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4 Farmers and the Great War After the United States formally declared war in April 1917, Michigan ’s rural population eagerly joined the war effort. Many small towns sponsored Liberty Loan Drives and abandoned German-language classes in their schools.1 The Gleaner, the most popular farm organization in the state, supported the war by selling “Gleaner Patriotic Bonds” and sending bronze medals to its “boys” on the home front. Gleaner girls dressed in red, white, and blue performed military drills to express support for relatives and friends abroad.2 Even businesses joined in the mobilization effort, with the German-American Sugar Company changing its name to the Columbia Sugar Company to show that it, too, supported the U.S. war effort. World War I seemed to usher in an era of unparalleled community cohesion and cooperation—anything to win the war. Despite these numerous examples of cooperation and conformity, the story of rural Michigan during World War I was also one rife with conflict. Over the course of the war and the immediate postwar years, sugar beet farmers and industrialists engaged in a series of battles that easily dwarfed those of the earlier part of the century. In 1917 and 1918, farmers demanded higher prices and warned the companies that unless they cooperated they would simply grow other crops, leaving the companies with multimillion-dollar factories and no raw product to process. In 1920 and 1921, farmers mobilized again, this time to force the sugar companies to share in the postwar price boom, or the “dance of millions” as it was known in Cuba, as the price of sugar reached historic highs.3 Clearly, the sugar beet farmers, who had suf- fered a decade of defeats, saw the wartime as an opportune moment to force the sugar companies back to the bargaining table. Although these conflicts might at first appear to be a mere repeat of earlier battles, the wartime context had changed everything. Wartime inflation, which translated into rising prices for all agricultural goods, provided farmers with the kind of leverage they had not possessed since the earliest days of this industry. Just as important, the state, which up to this point had acted mostly as a booster, now began to intervene in farmer/factory disputes to make sure that the nation’s sugar bowls would not go empty. Wrapping their intervention in the rhetoric of wartime nationalism, state officials, ranging from members of Michigan’s state legislature and the governor of Michigan to the head of the U.S. Food Administration, pleaded with both farmers and industrialists to put their own private interests to the side and support the larger public good by producing as much sugar as possible. Rather than placate the farmers, the state’s intervention spurred them to make even greater demands, for sugar beet farmers responded to the government ’s call to increase production with their own demands for “union” recognition and government intervention in the rural economy on “their side.” Borrowing from the labor movement’s arsenal of rhetoric, some even started to call for a form of “industrial democracy” for the countryside, arguing that the state had a responsibility to make sure that the agricultural side of the economy, and the farmers who made it possible, would not be ignored. To justify their militancy during wartime, farmers usurped the patriotic rhetoric of the era, claiming that they were the true “soldiers of the soil” while the sugar manufacturers were “sugar czars,” “sugar autocrats,” “sugar kings,” and “sugar kaisers.” Likening themselves to soldiers fighting for democracy abroad, farmers insisted that the state had a responsibility to make sure that the market functioned as democratically as possible at home.4 This quest to democratize the economy took place locally, in the fields and at the factories, as well as nationally, as farm groups across the country grappled with the meaning of the war and the reconstruction that they hoped would follow the cessation of hostilities abroad. Although historians have long pointed to the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century as the last great example of “agrarian democracy,” progressive and radical farm organizations during the war saw this time as an opportune one to remake modern industrial America. Because so much was at stake, and because no one farm organization could legitimately claim to represent farmers nationwide, a number of competing farm organizations vied to farmers and the great war · 97 [3.15.202.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 02:52 GMT...

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