Children of the Crisis: Farm Youth in Troubled Times

The farm crisis of the 1980s was one of the defining American moments of the late twentieth century. The Midwest’s farmers, long revered as the protectors of America’s agrarian heritage, saw economic reversals of a magnitude unseen since the Great Depression. Many had expanded their operations in the 1970s on the basis of rising land prices, only to see the value of their farms plummet in the early days of the 1980s. Farm income fell significantly, while the number of farm foreclosures skyrocketed. Families began to show signs of stress, as rates of spousal abuse, clinical depression, and suicide rose.¹ In the face of palpable distress, government agencies and volunteer groups rushed support activities into place. Although it was largely a midwestern event, the farm crisis pervaded the national consciousness, with stories in the New York Times, songs on the radio, and movies in the theaters. The stars of those movies testified to Congress about the passing of a way of life and the pain of the heartland’s farmers. This economic and social crisis captured the interest of the public like no other in the late twentieth century. It also transformed the rural Midwest, dramatically reducing the numbers of farmers and gutting many a small town. The Midwest that entered the crisis was not the one that emerged a decade later.

The story, as we know it, is largely a journalistic one, told about the adults who lost—or nearly lost—their farms. The farmers hardest hit by the crisis tended to be young and heavily indebted, with children still at home.² History tells us little, however, about what this experience meant to those youngest farm residents. Some parents shielded their children from the reality of hard times, while others were less able to do so, but undoubtedly it was an emotionally difficult time for children, with lost income, lost farms, and parental distress distorting families’ lives. Surely those experiences affected their choices in the years that followed. Other adults, such as teachers and 4-h leaders, adopted new strategies in dealing with their young charges, some of whom were living in households facing acute economic distress. Unlike the problems of the 1930s, the troubles of the farm crisis were far less evenly distributed among the Midwest’s families. The experience of the decade required young people to think long and hard about their lives and prospects, especially since this was a disaster that hit them far harder than their urban counterparts. Being the object of so much interest—and so much pity—must have added insult to injury.³ While it may not be possible to validate all of these suppositions with the evidence currently available, it is possible to begin the discussion and to suggest why the farm crisis presented a particularly difficult set of circumstances for the Midwest’s rural and farm children. In doing so, it is useful to compare the experience of the 1980s with that of the 1930s, in order to explain what may have been similar, and different, about the farm crisis. We know that the experience of the 1930s left an “invisible scar” on those who suffered its effects; the farm crisis, too, left a scar on its children.⁴

The farm crisis was not the first challenge that the twentieth century presented to midwestern farming families. The list of previous problems, in fact, was quite long. Farm incomes plummeted in the 1920s, and the situation went from bad to worse in the 1930s. There had been ups and downs in various communities throughout the century, often heralded by natural disasters such as droughts, grasshopper plagues, and animal diseases like hog cholera. In each of these cases, it was fairly easy to identify the problem that led to the crisis. In the 1920s, farmers suffered from the overexpansion of World War I. During the Great Depression, the nation as a whole experienced economic collapse, and farmers were not the only Americans to suffer serious losses. Farm families in the 1930s could read the papers or listen to the radio and know...