The Great Plains during World War II

6. The Farm and Ranch Front

By 1939 farmers in the Great Plains began to emerge from the Great Depression and the drought-stricken and dust-laden years of the 1930s. New Deal agricultural programs, particularly those of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (aaa) and the Commodity Credit Corporation, provided much-needed income for farmers who participated in acreage-reduction and price-support programs. Nearly normal precipitation had returned to the southern Great Plains. Wheat and cotton surpluses, however, exceeded foreign and domestic demand, and farmers continued to complain about low prices. Indeed, government officials believed that the most serious agricultural problem involved finding ways to increase farm prices and, thereby, income. Unless the demand for agricultural products dramatically increased, many Great Plains farmers confronted chronic poverty, flight from the land, and dependence on government payments, that is, subsidies, for their livelihood.1 As Great Plains farmers listened to the radio and read the newspaper reports of impending war, they were of two minds. Nearly all farmers wanted the United States to stay out of any new European war. They dreaded the loss of life, particularly their sons who joined the military, and they remembered the reports of the Nye Committee, which attributed the First World War to greed. Equally important, they remembered the federal government urging farmers to increase production and the collapse of the agricultural economy when the war ended. Farm men and women had no desire to live through another collapse, but many also saw the war, and the assix | The Farm and Ranch Front the farm and ranch front 148 sociated increase in demand, as a needed opportunity to decrease agricultural surpluses and increase farm prices. If the United States could stay out of the conflict, the war could work to the advantage of farmers in the Great Plains.2 As early as January 1939, however, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace believed that the production-control and price-support program of the aaa was too expensive for taxpayers and too restrictive for farmers, and he advocated a new processing tax on cotton and wheat to finance parity-income payments and the soil conservation program. Defense spending and politics, however, prevented Wallace from pursuing this goal before Germany invaded Poland. As a result the New Deal agricultural programs remained in effect, although Republicans increasingly supported an agricultural policy that would fix prices at home and dump surplus at world market prices, which essentially meant a recycling of the McNary-Haugen plan of the 1920s. Observers believed that Congress would soon appoint a committee to give further study to the agricultural problem . No matter the solution to the farm problems of overproduction and low prices, one agricultural editor in Oklahoma spoke for most Great Plains farm men and women when he wrote, “Our destiny is at home, here in the Americas.” If war came, the United States should stay out of it, and Congress should keep the president from bringing the nation into it.3 During summer 1939 farmers and government agricultural officials went about their business as usual. The Farm Security Administration , for example, received applications from tenant farmers, sharecroppers , and farm laborers who sought loans to enable them to purchase their own farms over forty years at 3 percent interest. County aaa officials made loan and insurance plans for the 1940 crop year. The Prairie States Forestry Project continued tree planting to help prevent wind erosion in designated areas, and the Rural Electrification Administration labored to string power lines and revolutionize farm life. When the European war began, however, farmers, government agricultural officials, and farm editors quickly turned their thoughts to matters of production because Britain and France would surely need American commodities. Although most farmers favored peace the farm and ranch front 149 and American neutrality, many also believed the war would increase farm prices. Surpluses would disappear as foreign demand increased to cover production losses where armies fought in once-bountiful fields. As a result wartime production would end the need for aaa acreage reductions, and commodity prices would rise with demand. One Kansas optimist ventured, “A lot of joy and profit may be the lot of the farmer.” Isolationists, however, worried that any war boom for agriculture would be followed by “inevitable depression” similar to the collapse of farm prices after World War I. They also argued that British and French markets would be limited because of a lessened ability...