A future member of the Hollywood Ten, the writer Albert Maltz visits Roberts County, South Dakota and sees a region where decades of mass production and mechanization, years of the Great Depression, seasons of drought and created a wasteland.

‘Cattle in the Gravel Pits’ by Albert Martz from New Masses. Vol. Vol. 12 No. 3. July 24, 1934.

Sisseton, S.D. NINETY miles out of Minneapolis going west the horizon: is suddenly covered with black storm clouds. I stop the car and am occupied with the side-curtains for a few minutes. When I look up, the black clouds are barely visible. In front of them, driving down hard, is a swirling, gray cloud. I have never seen a cloud. like this before and I try to recall what a “twister” is supposed to look like. This cloud doesn’t seem dark enough to be a twister, so I keep on driving. In five minutes I have to switch on my lights. After ten minutes I stop at a gas station. The man laughs and says it’s only a little dust storm. “We have ’em every two or three days.”

This “little dust storm” is a drought phenomenon. It never occurs in wet seasons. And it explains a great deal. It explains the cattle set out to crop the roadside grass—cattle with shrunken flanks and loose skin. They walk with drooping heads, muzzle at a clump of thistle and move on. It explains the wheat that will never be threshed, the stunted barley, the corn that has tasselled too soon; and the pastures that are gray and dark brown and black—pastures of late fall and not of mid-July. It explains also the ditches that are being hastily dug, the abandoned gravel pits for which a use has now been found, and the good milk cows, the calves, the beef steers, the sheep which are being slaughtered by the hundred thousands and thrown into those ditches and gravel pits. Prices in Chicago go up. The flies and speculators feast.

It is difficult to picture accurately the effect of the drought. It has covered a very wide area and rainfall has varied from state to state, from county to county, even within counties. A dozen miles from Sisseton, South Dakota, there was a good shower three days ago. This may still mean the saving of some corn that will be useful for feed if not for market. But the rain passed over Sisseton. “Rain clouds mean a dust storm here.”

However, the general rule is that as one proceeds west from Chicago the effects of the drought become more apparent, more consistent and more devastating. Through a good deal of Wisconsin and Minnesota the corn, hastily planted after the failure of the small grains (wheat, oats, barley and rye), has been receiving sufficient moisture still to be a possible crop. But the river beds are still dried out with wild shrubs growing in the bleached soil, the pastures are burnt, the hay is lost, the cattle have been sold at a pittance or are being shipped or slaughtered by the government. And from Minneapolis on, the corn will not be good for even fodder unless there is immediate and recurrent rain. “If I could make rain,” said a South Dakota farmer, “and if I could make it come as much and as hard as I wanted, we might still get some corn and a little hay or millet. But it’ll take as much rain as that to get anything at all.” And the cattle that remain to the farmers are tethered along the road where the thistle grows wild, or they are herded for miles to a scrubby patch of woodland, or they cluster in a corner of a pasture field and make no effort to crop because there is no grass.

It is difficult also to picture accurately the administration of relief since this varies from county to county. It depends, among other things, upon the make-up of relief boards and upon the degree of militant organization amongst the farmers. But it will help illustrate the drought situation and the farm problem in general to take up a specific county.

Roberts County in South Dakota is illuminating because it has been among the worst sufferers in the drought. There has been no rainfall “more than would drown a grasshopper” since last fall. And Roberts County was burned out by drought last year as well.

It is illuminating also because it possesses one of the strongest and most effective units of the United Farmers League.

South Dakota was opened for homesteading in the eighteen nineties. A farmer was given a free grant of one hundred and sixty acres of land. A few years ago this land was worth one hundred and fifty dollars an acre. Today it sells for twenty-five dollars—but today there are no buyers.

The homestead territory was largely populated by Norwegians, Germans and Irish farmers and city workers. Today these men, their grown sons and daughters and their families make up the population of sixteen thousand. (Roberts County was once an Indian Reservation and there are about twelve hundred Indians living here under Federal jurisdiction.)

These men farmed well. There is no soil in America better suited for grain than this prairie land. They were farming rich soil in a rising market. The wealth of the country accumulated, industry expanded, prices rose, the farmer bought more land, sowed more wheat, bought more machinery. When the World War came this process was accelerated. The farmer mortgaged his land to buy more land and sold his wheat at a still higher price. Finally there came a time in 1918 when wheat sold at $3.05 a bushel and an average Roberts County farmer walked home with a check of seven thousand dollars for his wheat crop alone.

The farmer was prosperous. He built a larger barn, he replenished his machinery, he painted his house, he bought a new automobile. But shortly after that the market for farm products fell. The cities could not consume what the farmer had to produce to keep his business going. The long twelve-year depression began. For many farmers the automobiles bought shortly after the war are the ones they still possess. I have seen more Model T Fords in Sisseton, the county seat, than in any other town in five thousand miles of travel. And the carnivals who played here the last two days report the largest attendance but the worst business throughout their whole circuit.

For some farmers the falling market meant immediate destruction as the stock market crash bankrupted certain speculators and industrialists. The degree to which others have held on has depended upon the extent of their overexpansion during boom times. The mortgages told the story and for many farmers a few years of falling prices spelled the end.

But now the drought of the last two years writes the final chapter in the post-war period.

The drought is not a farm crisis in itself. It is merely an added calamitous blow in a crisis twelve years old. From now on, with only rare exceptions, the farmers of Roberts County will be tenants of the banks or the insurance companies or the government. I spoke with a farmer who was pointed out to me as one of the few who still had their land free and clear. He had maintained this independent position through a combination of shrewd farming, of personal frugality and of a policy which preferred less efficient farming to the use of machinery which would load him with debts. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I used to have money and no debts. Then I had to sell my loose land. Now all that money’s gone. The money I get from the government I have to give right back in process tax for hogs and in income tax. Now I have to mortgage and how long will it be before I can’t pay on my mortgage and the insurance company forecloses? This is something to work all your life for, isn’t it?”

This is the picture of the Roberts County farmer. He was once an independent producer. Now he is either a tenant farmer or an unemployed worker, dependent upon the charity of the State. And this is the blueprint for the American farmer everywhere. Only a small class of wealthy farmers will remain.

In the last few weeks many of the farm belt statesmen have been asserting that had the government been able to forecast the drought it would not have embarked upon its crop and cattle reduction policy. This is oratorical nonsense. The truth is the reverse. The A.A.A, has done and is doing all in its power to accentuate the catastrophic effects of the drought. The clue to the New Deal Agriculture cannot be found in the puffed up statistics about the amount of cash which has so generously been placed in the hands of the farmers (from which it soon passed to the banks, insurance companies and wealthy farmers). The only clue is the statement of Professor Tugwell that there is overproduction and that two million farmers must be forced off the land and absorbed into other industries. This is economic trend and government policy in the same bowl.

The drought is merely nature conspiring to help the A.A.A. Had they the power, the Agricultural Brain Trusters would have written Drought in as their ace policy. Such a policy destroys more effectively than a government slaughterer and at the same time absolves the government from guilt and permits pious camouflage in the way of unreal drought relief.

If the government had been interested in drought relief, adequate relief could have been provided. The Farmer’s Emergency Relief Bill put forth by the United Farmer’s League demonstrates how this can be done. But the government has not been interested in drought relief. The government has been interested in capitalizing upon the effects of the drought in order to keep up the price of beef.

If the government had been interested in saving the farmer’s cattle it could have given him immediate feed relief, instead of paying out enormous sums to kill the cattle, sums which in most cases have gone to the mortgage holders on the cattle and not to the farmer.

The policy of the government has been to delay feed relief while putting through a widespread slaughtering campaign. In South Dakota alone approximately one hundred and forty-five thousand head of cattle have been shipped or destroyed already. Contracts have been signed for three hundred thousand more head of cattle and slaughtering will go on at the rate of four thousand head a day. The same program is being carried out in other states. With this in mind, Secretary Wallace’s shameless statement that “The drought is a blessing” becomes clear.

The drought is not only a means whereby the poor farmer can be forced out of business. It is also being used by the government to force the middle farmer into tenancy. Farmers who have hitherto been able to keep their cattle free of mortgage loans are now being forced to accept feed loans from the government. These feed loans must be repaid and in repaying: them the farmer will spend his last dollar. And, similarly, a farmer who sells his cattle for slaughter because he cannot feed them, is forced to become party to the reduction program of the A.A.A. For the small farmer the A.A.A. means penury. For the city worker it means higher prices for bread this year (the wheat crop is the smallest in forty-one years) and exorbitant prices for the cheapest meats in a year or two.

What is the policy behind the pure idiocy of asserting that two million farmers must be absorbed into other industries? Professor Tugwell knows that industry itself can never absorb its old workers or the new ones coming forward. The policy is that of subsistence farming—subsistence farming for evicted farmers, subsistence farming for unemployed miners or city workers. In western South Dakota a section of five hundred ten-acre plots has already been established. Unemployed farmers are given a shack to live in and told to raise varied crops for their own needs. If they want to go to town they are free to ask for a permit to ride in the government truck. In West Virginia the same thing is being done with the miners. A whole village is being constructed under the personal supervision of Mrs. Roosevelt. And this: policy is being pushed forward everywhere. Millions of workers and farmers have no longer any function to perform in American capitalism. The government policy is to render them harmless and quiescent through a subsistence life.

What relief is the farmer receiving? In Roberts County he has been getting ten dollars a month feed relief provided he worked this out in advance on government projects. For many farmers the necessity of working in advance for the feed has meant neglecting the corn crop. They have been getting food relief amounting to about six cents a meal and less. And for some time now they have been receiving cash payments for slaughtered cattle. These payments have varied from one dollar to twenty dollars, depending upon the age and condition of the animal. With this money the farmer has been supposed to buy feed for his other stock. But since most of the cattle is mortgaged, the farmer has to pay this money right over to the lien-holder.

Next month the farmer will receive government feed loans of seventy-five cents for each sheep, three dollars for cattle, and four dollars for a horse. In practice much of this money will go right ever go to the lien-holder. Although the contract officially provides for the lien-holder to waive his right of foreclosure till January 1, 1935, the farmer must secure that waiver to get the loan and before he can secure it he is forced to make a private contract to pay over all the money or part of it to the lien-holder. Furthermore, this loan is only for a month. If the farmer wants to renew, he must make out a new application. It may not be granted. If it is, his debt increases with little hope of paying it back. If it is not granted, it may take him weeks to get back on the county: relief rolls since he is cut off from county relief as soon as he receives a Federal loan.

How is the farmer re-acting to this? What is he doing? For many of them the ballyhoo bubble of the A.A.A. has burst. “The farmer will sign anything,” I was told. “He will sign anything because he has nothing to lose and he’s willing to swallow any plan that permits him to work his farm (or the insurance company’s farm) a little longer.” To believe that the number of farmers who have entered into government allotment plans, acreage reduction plans, etc., indicates a widespread approval of the government policy is to misunderstand what has been taking place. The farmer has agreed because he has had no other recourse. But no amount of ballyhoo, no Brain Trust, no President will ever convince the farmer that it is right to slaughter young hogs, to plow down cotton, to dump milk. I have heard more uniform criticism of the government, more bitter prediction for the future on this score than on any other. Whether they were small farmers or county tradespeople, I have never heard anyone champion the reduction policy. They have accepted it because they have not known what else to do.

The farmer knows that the processing tax supposed to be paid by the consumer has been shunted on to him because the packing trusts refused to raise their prices. He knows that the Home Loan Plan of President Roosevelt is a fraud because evictions have gone on steadily and attempts to evict are increasing. And he knows that even the government plan for canning meat from some of the slaughtered cattle and giving this meat to the unemployed, he knows that this too is a fraud because most of the meat is being buried and in the canning process little of the meat can be used.

The farmer has worked under the A.A.A. and seen his fortunes go down under it. In Roberts County 46 percent of the population ‘was on last week’s relief payroll. Of this number 75 percent received food for themselves as well as farm relief. And it is the conservative estimate of the relief board head that 80 percent of the people will be on relief next winter (if there is money to provide for them).

What does the farmer say to this? There are some who still quote the Bible and maintain that these are the seven lean years and we must tighten our belts. There was still some scattered applause in Sisseton the other day when Governor Tom Berry called Roosevelt the greatest man who ever lived and said that the farmer must not be disgruntled at the low price he is receiving for his slaughtered cattle because this is an effective means of preventing the big man from squeezing out the: little fellow. (A slight error in logic undoubtedly due to confusion at the size of his audience. The slaughtering campaign means that the small farmer is left with no cattle and no money, while the big cattle raisers like Governor Berry are left with prices up and the field to themselves.)

There are some farmers who shy away from the United Farmers League because the politicians and rich men have hatched the Red Scare, or because they listen to the local Lutheran minister preaching against the stoppage of evictions, or because they read the mimeographed pamphlet put out by the local Catholic church which contains sulphurous sermons and cartoons on the subject of religion in the Soviet Union.

But there are others who say: “The machinery is breaking down, can’t buy new ones…the cows are being killed off, can’t buy. new ones… no crops to sell…tractors too old to run…nothing to do…Hell, they’re striking in the cities, we might as well strike too.”

There is the farmer in Benson, Minnesota, who said, “I’ve never heard such kicking in all my life. The farmers around here are almost Reds. They’re just about ready for a revolution, I’d say.”

There is the South Dakota woman who wrote in a letter, “They had the sheriffs come out to the farm just as we were getting out of bed one morning when it was cold and took my husband three-quarters of a mile and dumped him out on the highway…So we were driven out like cattle with no place to go and no ways of paying rent in town…When things like this go on, we say organize and don’t delay…”

There is the United Farmer’s League and the militant rank and file of the. Holiday Association. In Roberts. County, where the U.F.L. is strong, there hasn’t been a successful eviction in eighteen months. In June when seventeen members of the Unemployed Council and the U.F.L. were tried on a count of rioting and violating an injunction in stopping an eviction, a farmer jury found them not guilty. The farmers are looking for leadership and they are finding it. The U.F.L. is growing rapidly. It is mobilizing support for an Emergency Farm Relief Bill which provides for immediate two billion dollars cash, feed and seed relief, for the cancellation of all debts, for the stoppage of eviction and the repeal of the A.A.A.—the money for this purpose to come from taxation on gifts, inheritances and all incomes over five thousand dollars. It is mobilizing forces for a simultaneous relief march on all capitals in the drought states.

“Since you are so capable at writing codes,” a local of the Nebraska Holiday Association wired to Secretary Wallace, “just suppose you make a rain code. And if you have any suspicion that you are not capable of making it rain, you had better turn the A.A.A. into a F.R.R.A. (Farm Relief Right Away) and get some feed started out here for our cattle and food as well as clothes for us and the wife and kids, or we will look for a means to get it. The situation is getting desperate and we are getting awfully tired of it.”

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1934/v12n04-jul-24-1934-NM.pdf