I grew up in the depression and really wanted to get off the farm. We were in real poverty. All I can remember is my father and mother struggling to make land payments, pay taxes, and hang on. But I appreciate farming. It's a wonderful place to raise a family. We don't own a lock on the door. We feel secure.

I was thinking this morning about the people around here being eliminated every day. About three-fourths of these farmsteads have been torn down, farmed over. In just the decade of the '80s, one-fourth of our country's farmers have been wiped out. For the first time, there are less farmers than there were before the Civil War. In 1945, we had six million farmers in the United States. Today we have about two million.
[...]
There's been two Americas, run not by generous people but by greedy, selfish ones. Even back in Revolutionary times, the Continental Congress at first rejected the Bill of Rights. We have to thank some farmers' uprisings, like Shays's Rebellion, where about ten people were killed. They said no, we've got to have basic rights. We can't be taxed out of our farms, out of our homes. Finally, the Continental Congress set up a country for white male property holders. Women didn't have a right to vote, blacks didn't, Indians didn't. It's been a struggle all the time to expand democracy.
[...]
I was about thirteen. My father was active in the Farm   Holiday Association. In 1928, he bought a garage in Newman Grove and was going broke. The group would meet in this garage. I'd go and liked to listen to these arguments.

One of the first actions of the association in October of '32 was to repossess a couple of trucks that the International Harvester Corporation had taken away from them. They just broke into the building and drove the trucks out. My dad was one of those people. The next day, they went up to a farm sale in Elgin, Nebraska. A widow woman with five children was being foreclosed. They were determined to stop the sale, so they set up a committee to do all the bidding. They were going to give this farm back to the woman free of mortgage. The total sale brought in $5.35. There were several thousand farmers that showed up.
[...]
Roosevelt called up Milo Reno. He said, "You got a revolution going on out there." Reno said, "Boy, I sure have." So Roosevelt went to Congress and said, "Listen, by God, you better do something because these farmers are revolting, tippingover trucks and hanging judges. You sure as hell better do something."

So it's interesting how changes are made. Some in the Roosevelt administration were sympathetic, like this guy, Tugwell [cf Schlesinger]. They come up with the idea of parity and nonrecourse loans . It was like a minimum wage for farmers. Parity is the relationship of what farmers buy with what they sell. Today, in the '90s, parity is even lower than when we had ten-cent corn and two-cent hogs. No price at all for sheep.

A lot of the reforms took the fire out of the protest. What triggered it off in the '30s was that it hit all the farmers at the same time. One of the reasons labor has more unity than farmers is because it happens to everybody in the factory at the same time. More recently, we've had ups and downs in agriculture. In certain areas, crops have been tolerable and acceptable, but in other things, farmers have been going broke pretty bad. Remember, the tractors went to Washington in 1977. I was among them. It was pretty bad then, but it's gotten much worse since. [Turkel, 124-126]

So you may imagine, I can't wait to crack open Hard Times: An oral history of the Great Depression.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.