INDUSTRIAL FREEDOM FOR THE FARMER
Industrial Freedom for the Farmer THE DEMAND for a free highway to market and reasonable rates of transportation over that highway originated, more than forty years ago, in the center of the most...
...They knew that for the purposes of a highway the public could enter upon and take a part of their farms...
...In the Badger state the farmers have increased the quantity and quality of Wisconsin cheese until last year they produced practically one-half—and it was the best half—of all the cheese made in the United States...
...It led these states to write into their statute books at that time, laws blazed out by pioneer legislators who found the true principle which should govern these common carriers...
...Beginning in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois in 1870, as a protest against unreasonable and extortionate trans-portion burdens, the movement spread to the East and to the West, growing and increasing in power, until finally in 1874, it reached the national capital, when the United States Supreme Court, affirmed the decisions of the Supreme Courts of these Middle Western states of the Upper Mississippi Valley, which settled the correct principle and marked clearly the line of division between state regulation of state commerce and federal regulation of interstate commerce...
...This organization, by a system of concentration, has made Plymouth in Sheboygan county, the controlling market for Wisconsin cheese...
...December eighth, ten thousand farmers from the states of Montana, the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, assembled in Saint Paul, and broke ground for a co-operative elevator to be owned and operated by the farmers...
...This was a great contest for just and reasonable rates to enable the farmers of the Old Northwest to transport their products to market...
...This time it is a movement to FREE THEIR MARKETS from the domination of combinations which have suppressed competition and which arbitrarily fix the prices of all farm products...
...Industrial Freedom for the Farmer THE DEMAND for a free highway to market and reasonable rates of transportation over that highway originated, more than forty years ago, in the center of the most progressive population in the United States...
...The great problem was to secure reasonable rates to enable them to reach the market...
...The small farmer-owned factory, unable to operate a cold-storage plant, having no facility for holding the product, would be forced to sell at the price dictated by the combination...
...Three years ago under the leadership of former State Senator Henry Krumrey, one of the strongest progressive Republicans of Wisconsin, the farmers of Sheboygan county organized a co-operative association, to break the power of this wicked combination...
...This great struggle leveled party lines...
...At that time there was no settled policy, no established laws, but their reasoning was as direct and simple as their lives...
...At that time the markets of the country were free, open, and competitive...
...It appealed to the patriotism of the citizenship of that vast territory...
...It expressed vigorously the first powerful revolt against the rise of monopolies, the arrogance of railroads, and the waste and robbery of the public lands...
...profit out of the manipulation...
...The farmers' movement to-day is a fight for a free competitive market at the end of the iron highway...
...What wheat is to the great grain belt of these states, dairy products are to the southern half of Wisconsin...
...But here, as elsewhere, the farmer is made the victim of a vicious, grinding combination that strangled competition and forced the price of the product DOWN for the farmer, and the price of the product UP for the consumer...
...These hard-headed old husbandmen from New England and from northern Europe, who thought as they plowed, went far toward roughing out the doctrine in regard to railroad control which the country has since adopted...
...To-day the sons of the sturdy pioneers of the Old Northwest are organizing another great farmers' movement...
...The lines are forming...
...If then, the right of passage through the country came from the people, the people should afterward have the right to control the use of the highway...
...Its success is already a demonstration...
...This organization is NOW SUPERINTENDING THE MARKETING OF MILLIONS OF BUSHELS OF THE WHEAT CROP OF 1915...
...For three years this movement has been on...
...Through this association the farmers have handled, stored, cured and marketed more than a million dollars worth of their own cheese this season...
...Six months later the Cheese Trust would advance the price to the consumer, making season after season close to one hundred per cent...
...In the summer, when the blue grass is at its best, when production is heaviest, and the quality of the cheese the finest of all the year, this combination would arbitrarily lower the price to, say, twelve cents per pound...
...That was the goal...
...The men on the farms now, as ever, are striking the first blow for industrial freedom, as their sires struck the first blow for political freedom away back in 1776...
...These combinations manipulate prices, manipulate the grading of the grain, swindle the producers on switching charges and on weights as well...
...There seems to be no limit to their greed and their cupidity...
...To-day they own one of the best warehouse and cold storage plants in the country...
...The hosts are gathering...
...The farmers' movement of forty years ago was a fight for free competitive rates over the iron highways to market...
...Paul and Plymouth are centers from which will spread a great broad comprehensive co-operative movement to make the market places of this country free, and bring the producer and the consumer face to face...
...It was plain to them that the railroad was only another form of highway...
Vol. 7 • December 1915 • No. 12
