FARM BANKRUPTCY FORCES RURAL EXODUS
Manly, Basil M.
Farm Bankruptcy Forces Rural Exodus Population 'Shift to Cities Becomes Menace; In One Year Rural Workers Numbering More Than Citizenship of Six States Move Out By BASIL M. MANLY (Director,...
...The general superintendent of one of the coke companies, an Englishman formerly in the air service, had bought an airplane...
...It is a great-, er menace than unrestricted immigration...
...They had to move...
...They lie in the monstrous system of distribution, which we have allowed to grow up in America, where the farmer gets only 37 cents out of every dollar that the city worker pays for farm products, while the city worker gets only 30 cents out of every dollar that the farmer pays for factory goods...
...But I do believe that it can be accomplished within a relatively short period of years by a series of carefully planned and wisely administered measures, that will move forward step by step toward the ultimate goal...
...They must have the help of the industrial workers...
...The industrial workers have succeeded in checking the deluge of foreign immigration, but what of this greater tide that is moving from the country to the cities...
...It is not socialism...
...It is probably the greatest movement of population in the history of the world...
...Small Movement To Farms THE Department of Agriculture says that it was in part offset by a movement of 880,000 from the cities to the farms, so that the net loss to agriculture was only 1,200,000...
...They do not have the power,, either politically or economically...
...It is a greater menace than the now nearly defunct "open-shop" drive...
...Roots of the Trouble - WHAT are the roots of~this trouble...
...migration from the farms to the cities...
...It can be checked in only one way...
...This is greater than the total populations of the six states—Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming...
...Thus the farmer and the city worker have one common enemy...
...Blow To Monopoly | DO not believe that this can be accomplished 1 at one great stroke...
...To the poorhouse, to the insecure and bitter life of a farm laborer, of to the city...
...That -is what "radical" means...
...Millions of men out of work and food selling at famine prices, because the country-side has been deserted by farmers seeking to better their lives in the cities...
...For the present at least, in the high tide of an industrial boom, the city may absorb them...
...But this in part is illusion, because all experience has shown that only a small proportion of those who go from the cities to the country remain there permanently, while it is notorious that the rural population when once engulfed in the city's maelstrom ' seldom returns to the farm...
...Although the1 farmers have been thus- grossly deceived regarding city conditions, this is not the fundamental cause of their migration...
...Menace To Workers — ""PHIS movement from the farms to the cities * is, therefore, particularly a menace to the workers\in the city factories and on the railroads...
...What will happen when the factories, responding to the dwindling demand from the country for manufactured products, begin to bank their fires and cut millions from their pay-rolls without a day's notice...
...But, if through misfortune or even through misdoing, some of them suffer reverses, he does not leave them to save themselves, and thus endanger the spirit and welfare of the whole family.' No, the wise father goes to their rescue and helps them get back on their feet...
...That is by restoring agricultural prosperity, by stabilizing prices at a decent level, by making the farm a place, where a man can settle down to a life of industry with the assurance that if he produces the crops which the nation needs, he will receive enough for them to enable him to buy enough of the city's products to support his family in health and reasonable Comfort and give the children an education...
...It will be worse even than the dark days of the "hungry nineties" when the jobless roamed the streets, hunting work at any price, and there were soup kitchens in every city...
...But why shrink from the word "paternalism...
...Bu* • ccprd-ing to Mellet's story, the real coke-workers, the poor devils who pull the flaming coke from the ovens 10 to 12 hours a day, are almost in destitution because they lost their strike for better conditions last year...
...For the past five years they have been fed on false propaganda about the huge wages paid to railroad and industrial workers...
...It cannot be cheeked by...
...Immediately, and perhaps from time to time during this period of progress toward a real industrial democracy, it may be necessary to put into force what the cynics are pleased to call "paternalistic measures," such, for example, as stabilization of prices by government purchase and sale of a part of the crops...
...It is not imperialism...
...Where could they go...
...I mean, in fact, all those Americans who do not share in the gains of this monstrous system which converts two-thirds of every producer's dollar either into profits or into waste...
...It will be worse for this reason...
...It is not capitalism...
...Hookworm larva are no respeetors of thorn •who five in hookworm sectors...
...It is the alarming decline of American agriculture ana me »a-tounding...
...See Unemployment Crisis _ 'T'HINK of it...
...The farmers are going to- the cities because they have been bankrupted and rendered destitute by the deflation of agriculture, and because they imagine they can improve their lot in the industrial centers...
...Big headlines announced: "COKE WORKERS USE AIRPLANE'S TO GO TO WORK...
...Then there will be unemployment and distress, far worse than we knew in 1920, when 5,000,000 men and women were out of work...
...Wc must go down to the roots of the trouble...
...This is a huge undertaking, but it is far less difficult in its essential elements than the organization of this, nation for the Great War...
...By this I mean the workers not only in the factories, but also on the railroads and in the mines, wherever men earn their living by performing useful service...
...There are today probably a million farmers and white-collar workers, - who read the original story and, did not read Mellet's exposure, who 'believe that if they could just get a job in the coke industry they would soon be on easy street end own.an airplane or at least a Rolls-Royce...
...Men and women past middle * age, thrifty and industrious, who counted themselves worth ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars in 1919, sold out for taxes in 1922 and evicted from their old homes...
...They are destroying the American nation by draining off its substance in the form of profits to be squandered in wastefully luxurious living or in the promotion of imperialistic exploitation in other countries...
...Millions were utterly ruined by the crash 6f agricultural prices "in 1920 and 1921...
...Lowell Mellet, one of the most experienced and, reliable reporters in the United States, went to the coke regions to investigate...
...By combinations, by consolidations, by price agreements, by manipulation of markets, by restriction of production, by stock watering, by multiplication of middlemen, by every device through which an additional dollar or penny of profit can be squeezed out between the producer and the consumer, they have created this ' frightful condition...
...Official figures of the Department of Agriculture disclose the fact that TWO MILLION persons moved from American farms to American cities during the year 1922...
...But what of the future...
...putting up the bars, by passing immigration laws, establishing "quotas" and "selective tests...
...Moreover this enormous movement from the cities to the farms merely emphasizes the condition of unrest and dissatisfaction which exists in all parts of the United States among the producing population...
...So- hundreds of thousands facing this miserable choice, have sold their little furniture and the few personal effects they were able to save from the wreck of bankruptcy and have come to the city...
...The " small type underneath told how one alleged coke worker had bought an airplane, but intimated that it was likely to become a habit among the coke workers because they were earning-such big money...
...The farmers alone cannot accomplish it...
...It cannot be accomplished by agricultural conferences like that which Secretary of-Agriculture Wallace called last year, which was dominated by such agricultural authorities as Julius H. Barnes, grain gamblei and President of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, J. Ogden Armour, the Wall Street bankers and the railroad presidents...
...He discovered the truth...
...Just so this great nation, seeing its children of the country-side In distress, the prey of money sharks, grain gamblers and other parasites, should go to their rescue and give them every assistance not only tp restore their independence and prosperity, but also to build for the future on a stabler foundation and with wiser plans than they have aver known before...
...It is twice as great as the flood of immigration which used to pour into the United States annually from Europe before the bars were put up...
...They have not been told these high wages, so far as they are true, apply only to a handful of exceptionally skilled or unusually situated workmen, and that the vast majority have not earned enough in the past two years to pay for the subsistence of their families on even the miserable standards to which they were accustomed...
...False Newspaper Propaganda AFAIR sample of this lying propaganda appeared in the newspapers last week...
...That enemy is the monopolistic group which owns, controls and operates this monstrous system of distribution...
...System Must Be Destroyed ¦|J1RLS system must be destroyed and a new ¦ system of cooperative distribution, for service and not for profit, must be builded in its place...
...In the' nineties, though factories were closed down, «food was cheap and a few pennies would feed a family...
...It cannot be accomplished by any kind of fake legislation, Only radical measures win be effective...
...This cannot be accomplished by the absurd method, which the Harding Administration has made notoriously famous, of enabling the already bankrupt farmers .to plunge further into debj...
...The world eannof be made over in a day...
...In One Year Rural Workers Numbering More Than Citizenship of Six States Move Out By BASIL M. MANLY (Director, People's Legislative Service) THE greatest menace to the national prosperity and general welfare of the United States is not bolshevism...
...What a tragedy that will be...
...Poor dupes of a perverted press...
...Now, when the full effects of this agricultural migration are felt, food will be scarce and dear...
...A wise father strives to make all his children self-reliant and self-supporting...
...Page after page of the country weeklies during the past year have been filled with tax sale notices of once prosperous farms...
...Ask the people of Moscow and Vienna what this means...
...They know...
...In county after county, in the Northwest and South particularly, more than half of the farms were sold for taxes...
...I mean not only the manual workers, but also the so-called "brain workers," whose supine-ness in the face of their continued exploitation raises a serious question as to whether they have any brains...
Vol. 15 • July 1923 • No. 7
