doing exactly what 80 percent of U.S. consumers say we would prefer to support, while our tax dollars do the opposite.

Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.

There are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous communities and nations, comprising nearly three million people in the United States. These are the descendants of the fifteen million original inhabitants of the land, the majority of whom were farmers who lived in towns.

Guess what? None of these guys said anything when the Trump administration added $1 trillion to the federal budget deficit by the end of 2019—before a single dime was spent on COVID-19 relief. They were rubber stamps for it in Congress. Many of them who raised huge stinks about TARP were only too happy to let Trump bail out farmers hurt by his trade war with China. These are the same people who were willing to destroy our economy to make their point but went on to suddenly abandon this core principle.

Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down.

Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down.

He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism.

They were more than illiterate farmers, more than victims who’d been duped by the federal government. They were a family who, given other opportunities, could have accomplished much more.

In December 1790, with other options foreclosed, Hamilton revived a proposal he had floated in his Report on Public Credit: an excise tax on whiskey and other domestic spirits. He knew the measure would be loathed in rural areas that thrived on moonshine, but he thought this might be more palatable to farmers than a land tax. Hamilton confessed to Washington an ulterior political motive for this liquor tax: he wanted to lay “hold of so valuable a resource of revenue before it was generally preoccupied by the state governments.” As with assumption, he wanted to starve the states of revenue and shore up the federal government. Jefferson did not exaggerate Hamilton’s canny capacity to clothe political objectives in technical garb. There were hidden agendas buried inside Hamilton’s economic program, agendas that he tended to share with high-level colleagues but not always with the public.

the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no . . . . when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart . . . . and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape . . . . or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing, If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This is the common air that bathes the globe. This is the breath of laws and songs and behaviour, This is the tasteless water of souls.... this is the true sustenance, It is for the illiterate.... it is for the judges of the supreme court . . . . it is for the federal capitol and the state capitols, It is for the admirable communes of literary men and composers and singers and lecturers and engineers and savans, It is for the endless races of working people and farmers and seamen. This is the trill of a thousand clear cornets and scream of the octave flute and strike of triangles. I play not a march for victors only.... I play great marches for conquered and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall.... battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

Center for Food Integrity (CFI). Its members include trade groups like the National Restaurant Association, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Dairy Farmers of America, and companies like Monsanto and Hershey’s,19 with a primary mission to downplay any public concerns about chemical food additives.

In 1887, with a huge surplus in the treasury, Cleveland vetoed a bill appropriating $100,000 to give relief to Texas farmers to help them buy seed grain during a drought. He said: “Federal aid in such cases … encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” But that same year, Cleveland used his gold surplus to pay off wealthy bondholders at $28 above the $100 value of each bond—a gift of $45 million

To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck.

Roosevelt won because he created a new kind of interest-group politics. The idea that Americans might form a political group that demanded something from government was well known and thoroughly reported a century earlier by Alexis de Tocqueville. The idea that such groups might find mainstream parties to support them was not novel either: Republicans, including the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had long practiced interest-group politics on behalf of big business. But Roosevelt systematized interest-group politics more generally to include many constituencies—labor, senior citizens, farmers, union workers. The president made groups where only individual citizens or isolated cranks had stood before, ministered to those groups, and was rewarded with votes. It is no coincidence that the first peacetime year in American history in which federal spending outpaced the total spending of the states and towns was that election year of 1936. It can even be argued that one year—1936—created the modern entitlement challenge that so bedevils both parties only.

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

it was still difficult for me to listen to Lou declare that Mace and his mother had been outsmarted by Mrs. Seager. Yes, it was true, neither of them could read, but his portrayal of them as simple country people whose priority was day-to-day survival fell short. These people were smarter than that. Mrs. Williams could put a piece of sweet potato pie in her mouth and know exactly how much nutmeg was used. Mace could stick his finger in the soil and tell you what would and would not grow in it, could recall the names of trees I had never even known existed. They were more than illiterate farmers, more than victims who’d been duped by the federal government. They were a family who, given other opportunities, could have accomplished much more.

The necessity arising from a want of specie is represented as greater than it really is. I contend that it is by the substance, not the shadow of a thing, we are to be benefited. The wisdom of man, in my humble opinion, cannot at this time devise a plan by which the credit of paper money would be long supported; consequently, depreciation keeps pace with the quantity of the emission, and articles for which it is exchanged rise in a greater ratio than the sinking value of the money. Wherein, then, is the farmer, the planter, the artisan benefited? An evil equally great is the door it immediately opens for speculation, by which the least designing and perhaps most valuable part of the community are preyed upon by the more knowing and crafty speculators.

Gene Logsdon is equally critical of the federal government’s interference with regional farming markets. In The Contrary Farmer,20 he explores how government manipulation of agricultural markets has led to costly, hare-brained, and environmentally damaging practices. For example, farmers are tempted by government subsidies to grow corn on land far better suited for other, unsubsidized crops. The end result: the agricultural and economic diversity of whole regions of the United States is diminished. This has the knock-on effect of undermining opportunities for people in these regions to obtain a variety of affordable, locally grown produce. People talk about addressing such problems by further regulating lobbyists, but every new wave of regulations seems only to make matters worse. The best way to avoid cronyism and the government manipulation of markets in favor of corporate bigness is to have big government shrunk down to size and hemmed in by severe limits.

I wondered what was going on in neuroscience that might bear upon the subject. This quickly led me to neuroscience’s most extraordinary figure, Edward O. Wilson. Wilson’s own life is a good argument for his thesis, which is that among humans, no less than among racehorses, inbred traits will trump upbringing and environment every time. In its bare outlines his childhood biography reads like a case history for the sort of boy who today winds up as the subject of a tabloid headline: DISSED DORK SNIPERS JOCKS. He was born in Alabama to a farmer’s daughter and a railroad engineer’s son who became an accountant and an alcoholic. His parents separated when Wilson was seven years old, and he was sent off to the Gulf Coast Military Academy. A chaotic childhood was to follow. His father worked for the federal Rural Electrification Administration, which kept reassigning him to different locations, from the Deep South to Washington, D.C., and back again, so that in eleven years Wilson attended fourteen different public schools. He grew up shy and introverted and liked the company only of other loners, preferably those who shared his enthusiasm for collecting insects. For years he was a skinny runt, and then for years after that he was a beanpole. But no matter what ectomorphic shape he took and no matter what school he went to, his life had one great center of gravity: He could be stuck anywhere on God’s green earth and he would always be the smartest person in his class. That remained true after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in biology from the University of Alabama and became a doctoral candidate and then a teacher of biology at Harvard for the next half century. He remained the best in his class every inch of the way. Seething Harvard savant after seething Harvard savant, including one Nobel laureate, has seen his reputation eclipsed by this terribly reserved, terribly polite Alabamian, Edward O. Wilson. Wilson’s field within the discipline of biology was zoology; and within zoology, entomology, the study of insects; and within entomology, myrmecology, the study of ants. Year after year he studied

Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.

Most of the mortgaged farmers. Most of the white-collar workers who had been unemployed these three years and four and five. Most of the people on relief rolls who wanted more relief. Most of the suburbanites who could not meet the installment payments on the electric washing machine. Such large sections of the American Legion as believed that only Senator Windrip would secure for them, and perhaps increase, the bonus. Such popular Myrtle Boulevard or Elm Avenue preachers as, spurred by the examples of Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin, believed they could get useful publicity out of supporting a slightly queer program that promised prosperity without anyone's having to work for it. The remnants of the Kuklux Klan, and such leaders of the American Federation of Labor as felt they had been inadequately courted and bepromised by the old-line politicians, and the non-unionized common laborers who felt they had been inadequately courted by the same A.F. of L. Back-street and over-the-garage lawyers who had never yet wangled governmental jobs. The Lost Legion of the Anti-Saloon League—since it was known that, though he drank a lot, Senator Windrip also praised teetotalism a lot, while his rival, Walt Trowbridge, though he drank but little, said nothing at all in support of the Messiahs of Prohibition. These messiahs had not found professional morality profitable of late, with the Rockefellers and Wanamakers no longer praying with them nor paying. Besides these necessitous petitioners, a goodish number of burghers who, while they were millionaires, yet maintained that their prosperity had been sorely checked by the fiendishness of the bankers in limiting their credit. These were the supporters who looked to Berzelius Windrip to play the divine raven and feed them handsomely when he should become President, and from such came most of the fervid elocutionists who campaigned for him through September and October.

Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people, or from the sharp show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat…the enemy triumphs…the prison, the handcuffs, the iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote and leadballs do their work…the cause is asleep…the strong throats are choked with their own blood…the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pass each other…and is liberty gone out of that place? No never. When liberty goes it is not the first to go nor the second or third to go…it waits for all the rest to go…it is the last…When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away…when the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators…when the boys are no more christened after the same but christened after tyrants and traitors instead…when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted and laws for informers and bloodmoney are sweet to the taste of the people…when I and you walk abroad upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master—and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves…when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night and surveys its experience and has much extasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority…when those in all parts of these states who could easier realize the true American character but do not yet—when the swarms of cringers, suckers, dough-faces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no…when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart…and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape…or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.

New Deal legislation undoubtedly saved thousands of lives and prevented destitution for millions. New labor laws led to a flourishing of unions and built a strong white middle class. The Social Security Act of 1935 established the principle of cash payments in cases of unemployment, old age, or loss of a family breadwinner, and it did so as a matter of right, not on the basis of individual moral character. But the New Deal also created racial, gender, and class divisions that continue to produce inequities in our society today. Roosevelt’s administration capitulated to white supremacy in ways that still bear bitter fruit. The Civilian Conservation Corps capped Black participation in federally supported work relief at 10 percent of available jobs, though African Americans experienced 80 percent unemployment in northern cities. The National Housing Act of 1934 redoubled the burden on Black neighborhoods by promoting residential segregation and encouraging mortgage redlining. The Wagner Act granted workers the right to organize, but allowed segregated trade unions. Most importantly, in response to threats that southern states would not support the Social Security Act, both agricultural and domestic workers were explicitly excluded from its employment protections. The “southern compromise” left the great majority of African American workers—and a not-insignificant number of poor white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and domestics—with no minimum wage, unemployment protection, old-age insurance, or right to collective bargaining.

In environmental litigation arising over fish habitat requirements in the Klamath Basin, for example, four different federal agencies take positions on water policies – some pushing for water to remain in the river, others advocating for drawing water out of the river for farmers. Serving as the government’s mouthpiece in court, the DOJ chooses which agency position to represent and, once the choice is made, effectively muzzles the others. Strict professional ethical standards generally prohibit attorneys from representing clients with conflicting interests, exactly for the reason

By the century's end, the balance of white Republicans and Democrats in the South mirrored the long-standing pattern in the non-South. In the past, each region perceived the parties in different terms. Southerners associated the Republican Party with the forces of Reconstruction, and non-Southerners associated it with business, farmers, and Protestantism. In the South, the Democratic Party was the party of states' rights and segregation, and in the non-South ii was the party of cities, labor and immigrants. For a variety of reasons—economic integration, migration, mass communication, the extension of federal power—the non-South's conception of the parties gradually spread southward.

No. I suppose not,’ the farmer said. ‘I just thought, with him being your friend and all.’ ‘I’m not that kind of officer anyway. Federal. With the financial intelligence unit.

Roosevelt secured passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which levied a new tax on agricultural processors and used the revenue to supervise the wholesale destruction of valuable crops and cattle. Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under. Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs by the millions were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. Even if the AAA had helped farmers by curtailing supplies and raising prices, it could have done so only by hurting millions of others who had to pay those prices or make do with less to eat. Perhaps

Edward Carrington of Virginia wrote to Thomas Jefferson that "these Letters are the best of anything that has been written" against the Constitution.77 What was it about the "rights" in a bill of rights that was considered so indispensable? In his second "Letter," dated October 9, the "Federal Farmer" declared: "There are certain unalienable and fundamental rights, which in forming the social compact, ought to be explicitly ascertained and fixed—a free and enlightened people, in forming this compact, will not resign all their rights to those who govern, and they will fix limits to their legislators and rulers, which will soon be plainly seen by those who are governed, as well as by those who govern . . . ." Contrary to the Constitution's proponents, "I still believe a complete federal bill of rights to be very practicable.

More than twelve hundred wheat farmers in No Man’s Land signed up for contracts and in turn got a total of $642,637—an average of $498 a farmer. Thus was born a subsidy system that grew into one of the untouchable pillars of the federal budget.

We do have a national industrial policy, one that has run roughshod over the free market of ideas, force-feeding federal—largely DOD—research goals into the hungry craws of craven scientists. This model does not let the best science and technology appear and grow organically in response to a multitude of societal factors—in the case of food, the concerns of farmers, consumers, public health officials, and even the food industry itself—but rather they are chosen and directed along a preordained agenda set to achieve military dominance on the world stage.

We were both dismayed by the freedoms the farmers were required to give up in return for the cash the government gave them. If you wanted to grow potatoes on your farm, for example, the Roosevelt administration would tell you how many bushels of potatoes you could grow and sell, tax free. Your tax-free potatoes, when they went to market, would go in a federal package, bearing a federal stamp, by permission of a federal bureau. If you wanted to grow and sell more potatoes than the law allowed, you had to pay a tax of forty-five cents a bushel. If you got caught bootlegging potatoes, you and your customer would be fined a thousand dollars. Get caught again and you went to jail—and your customer went as well.

great peril abroad. Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, setting a limit on hours worked and a minimum wage. The federal government began a system of parity payments to farmers and subsidized foreign wheat sales. In

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE? “The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as ’railroads’ and the federal government must preserve the canals. . . . If canal boats are supplanted by ’railroads,’ serious unemployment will result. Captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen, and lock tenders will be left without means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers now employed growing hay for the horses. . . . As you may well know, Mr. President, ’railroad’ carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ’engines’ which, in addition to endanging life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.” The above communication was from Martin Van Buren, then governor of New York, to President Andrew Jackson on January 21, 1829. In 1832 Van Buren was elected vice president of the United States under Andrew Jackson’s second term. In 1836 Van Buren was elected president of the United States. It is also interesting that the first railroad into Washington, DC, was completed in time to bring visitors from Philadelphia and New York to Van Buren’s inauguration. Sources: Janet E. Lapp, “Ride the Horse in the Direction It’s Going,” American Salesman, October 1998, pp. 26–29; and The World Book Encyclopedia, Volume 20 (Chicago: World Book—Childcraft International, Inc.), 1979, p. 214. 2

With the first banks opened on Monday, the afternoon brought another request from Roosevelt. Stating that he needed the tax revenue, he asked Congress that beer with alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent be made legal; the Eighteenth Amendment did not specify the percentage that constituted an intoxicating beverage. Congress complied. The House passed the bill the very next day with a vote count of 316–97, pushing it to the Senate. Wednesday brought good cheer: The stock market opened for the first time in Roosevelt’s presidency. In a single-day record, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained over 15 percent—a gain in total market value of $3 billion. By Thursday, for increased fiscal prudence, the Senate had added an exemption for wine to go with beer, but negotiated the alcohol content down to 3.05 percent. Throughout the week, banks were receiving net deposits rather than facing panicked withdrawals. Over the following weeks, the administration developed a sweeping farm package designed to “increase purchasing power of our farmers” and “relieve the pressure of farm mortgages.” To guarantee the safety of bank deposits, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created. To regulate the entire American stock and bond markets, the Exchange Act of 1933 required companies to report their financial condition accurately to the buying public, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission. Safety nets such as Social Security for retirement and home loan guarantees for individuals would be added to the government’s portfolio of responsibilities within a couple of years. It was the largest peacetime escalation of government in American history.

We're with the federal government. I'm Mr. Harrison. This is Mr. Woods." I didn't move, and I kept my left foot wedged securely behind the door. I wasn't as tall as either of them, but I was strong, a farmer, an athlete, a chopper of wood and hoister of fence posts. I trusted my ability to slam the door in their faces. I said, "What branch?" "What?" "What branch of federal government?" Harrison's mouth quirked to one side as if he was resisting a patronizing smile. "Information," he said. "That's not a branch." I braced my foot more securely. "The FBI is a branch. The War Department is a branch.

One of Washington's worst assumptions is this belief that bureaucrats in a handful of federal agencies in DC know more and care more about the natural environment than the people who own, cultivate, and depend on that land for their very survival. In reality, there are no greater environmentalists than farmers. They love their land. For so many of them, it's their legacy---what they hope to leave to their children someday. People tend to take pretty good care of their legacies. Farmers do so because we literally live the lessons of the land in our daily work. We teach our kids how to protect it, because we'll go broke and starve if we don't.

Japanese paranoia stemmed partly from xenophobia rooted in racism. This combination wasn’t peculiar to Japan, as the Nazis were demonstrating in Germany. In the United States, the 1924 Exclusion Act remained in force, prohibiting all immigration from Asia. Some Western states didn’t think the Exclusion Act went far enough, because it hadn’t gotten rid of the Japanese who had immigrated before the United States slammed the door. Xenophobes argued that these immigrants were now breeding more Japanese, who were recognized, outrageously, as American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Farmers in California and Arizona were especially hostile. Even before the Exclusion Act, these states had passed Alien Land Laws severely restricting the property rights of Japanese. Then in 1934 a group of farmers in Arizona’s Salt River Valley began agitating to kick Japanese farmers out, alleging that they had flooded into the region and were depriving farmland from deserving whites who were already hurting from the Depression. They also demanded that white landowners stop leasing acreage to Japanese farmers. The white farmers and their supporters held rallies and parades, blaring their message of exclusion. In the fall of that year, night riders began a campaign of terrorism. They dynamited irrigation canals used by Japanese farmers and threw dynamite bombs at their homes and barns. The leaders of the Japanese community tried to point out that only 700 Japanese lived in the valley and most had been there for more than twenty years. Three hundred fifty of them were American citizens, and only 125 worked in agriculture, mostly for American farmers. Facts made no impression on the white farmers’ racist resentments. Some local officials exploited the bigotry for political gain. The Japanese government protested all this. Hull didn’t want a few farmers to cause an international incident and pushed the governor of Arizona to fix the problem. The governor blamed the terrorism on communist agitators. Dynamite bombs continued to explode on Japanese farms through the fall of 1934. The local and state police maintained a perfect record—not a single arrest. In early February 1935 the Arizona legislature began considering a bill that would forbid Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land. If they managed to grow anything, it could be confiscated. Any white farmer who leased to a Japanese would be abetting a crime. (Japan had similar laws against foreigners owning farmland.) American leaders and newspapers quickly condemned the proposed law as shameful, but farmers in Arizona remained enthusiastic. Japanese papers covered the controversy as well. One fascist group, wearing uniforms featuring skulls and waving a big skull flag, protested several times at the US embassy in Tokyo. Patriotic societies began pressuring Hirota to stand up for Japan’s honor. He and Japan’s representatives in Washington asked the American government to do something. Arizona politicians got word that if the bill passed, millions of dollars in New Deal money might go elsewhere. Nevertheless, on March 19 the Arizona senate passed the bill. On March 21 the state house of representatives, inspired more by fears of evaporating federal aid than by racial tolerance, let the bill die. The incident left a bad taste all around.

An almost unprecedented scramble for this new power, new wealth and new income ensued. It broke down old standards of wealth distribution, old standards of thrift and honesty. It led to the anarchy of thieves, grafters, and highwaymen. It threatened the orderly processes of production as well as government and morals. The governments, federal state and local, had paid 3/5's of the cost of the railroads and handed them over to individuals and corporations to use for their profit. An empire of rich land, larger than France, Belgium, and Holland together, had been snatched from the hands of prospective peasant farmers and given to investors and land speculators. All the national treasure of coal, oil, copper, gold and iron, had been given away for a song to be made the monopolized basis of private fortunes with perpetual power to tax labor for the right to live and work. Speculation rose and flourished on the hard foundation of this largess.

One modest example of how the farmers managed to deceive the Bureau was provided by the case of Russell Giffen, one of the big landowners in the Westlands district. A Fresno rancher who stitched together seventy-seven thousand acres of valley property—about seven times the acreage of Manhattan Island—Giffen was the largest cotton grower in the world: nationally, he also ranked just behind Boswell and one other farming company in the combined federal farm subsidies he received. In the 1970s, Giffen decided to clean up his estate for probate, and sold most of the land for $32.5 million.

How do you explain to a child of New York, a student at Howard University, what it would be like down in Mississippi? Mississippi had defied every federal law, denied blacks of every right the Courts had promised them. Mississippians murdered their black citizens under the sun and in the cover of darkness.

I couldn’t press upon this eager young woman that down in the South, the states didn’t recognize federal law. They took the law into their own hands and called it states’ rights. Black people were beaten into submission by domestic terrorists just as evil as those labeled international terrorists decades later.

The individual most responsible for the triumph of the documentary style was probably Roy Stryker of the government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), who sent a platoon of famous photographers out to record the lives of impoverished farmers and thus “introduce America to Americans.” Stryker was the son of a Kansas Populist, and, according to a recent study of his work, “agrarian populism” was the “first basic assumption” of the distinctive FSA style. Other agencies pursued the same aesthetic goal from different directions. Federal workers transcribed folklore, interviewed surviving ex-slaves, and recorded the music of the common man. Federally employed artists painted murals illustrating local legends and the daily work of ordinary people on the walls of public buildings. Unknowns contributed to this work, and great artists did too—Thomas Hart Benton, for example, painted a mural that was actually titled A Social History of the State of Missouri in the capitol building in Jefferson City.16 There was a mania for documentary books, photos of ordinary people in their homes and workplaces that were collected and narrated by some renowned prose stylist. James Agee wrote the most enduring of these, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in cooperation with photographer Walker Evans, but there were many others. The novelist Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White published You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937, while Richard Wright, fresh from the success of his novel Native Son, published Twelve Million Black Voices in 1941, with depictions of African American life chosen from the populist photographic output of the FSA.

Unions, as we have seen, pushed for and won legislation that legitimized collective bargaining. Small farmers got federal price supports and a voice in setting agricultural policy. Farm cooperatives, like unions, won exemption from federal antitrust laws. Small retailers obtained protection against retail chains through state “fair trade” laws and the federal Robinson-Patman Act, requiring wholesalers to charge all retailers the same price regardless of size and preventing chains from cutting prices.

When Sauk leader Black Hawk led his people back from a winter stay in Iowa to their homeland in Illinois in 1832 to plant corn, the squatter settlers there claimed they were being invaded, bringing in both Illinois militia and federal troops. The "Black Hawk War" that is narrated in history texts was no more than a slaughter of Sauk farmers. The Sauks tried to defend themselves but were starving when Black Hawk surrendered under a white flag.

This decision produced a scene that provides the most graphic and dramatic illustration of the two competing versions of what the American Revolution had come to mean in the 1790s. On one side stood the rebels, a defiant collection of aggrieved farmers emboldened by their conviction that the excise tax levied by Congress was every bit as illegitimate as the taxes levied by the British ministry. On the other side stood Washington and his federalized troops, an updated version of the Continental army, marching west to enforce the authority of the constitutionally elected government that claimed to represent all the American people. It was “the spirit of ’76” against “the spirit of ’87,” one historic embodiment of “the people” against another.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, 42,000 native-born Japanese lived in California, as did 97,000 Germans and 114,000 Italians. The three groups were classified as “enemy aliens,” and were forbidden to enter military installations or the Canal Zone—as if anyone were traveling down there. They weren’t allowed to fly in airplanes or change residences within their own cities. They could no longer purchase or possess firearms, cameras, short-wave radios, codes, or invisible ink. Soon all enemy alien funds were frozen, and banks owned by enemy aliens were locked up—regardless of who the depositors were. In addition to these governmental restrictions, the populace at large—petrified by the possibility of radio-directed air raids—began making life difficult for the most easily recognizable enemy, the Japanese. Landlords evicted Japanese families; wholesalers stopped supplying products to Japanese businesses. The Japanese couldn’t get driver’s licenses, credit from banks, or milk delivered. On February 2, 1942, federal troops sealed the drawbridge and commandeered the ferry between Terminal Island and Long Beach. Of the four thousand people who lived on Terminal Island, more than half were Japanese farmers. The heads of all Japanese families were put under presidential arrest. On that same day, Attorney General Earl Warren recommended and received approval for a plan to have all Japanese aliens moved two hundred miles inland for the duration of the war. On February 19, a little over two weeks later, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9066, which authorized the Secretary of War to establish military zones within the United States from which any person might be excluded, subject to military regulation.