Golden Age, May 25, 1921
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CONTENTS •/ «• GOU)EN AGE
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Ntuaber 44
A Probe at the Farming Problem
IT IS a pitiful commentary on the wisdom of mankind that when America has greater crops than ever before known there are almost sure to be twice as many people in the land in need of food as there are when the crops are small. This has worked out after this fashion so many times that one United States congressman has made the statement in print that he does not know how the farmers of the country would get along if it were not for the pests that ruin portions of the crops every year.
The production of food in the United States is not decreasing; it is increasing. The average grain, potato, peach, pear and apple production per year from 1911 to 1915 inclusive was 5,820,510,000 bushels, while for 1919 it was 6,183,171,000 bushels. In 1920 the production, was unprecedented, the combined yield of the ten principal crops running thirteen percent above the average for the five years preceding; and the corn crop was so large that it did not pay to gather it, and yet in Connecticut hundreds of school children are starving.
Since 1916 the value of the agricultural output of the United States, expressed in terms of that wobbling thing which we call the dollar, has each year exceeded twenty billion dollars. In 1919 the total was nearly twenty-five billion dollars: hut in 1920, with larger crops, the value was estimated at $19,856,000,000, or $5,105,000,000 below the total for the preceding year.
In the month of May, 1920, a general scare was sent out ' through all the papers of the country that owing to the shortage of farm labor there was a practical certainty that the whole country would be faced with a food shortage. As late as June 15th the publisher of Farm, Stock and Home, of Minneapolis, was urging the conscription of farm labor, so that the food supply of the country should not be menaced; and ou the same date the then governor of New York State appointed-a Farm Labor Committee having as part of its mission "the economic problem confronting the farmer, in order that there may be a fuller production of food stuffs”.
Within a few weeks from that time farmers all over the country were complaining that they had lost money on their season’s work, and if they had been able to secure all the help desired their losses would have been greater. In Alabama the farmers in 1920 harvested four hundred thousand tons more of the commodities which feed and clothe the world than they did the previous year, and received $128,436,000 less for their work. -
Farm Values and Incomes '
UNCLE SAM’S farmers own one-third of the nation’s total wealth. The value of farm property is now estimated as in excess of eighty billion dollars, which is five times the value of all the railroads, twenty times the value of the iron and steel industry, and forty times the value of the textile industry. This farm value has increased sixty-five percent in the past five years and fivefold in twenty years, expressed in terms of the dollar, which wobbles with every wobble of the stock market.
It is generally conceded that, barring fire or other calamity, the farmer is more sure of his home, food, clothing and reasonable comfort than any other worker; and yet the farmers themselves, and many others on their behalf, do not regard farmers as properly paid, when the investment and the labor are taken into consideration.
The average returns on the farmer’s investments increased from four percent in 1913 to seven percent in 1918, which was the farmer’s banner year; and the fanner’s cash reward, over and above the products of the farm used
by his family, was less than live hundred dollars per year for the period. This about equalled the average annual income of the urn us trial workers for the same period. Government fig. ures for 1918 showed that the average net labor income of all the farmers for that year, including all the members of the*farmers family, was twelve hundred dollars. '
Detailed figures of farm incomes compiled by the Department of Agriculture in twentyeight representative sections of the United States shows that the average American farmer cleared $9.61 per week for his own toil. On one hundred typical Indiana farms the farmer averaged for seven years an annual wage of $558, after allowing five percent for capital invested and giving his family the produce the_y directly consumed on the place. In Wisconsin a group of experienced farmers made a study of their neighborhood, and came to the conclusion that every capable, industrious man in the neighborhood accumulated ten thousand dollars more of property every ten years.
Capitalists in other lines can show much greater returns than this, but workers cannot; and nothing is gained by pointing out that the average wage of the farmer is less than half the average wage of carpenters, bricklayers and other skilled city workmen. The latter must spend a fourth of their wages, or more, for a roof over their heads, and another fourth, or more, for the food which the farmer raises on his place, so that the net result is about the same, except that the farmer can accumulate property and does do so.
Comparing the farmers with other capitalists it is very evident that they do not obtain adequate returns on their investments as compared with what others receive. There is scarcely any other large industry in the country that has not brought forth large fortunes for some of the most energetic in it, yet the intelligent handling of a farm affords as great an opportunity for executive ability as is needed in a mercantile or manufacturing business, and a much greater . opportunity for hard work.
In the year 1919 three hundred and fifty thousand corporations in the United States made net profits twenty-five times greater than that of the seven million farmers. It took five hundred farmers to make, as much as one of these corporations. The profit of one coal company during the World War was 7,856 percent. 7
farm Logtea in 1920 " r
TN 1920 the average farmer lost over a thou
sand dollars on his crop. The crops were the . most costly to produce in American history but -when they were marketed the prices offered *-were thirty-three percent-below what they were at planting time. The sudden drop has left the farmer with a heavier burden of debt than he has carried for a long time; and it is said that about one-fourth of them are virtually bankrupt.
Much of what the farmer raises is fed to his' stock. The balance which he eould sell for cash . brought him about sixteen billion dollars in 1919, but in 1920 this amount was decreased by five and one-half billion dollars.; and if the decrease in the "value of live stock products be . taken into consideration the farmers suffered a setback in 1920 amounting to eight billion dollars. Most of this huge loss has bfeen absorbed in profits by middlemen before the ultimate consumer was reached, so a considerable part of the farmer’s capital and credit has been transferred to those who already have too many favors at the hands of those who have capital to supply and credit to extend.
With one-third of. the country engaged in _ agriculture, the rest of the country does twelve and one-half times as much “business”, much of it consisting in swapping the farmer's products back and forth, always at a profit, and seldom to his ’advantage or to the advantage of those who must.eat or wear what the farmer produces. - '
So severe were the 1920 losses that in Texas, Kansas, Illinois and Iowa the percentage of decreased valuation of farm property amounted to. between forty and forty-five percent. Lands in the Mississippi delta which brought $400 an acre but a little more than a year ago are now selling for $100 an acre, and mules which then brought $250 can now be bought for $75. . There is' some danger that in 1921 these losses . _ may actually produce the food shortage which was predicted for 1920. Fanners can hardly be blamed for not wanting to lose the increased value of their lands by producing crops at a loss; and as the farmer can always produce enough to keep himself and his family, he has it within his power to create a situation more
terrible in possibility than it is in probability.
Competition from Abroad
•" TT IS a new experience for the American •" A farmer to find his own market invaded; but the invasions have been so serious that during the first eight months of 1920 the import of r . foodstuffs was almost exactly the same as the export, and in the month of August the imports •actually exceeded the exports to the amount of , $55,900,000. This means that the high prices ruling here attracted agricultural products from other countries to such an extent as to make the foreign markets of American farmers » valueless to them.
For the fiscal year ending June, 1920, the United States imported the equivalent of twen-1 ty-five million bushels of unshelled peanuts. It is estimated that in the year 1920 the southern farmers lost from twelve million to fifteen mil-f lion dollars due to the importation of peanuts from China. It goes without saying that the J farmers or the south are no more able to. com-
i
1 t
pete- with coolie labor than is any other industry.
In July, 1920, one steamship brought into New York more than four million pounds of Danish butter, and for a long time it came at the rate of a million pounds a week. This is. the more remarkable, coming from Denmark, because at the close of the war she had few cows, not having been able to raise enough feed for them, or to buy it from the United States during the war. All this recovery has taken place in two years.
During the winter just past it cost $1.23 per barrel for the Maine potato growers, in the famous Aroostook district, to land their potatoes in New York, while Holland potato growers placed them on the dock in New York for twenty-five cents a barrel. In the sama winter months four hundred carloads of finest lemons were dumped into a gulch near Los Angeles because they could not compete in price with the lemons of southern Europe. The freight charges killed all prospects of selling these lemons even at cost.
One reason why the American farmer is now _ in trouble is that, theoretically, he has a free-trade market to sell in, all of his products being sold at a price which enables them to compete in the world's markets with the competitive products of pauper countries* But actually, in 1920, he had no foreign markets at all, as we have seen, and was at the greatest possible disadvantage because his own natural market in the United States was invaded.
The only good his foreign market did in 1920 was to fix for his products a price so low that he could not sell them for enough to pay for raising them. Then he had the double disadvantage that everything he needed to purchase was bought in a lane which has now for its manufactured articles the highest prices of any country in the world. Protection has protected the manufacturer in America, but it has not protected the farmer. To this we must add the further fact that the fanner has had to pay the highest prices for labor, due to the scale of wages fixed for the protected manufacturing industries.
During the years 1918 and 1919 the prices of farm lands throughout the country went up and up; and those who bought farms during those years, at three hundred to four hundred dollars per acre, are faced with ruin unless the farms were bought outright for cash. At the prices agreed upon the new owners can never hope to pay for them, and the holders of mortgages on such investments have almost as much to worry about as the ones who did the purchasing.'
Improved Farm Acreage
OF THE total land area of the United States twenty-five percent is improved, ten percent is arable forest or cutover land, three percent is swamp land which needs to be drained before it can be used, two percent is irrigable land, four percent is improved land other than wood land, twenty percent is adapted to forestry but not to general agriculture, thirty-two percent is suitable for grazing purposes, two percent is desert and two percent has been used for city lots and railroad rights of way.
The improved farm acreage of today is 293 percent of what it was sixty-five years ago. In 1920 it was divided into 6,449,998 farms, ranging in value from six dollars an acre for grazing lands to eight hundred dollars an acre for highly developed orchards and truck gardens.
But there is an ugly side to this matter of improved acreage. One-half the once tilled land in New York and New England now 11m idle.
, W’-'
■ Those who first farmed these lands sold the fertility off without replacing anything, the low prices obtained for their products not enabling - - - them to purchase the needed fertilizer. . . • The recent census showed a net decrease' of one hundred thousand farms in New York, • Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, » Illinois and. Michigan. There are twenty-nine . thousand abandoned farm houses in Ohio as compared with eighteen thousand a year ago, ■ and seven men leave the farm everv year to one that returns to it This is a serious situation. In Iowa there are 3,732 fewer farms . • than ten years ago, but there are 44,071 more • in Montana, showing the drift of the farming • population toward new lands. In the year 1920 eight and three-fourths percent of the farms of t - Michigan were wholly idle, with 30,300 of the ' houses abandoned. ,
Tenant Farmers Increasing
IN ONE county in Illinois twenty percent of the farms are owned by men who have never seen them, and who live on the Atlantic sea* board. They toil not, neither do they spin, and
t Solomon never had a softer time in his palmi
est days. Any improvements on these farms » must be made by the renter himself. Sixty per-
4 cent of the farmers of Iowa are tenants, most
of them paying an annual rental of twenty dol, lars an acre. Unless these farmers make plenty of money they cannot get along: yet in 1920 ‘ they raised wheat at a cost of $1.88 and sold it at $1.45 a bushel, and raised corn at 75 cents, which they sold at 45 cents.
< Of the farms in the Mississippi valley 60 per- cent are worked by tenants; and DeKalb County, Illinois, has 72 percent. Stunner.County, Kansas, has 55 percent of tenants. In Mississippi 66.1 percent of the farmers of the state are tenants; in'Georgia 65.6 percent; in South Carolina 63 percent. Of the land in South Caro-
1 lina 68.7 percent lies idle. Negro owners operate one-tenth of the farms of the state. Taking the country as a whole it is estimated that 37 percent of all farms are operated by tenants and 9.3 percent more by lessees, so that nearly half the land under tillage is being worked by persons other than the owner.
Soil ownership is the foundation of social • order. Take the land away .from the people, and you have another Mexico. When a man owns property he is not inclined to turn Bolshevik. Lenine and Trotsky lost the support of the farmers in Russia as soon as they divided up the great estates among them. This is an economic law which other laws cannot change. It is inborn in hitman nature. These conditions make it highly desirable, if not necessary, that tenants should be able to get out of debt in a reasonable time and become owners of farms on their own account.
A tenant does not feel at home on another man’s land. Unless he has the prospect of owning the farm which he leases he has no inducement to build up and maintain the soil of the farm. If he cannot make money he has no permanent interest in the upbuilding of a community, and hence is not so good a citizen as an owner. In some sections the net return on farm lands is only three’ percent: and it is an impossibility for a farmer who is in debt to make enough to lift the mortagage, or even to . pay the interest on the mortgage already existing, without- cutting into his capital. The present outlook for tenant farmers becoming owners is not bright. ,
Wheat Costs and Prices .
IN THE year 1915 the countries of the world producing more than fifty million bushels of wheat each were as follows, in the order of their production: United States, Russia, Canada, India, France, Austro-Hungary, Italy, Argentina, Germany, Spain, Roumania, Great Britain and Turkey. The United States and Canada together produce-one-third of the wheat of the world.
Not all of the United States is. as favorably situated for the production of wheat as North Dakota. In that state, during the past fourteen years, by means of crop rotation, good seed and good cultivation, the increase in wheat production per acre has been fifty-four percent, and they have made some profit even in bad years. Eleven years’ data on farms at Bathgate, Larimore. Hoople, Portland Junction and Wahpeton, North Dakota, all in the Red River valley, show that the average annual income at these places, exclusive of any cost for land rental or interest on the investment, was $16.32 per acre per year. This is the interest at six percent on land worth $272 per acre. - '
The Government investigated the cost of pro-
-• dosing the 1919 wheat crop on 481 farms scat-r tered widely over the wheat-producing areas, _ and found the average cost to lie $2.15 per i . bushel. In that year the Government was guar-f ’ anteeing the fanners a price of $2.26 per bushel, and at that price one-half of the farmers who raised wheat raised it at a loss. On twenty of r' the 481 farms the cost of raising was over five dollars per bushel. On two of them it was less ;than one dollar per bushel. .
Farmers have taken wide notice of the fact ' that there is a great disparity between what
# they receive for their wheat and what others . receive. A Senator in Washington made calou-
1 - lations which showed that when the farmer was
t getting $8.37 for the wheat in a barrel of flour,
the miller was getting $12.70 for the same wheat, the baker was getting $58.70 and the Washington hotel-keeper $587.
1.." Another Senator calculated that a 196-lb. . barrel of flour produces three hundred sixteen-
1 ounce loaves of bread owing to the water, salt 1 and other ingredients used; and his figures showed that when a barrel of flour is made r into bakers’ bread the farmer receives one-.fourth of the retail price of the bread, while
1. the other three-fourths go to elevator men, ,' millers, jobbers, wholesalers, bakers and retailers. In the year 1920, a most disastrous year for wheat growers, the Northwestern flour ' mills made profits of 44.7 percent, and during
■ the preceding five years their average annual
. profits were 24.4 percent.
“Fixing” the Price of Wheat
THE price of wheat is “fixed” in Liverpool and Chicago. Theoretically the price is what . it is because a fairly constant supply, from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres and from wide ranges of climate, is pouring into the markets of the world, the chiefest of which is Liverpool, the principal port of entry for the world's greatest consumer.
The United States produces a surplus of ___wheat. Theoretically that surplus is sold in ! Liverpool at auction, and the price which it brings is the going price for all the wheat raised in the United States. Various things conspire, however, to prevent the carrying out of this theory without more or less interference.
The American farmer is a long way from his Liverpool market. Not merely is he confronted with the fact that transportation and elevator charges are all subtracted from the amount which gets back to him, and that he has limited means for controlling any of these charges, but he is peculiarly helpless as respects the Liverpool price. If arrived at by a conference in which he was in some way represented he could have more confidence in it. The prices are really fixed by great financial interests that have a controlling “say” in governmental affairs.
Even in normal times it has been learned that surplus manufactured goods have been sold in foreign countries below cost, while the very highest prices were charged for the same goods here in America. The knowledge of this fact, and the certainty that he has paid the high prices for the manufactured goods sold in the American market, makes the farmer wonder whether perhaps the same principle may not be working in the case of the wheat surplus, except that in this instance there is no way of holding up the domestic price.
During the years of the war the price of wheat was admittedly fixed by collusion between the governments involved, and arbitrarily fixed in such a way as to encourage wheat production in Britain and to take into account the increased costs in the United States as compared with Australia, and even with Canada. In 1917, when the government-fixed price of British wheat was $2.24 per bushel, the price of Australian wheat landed in Britain was 72 cents less per bushel. The knowledge of this difference was kept from Australian growers by means of the censorship.
At one and the same time, when the British Government was paying $2.40 per bushel to American wheat growers, it was paying but $2.20 to Canadian farmers and as low’ as 96 cents to $1.14 per bushel to Australian farmers. The compensation of the Australian farmers was kept down by juggling the freight rate, which, 45 cents per bushel between Australia and England according to the British Blue Book, by a system of bookkeeping on the part of the Australian goveriunent was made to appear as if 96 cents.
American governmental-control of prices of wheat and flour was relinquished at ’’.e end of May, 1920, and straightway the pric f wheat fell. From July first to November firs, the price dropped from $2.53 per bushel to $1.83. The explanation offered for this is that the world has not the purchasing power tb buy $3 wheat, and that Britain diverted her wheat orders to Australia. India and the states along the Danube, whenever possible, where she could get snore forTier money than in the United States.
The key price to farm products is the wheat price. As wheat goes, so go ail products of the farm. Corn and oats fall, if wheat falls, and rice, cotton, tobacco, and finally garden produce slip down the price hill. A. special attack was made on wheat in 1920, which by a hidden fraud rapidly depressed the price. Like other international products the lowest price in the international market is the price for the whole' world. Wheat comes largely from India, Russia—formerly—Hungary, Argentine, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. If the price of wheat could be forced down in one of these markets the others would follow.
It happens that in the Argentine wheat market there are practically only five large buyers, England, France, Holland, Germany and Belgium, who deal through five firms, which control absolutely the Argentine market. If the relatively small amount of wheat from Argentine could be forced down in price, the immense . amount L'rmn the United States would fall. So these fiv • countries conspired to force down Argentine wheal. For days at a time they would <-oi:o^rt? Uy stay out of the Argentine market, and from lack of demand the wheat offered there on those days would drop in price as much as six to nine cents, a bushel. At the same time the buyers of these countries refrained from buying in the great Chicago market for wheat, thus creating a situation in that market peculiarly susceptible to a low foreign price. Thu.- by fraud under the lead of Great llritain, the largest buyer in the great wheat '•onsniracy of 1920, the price received for wheat by the American farmer was depressed with unprecedented rapidity, and with it went the other grains and the rest of farm produce, to die ruin of hundreds of thousands of farmers who got almost nothing for their crop but hard work and a loss. ■ „
Tills job was pulled off by rich men, and it was to this class that the" Apostle James by inspiration addressed these burning words: “Go to now. ye rich men . . . Ye have heaped treasure together [not to keep but] for the last days.
. . . Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields [the farmers], which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth [for divine vengeance]: and the cries of them which have reaped [the farmers] are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth” (Greek, armies—this time the rich have done it once too often; God is now paying attention to their treachery, and the great armies of .the Lord—the politically embattled farmers and workers are already on the march against their oppressors, determined now that such wrongs shall be no more forever).—James 5:1,4.
Wheat Speculation
IN THE Chicago Board of Trade, in October, 1920, more wheat was sold than was raised in the United States during the entire year, and the corn crop was sold fourteen times in the same place before a bushel of corn had’ reached the markets. These speculators know just when the farmer must sell, and they take advantage of the farmer’s necessities to gamble away his profits by trading in what are called “options”, covenants to deliver a given quantity of grain at a given price in some future month. Farmers have under agitation plans to prevent this option trading, a thing that was done of its own volition by the Government during the war, and until July 15th last.
The maintenance of the system of fixing the price of the farmer’s products by gambling on the stock exchanges results in low prices to the farmer, high prices to the consumer, and an easy living and vast profits for the speculators. The system has its defen<b-KS. The. claim is made that the speculator tends to stabilize prices, and that fluctuations am always gr.mvr in markets where there is no organized speculation. For example, it is pointed out *’e:t in London, in 1335, before the days of Bear,’s of Trade, wheat sold for' ten shillings a bu.db l, and that the following year, on account of unusually large crops, it sold for ten pence a bushel. The devil "never hesitates to go back six hundred years, or longer if necessary, to find some excuse to justify -his Satanic majesty’s way of doing things.
Saving Sortie of the Profits
IT IS evident that some one must hold the hulk of any crop until it is consumed, and the farmers claim that there is abundant evi-- deuce that the wheat crop could not have been . in more unscrupulous hands than the gang of gamblers and “bankers” that have heretofore directed its disposition. It is their claim that the age-old custom of rushing farm products to the market has played into the hands of the speculators who, having forced prices to the lowest point, stocked up heavily. Then, as the prices advanced; they received the profits which . the farmers had been previously forced to lose.
These speculators are always ready to advance . ..their prices after they have the crops in their hands, but only the most urgent of reasons can cause a reduction of ever ? o little.
An evidence that there is money in holding ■ back wheat until the time for consumption has arrived is afforded by the fact that in numerous instances where farmers have gone in together . for cooperative grain elevators, the elevators have made a yearly interest of thirty to one-hundred percent on the investment.
Two of the largest elevator systems in Cana-’ da are owned and operated by fifty-nine thousand farm shareholders. These are the United ,Grain Growers and the Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator Companies. In addition, the Dominion Government has storage elevators with a capacity of eleven million bushels.
Throughout tin? districts served by these seven hundred cooperative elevators, the farmer first brings in his wheat and receives a certain price. Later in the year, as the price becomes more definitely fixed, he gets a little more: and at the end of the year he gets the balance. By this method the man who raises the wheat gets the .full price for it, instead of having the profits diverted to the pockets of speculators.
Farmers of the United States have now taken up this matter of cooperative elevators in earnest, with prospects of interesting developments within the next year or two. Such an elevator company was organized at Twin Falls, Idaho. Octolier 11. 1920, and doubtless in scores or hundreds of other places.
Meantime, the farmers have undertaken to accomplish something by going r\t things in a ’ cruder and less effective way. Tn North Dakota twenty-three banks were forced to sit down and wait quietly, with Hosed doors, until the farmers got ready to sell their wheat, which, at the time of our information, they were re
fusing to part with for less thau $2.50 per bushel.- .
At the end of December, .1920, seventy percent of the farmers of Nebraska were still holding to their wheat, waiting for a three dollar price. There is a risk in all this, however, along with the chance for a profit; for as soon as Canada, Australia, Argentine and other wlieat-produeing countries find an artificially good market created by the withholding of American wheat, they are bound to take advantage of the situation to rash their own products into the void. '
In Kansas, in December, there were seventyseven million bushels of wheat stored, waiting for a better price. It makes the heart ache for the promised kingdom of God to read that at that same time twenty million people were starving in China, parents were selling their fourteen-year-old girls at four to five dollars each, to lie taken to the cities and placed in brothels: and as they themselves left their pitiful hovels, to starve by the wayside elsewhere, they were tying their younger children to the trees so that the little ones co.uld not follow them. We have starvation in New England, too.
People who glibly quote, "God’s in His heaven, all's right with the world”, should use their brains and learn that we are now living in the time of Satan's kingdom, not Christ's kingdom, and that the whole trouble with the world is that the Desire of all Nations is not yet in control. But cheer up. the Dawn is near!
Farmers who are trying to extend their marketing ’periods have good Biblical authority for the storage of food in times of plenty, as witness' the story of Joseph, who saved the surplus in the seven years of plenty to last over the seven years of famine. As far as the consumers are concerned, they would be quite as well pleased, and their intere.-ts quite as ’.veil cared for. -if the storing of grain were done by the farmers until the time of consumption, as they would if do::-* by those financial interests which have so abundantly proven in the recent past that they cannot be trusted in Hiiythini} which has to do with the welfare of the people or tn any statements whatever that they mak -*. Many countries of the world arc short of I;,-at. but do not have the money to buy. This is true of Germany, Austria and Armenia.
Federal Restrvt w. Farmer*
IN Golden Age No. 37 we have discussed the
Banking and Pawnbroking question at quite some* length, and made .'<>me reteieuc . attitude of the Federal Reserve Bank toward the farmers. It here seems advisable to extend these remarks; for it seems evident that the farmers will never receive from this institution, in carrying their products until the markets are ready for them, the assistance that has been and is being freely granted to the jobbers and wholesalers after the farmers’ products are in their hands.'
The Federal i».eserve Bank is a pruately-owned institution controlled by Wall Street bankers. Under the law the Secretary of the Treasury is the chief officer of this system. When in the winter of 1920-19’21 the farmers oame to the then Secretary of the Treasury, asking his consent to the principle that warehouse receipts, based on the products of the farmers, should be made the basis of credits to be granted to the farmers by the Federal Reserve system, he refused point blank, though he consented that those same products, after they had left the farmers’ hands, should be used as the basis of credit to the plug-hat gamblers and profiteers that have done so much to ruin the world.
The Federal Reserve system was found adequate for the financing of America and her allies during the war, but credit to the farmer has been restricted and the rate of discount on farm products has been raised. The banking resources of the United States were stated by the Comptroller of the Currency to be >53,079,-108,000, and as America is the credit-reservoir of the world it is passing strange that the temporary support of credit on the perfectly liquid assets of farm produce between harvest time and time of need should be beyond its powers.
The banks, including the Federal Ib-serve, have profiteered all the time, and are >till profiteering. More than a billion dollars was Ijeing loaned on Wall Street as call money at the very time when the yeomanry of the great West were vainly seeking to hpld' their products a little time for a better price. A crop represents a whole year’s work to the farmer; and if he has no credit and has to dump all his products on the market at once, and take what is offered him at the time the price is lowest, he is treated most unfairly.
The proposition recently made to transfer the one hundred million dollars of profits of the Federal Reserve Bank to the farm loan banks, and thus aid the farmers, is like expecting a man to get well by sucking the wound from which he is bleeding to death, and then swallowing the blood. To get the point of this remark, take note that in Iowa and other western states, in October, the banks were demanding a twenty-five percent discount on farmers' eight percent notes.
Since the war the situation calls for more money to the average man, and a greater distribution of money than ever before; and the efforts of Big Business to force things back to where they were before the war can succeed only in throwing farther out of joint conditions which were already sufficiently disorganized.
The Federal Reserve Bank began the policy of restriction of credit early in 1920, and the business of the country went down before that policy like a house of cards. It may be good business to ruin the country’s business so that the business of the country will not be ruined by some other means, but there is a vague suspicion that the financial interests which seized billions in profits during the war are now trying to double those profits, already capitalized, by making every dollar twice as valuable as it was when the profits were made.
Some of these men are frank in saying that the job was badly overdone. Some in the Federal Reserve seem to have sensed the same thought. The Chicago branch of that institution requested the farmers of Iowa to accept their losses and pay the Iowa bankers what was owing to them, because the Iowa banks were then short of money and would be until the farmers sold their grain and paid up.
The financial interests have the farmers at their mercy in another way. There are three groups of bankers in Wall Street who dominate the 207,000 miles of railroad in this country. These railroads wield a crushing power over the farmer. They are now squeezing him as never before. The rates are sky-high, so high indeed that many shippers now send thmr goods by truck rather than try to use the railroads at all.
The War Finance Corporation might con-
eetvably have been of some help to the farmers. . At the time it was dissolved it had in hand • applications amounting to one 'hundred million dollars for the export of copper, steel, tobacco, ' cotton, coal and ships, backed by prominent bankers of Italy and Czecho-Slovakia.
JKrat Coots and Loaa
DURING the year 1920 all kinds of live stock
—horses, mules, cOws, steers, sheep and hogs — decreased in numbers in the United States, and the decrease in their values over the previous year was $2,250,000,000. Part of this decrease is due to the fact that Europe and America cannot afford to eat much meat, and the American farmer could not therefore afford to raise it; and part is due to the fact that other countries are raising meat in larger quantities than previously.
Before the war Brazil exported annually les? than two million pounds of meat; in 1919 it exported two hundred and fifty-one million pounds. Before the war British South Africa exported five hundred thousand pounds of meat; - in 1919 it exported forty-six million five hundred thousand pounds. .
What is true of wheat is true of meat The farmers do not receive as large a proportion of the consumer's dollar as they should. There are towns in the United States where there is one meat dealer to every four hundred of the population. These dealers take large profits on their sales, and even at that can hardly make a living.
. Five farmers, visiting Washington, D.C., in an effort to have something done for the farmers, paid eleven dollars for a modest meal consisting of steak, potatoes, com, bread, butter and coffee,with no dessert and no tip; and when they came to figure it up found that the farmer who had produced the food had received just eighty-two cents of the amount At that time, ' within a few miles of the capital, Virginia steers were selling at eight cents a pound. -
Reports of government experts showed that in DeKalb County, Illinois, only sixty miles from the plants of the millionaire packers of Chicago, in the season of 1918-1919 only forty percent of the cattle were produced at a profit, while during the 1919-1920 season only five and one-half percent were produced at a profit
In November a ship arrived in New York with one hundred and fifty thousand carcases of New Zealand lamb at fourteen cents a pound, which is less than the American farmer can raise it for, and possibly less than the New Zealand farmer himself can raise it for. The effect of that shipment, and the attendant circumstances, was that two thousand sheep sold in the Chicago stockyards at a price which netted the shippers only thirty-four cents a head, and a fanner near BlaisdeIl, N. JX, who shipped twelve sheep to the South St Paul market received a net return of three cents for the twelve.
On the demand of the Government, and with a view to lowering the cost af Jiving, the packers knocked the. bottom out of the hog market in the Fall of 1919, and thousands of American farmers went bankrupt Thie alius^ter of the farmers was followed by/an a&trance of eleven percent in the price of t. baogtt 'During the months that followed, tike retaWprices of pork and pork products actually advanced while the wholesale price of pock onjho hoof was falling nearly one-half.; H '
In June, 1920, to show the gait that the profiteers had struck and were still keeping up, the farmer was getting $5.50 per hundred less for his pork than the year previous, and the retail prices of ham were $3.00 per hundred more. A farmer near Baltimore sold his pigs at seventeen cents per pound, and chops from these same pigs were delivered to his own home and charged at forty-five cents a pound. In January, 1921, hogs weighing two hundred pounds each were being sold for nine dollars apiece.
As late as April, 1920, the farmers still had great hopes of making money in meat At that time, in Villisca, Iowa, a pure-bred Poland-China sow, which had been bought fifteen ' months previous for $265 was sold for $40,000. It was a bad buy for the second purchaser.
Taking the Skin Off
over was
THE Hide and Skin companies have been * taking hides of the farmers recently at a price that is illuminating when we ponder the propaganda with which the country flooded only a little while ago to justify the outrageous prices for shoes. A few illustrations tell the story:
J. W. Patton, Rayville, Mo., sold a hide at five cents per pound. The hide brought him -$2.80; for it weighed forty-six pounds. On the same day Mr. Patton had his shoes half-soled, the leather mi&Ung perhaps a pound, and paid $1.40 for the jidfewa wonder what Mr. Patton thought that night when he went home with his ninety cents, his munificent reward for skinning the cow and taking the hide to market
A subscriber in Pennsylvania reports sending a calfskin and a Iiorsehide, both large, direct to a tannery company. For these two hides he received $2.50 net, after the expressage of $1.25 had been deducted. Shoes ought to be cheap at that rate.
We have before us an invoice or credit memorandum of the Southern Hide and Skin. Company, Jacksonville, Florida, made out in favor of J. W. Moffitt, Hallandale, Florida. It allows five cents per pound for one green-salted hide, ostensibly weighing thirty-five pounds. The word as we got it from Mr. Moffitt, through a friend, was that the hide weighed very much mote. It had been cured by having not more than a pound of salt rubbed into it When the hide arrived the Huie and Skin Company "deducted” a weight not stated for the salt in the hide, "deducted” ninety-seven cents more for freight charges, and rewarded Mr. Moffitt with seventy-eight cents for skinning his cow, curing the hide, wrapping it up and shipping it to Jacksonville. •
We thought this so rich that we wrote to the Hide and Skin Company inquiring whether they had any securities on the market of interest to investors; but they must have smelled a rat among their hides somewhere, for the letter that we longed for never came. However, we did get an answer to the letter which we wrote Mr. Moffitt asking whether we might publish the ' facts about the talcing of his hide; and his letter in reply gives some more facts and shows that this first Hide and Skin Company were benefactors to humanity compared with the next crowd he fell in with. He says:
"Perhaps you better not say anything about that; for I got dissatisfied with that firm and shipped to Sabel Brothers two hides a few clays apart and received for the on<; thirty cents and for the other ten cents; I don’t mean per pound, but thirty cents and ten cents ench. They did say that the hides arrived in bad condition. which might be true or might not. One hide was shipped two hours after being taken off the animal and .-should have been in Jacksonvillo the following morning, at most not over twenty-four hours off the animal. The other was three-or four days here before shipping, but was salted. I should have kept both hides longer; for the one I kept the longer brought the higher price. No! I don’t care what you say about it; you have the facts, only the income tax man might get next to the facts and get me on excess profits.”
Garland Morri ss, of Manteo, Virginia, sent a fourteen-pound cowhide to a hide and fur establishment in Richmond, was allowed four cents a pound for it, total fifty-six cents. From this amount forty cents was deducted for express, and the remaining sixteen cents was forwarded in postage stamps. This was in Jamu. ary, 1921.
W. A. Sewright, Buffalo Gap, S. D., shipped a fifty-pound hide to a hide-buying firm in Omaha, was paid six cents a pound on thirty-four pounds, total $2.04. But there was deducted $1.61 for freight and thirty-nine cents for cartage, so that the net amount received for the hide was four cents.
' H. M. Scott, Stanley, North Dakota, shipped a cowhide to Minot, N.D.; and after the freight charges were deducted he received a net return of three cents. - '
C. D. Helms, Marmon, North Dakota, holds the banner. He sent a thirty-one pound hide to the Watertown Hide and Fur Company. He was allowed four cents a pound for the hide; but the freight charges were $2.09, and the Hide Company sent Mr. Helms a bill for eighty-five cents for sending them the hide. And shoes are $6 to $16 a pair.
We hope that as Mr. Helm looks at that bill he gets joy from knowing that in the year 1919 the American Hide and Leather Company made 265 percent profit over their 1914 profits, and that in the same year the Central Leather Company made 103 percent over their profits for the previous year. The accumulated profits of Central Leather Company rose from 7j millions in 1914 to 30J millions in 1919; the dividends of the American Hide and Leather Company common stock were thirty-five times as great in 1919 as in 1915, when they were ample; and the profits of the great Endicott-Johnson Shoe Mfg. Co. were $9,791^580 in 1919 as against $2,174,430 in 1915. The cost of the leather in a shoe is about one-sixth the price of a shoe.
Speaking of hides, the profiteers skinned the farmers and the rest of the people alive, and then were in deadly fear of the shadow of the penitentiary for their offenses under the Lever
Act. It was needful to keep attention off from themselves; and through their newspapers they . kept up a succession of roars for**Americanism” against pro-Germana, Bolshevist., and Reds until the Supreme Court decided they had not violated the Lever Act. No further need of a smoke screen, and the newspapers are again about the domestic business of maligning the NonpartisanLeague and other away-from-Wall-- Street movements.
_ Milk, Butter and Egg»
IN New York, when the consumers were paying sixteen cents a quart for milk, the producers were being paid six and one-tenth cents a quart In Chicago, when the consumers were paying fourteen cents, the farmer received five - and two-tenths cents; and in Omaha, when the consumers were paying fifteen cents, the farmer was receiving six cents a quart. The farmers think that this is too great a gap.
The warehouses about New York are crowded with condensed milk and evaporated milk put up when sugar was twenty cents a pound. This milk is held—until rotten—to be sold at fifteen cents to twenty-five cents a can, and cheaper milk and cheaper sugar now in the market are being refused by the manufacturers until the old product is worked off at the war-prices- at which it was made. In the meantime the consumer pays high prices, the farmer has no market for his milk and must kill his cows for beef at a time when the beef market is all shot to pieces.
When butter was selling to consumers at eighty cents per pound, the producers were being paid but forty-five cents. In January, 1921, the farmers in Tennessee were being paid only twenty cents a pound for their butter.
•EaHy in January twenty-one carloads of eggs •frbm China and three carloads from Japan came through in a solid train from Vancouver. These eggs came through in twenty-one days from Japan to Vancouver and in ten days more were distributed, twelve carloads in New York, seven in Boston, four in Philadelphia. They arrived just in time to command a winter price of sixty-two cents, but the arrival caused a drop of ten cents a dozen in the wholesale market.
In the same special egg train came four cars of choice California eggs, which find their way into the New York market through a cooperative society. This society makes a specialty of shipping the eggs in a uniform and attractive mann^.
On February eleventh, when the finest graded California eggs were selling in the wholesale market of New York at forty-three and forty-four cents per dozen, retail grocery stores in New York, operating large chains of stores, were charging the people eighty-four cents a dozen for the same eggs; and as eggs make up twelve percent of the business of the average grocery store the people may judge whether or not they'were fairly treated.
Pulling the Wool Over
ONE of the concerns that stood out with“100 percent [profit] American” distinctness during the war was the American Woolen Company. If you had known how this company intended to stand by Uncle Sam in his hour of need, and had invested one hundred dollars in its shares in 1914, you would have drawn out $459 in dividends during the next fivo years and could then have sold your stock for $1,204. Uncle Sam got after this concern for profiteering at his expense, only to find, by the decision of a wise judge, that woolen cloth is not woolen clothing, and that therefore no way existed under the law to make the chiefest of all cloth profiteers disgorge. ’
Now let us see what follows. The wool manufacturing interests must, have sold, out an enormous quantity of wool, bought at a low price and sold at a high price, in order to have caused Uncle Sam to cast a suspicious eye at its enormous profits. Having sold out the Govermnent and the people at such outrageous prices that suits of ordinary clothing sold in the retail stores at one hundred dollars a suit, what would be its next policy? Why, of course, to lay in another enormous stock of wool at a low price. How can this be done? Use all influence with banks (and people who have cleared millions of dollars in profits always have plenty of influence with banks) to curtail the credit of the farmers so that the farmers will have to throw everything overboard. Then those that have accumulated vast surpluses of cash can invest to their heart’s content until another war can be arranged or a propaganda developed showing that the country is short of wool, and
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the prices can be sent skyward again. It is all very simple; it works like a pump.
Something like this has happened. Wool prices have collapsed, and the warehouses are jammed with raw wool, the estimated total being about four billion pounds. Meantime the people are largely clothed with "all-wool" goods maae of old woolen rags, hundreds of tons of which are imported from Germany. It is claimed that the people, to live comfortably, need about twelve pounds of wool per year, but are not able now to get three pounds.
An ordinary suit of clothes weighs six pounds. During the year 1919, when the price of wool suits was $100, the average price paid to wool producers was sixty cents per pound, so that the wool in a suit at that time was worth about $8.60, not affording any too much reason for the quadruple prices charged. .
It was stated in the United States Senate that during the war, when all the women of the land were using wool in Red Cross work, and paying for it at the rate of $4.70 to $5.25 per pound, the farmer was getting for the same wool only seventy cents in the grease, or one dollar and forty cents scoured, and the yarn makers had done not a thing to the farmer’s product but to dye it and spin it into yarn at a cost of a few cents a pound.
Fruit Growers’ Troubles
FRUIT-GROWERS always take long chances.
If it is a good year for fruit, everybody has fruit and the market is glutted, with no profits. Fruit must be supplied to distant markets, with often a poor chance of finding a remunerative market on arrival. In the great Yakima Valley, Washington, in the winter of 1920 the warehouses were piled with high-grade apples, the bins were full of com and the fields dotted with stacks of hay for which there were no purchasers. Farmers with bumper crops were unable to raise enough money to pay the interest on their mortgages or to pay their grocery bills.
Transportation is a deciding factor. Cars must be had promptly for some kinds of fruit, or the crop is valueless. Four thousand cars of peaches and other perishable fruits were wasted in Western New York last year because the shippers could not obtain cars for their transportation. Freight rates are prohibitive.
The demand of the railroads for excessive earnings is strangling the country. Distribution in America costs, in all its items, one-fourth more than in any other country. .
Melon-growers in Colorado and the Southwest find themselves unable to stay in the business on account of the excessive freight rates. It now costs $3.07 to put a crate of melons in Chicago against a cost of $1.96 before the war. This may help melon-growers in New Jersey, at the expense of their western brothers, but there is small comfort in that? to any one that loves justice. Melons remain high to consumers. When the farmers were being paid but eight to ten cents apiece, the consumers had to pay sixty to eighty.
While thousands of cars of apples were rot- . ting in various parts of the country, the prices for apples at fruit stands in the large cities remained the same as during the war. The best apples cost seven to fifteen cents each; and in‘ the dining cars the farmer is charged the same price for one baked apple that he gets for a whole bushel on his trees. ,
At the time when alligator pears were being sold in Washington Market, New York, at three for twenty-five cents, they were being served in Broadway restaurants at sixty-five cents each. This idea of multiplying the market price of food by about eight seems to be a principle with New York restaurants. If your income is small and you 'wish anything to eat, you had better get in line on the raw-food fad now coming into prominence.
Statistics show that for a box of grapefruit retailed at six dollars, the grower received one dollar, the picker and packer one dollar, the brokers, commission men and jobbers one dollar, the transportation companies one dollar and fifty cents, and the retailer one dollar and fifty cents.
Potatoes and Other Vegetables
THOSE who were connected with the food administration during the war have admitted that, contrary to fact, a propaganda was deliberately started to the effect that there was a bumper crop of potatoes, so as to induce the farmers to send their potatoes to market quickly and break the price. In other words, the farmers were deliberately lied to and robbed by the transaction. In the spring of 1920, in the grocery Stores of New York city potatoes were selling at twelve and one-half cents a quart.
, At Poughkeepsie in March, 1920, the price of potatoes was so high that George Booker of Hyde Park, N. Y?, sold three bushels, and with the proceeds bought a ton of coal and had money left over. The next day he sold thirty heads of cabbage and bought another ton of coal with the proceeds, and again he had money left over. Six months later there were fifteen million bushels of potatoes stored in Maine warehouses with almost no market in prospect, and m Virginia Irish potatoes were selling for fifty cents a barrel and prime sweet potatoes at one cent a barrel.
In the spring of 1920, in the grocery stores in New York, tomatoes retailed at ninety-five cents a pound. Six months later Maryland's great tomato crop was rotting on the ground; for canners could not afford to pay anything at all for it, because the warehouses arc filled with high-priced canned tomatoes. Yet, at the very same time, hotel keepers in Boston were charging $1.70 for two tomatoes with the skins removed.
In the fall of 1920, at the very time when lima beans were selling in Boston at eighteen cents per pound, the farmers who raised them were being offered one and one-half cents per pound. In the spring of that year string beans in New York sold at twenty cents per quart.
The Bureau of Markets, of the United States Department of Agriculture, has assisted the bean growers of New Mexico to organize a Bean-Growers’ Association; and it is estimated that as a result of cooperative selling these growers have saved seventy-five thousand dollars in one year, a tenth of which was saved in buying their bags in carload lots.
In the year 1919 John J. Scofield, Wappin-ger’s Falls, New York, on one and one-half acres of land, raised all the food needed by his own family and sold $1,300 in vegetables besides. On June 27, 1920, the Department of Agriculture reported that California oniongrowers were plowing under their crops because the onions would not bring the cost of marketing. In August, 1920, thousands of crates of Cristobal Peris Selected Valencia onions were thrown into the ocean below New York city because the selling price at that time was soven-
ty cents per bushel and no demand. In the Fill of 1920, when the wholesalers in New York weri charging only one cent apiece for first-class cabbages, the retail dealers were charging twenty cents apiece for the same cabbages. •
Cotton~Grower» Ruined
IN Oklahoma, in the Fall of 1920, from fifty to sixty percent of the cotton crop was not picked, because it was cheaper to let the cotton rot in the fields than to pick it The cotton-ginners were charging the same price for ginning and bagging the cotton as during war time, and the price of cotton shoestrings at the local stores was fifteen cents a pair. After disposing of what cotton they did -have ginned, it is claimed that Oklahoma cotton-growers were able to pay only ten percent of their debt*.
Cotton-growers'who expected aid in carrying their crops were disappointed. Banks which had promised aid carried the producers only sixty days, but the big banks will carry the big cotton gamblers long enough. Be assured of that. And the big gamblers will figure on so steering things in Europe and America as to emerge with great profits. It is estimated that even now the world is cutting into its cotton stock at the rate of five million bales per year, and it is but a little while since the world’s cotton conference urged the South to increase its cotton production from 11,500,000 bales to 15, 000,000 bales.
Millions of pounds of cotton were bought and stored at twelve cents. The cost of producing this cotton was much more than this; and as sixty-two^percent of the cotton-producers are tenant farmers, and pay one-fourth of all they make to the landlord, large numbers of them are ruined. Those who harvested -their crops and sell them piecemeal perhaps do as wisely as is possible under the circumstances. Night-riders, are now forcing cotton-growers to cut their production in half and to agree to plant their own food on the remaining acreage.
When the cotton-grower wants cotton goods he must give up ten pounds of cotton for one pound of cotton cloth. Before a committee of the United States Senate, in the spring of 1920, * Senator exhibited a piece of gingham for which he had paid $4.50, and for the cotton In which the farmer had received twenty-five cents; * piece of voile which cost the Senator $3.4S and
{•turned nineteen and one-half cents to the fanner; a handkerchief which cost the Senator twenty-five cents, and for the cotton in which the farmer received one and one-half cents.
Tobacco and Other Southern Products
THE Department of Agriculture has estimated that the cost of growing tobacco is thirty-six cents a pound; and when the central Kentucky tobr co market opened on January third at Lexin .on, tobacco was sold at one-half cent a pound, equal to that sold at the same sale, the year previous, at fifty to sixty times the price.
The net profits of the United Cigar Stores Company in August, 1920, showed an increase of more than one hundred percent over August, 1919. How do they get away with this, year after year ! As previously stated in The Golden Ara, "out of every dollar sold by the General Cigar Company in 1918, 34 cents was profit, while in 1919 it was 38 cents, but this was not enough, so the price of this company's 7-cent cigars was increased to 8 cents.”
Following the collapse of the tobacco market in Kentucky two thousand growers, representatives of one-hundred thousand growers, entered into an agreement not to plant any tobacco in 1921; and a similar organization has been perfected in North Carolina. This will probably mean bloodshed, as it is doubtful whether all growers will concur.
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