Warren County and Missouri farmers demand relief for ‘worthy’ farmers by taxing the rich

Nearly forty farmers from across Warren County gathered at the Courthouse Wednesday evening, August 30, 1933. It was hot, and they were surely more than a little anxious. All around them, farmers were falling behind on mortgages, losing their homes, and suffering crop losses from all the dust that kept blowing east. They gathered in the Courthouse to hear about new Farm Mortgage Committees (FMC) that seemed like a promising way to get some relief.

All of Warren County’s leading farmers were there, including W.H. Wisbrock, president of the Warren County chapter of the Missouri Farmers Association. W. H. Eichholz, of Smithton was there. He said 1,200 farmers over in Pettis County had recently found success in halting farm foreclosures through their FMC. In Pettis County, he said, the committee had done work to reduce “excessive county salaries” and taxes on farms, too.

Just yesterday, they learned, Ste. Genevieve County farmers had constituted a Farm Mortgage Committee that saved a “worthy farmer” that same day. Everyone applauded and endorsed the idea, voting unanimously for a motion to organize a Warren County FMC. Membership cost $1 annually¹)

Farmers zeroed in on one big problem: mortgages.

A lot was changing faster than anyone could imagine. In 1925, Warren County farms still had only 129 tractors, alongside 73 radio outfits and 15 silage-reporting farms. Warren County had 1,195 farms in 1930, but farm size was already shrinking on average from 182.6 acres to 167.2 acres. Total land devoted to farms would continue to drop from 218,202 acres to 211,634 acres over the next decade. Desperate farmers were becoming fragmented and selling off small parts of their land to survive.

With less land to farm, Warren County farm land-and-building value fell from $8,372,814 in 1930 to $5,838,745 in 1935 and the average value per farm collapsed from $7,007 to $4,612, and average value per acre loss from $38.37 to $27.59.

To the farmers in the Courthouse that late summer evening in 1933, a farm that “looked” the same from the road was often worth roughly a third less on paper than it was just a few years prior.

At the 1933 Missouri Farmer’s Association meeting in Sedalia a couple of weeks earlier, 7,000 farmers heard Wood Netherland, President of the St. Louis Federal Land Bank talk about the situation.

“The great difficulty is that there are thousands of deserving farmers in Missouri and other states who cannot borrow enough through the Land Banks or elsewhere to take up the existing mortgages. And since many farmers are behind on their interest and taxes, they are face-to-face with the possible loss of their homes.”

It was estimated about 35-40% of all farms were tenant farms².

The farmers elected Edward Gross, Henry Godt, and W. H. Wisbrock from Hickory Grove to the Committee. Representing Elkhorn were Martin Oberhellmann, C. T. Yocum, and William Dickman. Charrette’s delegates were Hugo Hellebush, Walter Rottman, and Ben Glosemeyer. John Dothage served as the representative for Pinckney, and William Rueff was elected from Bridgeport. Finally, Camp Branch chose F. H. Vahle and Martin Winter as their delegates³).

The FMCs didn’t have much of a plan beyond unity. The goal was 60% membership among farmers in every Missouri County. The FMC would then investigate all cases where members of the Association are threatened with foreclosure, and if it finds that such members are deserving, farmers who “have done the best they could”, then it will get in immediate touch with the loan companies and earnestly request that they give the farmers in question a year or two of additional time in which to “pull out.”

The way the farmers figured it, 60% of a county is so large that loan companies would simply be unable to ignore them. The idea was humble enough, but suffered from personal attitudes. Farmers judged to be inexperienced, or with personalities or characteristics the group didn’t care for were often shut out.

Protest, mediation, and the New Deal

Farm Mortgage Committees were part protest valve, part mediation board, and soon a part of the New Deal intake system. They had no legal authority, but they were designed to bring farmer, creditor, appraiser, county agent, and as the New Deal grew, they’d bring federal credit programs into one room and see whether foreclosure could be delayed, refinanced, or converted into a more manageable repayment plan. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed A.S. Goss Chief of the Land Bank Commission and also Federal Farm Mortgage Commissioner to help work with the local committees.

FMCs were probably best at buying time and arranging refinancing for owner-operators who still had enough equity, land value, or creditor goodwill to make a deal possible. But “saved” often meant “saved for now”, not permanently rescued. Delinquencies stayed high through the late 1930s. Federal Reserve researchers noted that delinquency rates rose when principal-forbearance periods expired and by the end of 1938, Federal Land Bank delinquency reached 20 percent, and Land Bank Commissioner delinquency reached 28 percent.

Despite their broad membership, many banks and lenders paid notice to FMCs, but weren’t always willing or able to meet all their requests. But politicians did. In 1935, the Missouri Farmers Association moved on from mortgages and had zeroed in on another age-old problem: taxes. The Association proposed taxing larger incomes and estates, rather than farmers.

“It is estimated there is more than $2 billion in ‘hidden wealth’ in Missouri that now is escaping taxation,” says William Hirth of Columbia, the MFA’s President. “The sum includes principally money, notes, and bonds. And heavy rural taxes in recent years have done much to prolong the depression.”⁴)

Legislation had passed in several states, including Kansas, as recently as 1934 to reduce taxes on farmers.

In a mere fifteen years, dozens of farms were lost just in Warren County and acreage shrank. In 1925, Warren County had 1,169 farms. 1935 was the highest, with 1,266. While farmers were rightly concerned with what was happening on the ground beneath their boots, hindsight suggests there were much bigger forces at work — and in the air.

A thick, black, blanket of dust

World War II had not yet fully impacted the American heartland, but it was impacting global food consumption and production. Combined with mechanization, fewer farmers could farm vastly more land. And farm they did. In an effort to keep their incomes stable, farmers planted more and more wheat, corn, and other crops no matter what the commodity prices were. If prices were high, they’d farm more to make more. And if they were low, they’d farm even more to maintain incomes. Tractors made it faster and easier to plow on land that was otherwise left alone, like the sides of hills. Farmers across the Corn Belt and Midwest planted fence-to-fence in tight rows, year-after-year.

The tractor had made farming so much easier that people lost sight, literally, of how to tend to the soil. The Dust Bowl was at its worst in March 1935. In late March, a dust storm blotted out the sun across all of Missouri. Five were killed in Kansas after inhaling too much dust. Elsewhere, people were electrocuted from the shock of touching metal posts or automobiles due to static electricity. The storm covered 300,000 square miles of the Midwest, blowing over 10 tons of dust eastward, stranding trains and motorists. Further west, farmers believed the storm “killed all prospects of a wheat crop.”⁵)

Left with little choice but to keep doing the only thing they knew to do, farmers got back on their tractor and planted what they could, tilling up even more land, removing the grasses and tree lines that kept dust settled and exhausting an already tired landscape. And all the excess planting had even more perverse effects on the price of commodity crops.

There was one person who predicted what was coming. As dust was blowing east, Hugh Hammond Bennett, head of the U.S. Soil Erosion Service testified before Congress in spring 1935. He timed his testimony on the bill that would create the Soil Conservation Service, as “a dust storm from the Great Plains moved over Washington, D.C.”. Bennett knew it was coming and that many Eastern residents didn’t believe the wild stories coming out of the plains and Midwest. As he was speaking, skeptical legislators looked out the Capitol window as near total darkness descended. Timothy Egan wrote in The Worst Hard Time that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was said to have wiped a finger across his desk to inspect the layer of topsoil that blew over 1,500 miles through the White House windows.

Bennett stopped speaking as lawmakers walked up to the windows. A month later, Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act of April 27, 1935, just a week after an infamous April 14, 1935 “Black Sunday” storm. The bill created the Soil Conservation Service at USDA and put in motion efforts to simply pay farmers to stop farming, furlough some land, plant grasses and tree lines, and eventually tamp down on the arid dust storms.

The farmers who gathered in the Warren County Courthouse in 1933 had come to save farms from foreclosure. Soon, Washington would be trying to save the land from the farms themselves. The hard lesson of the 1930s was a farm could be lost all at once at the Courthouse, or, it could be lost by inches in the form of dust.

Farmers benefited from many New Deal programs, many of which would last into the 1960s. But the general economic force of consolidation, increasingly larger farmers, more machines, and fewer individual farmers could not be stopped. By 1940, 412 farms were lost since 1930 and yet market forces or maybe pride would introduce 254 more tractors in the county. Today, fewer than 2% of Americans work in farm operations.

1. Warrenton Banner • Fri, Sep 08, 1933 • Page 4 • (Warrenton, Missouri [↩]
2. The Marthasville Record • Fri, Apr 26, 1935 • Page 4 • (Marthasville, Missouri [↩]
3. Warrenton Banner • Fri, Sep 08, 1933 • Page 1 • (Warrenton, Missouri [↩]
4. The Marthasville Record • Fri, Dec 27, 1935 • Page 2 • (Marthasville, Missouri [↩]
5. The Marthasville Record • Fri, Mar 22, 1935 • Page 2 • (Marthasville, Missouri [↩]