Great Depression, Iowa, & Revolts

Last night, I was reading some of Nate Braden’s book about the Great Depression, State of Emergency: The Depression and the Plots to Create an American Dictatorship. It is a worthwile read about an era that most Americans know little about. Democracy was more threatened at that time than maybe during any other era since the founding of the country.

What caught my attention was the role Iowa, my home state, played during that radical period. President Hoover was an Iowan and so maybe it makes sense that some of the earliest political activism began in Iowa. I could imagine that Iowans would have expected more help from a president who they might have thought understood what it was like to live in the rural Midwest. Hoover had known the working class life for his first 11 years in Iowa (West Branch, a small town nearby where my brother lives).

However, after leaving Iowa when his parents died, Hoover lived in Oregon with an uncle who was a doctor where he spent his teens. Apparently, rural Iowan life had become such a distant memory that he lost touch with his own roots. This is particularly significant as he was raised Quaker. It is Quakers who have a long history of social justice political activism, often quite radical.

By the time he was an adult, Hoover was far away from his rural Iowa Quaker childhood. And by the time he was president, he had become a wealthy businessman. When as president he claimed there were no starving Americans, he demonstrated how disconnected he had become from the average American and from the rural Midwesterner.

* * *

Here is the passage from Braden’s book where he discusses Iowa and the Midwestern revolts (Kindle Locations 510-571):

“In September 1932 Fortune published a shocking profile of the effect Depression poverty was having on the American people. Titled “No One Has Starved” – in mocking reference to Herbert Hoover’s comment to that effect – Fortune essentially called the President a liar and explained why in a ten page article. Predicting eleven million unemployed by winter, its grim math figured these eleven million breadwinners were responsible for supporting another sixteen and a half million people, thus putting the total number of Americans without any income whatsoever at 27.5 million. Along with another 6.5 million who were underemployed, this meant 34 million citizens – nearly a third of the country’s population – lived below the poverty line. [1]

“Confidence was low that a Hoover reelection would bring any improvement in the country’s situation. He had ignored calls in 1929 to bail out banks after the stock market crashed on the grounds that the federal government had no business saving failed enterprises. With no liquidity in the financial markets, credit evaporated and deflation pushed prices and wages lower, laying waste to asset values. Two years passed before Hoover responded with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, created to distribute $300 million in relief funds to state and local governments. It was too little, too late. The money would have been better served shoring up the banks three years earlier.

“With each cold, hungry winter that passed, political discussions grew more radical and less tolerant. Talk of revolution was more openly voiced. Harper’s, reflecting the opinion of East Coast intellectuals, pondered its likelihood and confidently asserted: “Revolutions are made, not by the weak, the unsuccessful, or the ignorant, but by the strong and the informed. They are processes, not merely of decay and destruction, but of advance and building. An old order does not disappear until a new order is ready to take its place.”[2]

“As this smug analysis was rolling off the presses, the weak, the unsuccessful, and the ignorant were already proving it wrong. Most people expected a revolt to start in the cities, but it was in the countryside, in Herbert Hoover’s home state no less, where men first took up arms against a system they had been raised to believe in but no longer did. On August 13, 1932, Milo Reno, the onetime head of the Iowa Farmer’s Union, led a group of five hundred men in an assault on Sioux City. They called it a “farm holiday,” but it was in fact an insurrection. Reno and his supporters blocked all ten highways into the city and confiscated every shipment of milk except those destined for hospitals, dumping it onto the side of the road or taking it into town to give away free. Fed up with getting only two cents for a quart of milk that cost them four cents to bring to market, the farmers were creating their own scarcities in an attempt to drive up prices.

“The insurgents enjoyed local support. Telephone operators gave advance warning of approaching lawmen, who were promptly ambushed and disarmed. When 55 men were arrested for picketing the highway to Omaha, a crowd of a thousand angry farmers descended on the county jail in Council Bluffs and forced their release. The uprising just happened to coincide with the Iowa National Guard’s annual drill in Des Moines, but Governor Dan Turner declined to use these troops to break up the disturbance, saying he had “faith in the good judgment of the farmers of Iowa that they will not resort to violence.”[3]

“The rebellion spread to Des Moines, Spencer, and Boone. Farmers in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota declared their own holidays. Milo Reno issued a press release vowing to continue “until the buying power of the farmer is restored – which can be done only by conceding him the right to cost of production, based on an American standard of existence.” Business institutions, he added, “whether great or small, important or humble, must suffer.” While advising his followers to obey the law and engage only in “peaceful picketing,” Reno issued this warning: “The day for pussyfooting and deception in the solution of the farmers’ problems is past, and the politicians who have juggled with the agricultural question and used it as a pawn with which to promote their own selfish interests can succeed no longer.”[4]

“Reno and his men had laid down their marker. Aware that the insurrectionists might call his bluff, the governor stopped short of issuing an ultimatum, but he kept his Guardsmen in Des Moines just in case. The showdown never came – a mysterious shotgun attack on one of Reno’s camps near Cherokee was enough to persuade him to call off the holiday – but others weren’t cowed by the violence. The same day Reno issued his press release, coal miners in neighboring Illinois went on strike after their pay was cut to five dollars a day. Fifteen thousand of them shut down shafts all over Franklin County, the state’s largest mining region, and took over the town of Coulterville for several hours, “exhausting provisions at the restaurant, swamping the telephone exchange with calls and choking roads and fields for a mile around” the New York Times reported. Governor Louis Emmerson ordered state troopers to take the town back. Wading into a hostile, sneering crowd who shouted “Cossacks!” at them, the police broke it up with pistols and clubs, putting eight miners in the hospital.

“The rebels were bloodied but unbowed. Vowing to march back in to coal country, strike leader Pat Ansbury told a journalist, “if we go back it must be with weapons. We can’t face the machine guns of those Franklin County jailbirds with our naked hands. Not a man in our midst had even a jackknife. When we go back we must have arms, organization and cooperation from the other side.” Shaking his head at the lost opportunity, he made sure the reporter hadn’t misunderstood him. “This policy of peaceful picketing is out from now on.” Reno conducted a similar post-mortem, acknowledging that his side may have lost the battle but would not lose the war: “You can no more stop this movement than you could stop the revolution. I mean the revolution of 1776.”[5]

“Not only were farmers burdened by low commodity prices, they were also swamped with high-interest mortgages and crushing taxes. In February 1933 Prudential Insurance, the nation’s largest land creditor, announced it would suspend foreclosures on the 37,000 farm titles it held, valued at $209 million. Mutual Benefit and Metropolitan Life followed suit, all of them finally coming to the conclusion that they couldn’t get blood from a rock.

“It was also getting very dangerous to be a repo man in the Midwest. When farms were foreclosed and the land put up for auction, neighbors of the dispossessed property holder would often show up at the sale, drive away any serious bidders, then buy the land for a few dollars and deed it back to the original owner. By this subterfuge a debt of $400 at one Ohio auction was settled for two dollars and fifteen cents. A mortgage broker in Illinois received only $4.90 for the $2,500 property he had put into receivership. An Oklahoma attorney who tried to serve foreclosure papers to a farm widow was promptly waylaid by her neighbors, including the county sheriff, driven ten miles out of town and dumped unceremoniously on the side of the road. A Kansas City realtor who had foreclosed on a 500-acre farm turned up with a bullet in his head, his killers never brought to justice. [6]“

Investigations On WMD Lies That Led To Iraq War

That rant was quite satisfying. I’ve noticed lately a lot of frustrated ranting from progressive liberals, specifically from people who aren’t known for their ranting. The guy in the above video is someone I regularly watch and I don’t recall ever having seen him gone off on a rant like that. Another example of this is Thom Hartmann which I made a longer post about:

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/life-is-stupid-humans-are-stupid/

I’ve grown tired of the weak sauce moderate centrists that have taken over the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama seem like nice people. I respect them as far as my respect goes for most professional politicians of the moderate centrist variety, but I don’t respect them as liberals and for damned sure I don’t respect them as progressives… because they are neither.

I’d love to see Washington politics filled with passionate defenders of progressive liberalism. People like Bernie Sanders, Anthony Weiner, and Alan Grayson. I don’t care if I entirely agree with everything these people say and do. I just want people who have strong convictions that they are willing to fight for. I don’t want professional politicians who only care about maintaining their power by maintaining the status quo, who only care about advancing their careers.

I want a functioning democracy where citizens have real influence. I want civic participation like never seen before. I want people angry and out in the streets.

I know I’m part of the problem. Like most Americans, I’m apathetic and cynical. But, at least, I’m not ignorant. I know what is going on and I know I don’t like it. I want to live in a society where everyone matters, not just the rich and powerful. I want to live in a society where justice and fairness matters.

I don’t want to live in a society where the powerful get away with lying to the public, get away with blatant corruption, get away with war crimes. Is that too much to ask for? I don’t know. I too often feel isolated in caring about any of this. The media seems to intentionally isolate us. The mainstream media personalities usually just distract us from anything of consequence. When someone in the media actually says something true and says it with passion (which usually only happens in the alternative media), I feel part of myself wake up from apathy.

I want all of society to wake up. I was reading a book about the Populist Era where a person of that time was quoted. The person spoke of it in the terms of a whole generation waking up to the corruption as if the flames of the Holy Spirit brought forth a revival across the land. It’s amazing to read about that time. People were content and apathetic… and then all of a sudden they were fighting for a whole new vision of society. What wakes up a generation like that? What is the event that finally pushes people just too far and it somehow becomes collectively determined that they can’t, won’t take it anymore? How do people go from feeling like powerless individuals to feeling like a collective force to be reckoned with?

- – -

I was looking through my books about the Populist Era, but I couldn’t find the exact quote I was thinking of. Instead, I found a couple of passages from one book that describe clearly what was going on at the time.

Rebirth of a Nation
by Jackson Lears

Location 2964:

…had demonstrated what insurgents could do by connecting monetary reform to a wide range of egalitarian and anti-monopoly policies. They could challenge the notion that government was a private (white) men’s club; they could widen the public sphere by creating common ground among the indebted classes, linking farmers and laborers, even blacks and whites. Of course these alliances were shaky and easily toppled. But they provided political outsiders—people who had never imagined themselves acting effectually in public—with a glimpse of what an insurgency could do. As the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has argued, this was a crucial moment in the creation of a “movement culture”: a mass of insurgents becoming visible (to themselves and others) as political actors for the first time.

Farther west, the Farmers’ Alliances had embarked on a similar project. The organization began in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Kansas as a counterforce to the feelings of isolation and impotence that enveloped the countryside in the 1880s. Dividing into Northern and Southern Alliances, the farmers nevertheless soon began to see themselves as part of a huge and effectual national movement—and not merely another interest group scuffling for narrow gain.

Location 3035:

Indeed, Kansas was one of the states where the Farmers’ Alliance began to take on the characteristics of a regenerative mass movement—described by various observers as “a pentecost of politics,” “a religious revival,” and “a crusade.” Along with stump speeches by Macune and other orators, Farmers’ Alliance meetings featured long parades of wagons stretching for miles, decorated with evergreens to symbolize the “living issues” of the Alliance rather than the dead tariffs and bloody shirts of the existing two-party system. The plain people could see themselves acting politically en masse. In Kansas as elsewhere, farmers fired up by the experience of participatory democracy began to take matters into their own hands. The insurgent culture produced insurgent politics. In Harper County, Kansas, the Alliance demanded stricter usury laws; in Brown County they protested “the extortions of the binding twine trust” and proceeded “at once to the erection of a co-operative manufactory for binding twine.” This was how a democratic social movement was born.

Still, the Alliance had to overcome the power of regional and racial mistrust. Little more than twenty years earlier, Midwesterners and Southerners had been killing each other at Fredericksburg and Chickamauga. Old resentments died hard, as Garrison understood when he recommended the bloody shirt to Republican orators. At the same time, the two regions’ shared evangelical ethos began to acquire greater strength and political significance, bringing old antagonists together on common cultural terrain.

Far Right’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Secessionism & Militias, Paranoia & Violence

I find it hard to comprehend the mindset of some rightwingers. I don’t disagree in principle with many of their values and ideas, but I always sense some hidden motive behind the rhetoric. It’s partly just that rightwingers are more prone to paranoid conspiracy theorizing than those on the left. I’m actually sympathetic to the paranoid state of mind. As they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

However, sometimes it seems that the far right has a self-enclosed, self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling way of seeing the world. For example, some rightwingers get all worked up over a talk show host telling them the Feds are going to take their guns away. So, they stock up on guns and start acting suspicious which attracts the attention of the police or FBI. It never ends well for the paranoid rightwinger.

This kind of rightwinger might even be correct about some of their fears, but there is something demented about their being prone towards aggressive self-defense which not unusually leads to self-destructive behaviors. This style of thinking isolates them and makes everyone who is different than them into a potential enemy.

Fear is fine, but fear-mongering just isn’t helpful for the fear-mongerer himself or for anyone else. I mean what benefit does someone like Glenn Beck gain from fear-mongering? To be cynical, many say it’s all just a show and so it comes down to profits. And profitable it is. Beck wasn’t rich before fear-mongering, but since beginning his extremist style of punditry he has become massively wealthy. If he actually believed the nation would collapse or the socialists were going to take over, then what would be the point of his amassing all that wealth?

One element behind my thoughts are the recent talk of secessionism. Even some Republican politicians have openly and directly encouraged secessionist attitudes. Do these politicians actually want a new Civil War? Unlike the first one, a second Civil War would probably be over in days or weeks. And if for some reason the army itself became split in it’s allegiances, we would experience a war that might be more destructive than any war fought in modern history. Could you imagine the country splitting in half with the respective military forces lobbing nukes at each other. It would make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look like Disneyland in comparison.

The specific issue that started this line of thought is that some rightwingers are seeking the establishment of state militias. I’m fine with the proposition in the abstract, but the motives seem a bit suspect. When I hear the proponents speak about it, there is a lot of talking around in circles and much that is implied.

It’s all very strange. At the bottom of it all, I sense that some rightwingers feel their being left in the dust of the 21st century and so their itching for a fight. I suppose that, going by the demographics, many of these rightwingers are out of step with where society is heading. It’s just a fact that America is becoming less dominated by whites, by fundamentalists, by the culture wars. A shift is happening in demographics right now that is unlike anything that has happened before in American history.

Ultimately, I wonder how many of these rightwingers take themselves seriously. Are they just posturing? Maybe most of them are just posturing, but definitely some rightwiners are working themselves up and some are seeking ways to organize. What will happen if and when they organize is another issue. But I have no doubts that the authorities (be they police, FBI or maybe even National Guard) will come down hard on some of these groups. Be prepared for the same violent confrontations and bombings we saw from the rightwing militia types in the ’90s. It will be interesting to watch it all play out.

It’s not that I necessarily trust the government more than the average conservative. I just trust the far right fear-mongering machine even less. It’s like these rightwingers have a narrative stuck in their head and their determined to play that narrative out to its inevitable conclusion. Of course, the authorities are more than willing to play their part as well. Personally, I’d prefer a different story to be played out on the national level.

Ralph Brauer: Revolutions & Liberal America

I just yesterday discovered the work of Ralph Brauer.  I came across his book The Strange Death of Liberal America in Google books while doing a websearch about the religious right.  I found the passage rather insightful.  His view on American history makes even more sense when put in the context of Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning.

Below are some writings from Brauer.  The first is the beginning of an article.  The second is the aforementioned passage from his book.

A Call For a Third Revolution of Liberal America

By Ralph Brauer

<!– addthis_url='’; addthis_title=”; addthis_pub=’Nonpartisan’; // –>

The history of Liberal America can be seen as encompassing two revolutions. The first centered on rights, as the notion of what Tom Paine termed “the rights of man” extended to include the propertyless, people of color and women. In the United States that revolution was in part derailed by the rollback of Reconstruction when the country essentially bought the South’s idea of segregation. A similar rollback has been under way since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in what I have referred to as the Second Reconstruction.

The Second Revolution focused on economic justice, embodied in this nation and other democracies as governmental programs designed to keep the playing field level for all people. Unfortunately the Second Revolution stalled out for much the same reasons as the first: the country as a whole had little stomach for pushing this to its conclusion. Most people, for example have probably never heard of the Economic Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin Roosevelt shortly before his death.

Part of the genius of Martin Luther King lay in his recognition of the connection between the First and Second revolutions, but his pleas were thwarted in Chicago and Memphis. Like many African American leaders during the Second Reconstruction, King was murdered while those who sought to pick up the banner were marginalized and/or ineffective.

Curiously the last half of the twentieth century played out much like the last half of the nineteenth as the revolution of economic justice went through the same counterrevolution as did the First Reconstruction.

In the case of both revolutions there was a very narrow window during which the cause might have managed to maneuver enough to fully realize its ideals. In both cases America flinched when it might have pressed the advantage. But African American congressmen and state office holders were driven from office in the rollback of the First Revolution and Dr. King, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer and others were murdered or sent packing in the rollback of the Second.

 

The Strange Death of Liberal America
By Ralph Brauer

pp 32-36

Three of the four partners of the Counterrevolutionary coalition had fallen into place.  The first were the corporate fundamentalists who detested any government regulation of business.  The second were the former Dixiecrats who fought for state’s rights.  The intersection between the Dixiecrats and the corporate fundamentalists sought to pull back the government’s role in leveling the social and economic playing field.   The intersection between the Religious Right and other Counterrevolutionary members involved a crusade that has come to be called the “Social Agenda.”  Although the fundamentalists’ position on such issues such as abortion has received much media and political attention, the linchpin has been education.

If Strom Thurmond personifies the first stage of the Counterrevolution, Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition Executive Director, personifies the second, for like Thurmond he has that Forrest Gump quality of being at critical crossroads.  Looking like a frat boy whose too-well-groomed apearance and smirking smile suggest he has played more than his share of pranks, Reed’s early career is characterized by questionable actions.  Nina J. Easton, author of Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade notes he was fired from the University of Georgia student paper for plagiarism.  He then worked with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist to take over the national college Republicans.  Later he built Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition into a major force in the Republican Party.  In the 2000 election he served as an advisor to George W. Bush.  He even managed to get himself hired by Enron.  After somehow landing on his feet after that fiasco, Reed became head of the Georgia GOP, running for the lieutenant governorship in 2006.  Reed illustrates the abilities — even necessity — of key Republican operatives to move seamlessly between three worlds of politics, religion, and business.  In fact these operatives probably do not see the three arenas as distinct, but part of one divine mission.

What helped consummate the marriage Land spoke of was one major cornerstone of Liberal America: education.  The Religious Right has been dissatisfied with public schools for some time because by law America’s classrooms have been nondenomenational.  The fundamentalists became especially incensed as courts and legislatures ruled against school prayer and the IRS moved to revoke tax exemptionfor religious schools that served as covers for segregation the way bed sheets covered Klansmen.  As public schools invested in programs such as diversity, fundamentalist Christians bailed out of the system, forming private religious academies or seeking to remove programs that did not agree with their theology.  Finally, Darwin again entered the picture as fundamentalists agitated against the teaching of evolution while advocating what they called “intelligent design.”

In Political Agendas for Education: From the Christian Coalition to the Green Party, author Joel Spring zeroes in on a statement in which Ralph Reed acknowledges, “More than any other single episode, the IRS move against Christian schools sparked the explosion of the movement that would become known as the religious right.”  Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the new GOP coalition, agrees with Reed’s analysis, noting that the Religious Right was born in response to two decisions by the Carter administration: the IRS ruling and the belief that the FCC planned to regulate Christian radio stations (although imaginary, it was widely believed).

Thus began the second phase of the Counterrevolution, built around a series of Devil’s bargains that made their coalition the equivalent of the New Deal coalition of Franklin Roosevelt.  The Counterrevolution’s road to power was paved by two crucial decisions that played a major role in creatign the Era of Bad Feelings.  The first came from the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo, a 1976 case revolving around reforms initiated after Watergate designed to lessen the impact money on the electoral process.  Those reforms resulted in making the election of 1976 one of the few in which both candidates spent identical amounts.  The Buckley decision upheld the Watergate reforms with one notable exception: the Court ruled that individuals and groups not affiliated with the official campaign had no spending limits.

The GOP pounced on this loophole.  In the 1984 campaign when Ronald Reagan faced Walter Mondale, Republican Political Action Committees (PACs) spent almost four times the amount of their Democratic coutnerparts: $15.8 million to $4.2 million.  In 1988, independent expenditures amounted to $13.7 for the Republicans and $2.8 for the Democrats.  A Brown University study summed up the effect of the changes: “Since the GOP historically had a stronger base among big businesses and wealthy individuals, independent expenditures advantaged Republicans more than Democrats.”

This came as Sunday morning religious programs became serious business, turning preachers into instant conglomerates with tentacles reaching into every part of the media and, along with this, money for political organizing.  Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to give them their due, were doing nothing that had not been done before by the liked of John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould.  Only this time the money lay in churches with an ideology to advance, particularly the remodeling of the American public education system.  Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, no slouch himself when it comes to raising PAC money, detailed the considerable clout of the Religious Right in a 1998 article, toting up the coffers of various religious organizations and then favorably comparing them with such heavyweights as the Chamber of Commerce.  He admirably pointed out, “The Christian Coalition has one million donors, 1.5 million activists, and 2000 local chapters that distributed 66 million voter guides in the 1996 election cycle.  Since 1990 the Christian Coalition has trained 52,300 community activists, 18,000 in 1996 alone.  The 1997 budget was $17 million dollars.”  Much of this considerable war chest came from the efforts of Ralph Reed.

A second decision that became equally important for the Counterrevolution was the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.  First enacted in 1949, the FCC ruling looked into the future and decided that because they operated in the public interest, the mass media should present all sides of controversial questions.  The Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine in the 1969 Red Lion case, still generally considered as one of the Court’s landmark decisions.

Red Lion  not only involves the Religous Right but also foretells exactly what would happen with repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.  The case began when the Reverend Billy James Hargis, the Jerry Falwell of his day, accused the author of a book on Barry Goldwater of being a communist.  The author sued under the Fairness Doctrine and the Court found in his favor.  In its decision the Court said the Fairness Doctrine serves to “enhance rather than abridge the freedoms of speechand press protected by the First Amendment.”  It also noted that “when a personal attack has been made on a figure involved in a public issue” the doctrine requires that “the individual attacked himself be offered an opportunity to respond.”

In 1987, an FCC packed with commissioners appointed by Ronald Reagan voted to repeal the Fairness Doctrine.  When Congress tried to overrule the decision by passing a law extending the doctrine, Reagan vetoed it.  Just as the Buckley decision opened the door to single-issue PACS, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine opened the door wide for ideologues like Robertson.

On stage stepped a key actor in the next phase of the Republican Counterrevolution, Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich helped engineer the GOP take over of the House of Representatives in 1994 by making great use of Ralph Reed and his allies.  At the center of the takeover lay the Contract with America, a Gingrich inspiration laying out his party’s agenda.  The preamble makes no bones about what the takeover would bring, stating, this “historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with public’s money.  It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.”  The second sentence spells out the next phase of the Counterrevolution: linking distaste for big government with the agenda of Jerry Falwell and the fundamentalists.

Manifestoes have always served as the core of radical movements composed of true believers convinced they have the answer to every problem.  Nothing signifies this better than a sentence from the opening of the Contract with America, which puts a religious cast on everything after: “Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act ‘with fairness in the right, as God gives us to see right.’”  In other words, the zealots of the Counterrevolution evoked the secular saint Abraham Lincoln, linked him to God and themselves.  History is full of people who believe they are acting in God’s name and their record is hardly one that would inspire confidence in the Contract with America.