Dakota: The Story of the Northern Plains

10. Paths to the Present

chapter ten Paths to the Present A modern observer, distant by eight decades from the Great Depression and armed only with statistics, might well conclude that the farmers of the northern plains barely felt the impact of the stock market crash of 1929 or the ensuing failures of eastern banks and businesses . Dakota farmers, after all, had been suffering economic depression since the early 1920s, when European agriculture had recovered from the war and world commodity prices plummeted. Wartime demand had induced farmers to mechanize their operations, for which they particularly needed to purchase gasoline-powered tractors, and when the price of wheat collapsed in 1922, they found it virtually impossible to repay their debts. Many lost their farms and found themselves paying rent for land they had once owned to a bank or mortgage company. In 1920 one in every four North Dakota farmers was a tenant, many of them sons renting from their fathers; a decade later the figure was one in three, now mostly fathers renting from banks. 222 paths to the present In South Dakota the value of farm real estate fell by more than half from 1920 to 1930. Despite these devastating statistics the modern observer would be mistaken in assuming that times were already so bad in 1929 that the business crash must have been scarcely noticed on the Great Plains. Things could get worse. And they did. Farm commodity prices continued to fall in the early 1930s, and farmers suffered additional stress from drought and grasshopper plagues. Some were so hard hit they could barely feed their families and had no surplus to sell, except perhaps a few eggs from the family henhouse. In South Dakota land prices fell by half again between 1930 and 1935. In the latter year, when the federal government at last undertook a massive program for relief of the unemployed , it found that 40 percent of the population of South Dakota qualified for relief—the largest percentage of any state. In second place was North Dakota. The New Deal Just as their fathers and grandfathers had flirted with Populism in the desperate times of the 1890s, Dakota voters turned to Franklin Roosevelt over Herbert Hoover in the presidential election of 1932. In South Dakota Democrats even swept the state offices, including a governor for the first time in twenty years. North Dakota voters adhered to their tradition of returning Republicans to the state offices, but they did elect as governor William Langer, former leader of the radical Nonpartisan League who, though a nominal Republican , would generally support Roosevelt and the New Deal. In reality it made little difference which party controlled the state governments because both states were too financially distressed (due to the collapse in land values) to take any positive steps toward relieving the Depression. In North paths to the present 223 Dakota Governor Langer did manage to declare a moratorium that forbade foreclosures on real property being farmed by the owner, and the legislature held the moratorium in effect until 1943. The main effect of the moratorium, however , was to take banks out of the farm mortgage business and send farmers to federal mortgage agencies created by the New Deal. Although Roosevelt had made only the vaguest of promises to farmers during the election campaign, the New Deal made agriculture a priority in the avalanche of legislation passed by Congress during the famous “hundred days” (a special session of Congress that met from April to June 1933). In May Congress attempted to meet the basic necessities of both townspeople and farmers by establishing the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (fera). To receive help a destitute family had to apply at the local relief office. If the office could find work, it provided a job for those able to work. When work was unavailable, the agency gave out cash or food commodities. If an investigator decided that a family’s weekly needs amounted to $10 and it had only $6.70 in income, he granted it $3.30 in relief. Though driven by humanitarian ideals, the program’s drawback was its similarity to the European “dole,” and reliance on such charity humiliated the proud prairie people, whose tradition of self-reliance had been honed by decades of intermittent drought and depression. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (aaa), also passed in May 1933, sought to raise farm prices by curtailing production . Farmers...