Bones of Plenty

Author's Note

Author's Note IN 1933 this nation was closer to political collapse than it has ever been since the Civil War. In these present days of affluence it is hard to believe that so many of us could have been so poor less than a generation ago. The war-tainted prosperity that began in 1941 makes the preceding dozen years seem shorter and farther away than they really are. This abnormally elongated perspective with which I must deal has led me to employ some verbatim reminders. The more outrageous the scene, the more closely it may follow an unimpeachable source. For instance, most of the words of County Agent Finnegan are verbatim statements from contemporary publications of the United States Department of Agriculture . I have moved the dates of several actual but minor events by as much as three months, but there are no other conscious deviations from historical truth in the book. If I say that the price of spring wheat went from two dollars and seventy-six cents in 1920 to twenty-six cents in 1932, that is exactly what it did. If I say that in 1925 a farmer got thirty cents a dozen for eggs and in 1933 he got thirteen, these are exactly the prices he and millions of other farmers were paid. Seven thousand American banks, most of them rural, failed between 1920 and 1930 - before the final three years of panic liquidated another seven thousand. In 1933 alone, three hundred and fifty thousand farmers lost their farms. The Great Depression began for farmers in 1921, almost a full decade before it began for the rest of the nation. And for the lower half of the farm families in the United States today, who produce only ten per cent of the nation's agricultural wealth, the Great Depression has never ended. l¥ 437 Nor have the other fann problems I try to deal with in this book. On the contrary, almost all of those problems have become worse, and new problems have been added to the old ones. The price supports instituted by Herbert Hoover in 1929 helped to create, one year later, a surplus that horrified his administration. Yet today our wheat surplus makes that surplus of 1930 seem small indeed. Wheat acreage has been cut by a third since those days, but the surplus has swollen until the storage costs for it run to well over a million and a half dollars a day. Now as then the wheat nobody can buy is our most troublesome surplus. And now even more than in 1933 technological advances create surpluses at the same time that they put fanners out of work. The accuracy I have insisted upon is the minimum of respect I would pay to the people I write about. It is hard for us now to believe that these things ever happened; even while they were being annihilated, the fanners themselves could not believe what was happening. They kept on believing that things would be better soon. There was a time within their own memories when "one good year in seven" would see them through. For three times seven years they waited for that one good year with the nearly indestructible faith of the most dedicated gamblers. If a tenant fanner included in the value of his wheat the most menial wages for the work of himself and his family, it cost him a dollar and eighteen cents to produce a bushel of wheat in 1933. But he was lucky to sell that wheat for eighty-five cents in the fall of 1933. A man who owned his fann could pay himself these wages and just break even. But for the tenant, the deficit ate into the sinking fund of his strength and faith more deeply every year. And every year more owners became tenants again, after struggling half a lifetime to become owners. When a fanner finally discovered that he was living on faith and nothing else, then faith could sustain him no longer. Too proud to admit fear even to himself, a fanner ran ahead of disaster till he lost the race, and then he went down to defeat in silence and isolation. Each fanner believed that the combination of wars, booms, famines, ,~rops, weather, prices, and six million other fanners would operate like a vast game - a game too complex to outguess, but too reasonable to cut him out on every single play. But it happened that the 438...