Thinking about the Farm Crisis

Contradictions at the Heart of American Life

Farm Activists Burn a Tractor in protest at the Capitol

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, I’m writing a chapter for my book about the Ruby Ridge incident in the mountains of Idaho. But it’s important to note the Weavers originally came from Iowa. During the early 1980s, around the time the Weavers were hatching their plain to light out for the territory, the Plains states were hit by a massive agricultural crisis, the worst the region had seen since the Great Depression. Family farmers were losing their farms at alarming rates in foreclosures. Suicides and what’s grimly called “family annihilation” were also one the rise. Rural communities in the heartland started to face a lot of the same issues as inner cities: drugs, crime, rampant unemployment. The bottom suddenly fell out from under American agriculture after years of plenty.

What happened? Inflation in the 1970s made crop prices soar. American farmers were feeding now a hungry world. The value of farmers land went up with them. Farmers were encouraged to plant crops “fencerow to fencerow” by the Department of Agriculture and were offered generous loans at low interest rates by banks. They used these loans to invest in more equipment that would further increase productivity: the more crops, the better, right? After all, they got such high prices for them. The government confidently declared that the problem of agricultural oversupply was solved forever. Then it all went to hell. The drastic interest rate hikes of the early ’80s, designed to fight rampant inflation, both devastated commodity prices and made the debts of farmers suddenly onerous. The new strength of the dollar made American crops suddenly look unattractive to the foreign markets that once gobbled them up. The expansion in capacity that once enriched farmers sowed the seeds of disaster: there was a glut, overproduction. The loans the farmers had taken out were backed by the land and when they could not pay them, they lost the farm.

The vaunted efficiency of the family farm, now suddenly a curse, came from two sources: one very ancient and one very modern. Since they relied on “self-exploitation” of family labor, they could keep costs down. But they also had at their disposal all the technological developments of industrialization: tractors, harvesters, pesticides, fertilizer, and irrigation. But ultimately they lacked the economies of scale of big, combined corporate agriculture. Agribusiness could weather the storms; a family farm could not. Price supports that were instituted during the Depression started to benefit big agricultural firms much more than family farms.

There’s a contradiction at the center of American attitudes and policy towards the family farm. On the one hand, there’s a sense that family farms are an end in themselves, a form of life that the government and society should support because it was an integral part of our national being, but on the other, family farmers were encouraged to compete, to behave like capitalists, investing in machinery and wildly expanding, thereby contributing to the conditions of their literal expropriation. The more they became integrated into the global economy and took advantage of the fruits of social labor in the form of improved equipment, the more they experienced a loss of community. While they once cooperated with neighbors during threshing and harvesting season, they now could do it all on their own with their John Deeres. The same chemicals that provided bumper crops also polluted; rates of cancer started to rise in rural communities at the same time as farmers would have trouble paying for medical bills. One can easily see how an apocalyptic sense of terminal decline set in.

Farmers, one the one hand, relied on their communities and missed its benefits, but on the other, other farmers were their competitors, selling the exact same commodities. This created a contradictory form of ideology: farmers at once were deeply nostalgic for communal ties, but also highly fixated on self-reliance and distrustful of outsiders. They relied on government policy, but government policy never seemed to be able to fix the underlying problems and created a kluge of conflicting incentives, so they resented it as well.

Randy Weaver did not work on a farm, although he and his wife Vicky both grew up on one. He did, however, work at a John Deere plant in Waterloo, Iowa. Around the same time as the farm crisis took hold, John Deere in Iowa started laying off workers. Who would be able to buy all those tractors now? Besides there was cheaper stuff coming in from Japan and cheaper labor to be had in Mexico. The Deere plant was also automating: substituting computerized systems for workers. It’s probably not surprising then that many of Randy Weaver’s conspiracy thoughts fixated on computers. On the shop floor, there was also a member of Aryan Nations, trying to recruit for that group. Just as workers once often encountered radical organizers for the first time on the factory floor, now they could get their first taste of hate.

During the farm crisis, the extreme right blanketed the plains states with propaganda. The once dense civil society of middle America strained to organize responses to the crisis, and the far right was right there alongside, melding itself to movements or starting its own. Farmers started getting Lyndon LaRouche’s newsletters and Willis Carto’s Spotlight newspapers. Organizations with innocuous sounding names like Iowa Society for Education Citizens met in the basements of churches and family restaurants. Members of Posse Comitatus infiltrated the American Agricultural Movement and encouraged them to train in bomb-making. With Christian Identity, they aped the form of Church congregations and dressed their message up in the rhetoric of the pulpit. All these groups spread conspiratorial narratives about the desperate situation of farmers, much of them ending up with the inevitable conclusion that it was Jewish bankers who were to blame. They also had martyrs: desperate men who had enough and got into suicidal last stands with the government. Usually they were already convinced ideologues by then, but they appealed to the sense of despair of the average farmer as well. Instead of forming bonds of solidarity, men were encouraged to go out in flames as propaganda examples to others.

There’s another contradiction here, mirroring the farmer’s paradoxical relationship with their neighbors: community through isolation, and isolation through community. It was out of a sense of insufficient communal bonds and support that many found the hate groups, but the hate groups encouraged further isolation, proposing deeply paranoid explanations and sowing distrust, suggesting that farmers quit the Midwest for remote parts of the Northwest, and holding up lone, desperate gunmen as admirable examples of fighting back. Through the means of civil society they sought to dissolve the bonds of civil society. The purpose was to create an entire alternate world outside mainstream society, with its own narratives, its own heroes, martyrs, and solutions. The Weavers entered this alternate world, leaving their friends and family behind and going to Idaho, where they were close to the Aryan Nations compound.

The effort to take advantage of the farm crisis did not immediately yield a mass movement for the far right, but it would lead indirectly to the Militia movement in the next decade. In the end, progressive organizing was more successful. Jesse Jackson and the Farm Aid concert, featuring Willie Nelson and Neil Young, were much more appealing. They combined concrete help with a more hopeful message, and envisioned a multi-racial coalition between the urban working class and rural farmers. Social democratic politics might have been at a low ebb in the late 80s and early 90s, but we should give it some credit: it did help stop the fascists in the Midwest, although it could not become its own permanent force either. I will leave it to you think about what political tendency has been more successful in the longterm.

The political lessons here I think are fairly clear. The extreme right is often limited in scope and appeal but is very serious about organizing and propaganda and knows what to look for: desperate and disaffected people. Anywhere blight sets in, they will not be far behind. These groups are chameleonic, constantly adapting to their environment, and altering their message to the circumstances. They try out lots of different organizational forms and propaganda appeals. Their ideology also melds easily onto the contradictions of American life: the concomitant need for community and demand for self-reliance. It offers a vision of both the sovereign individual and a more wholesome community. It looks both realistic with its stark and brutal worldview, and idealistic, holding up fantastical visions of apocalypse, revolution, and social reconstruction.

One more thing to note here about how economic causes work in politics. The Weavers did not particularly suffer during the Farm Crisis compared to their neighbors. So far as I can tell, Randy kept his job at John Deere, although many coworkers and supervisors wanted to fire him for proselytizing. He ultimately quit, was not laid off. But think for a moment about the context he lived in: one day, it looked like an idyll, then started to collapse and rot. Weaver was already primed to think of the world in apocalyptic terms and now it seemed to be all coming true. The ideology of the mainstream stopped providing a plausible explanation for what was going on. And he would not have encountered the degree of propaganda he did if it were not for the efforts of the far right to take advantage of the farmers’ hard times to push their politics. Randy and Vicki Weaver saw families being destroyed all around them and wanted to preserve their own. Ultimately, it was this urge for self-preservation that brought their family to its doom.