Stomach Strike (Cont'd)

In Iowa last week a thousand shiftless, debt-ridden farmers, many of them with no underwear beneath their ragged blue overalls, extended their strike for higher produce prices from Sioux City to Council Bluffs, across the Missouri River from busy Omaha. On seven highways leading into town they used placards, planks and palaver to turn back truckloads of milk, eggs, hogs and cattle. Sometimes a glib driver argued his way through the picket lines but not often.

Word of these activities was quickly carried to Sheriff Percy Lainson who lets no one forget that he served as a captain overseas with the Rainbow Division. This 225-lb. pillar of the law loudly announced: "We're going to stop this picketing if we have to use 5,000 deputies to do it. Probably not over 100 Pottawattamie County farmers are involved in this affair. The others are hoodlums. Many are from Sioux City, the toughest town in Iowa."

Sheriff Lainson deputized 100 Council Bluffs citizens at $3.50 per day each, armed them with baseball bats and pick handles after one Claude Dail had been accidentally killed while being instructed in the operation of an automatic shotgun. Sent out to Route 34 to break up the principal picket line, deputies jostled the strikers around indecisively, cluttered the highway, halted trucks, witlessly helped the strike.

Next Sheriff Lainson planned a night gas attack on the strikers. He loaded a sedan, its windows shut tight, with three policemen, a chemical warfare guardsman and a deputy game warden. Cans of tear gas were opened on the running board and the car driven full tilt into the picketers. Most seriously gassed was a girl reporter from Council Bluffs. The strikers, blind and gasping, gave ground but not before they had hurled railroad ties at the car, smashing its windows, cutting two of its occupants badly and subjecting the other three to the gas. About 60 strikers were jailed during the night for unlawful assembly but by dawn the picket lines had reformed.

The 60 arrests stirred the countryside. About 1,000 farmers massed to march on Council Bluffs and empty its jail. Ahead of them hurried a wizened little fellow named Reiminsnyder to challenge Sheriff Lainson. Said he: ''These prisoners are out on the streets by nightfall or else-- I'm prepared to meet my God tonight as well as any other time."

Sheriff Lainson thought it over as the mob approached the jail. He suddenly summoned Justice of the Peace Jack Dewitt and arranged for the release of the picketers on $100 bail. The prisoners filed out, among them a piccolo player, a barber, a house painter and a store clerk, all jobless. The deputies swung their baseball bats idly. Sheriff Lainson decided to relax his efforts, put his trust in the lowland mosquitoes to break the strike. The blockade was practically produce-proof.

Dennis Ryan, oldtime farm agitator, visited the Council Bluffs picket lines just when a dairy truck carrying two dozen 35-gal. cans of milk had been seized. Its driver had tried to sneak into town by a back road. Ryan made a public demonstration of the incident before newsmen. "Drag the cans out," he shouted. "Put 'em to one side and we'll dump 'em later. Now you writen' fellers, listen to this. We're here on this thing till everything has been put up 33 1/3%. That's the only road to prosperity we know. Action is-- action. To hell with the Department of Agriculture, to hell with Hoover and to hell with you newspapermen!"

When a reporter asked Ryan what the milkmen's basic complaint was, he snorted angrily: "I don't know. I'm a hog man myself."

Informed that the pickets had just dumped 800 gal. of milk. Sheriff Lainson calmly remarked: "That's highway robbery. . . . I'm an old soldier and I know what I'm doing. . . . I'm just sitting by and waiting till the citizenry is good and enraged. ... A few more outrages like that and you'll see things happen!"

A footless and headless affair, the Iowa "stomach strike" had the active support of only a small faction of the State's 214,928 farmers. At Des Moines it recruited the aid of the "Khaki Shirts." stepchild of the Bonus Expeditionary Force. In the Press of the land it got big black headlines but in local markets no visible increase in farm prices. Farmers unable to sell their wares were closer to starvation than beleaguered city dwellers. Rural politicians from Governor Dan Turner down laid low to see if it would peter out or sweep the Middle West as a successful experiment in direct action.

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