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Collective Actions in the Gloaming of the Past: Modern Midwestern Farm Protests and Social Change from the Post-WWII Era Until Now

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Bygone Utopias and Farm Protest in the Rural Midwest

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Abstract

Despite experiencing more economic crises in the post-World War II era, including an eerily similar foreclosure crisis, Midwestern farm communities did not participate in truly utopian actions; protests were standard in contemporary terms. Why? Looking backward provided rural Americans of the 1930s a frame for their discontent and gave them tools for dealing with economic hardship. Protest was not only an economic tool: it also restored an imagined community. When hard times returned to the countryside after World War II, farmers, now fully conditioned to the business ethic of contemporary life, adopted different forms of protest, rejecting communal action in favor of more businesslike, corporate tactics. The earlier epoch was no longer a bygone to be revived: farmers cemented their modern identity through action.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ryan Stockwell, “The Family Farm in the Post World-War II Era: Industrialization, the Cold War and Political Symbol.” PhD dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008: 217–266.

  2. 2.

    Lowell K. Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 206; Jon Lauck, “The National Farmers Organization and Farm Bargaining Power,” Michigan Historical Review 24, no. 2 (1998): 90.

  3. 3.

    Stockwell, “Family Farm”, 291.

  4. 4.

    Wayne D. Jackson, oral history interview by Douglas J. Rasmussen, Creston, IA, April 28, 1974. Tape #2956 transcript on file at the South Dakota Oral History Center, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, 1.

  5. 5.

    Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 91; Brad D. Jackson, oral history interview by Douglas J. Rasmussen, Creston, IA, April 28, 1974. Tape #2955 transcript on file at the South Dakota Oral History Center, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, 2; Wayne Jackson, oral history, 3,9; Don Muhm, The NFO: A Farm Belt Rebel (Rochester, MN, Lone Oak Press, 2000), 21–28.

  6. 6.

    Muhm, NFO, 28–29.

  7. 7.

    Wayne Jackson, oral history, 3.

  8. 8.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 208; Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 92; Muhm, NFO, 25–26.

  9. 9.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 207.

  10. 10.

    Harry Grundman, oral history interview by Douglas J. Rasmussen, Corning, IA, March 6, 1974. Tape #2916 transcript on file at the South Dakota Oral History Center, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, 7.

  11. 11.

    Cited in Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 92.

  12. 12.

    Normal Larson, oral history interview by Douglas J. Rasmussen, Worthington, MN, February 24, 1974. Tape #2911 transcript on file at the South Dakota Oral History Center, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, 4.

  13. 13.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 209–213.

  14. 14.

    Grundman, oral history, 8; Larson, oral history, 4.

  15. 15.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 208–209; Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 92–93.

  16. 16.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 207–209; Wayne Jackson, oral history, 5; Larson, oral history, 22; Muhm, NFO, 37; Stockwell, “Family Farm,” 292.

  17. 17.

    Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 93–95; Muhm, NFO, 219.

  18. 18.

    Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 93–94.

  19. 19.

    James Denney interview with Oren Lee Staley, published in December, 1977, quoted in Muhm, NFO, 224.

  20. 20.

    Muhm, NFO, 51.

  21. 21.

    John T. Schlebecker, “The Great Holding Action: The NFO in September, 1962,” Agricultural History 39, no. 4 (1965), 204.

  22. 22.

    Quoted in Stockwell, “Family Farm,” 294.

  23. 23.

    Orville Tatge, interview by Jo Antonson. Benson, MN. July 31, 1973. Transcript on file at the Southwest Minnesota Regional Research Center, Marshall, MN, 16.

  24. 24.

    Homer Ayres, oral history interview by Earle Hausle, Sturgis, SD, June 28, 1971. Tape #0187 transcript on file at the South Dakota Oral History Center, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, 18–19; Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 93–94, 110–112; Tatge, interview, 27.

  25. 25.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 209; Muhm, NFO, 46.

  26. 26.

    Muhm, NFO, 41–42, 57; Schlebecker, “Great Holding,” 204.

  27. 27.

    Muhm, NFO, 42, 64–66.

  28. 28.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 209; Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 97; Muhm, NFO, 45–47.

  29. 29.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 209; Muhm, NFO, 47.

  30. 30.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 209; Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 97; Muhm, NFO, 47; Schlebecker, “Great Holding,” 204–206; Stockwell, “Family Farm,” 294.

  31. 31.

    Stockwell, “Family Farm,” 277–280, 283–291.

  32. 32.

    “Farm Group Votes to Keep its Products Off Market, Lift Prices,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 29, 1962), quoted in Stockwell, “Family Farm,” 294.

  33. 33.

    Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 98; Muhm, NFO, 61; Schlebecker, “Great Holding,” 298, 210–211; Stockwell, “Family Farm,” 298–299.

  34. 34.

    Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 113–115; Muhm, NFO, 63–65.

  35. 35.

    Ibid.

  36. 36.

    Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 117; Muhm, NFO, 43; Schlebecker, “Great Holding,” 205; Stockwell, “Family Farm,” 296–300.

  37. 37.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 209–210; Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 98; Muhm, NFO, 69; Stockwell, “Family Farm,” 300–301.

  38. 38.

    Muhm, NFO, 75.

  39. 39.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 210–211; Muhm, NFO, 78–85; Orville Tatge, interview, 18–19.

  40. 40.

    Muhm, NFO, 44.

  41. 41.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 211.

  42. 42.

    Muhm, NFO, 90–92.

  43. 43.

    Orville Tatge, interview, 27.

  44. 44.

    Ibid.

  45. 45.

    Muhm, NFO, 92–103.

  46. 46.

    Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 118–119; Muhm, NFO, 113–121.

  47. 47.

    Lauck, “Farm Bargaining,” 101–103.

  48. 48.

    Muhm, NFO, 149–158, 211–213.

  49. 49.

    Anne Kanten, Oral History transcript, Minnesota Farm Advocate Oral History Project, recorded 6 June, 1989 near Hawick, MN, accessed 6 May 2019 at http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10362520, 5–6.

  50. 50.

    Muhm, NFO, 203–204.

  51. 51.

    Barry J. Barnett, “The U.S. Farm Financial Crisis of the 1980s,” Agricultural History 74, no. 2 (2000): 366–380; Neil E. Harl, The Farm Debt Crisis of the 1980s (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1990), 3–17.

  52. 52.

    Gilbert C. Fite, “The 1980s Farm Crisis,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 36, no. 1 (1986): 69–71; Harl, Farm Debt, 3–17.

  53. 53.

    Harl, Farm Debt, 19–40.

  54. 54.

    Barnett, “U.S. Farm,” 376.

  55. 55.

    Harl, Farm Debt, 161–180.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 191–201.

  57. 57.

    Jim Schwab, Raising Less Corn and More Hell: Midwestern Farmers Speak Out (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 59–60, 129–132.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 97.

  59. 59.

    Schwab, Raising, 114.

  60. 60.

    Kenneth Dofner, “Picket Lines, Picket Fences: How Feminism Saved Iowa’s Family Farms During the Farm Crisis of the 1980s,” Iowa Historical Review 4, no. 2 (2014): 50.

  61. 61.

    William C. Pratt, “Using,” History to Make History? Progressive Farm Organizing During the Farm Revolt of the 1980s,” The Annals of Iowa 55, no. 1 (1996): 28.

  62. 62.

    Schwab, Raising, 136–139.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 197–202, 223.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 165–181.

  65. 65.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 177; Patrick Mooney and Theo J. Majka. Farmers and Farm Workers’ Movements: Social Protest in American Agriculture (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 106–114.

  66. 66.

    Mooney and Majka, Farmers’, 110–111.

  67. 67.

    Mark Friedberger, “Women Advocates in the Iowa Farm Crisis of the 1980s,” Agricultural History 67, no. 2 (1993): 224–234.

  68. 68.

    See Harl, Farm Debt, 221–286, for a detailed analysis of the role that the media played in shaping the public’s views of, and politicians’ urgency and actions to alleviate, the Farm Crisis.

  69. 69.

    Mooney and Majka, Farmers’, 111–112.

  70. 70.

    Laura B. DeLind, “For Whose Benefit? A Second Look at Fund Raisers and Other Charitable Responses to the U.S. Farm Crisis,” Agriculture and Human Values, Spring-Summer (1987): 4–10.

  71. 71.

    Mooney and Majka, Farmers’, 111–112.

  72. 72.

    Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 269–271; Mooney and Majka, Farmers’, 112–114.

  73. 73.

    William P. Browne, “Mobilizing and Activating Group Demands: The American Agriculture Movement,” Social Science Quarterly 64, no. 1 (1983): 22–24, 47; William P. Browne and John Dinse, “The Emergence of the American Agriculture Movement, 1977–1979,” Great Plains Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1985): 221–222. This frustration with farmers’ organizations included former members, as illustrated by NAFA member Selmer Odne, who served on the Iowa Farm Bureau state board for 12 years; see Schwab, Raising, 30–33.

  74. 74.

    Browne, “Mobilizing,” 25–26; Browne and Dinse, “Emergence,” 224.

  75. 75.

    Browne, “Mobilizing,” 21, 28; Browne and Dinse, “Emergence,” 222–223.

  76. 76.

    Browne and Dinse, “Emergence,” 222–224.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 225.

  78. 78.

    Browne and Dinse, “Emergence,” 226; Browne, “Mobilizing,” 24, 27.

  79. 79.

    Browne and Dinse, “Emergence,” 226–227; Mooney and Majka, Farmers’, 101–106.

  80. 80.

    Browne and Dinse, “Emergence,” 227; David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 255; Michael S. Foley, “‘Everyone was Pounding on Us’: Front Porch Politics and the American Farm Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s,” Journal of Historical Sociology 28, no. 1 (2015): 113–115; Mooney and Majka, Farmers’, 101–106.

  81. 81.

    Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 60.

  82. 82.

    Danbom, Born in the Country, 255; Dyson, Farmers’ Organizations, 8–14; Mooney and Majka, Farmers’, 101–106.

  83. 83.

    Schwab, Raising, 117–119.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., 18.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., 80.

  86. 86.

    Ibid., 81, 161. See also 108 for a similar comment about forcing out small, rural banks.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., 164.

  88. 88.

    Foley, “Everyone,” 115–117; Pratt, “Using,” 31–32.

  89. 89.

    Allen Wilford, Farm Gate Defense (Toronto, Ontario: New Canada Publications, 1985), 211.

  90. 90.

    Harl, Farm Debt, 20.

  91. 91.

    Robert Wuthnow, Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 49–52.

  92. 92.

    See, for example: Richard S. Kirkendall, “Up to Now: A History of American Agriculture from Jefferson to Revolution to Crisis,” Agriculture and Human Values, Winter (1987): 10–11; Joseph L. Anderson, Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945–1972 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 5.

  93. 93.

    Anderson, Industrializing, 20–21, 26, 28, 30, 38, 42, 50.

  94. 94.

    Ibid., 52–54, 66.

  95. 95.

    Ibid., 108–113.

  96. 96.

    Ibid., 153, 166, 177–178, 188.

  97. 97.

    Ibid., 157–158, 162–164.

  98. 98.

    Danbom, Born in the Country, 235–244; Linda Lobao and Katherine Meyer, “The Great Agricultural Transition: Crisis, Change, and Social Consequences of Twentieth Century US Farming,” Annual Review of Sociology 27, (2001): 107–110.

  99. 99.

    Wuthnow, Remaking, 59–87.

  100. 100.

    Sonya Salamon Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming, and Community in the Midwest (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 92, 97–102; Robert Wuthnow, In the Blood: Understanding America’s Farm Families (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 22–23.

  101. 101.

    Luther Tweeten, Terrorism, Radicalism, and Populism in Agriculture (Ames, IA: Iowa State Press, 2003), 111–125.

  102. 102.

    Lobao and Meyer, “Great Agricultural,” 109; Wuthnow, In the Blood, 33–36, 114, 176.

  103. 103.

    Charles Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 112, 118–132, 157–158.

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    Daniel Jaster

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Jaster, D. (2021). Collective Actions in the Gloaming of the Past: Modern Midwestern Farm Protests and Social Change from the Post-WWII Era Until Now. In: Bygone Utopias and Farm Protest in the Rural Midwest. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71013-2_6

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