Posted on 04/02/2015 7:35:33 AM PDT by kevink0000
I recall an incident, I believe during the Great Depression, when US Marshalls or other police were stopped at the edge of a certain town and prevented from forcing the farmers of that town to destroy their crops. Google appears to have scrubbed any references to this incident. It used to be easy to find on search engines.Anyone remember the name of the town or the year? Thanks.
bttt
Welcome to FR.
I can’t recall any history from the 1930s but I do recall milk dumping and similar price protesting in Iowa and the Midwest, sponsored by the NFO, National Farmers Organization.
This was in the mid 1960s and early 70s.
goooo -Don’t Be Evil- ooogle decided it wasn’t “truth” and filtered it out.
Velcome kevink darlink...
Also check out the ‘Penny Auctions’ during the depression.
I grew up hearing about “penny auctions” when banks foreclosed on farmers & sheriffs sold off their farms to recover value for the banks - except that the people who turned out to bid offered pennies & nickels for livestock, land, & equipment, and threatened anyone who dared bid higher.
Then they gave the farmer back his farm.
I know what you were referring to and it wasn’t the Penny Auctions. Darn thing is hard to remember but I know someone here in Hollywood had a screenplay about it. It wasn;t the US Marshall but Fed agents stopped by an entire town.
and yeah, leftard Google scrubbed it unless my search queries were not exact enough.
I posted this about a month ago.
http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/pings?more=377070139
A few excerpts;
On December 5, 1932 members of Congress were greeted by a crowd of 2,500 men, women, and children on the capitol steps chanting, “Feed the hungry, tax the rich!”
snip
The strains of the Internationale were ringing out from the metropolises of America. In New York 35,000 men and women packed Union Square to listen to communist orators. Led by Unemployed Councils crowds broke into groceries and meat markets in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. In Lincoln, Nebraska 4,000 men occupied the statehouse, another 5,000 took over Seattle’s ten-story County-City Building, and 5,000 Chicago teachers stormed the city’s banks. In Columbus, Ohio Louis Budenz led a mass march on the Columbus statehouse declaring, “We must take control of the government and establish a workers’ and farmers’ republic.” Governor Floyd B. Olson (Farmer-Labor) began building up his own left-wing army, announcing that he was “taking recruits for the Minnesota National Guard” and he wasn’t “taking anybody who [didn’t] carry a red card.” At the same time the response of the well-fed grew less sympathetic (if it ever had been sympathetic) and more violent. Businessmen formed associations of armed volunteers should the worst happen. Police were more willing to use the nightstick, elected officials more willing to call out troops. Father Coughlin was on the radio and Huey Long had Louisiana tied up neatly with a bow. An uprising either left or right in the cities seemed imminent. But as it was when the revolt began it was in the country.
snip
In conservative, Republican Iowa (Hoover’s home state) the embattled farmers had finally had enough. Under the leadership of one Milo Reno, sunburned men reached for their shotguns and pitchforks and proclaimed a Farmer’s Holiday. All roads leading into Sioux City were blocked by insurgents who refused to allow milk to enter (they were protesting being paid 2 cents for milk that was sold in the city for 8 cents). Sheriffs who tried to intervene were disarmed. One farmer told a reporter from Harper’s, “They say blockading the highway’s illegal. I say, ‘Seems to me there was a tea party in Boston that was illegal to.’” “You can no more stop this movement than you could stop the revolution.” Reno himself said, then felt the need to clarify. “I mean the revolution of 1776.” They farmers didn’t align themselves with communism or radicalism of any stripe, they saw themselves as Americans and revolution as an American tradition.
snip
Eventually the “uprising” was broken up with minimal force. But lawyers who tried to foreclose on farms found themselves being threatened (or killed) and in private meetings of the Farmer’s Associations men sang;
Let’s call a farmers’ holiday
A holiday let’s hold;
We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs
And let them eat their gold.
snip
Meanwhile the banking situation was worsening. Since the Crash the public had been hoarding gold which began vanishing from vaults at a rate of approximately 20 million dollars a day. Those who couldn’t get metal took paper, and so the Treasury found itself expanding the currency even as the gold upon which it was based was disappearing. The rampant extension of credit before the Crash meant that America’s 18,569 banks had about six billion dollars on hand to meet forty-one billion in deposits.
There’s more here http://www.alternatehistory.com/Discussion/showthread.php?p=8605287
bfl
That was the plot on a Little House on the Pairie episode I watched the other day
That is a sweet idea.
Something that might help the search: In summer 1933, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration tried to boost the wholesale price of agricultural produce through an artificial scarcity initiative, in which crops were plowed up or left to rot and six million pigs were killed and discarded.
They were intensely unpopular, as you might suspect.
On November 18, 1935, its name was changed to the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation. The FSCC was the first federal contribution to the school lunch programs and the first step toward the national school lunch program.
In 1937-’38 he agency was consolidated with Division of Marketing and Marketing Agreements into Surplus Marketing Administration. Then in 1942, merged into Agricultural Marketing Administration by Executive Order 9069 of February 23, 1942.
After World War II, the Federal purchase and distribution of food services continued. In the 1960s, counties began to cease distributing the surpluses direct to low income individuals, instead providing an early form of food stamp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Surplus_Relief_Corporation
interesting link, yours was.
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