BackStory; Green Acres: A History of Farming in America

This is backstory. I'm Peter Onof. It's harvest season for American farmers and grocery stores are filled with freshly picked apples and beets, potatoes and pumpkins. Now farmers have always been a big part of the American identity. But in the early 20th century, farmers became something else. A powerful political lobby. What happened in the 1920s is the representation of farmers as an interest group came to Washington. Today on backstory, we'll explore the political cloud of farmers and their special place in the American psyche. We'll ask why the image of the family farmer has been so enduring. We'll also hear how an Iowa farmer got the attention of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and his entourage at the height of the Cold War. I'll drive up in my car and I'll open a passenger door. Roswell basically kidnapped him from underneath the nose of Iowa State. The history of American farmers today on backstory. Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot and I'm here with Peter Ones. Hey, Brian. And Ed Ayers is with us. Hello, Brian. In the middle of the 19th century, big railroad companies in the US faced a bit of a problem. Congress had recently granted the millions of acres of public lands in the newly acquired Western Territories. But all that land didn't amount to much for the railroads without products to carry on their trains. They needed people. They needed towns. They needed goods to transport and farmers to grow those products. They realized that they were going to have to import a brand new population. And so in the 1870s, they turned to Europeans, ideal candidates for relocation. European farmers and peasants were struggling at that very time under various forms of persecution, famine and crushing rents.

And you're moving from that to somewhere where there suddenly is real hope and purposefulness. This is Andy P. Asetski. As student of public relations, he argues that the campaign to attract European settlers to America was one of the earliest examples of the kind of sophisticated corporate marketing efforts that we'd recognize today. Railroad companies established offices and vast networks of travel agents across Europe. They conducted a sort of market research to find out which groups would be the most likely to make the move. And P. Asetski says, the entire campaign was rooted in one basic message. If you move out for the West, you become free and independent. Across the European continent, railroad men visited agricultural fairs to distribute maps and pamphlets. Hired men masquerading as professors touted the idea that America was a farmer's paradise. Some of these so-called professors said a farmer could grow crops nine months out of a year in America,

or that Nebraska only had one month of winter. One even claimed that the speed of the railroads produced a magnetic effect that increased rainfall. Nobody told them about the harshness of the climate. Nobody told them about the tornadoes. Nobody told them about the brutally tough winters. Nobody told them that in some parts of the prairie the grass is so high that your children could actually get lost in the grass. Now, it's not that the railroad companies were promising a walk in the park in the American West. In fact, some of them actually appealed to the Protestant work ethic of the Northern Europeans. And Piersetski found a great example of this in a publication that came from the Santa Fe railroad. If hard work doesn't agree with you or you can't get on without luxuries, stay where you are. If you are susceptible to homesickness, if you do not have pluck and perseverance, stay where you are. Wealth here is one only by work.

In other words, it wasn't going to be easy. But, you know, behind that, the message from the railroad companies is that we're there to help you. We're there to help you in every way if you're made of the right stuff. In the end, the PR campaigns were a stunning success. During the 1870s and 1880s, nearly four and a half million immigrants came to the Midwest. New settlers established almost two million farms. As for what they found when they got here, that whole independence thing, well, for many, it didn't pan out. The farmers found that they were dependent on the very companies that had promised them independence in the first place. A lot of the farmers had taken loans from railroad companies to acquire their land. And those same companies were controlling the costs of moving produce to markets. No matter how hard a farmer worked, he couldn't seem to ever catch up with the debt that he was saddled with. Many people ended up mortgaging their houses to the railroads.

About 25% of all those people who were settled out in the West became tenant farmers by 1880. 25%, one quarter, you know, the irony is that what you're trying to escape from is what you end up going back to. For the rest of the hour today, we're focusing on that idyllic image that railroad companies capitalized on in the 19th century. The image of the independent, self-sufficient, yeoman farmer. And we're considering the ways subsequent generations have continued to capitalize on it. Take the most recent version of the Farm Bill, which President Obama signed into law last year. The legislation, which enjoyed rare bipartisan support, awarded more than $7 billion in crop insurance to farmers over 10 years. That got us wondering how farmers managed to get federal subsidies in the first place. The most basic answer is that they started with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Created in the midst of the Great Depression, farmers had been lobbying for political reform since the populist movement in the 1890s.

That third party insurgency was defeated by voters in 1896. Two and a half decades later, when conditions for farmers were desperate, they came up with a new strategy. What happened in the 1920s is the representation of farmers as an interest group came to Washington. This is Adam Shungate, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins University. Adam says that the powerful farm lobby we know today has its origins in the American Farm Bureau of Federation. So the Farm Bureau begins in 1919, and it's really an outgrowth of the efforts by the federal government itself to promote the development of agriculture and increases in productivity by sending out folks called county agents through something called the Extension Service. The county agents really became an important force by helping organize farmers into county farm bureaus. And then those farm bureaus came together into state farm bureaus.

And in 1919, a federation of states made the American Farm Bureau a federation. And they decided that they should employ a guy named Gray Silver to... Oh, you're making that name up. To go to Washington and to represent their interest. And in fact, there were other groups like the Grange that also employed Washington representatives at that time. And I think it's a recognition by farmers given their history of efforts to shape policy through electoral politics and the failures of those strategies in the late 19th century to take their case to Washington not as a partisan force, and economic or occupational interest that would potentially cross party lines and speak directly to members of Congress senators who represented farmers who came from the rural parts of the United States and speak more directly to their constituency interests rather than their partisan identities. Adam, something is in adding up here.

I mean, you've convinced me that this is an innovative lobby that comes to Washington, but unless I missed something, there wasn't any major farm legislation passed in the 1920s. Well, they tried. They were successful in getting Congress to pass legislation that would have required the government to step in and purchase commodities to lift prices. But that bill, which was called the McNairy Hogan Act, named after its sponsors, was vetoed by President Calvin Coolidge twice, in fact. So in other words, the farmers were successful in capturing Congress. They just forgot one important office. That's right. That's right. And they couldn't get the bill signed. And then by the end of the 1920s, the Farm Bureau sees a massive decline in their membership in the latter part of the 1920s. Is that because people can't afford to pay the dues? That's right. They can't afford to pay the dues. They're maybe leaving farming. You think about the dust bowl in the 30s. And so the leadership of the Farm Bureau at the time is thinking about two problems.

Really, one is the problem of how to help agriculture. The other is the problem of how to maintain and build an organization of farmers. And with the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, they come upon a solution to both. One is a government policy, which will control production and lift prices, but also will be administered through those same county agents and, in fact, through the Farm Bureau's in those localities. So that joining the Farm Bureau becomes closely linked to receiving a government check. And, in fact, there's an incentive for children. That's right. And through the 1930s, their membership takes off and they become the largest farm organization in the country. Were there other factors in the 30s that made farmers particularly effective? I'm going to throw out one possibility when everyone is hurting, when everybody of a sudden is feeling pain, perhaps it's a little easier to get the same proposals through. Was that a factor?

I mean, I think that we have to remember that farming was a much larger part of the economy than it is today. So in terms of economic recovery, it would make sense that farming and agriculture would have to be a big part of the puzzle or a big part of the solution to the depression. So we're not doing something special for the farmers. This is what we need to get the economy moving again. Well, I would say it was part of the larger fabric of weaving a welfare state in the 1930s, that we just happen to have a sector-specific form of a welfare state. But of course, there were plenty of groups that were not successful. What made farmers particularly effective in the 1930s? Well, I think we have to remember geographic representation. We have a lot of members of Congress, members of the Senate who represent rural areas. And for those members of Congress and Senators, the Farm Lobby becomes a very important and reliable source of information about what's happening back home in their districts. And that's, I think, an important basis for the influence of the Farm vote, creating that link between an interest group and elected representatives.

And perhaps it's easier to do that with agriculture because for those rural areas, that's very clearly the most important concern that most people have. Perhaps in other parts of the country there's a number of issues. There's business. There's labor. There's maybe ethnic issues, immigration. Perhaps there's more of a single issue focus at the time in these rural areas that allows that linkage to become stronger. So is this the 20th century variant of farmers being good citizens? What they're adding now to the traditional notion of that independent, uncorruptible farmer is a source of information for DC? They're kind of the first public opinion polls in many ways. I guess so. Yeah, I mean, that they figure out a way to communicate. But I think your question is also getting at this interesting aspect of farming that on the one hand is about the individual yeoman, but is also about claiming a certain exceptionalism for farming. That it's different from other occupations. It's subject to different challenges, let's say of the weather or other factors beyond farmers control, that it performs an important function in the large economy.

We all have to eat that farmers obviously are part of this fabric of democracy going back to Jefferson. And all of those political, economic, cultural claims, I think, combine to make the claims of farmers particularly forceful in American politics. Adam Shinegate is a political science professor at the Johns Hopkins University. He's the author of The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State, Institutions and Interest Group Power in the United States, France, and Japan. It's time for a short break that don't go away. When we get back, we meet some unblockly advocates for Philippine liberation, Michigan beat farmers. We are listening to backstory, and we'll be back in a minute. This is backstory. I'm Peter Onof.

I'm Ed Ayers, and I'm Brian Ballot. We're talking today about the mythology surrounding American farming throughout our history and the impact of that mythology on our politics and economy. In the first part of the show, we looked at how the farm lobby took shape in the early decades of the 20th century. We're going to turn now to one specific instance of how some farmers managed to influence U.S. foreign policy. The story concerns sugar, and it begins with a sugar beet. Now, unlike sugar cane, beet's flourish in chili places. And in the late 1890s, sugar beet farming took off across the American Midwest, and a lot of Midwesterners saw this as the future of their agriculture. There was just one problem. In 1898, the U.S. won the Spanish American War. It had suddenly acquired an overseas empire, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. American beat growers worried that cheap sugar from the new colonies would swamp the U.S. market, just as their own industry was getting off the ground. These farmers made their case to lawmakers, and they won some victories. But by the 1920s, things weren't looking good.

Sugar prices were falling, and by 1929, had bottomed out, just in time for the Great Depression. It was, of course, a major crisis. But at the same time, the beleaguered beet farmers saw a door opening. And the door opening was a door opening to say, we are going to stop Philippine sugar from coming into the United States. This is Kathleen Meep's, a historian at SUNY Geneseo. They point to the fact that factories are closing down in the United States, and this industry simply can't survive with all of this sugar coming from Cuba and sugar coming from the Philippines. What the beet farmers wanted was high tariffs on Cuban and Philippine sugar. That would bump up the cost of imported sugar on the U.S. market, making it easier for domestic sugar beet farmers to compete. It was something they'd been clamoring for since 1898, and with the Depression highlighting the need for government help, they thought they might finally get what they wanted. So when Congress convened hearings to consider raising tariffs, beet farmers and factory owners lined up to testify.

And they weren't shy about using very racialized language to describe U.S. grown sugar bee as basically the sugar of civilized nations. This was the sugar of the future, versus cane sugar, which they thought is really the sugar of the past. They talked about coolly laborers who lived in misery, overworked and underpaid. It was little wonder they said that sugar could be produced so cheaply overseas, and wasn't it unfair to allow hard working American farmers to be run out of business about what were essentially slave plantations in the tropics? But there was one obvious problem with framing the tariff debate as a showdown between American farmers and foreign workers. By 1929, American beet farmers depended on foreign workers. The U.S. had started a guest worker program during World War I, and by the 20s, much of the beet farm's labor force was Mexican. Skeptical congressmen pointed out the hypocrisy of demanding protection from foreign labor and Cuba, while we're lying on it in Michigan.

The beet farmer's foreign labor argument ran into another problem too. A lot of their testimony had focused on Philippine sugar, which is more of a threat at the time than Cuban sugar. But the Philippines, unlike Cuba, was not a foreign country. It was legally part of the United States. To a lot of American politicians, it didn't make sense to put a tariff on one part of the U.S. to protect another part of the U.S. Congress responds by basically saying there is no way that we are going to impose a tariff on the Philippines as long as the Philippines remain part of the United States. So the sugar beet industry says, great, then the Philippines should no longer be a part of the United States. They become advocates for liberation. They do. They become perhaps the strongest advocates. Within a few years, those farmers in Michigan had won the day. In the early 1930s, Congress passed measures providing for Philippine independence in 10 years time. That legislation included serious restrictions on the amount of Philippine sugar that would be allowed into the U.S. duty free.

Americans who'd followed the debate had no trouble connecting those restrictions to the sugar beet industry's political muscle. The Washington Post carried an editorial hurled in the act as quote, fake independence, charging that quote. Instead of proceeding from a wholehearted desire to give them liberty, it arises from a desire to restrict Philippine immigration and products, particularly sugar. The hand is the hand of Uncle Sam, but the voice is sugar. Many Filipinos were just as critical. If the Philippines were independent, it would lose its privileged trade status with the U.S. Trade would shrivel, and that would be disastrous. After all, in the 1930s, 90% of Philippine products were exported to the U.S., most of that sugar. Independence on these terms was too much of a gamble. So in 1933, the Philippine legislature actually rejected the American offer of independence. Fighting American agricultural interest, however, was a battle that Filipino leaders could not win.

A year later, their legislature approved independence, hoping to negotiate better trade terms down the road. Back in the U.S., beat farmers celebrated. They'd finally won their decades-long battle against that barbaric Philippine sugar. And while the Filipinos had won independence, many of them saw it as a peric victory, as one leading Manila newspaper warned, one more such victory, and we are undone. Helping us tell that story was Kathleen Mapes, a historian at SUNY Geneseo. Her book is sweet tyranny, Margaret labor, industrial agriculture, and imperial politics. As we just heard, U.S. farming and international politics can get easily entangled, and the Cold War wasn't an exception. In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev came to America. Now, this was surprising to many Americans at the time.

Just a few years before, Khrushchev had said the Soviet Union would bury the West, but sure he was shaking hands with Americans all over the country. He had specifically requested meetings with two men, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and a farmer in Iowa. Nikita Khrushchev's American tour swings into the world's best corn country. On the Koon Rapids Iowa farm of Roswell Garst, Mr. K has one of the most jovial and folksy days of his visit. The next story producer, Andrew Parsons, has the story of how this once feared communist leader ended up in corn country. Liz Garst was eight years old when Khrushchev came to her grandfather, Roswell's farm. She says they were oddly compatible. I did have the impression he was like my grandfather. He was sort of loud, had a big belly, a big belly laugh, and just a little bit scary. She says Khrushchev's high profile made the day a bit of a circus. The news media swarmed the two men, and then there was the security. Her grandmother couldn't even make a simple meal for the Soviet leader without officials budding in.

As one of the security procedures, they had two food tasters, one American and one Soviet food taster. It tasted each dish an hour before lunch to make sure it wasn't poisoned. The whole hour before lunch, we did not let them out of our sight. Just praying they would die of food poisoning. As an eight-year-old, that was just beyond exciting. Khrushchev was on his way to Camp David to discuss pressing matters, like this big arms race that was threatening World War III. So, why was it so important for him to stop in this American farm? In a word, corn. Ever since he rose to power six years earlier, Khrushchev had been crazy about corn. While the arms race was important, so was feeding a massive population with a long history of famine. The goal of my father was to improve life of the Soviet people. This is Khrushchev's son, Sergei. His father knew that in America, corn mostly fed lucrative meat and dairy industries.

So, his first priority was to increase food production and most important meat and dairy product. So, the agriculture was one of his main priorities at that time. In 1955, Khrushchev set a goal to create what he said would be an Iowa-style corn belt in the Soviet Union. Four years before that famous televised visit, he even sent a delegation to Iowa to take some notes on how it was done. Liz Gars says that's where her grandfather first appears. The delegation was hosted by Iowa State University, and Roswell always thought that he was way ahead on technology compared to Iowa State University. By technology, she means hybrid corn seed, which yielded huge harvests. The problem was that the state government hadn't scheduled the Soviets to go anywhere near Gars's farm, but Gars had other plans. He intercepted the head of the delegation and invited him to tour his land the next day.

Roswell said, so tonight keep your mouth shut. Tomorrow morning, you load your delegation up in Iowa State's cars to go on their plan toward to Newton. And at the last minute, just refuse to get in their car. And I'll drive up in my car and I'll open up the passenger door and you just get in my car. So, that's how it happened. Roswell basically kidnapped him from underneath the nose of Iowa State. The Soviets returned home with a 400 page report on Iowa corn, and Gars use of hybrid seeds and nitrogen rich fertilizer stood out. He soon found himself sitting with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, drawing up contracts to sell his seeds. It was in this meeting in 1955, where the two men struck up their unlikely friendship. Their surface level motives were clear. Gars got big contracts from the Soviet government, and Khrushchev got technology that could help his massive collective farms.

But Sergey Khrushchev says there was something else. The Soviet premier came from humble roots, and he really liked the image of a self-made American farmer. And I remember Gars, he was a strong man, big, and a real American farmer, as I understood at that time, hard-working person. And my father was also a hard worker, and not only in the politics, but when he was a metal worker on the factory, of course, it increased the simplicity to each other. Two hard workers better understand each other. But selling American farming to the Reds wasn't all smooth sailing. At first, the State Department was skeptical about Gars adventures in the East, and only reluctantly gave him the license to sell. And the Soviet corn belt? That didn't exactly pan out either. Lysgar said corn was planted everywhere, including where it couldn't be sustained, like Siberia.

A common joke of this era in the Soviet Union is someone says to Mrs. Khrushchev. Mrs. Khrushchev, your husband's planning corn every place but on the moon. And Mrs. Khrushchev says, don't give him the idea. And technology wasn't always applied consistently, even on fertile soil. The Soviet leader later claimed this wasn't his fault. He said in a rush to please him, the Soviets just planted hybrids too quickly in too many places. Though yields improved overall, the program wasn't nearly as successful as it should have been. Khrushchev later wrote in his memoirs, corn was discredited, and so was I. Gars' short-lived attempt at American farm diplomacy was a big deal in the early 50s. At the time, few Americans traveled to the Soviet Union, but by 1960 both governments had embraced the idea of cultural exchange. Khrushchev even said in 1959 that this corn diplomacy helped pave the way for his dealings with Eisenhower.

His son Sergei says Gars' impact was more than just agricultural. He became not only the farmer who sold his product, but through this he became the politicians who just put one of the first cracks on the Iron War. And it was helping to move from the Cold War in Amarice to the normal competition between two economists. Khrushchev had used the image of Gars and of Iowa in general in state television, Soviet newspapers, and pamphlets, and had formed a lasting impression. By the 1980s, the Iron Curtain had opened wider, and the first privately owned family farm in the Soviet Union was established. It's named Iowa. Andrew Parsons is one of our producers. That was a very interesting piece, but I must protest on behalf of earlier periods.

This is an old story, as long as America had been around, even before it was actually around. People imagined it as the beacon of productivity from the land. People would come here and tour the showcase orchards of the North or the big plantations of the South. When we had big world fairs in the 1870s and in the 1890s, what did we show? We showed the great agricultural bounty. Thomas Payne said in 1776 in common sense, as long as eating is the custom in Europe, they're going to want what we have. They're going to recognize this, and we're going to gain our independence. Because we produce a lot of food. Exactly. And yet, throughout all of this display, whether from big showy farms or fairs, one image endures, which is that of the individual farmer, the self-sufficient farmer. Well, I wouldn't dispute that the 19th century was all about selling the image of the self-sufficient American farmer. And I wouldn't dispute the success of that.

But I do think what's distinctive in the 20th century is this notion of the American system. We apply the term to manufacturing. But I think in the 20th century, we also apply the term to farming. What was in that system? Well, it started with the agricultural universities, the state universities. And tractors, mechanization was a crucial part of that. Hybrid corn, and after World War II, fertilizer, things like DDT. Put them all together, and what America was selling to the world was a system of agriculture. Not the self-sufficient farmer or the show farm that produced show fruit. Well, Brian, what you're describing to me is what you might call the agricultural and industrial complex. You can't extricate one element from all the others from technology, transportation, chemistry, and it all requires tremendous private and public investment.

And I do think that makes it different than the system that Ed and I would describe in the 19th century, which is the way international grain markets and cotton markets operate. It's not that they lack sophistication. It's not that there isn't amulation. There isn't development of more advanced kinds of agriculture. But this is a big change. And it's important because the Soviet world, the evil empire, they have offered the world a new system, another system, collectivism. And so, a lot's at stake in these conflicting images. It's system against system, but this is a system that has the enterprising human face of the farmer. Yeah. And it was competing for the hearts and minds of those hundreds of millions of people in the third world in Latin America, in Africa. They were watching these two systems very carefully. They wanted to know which way do we go?

And the United States gave these countries subsidized food. We sold our surplus crops very cheaply. But more importantly, we sold them and sometimes gave them hybrid seeds. We gave them technology so that they could produce their own system in the likeness of the United States. Well, so what do we make of farmer garst, the guy in the piece? He seemed to me like an independent farmer. What do we make of that? Well, Ed, he's kind of hybrid. I think that's the way to think about him. He's both that old idea of the farmer, but he's also standing on the shoulders of that agricultural industrial complex you talked about, Brian. And he thinks he's smarter than all of the Aggies at Iowa State University, but hey, he wouldn't have been where he was. He wouldn't be producing these seeds if he hadn't had the benefit of all the information, all the knowledge, all the investment that went before it. So here you get the best of both. You get a system. And I think that's really important, Brian.

But you also get enterprise. And that's the new face of agriculture that's presented to the world. And I think that's the context for food diplomacy. It's time for another quick break, but don't go away when we get back. We'll take some of your calls. You're listening to backstory. We'll be back in a minute. We're back with backstory. I'm Peter Onof, historian of early America. I'm Ed Ayers, historian of the 19th century. And I'm Brian Ballot, speaking for the 20th century. We're talking today about the myths and realities of American farming through all of our three centuries. And we've reached the point in our show where we turn to those of you who have left comments about today's topic on our website and Facebook. Hey guys, we get a call from Northport, Alabama. It's Charles. Charles, we're talking about farms. They have them down in Alabama. You got a question for us? My question is about the idea of the family farm. Why the idea of the family farm is still so powerful in America,

even though that hasn't really been the reality in American agriculture for decades now. What's the attraction or why are Americans obsessed with family farms? We're a bunch of antiquarian stylists who we just can't get over it. What's the story, guys? I think it's symbolic degree of sort of inclusion and self-sufficiency in various kinds of dimensions. I mean, Peter, our great Jefferson scholar, knows that Jefferson thought it was the very foundation not only of a healthy society, but of a healthy polity and everything. Is that right? And where would he have come up with that idea, Peter? Well, it's really interestingly, people like Jefferson are commercial farmers. They're planters. They're reliant on long-distance markets. They're deeply in debt. They're connected to the world. And it's out of that notion of indebtedness and connectedness that Jefferson imagines independence of being immune to the pressures of the larger world. Because, after all, if the farmer feeds us all, he also feeds himself and his family.

And I think you're right about the notion of the self-sufficient family being an idealized microcosm, or model for the larger society and polity that is, think of the whole nation as a great family of family farmers, who are bound together not by the sorted ties of interest and markets, but by affection and love, because, after all, the family models love. And that's, I think, the great attraction for Jefferson. Yeah, that they can take care of themselves. That's right. And then contribute to the larger good as well. So nobody's dependent on anybody else. So Brian, do you think we're on the verge of this idea ever fading away, or is it sort of hardwired into the American dream? My own sense is that it's hardwired. I mean, if you take something as recent as the debate over estate taxes, for instance, one of the arguments against estate taxes is that it's going to hurt the family farm if you re-institute estate taxes.

Now, we know that, in fact, a very small percentage of what we would call real family farms benefit from that, yet the language of the family farmer is still invoked to defend a very controversial issue. I think the notion of family farm is alive and well. You know, though, if you think about representation in popular culture, the family farm seems to disappear. We'll remember Little House on the Prairie, the Walton's, of course, most popular, you know, Andy Griffith. In the 60s and 70s and even in the 80s, those were mainstays in American popular culture. Green acres. Don't forget green acres. Yeehaw, but that seems to have dissipated. So now you have dynasty, which, of course, is a huge corporation in which the guys live in these mansions and drive these huge trucks and stuff. So it makes me wonder if, you know, the popular culture is signaling that while we still like having local food, we don't really like thinking about what those farmers' lives are like very much, either to make fun of them or to glorify them.

So it makes me wonder if we're not seeing the beginning of the end of something. What do you think, Charles? That'll certainly make sense to me. The farmers that I know are. They're certainly not independent. They all have contracts and responsibilities with either that part of owned by larger corporations, or they're essentially run by the larger corporations, but they still. There's still the idea that they're running their own show, and I think that's great. So what's the big crop there in West Alabama? You do see a lot of soybeans, and we still see a lot of cotton, especially if you keep going further west. And yeah, both of those are crops where the whole structure of the markets for them is decided by the federal government. They'll find federal regulation and federal marketing. But we call them family fires. We don't call them government farms, right?

And I can remember working with my grandfather and his farm, and we'd be digging a post hole or something, and he'd say, well, that's good enough for government work. We could quit. I hope this call doesn't feel like government work to you that we rose to the standard of the family farm. Oh, certainly not. Thanks for calling. Thank you for having me. Thanks a lot, Charles. Hey, Brian and Ed, we got a call from Chicago, Illinois. It's Brendan, Brendan. Welcome to backstory. Great to be here. Hey, we're talking about farms. What have you got for us? Well, I was wondering, when I think of a farmer, I just think of a guy with a pitchfork, but I know that, you know, farmers farm different things. I was wondering, is there any difference in social standing between, you know, a farmer who farms grains and a farmer who farms animals, you know, where people who kept orchards treated differently from people who kept pigs. And you seem eager to jump into the well, yeah, in the golden age of American agriculture in the 19th century.

I think there was a clear hierarchy, at least in the eyes of the people who thought they were at the top of the hierarchy. They would have made the distinction between being a farmer and being a planter. The more highly cultivated your farm, the more challenging the crops and livestock you grew, the more status that you had. So therefore, as you're suggesting, an orchardist was a high status thing because it required skills and grafting and producing these kind of exotic and somewhat vulnerable crops. At the same time, if you were involved in the breeding of blooded livestock often with its origins in Europe, you were also very high of status. On the other hand, if you were just producing a monoculture of cotton, especially I think we've been in the bottom of the status hierarchy because it would have been a lot of tenants, especially African Americans. So I think that's the general hierarchy.

And that's for the late 19th century, and you wouldn't say that for the antebellum period, would you? That's a good point because I think that in the antebellum period, the goal there is not to actually farm anything but to preside over the production of cotton. So the people who were richest from the land would have been the owners of slaves and plantations. So let's say for the last two thirds of the 20th century, Brendan, starting with the Agricultural Adjustment Act under Roosevelt during the New Deal, legislation that provided subsidies to farmers to stop growing things. It's a very status dependent on your access to those government supports, and it started out supporting wheat and cotton and eventually within a couple of decades grew to supporting 100 different kinds of crops. So your status and the hierarchy of farming could well turn on your access to those government subsidies. And Brian, guess what? In my period, that's the epitome of corruption, that's the opposite of being a yeoman farmer, is to take favors from government or manipulate government.

They didn't mind getting all that subsidized land, did they, Peter? Now let's not be coherent, Brian, I'm talking about perceptions, and virtue is connected with independence. And from the perspective of independent, virtuous Americans of the 18th century, manipulating government policy in order to seek rents and vanishes, tariff protection, you name it, that's all corruption, and that's anti-American, that's un-American. I'm wondering maybe the changes in international taste for crops, is that change at all, what crops are high status and low status, guys in 18th century London suddenly developed taste for coffee, and that spread the coffee bush to the far ranges of the British Empire? Yeah, no question, and that is, of course, sugar is the big one, as you know, and sugar and coffee go together very nicely, and the sugar planters had enormous wealth and status, status and wealth are somehow correlated.

Peter, you mentioned sugar, which was the big product of the early era of the Atlantic economy, but of course, here in Virginia, we were all based on another commodity for which the market was entirely extra local, which was tobacco, and which was just as useful as sugar in advancing the human race. And so there's a case, the highest status would come to the people who could make something for which there was a very limited local market, but a vast market on the other side of the ocean. Here's another division we might talk about based on your question, which is locally produced food. I think that certainly in the 50s and the 1960s, locally produced food was kind of frowned upon, I mean, because it was so limited. And today, with the resurgence of interest in locally produced food, I think lots of small farmers who may only produce one or two crops are getting a lot more attention, and I would argue higher status because of that, because of changing consumer patterns as you put it.

Yeah. I would just say I like very local food, meaning the food in front of me. We make it our own, don't we? Thanks a lot. Thanks very much. Ed Bryan, we got a call from far out back in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, a farm, and we got Melissa on the line. Melissa, welcome to backstory. Well, thanks. Hello. So I was thinking about the whole independent farm family thing, and then I was thinking about how much time my children and I spend on the internet and texting, and I was wondering, you know, back in the day when the federal government was giving out land out west to entice people to move there.

That resulted in a lot of really isolated farm families and a lot of women who had no other women to talk to, you know, I mean, they had no support network. Right. So I was wondering if the government at any level, you know, ever thought that that would be a problem or ever realized that it was a problem. Did they do any kind of outreach to try to help farm families in general and farm women in particular, you know, kind of keep it together. We're talking about the mental health of farm families. We're going to quiz you about yours shortly, but we have Ed on the line from the 19th century. Well, in the 19th century, along before the government identified it as a problem, farm families themselves did. And kidding aside, they identified exactly what you're talking about, Melissa, that loneliness, especially for women, was very real with child rearing, child bearing. And people, you know, so you're asking, you get married, you're a man, you ask your young wife to go with you to the frontier.

And you're asking her to leave the primary support network of her mother and sisters and friends who people had traditionally relied upon to help them, you know, bring you life into the world. Then once the babies are born, there's nobody to help out with them and no one that you trust as family, everybody's a stranger. So in the 1870s, it took that long, you know, as people were settling, especially in the west, to form the grain, which was basically farmer self-help. You still have grain jowls around up there in Pennsylvania. One or two, not a whole bunch. Well, they, you know, they're a holdover from the 19th century. And the whole idea was this is self-help for farmers on the psychological front, basically. You get together and swap tips about how to grow the latest crops and fertilizer and so forth. But a large part of the two would be to basically have fellowship. And I think that business about the grain is really interesting because women played a very important role in the grain movement.

Because it served functions far beyond market functions or improving agriculture. We are forging new forms of community. And that's what happened in rural America. And it's partly because rural Americans have dominated legislation, state legislatures, and have used their power in government to get the government to work for them in order to forge connections. And you talk about text, Melissa. Well, people in the 18th and 19th century, as the frontier expanded, had the advantage of the post office, which followed them wherever they went. It couldn't be a farmer if you weren't linked or connected to markets. So farmers pioneer new forms of social communication. And so in many ways, we think of farmers as throwbacks as archaic figures from the past, a kind of a living museum as a modern farm. No, far from it. These have been right on the edge of developing new ways of communicating, connecting, especially in Brian's century, the 20th century. Yeah, well, the most important service in the 20th century are roads. And what did farmers want? They wanted roads not only to get their crops to market, but so that they could meet with each other so they could get to church so that they could connect with each other.

And those roads we take them for granted today, but they are just so crucial to the social life of those farmers. Melissa, we haven't really addressed your problem with therapy. And of course, we can provide some of that now here on backstory, but. Hang on, how long is this show? So tell us now, how do women in the form, do they form the kind of networks we're talking about? Do they compensate for isolation? How do you compensate for isolation? Well, you know, I am umbilically attached to the internet. I have, I'm a freelance copywriter, actually, so I have an office on the back of the house. And, you know, so literally I have gone, you know, for half a week sometimes without ever leaving the hill. And I can see where, if you couldn't talk to anyone in that time, you know, it could start to set you off a little bit.

You know, I mean, and the other, well, the other comment that you made that resonated a lot with me is about roads. And, you know, because our roads used to be so bad all the time, I really appreciated the fact that the world used to be covered with nothing but dirt roads. And how lucky we were that, you know, the state runs a plow down the highway. And so I can get the kids to school in the winter time. It's, you know, we don't farm for a living. We farm on the side. And it is frustrating. And almost every project you get into at some point, there's some morning in January where it's dark and it's five degrees out. And you think to yourself, I know why everyone got off the farm as fast as they could. So, you know, having someplace to turn to turning to radio for information and entertainment, turning to the internet because, you know, there's lots of blogs and advice sharing out there by farm people, you know, to find out what to do with your broken hog panel when you have to get the kids to school in 10 minutes and you've got a lot of animals to keep in. And just being able, you know, to indulge in the basic human need to complain. Yeah. Well, Melissa, you should call often. We're here for you. Okay. Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed it.

Thank you, Melissa. And that is where we're going to have to leave things for today. But as always, there's plenty more for you to explore online. And just visit backstoryradio.org to see the articles and books that shape today's show. You can also find all our past shows there along with a link to our free podcast. Once again, that's at backstoryradio.org. We're also on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Don't be a stranger. Today's episode of backstory was produced by Jesse Dukes, Jessica Bretson, Nina Ernest, Andrew Parsons, Tony Field. And Jamal Milner is our engineer. Backstories' executive producer is Andrew Windom. Special thanks today to Elizabeth Clemens and the White Rock Conservancy.

Backstories produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Dowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the tomato fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment. And by history channel, history made every day. Brian Ballot is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Oniff is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Backstories was created by Andrew Windom for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstories distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.