Back to the Farm

In Manhattan last week Mrs. Charles Carey Rumsey, daughter of the late great Banker-Railroader Edward Henry Hardman, announced that through her Co-operative Agricultural Organization Society she was about to send 50 farm-wise metropolitan families upstate to wrest their living from the land. If the project proved successful, she had some land of her own in Virginia to colonize with other jobless.

The Michigan Department of Agriculture listened with interest to Maynard D. Smith, Detroit hotelman, as he propounded a program of agricultural colonization throughout the State on land forfeited for taxes. His idea, not unlike Henry Ford's, is to get the R. F. C. to finance families on 5 or 10-acre plots, close enough to cities and beet sugar factories so that the family could work for cash part of each year. Within 20 years, with small payments, it was estimated that the Government could be paid off.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt sounded as if he, too, were sponsoring a back-to-the-farm movement when last week he told a group at Manhattan's Metropolitan Club: "If every factory wheel in the country were turning at full speed today we should still have 5,000,000 unemployed. When prosperity comes back . . . what are we going to do with that 5,000,000? We have got to restore the balance of population, get them out of the big centres of population, so that they will not be dependent on home relief."

Elsewhere the back-to-the-farm movement was bitterly damned: P: Government statistics showed that U. S. farm wages were lower than they had been for 34 years. Bottom average: 40-c- per day & board in South Carolina. P: "When well-trained farmers, graduates from the school of agricultural experience, with capital behind them, are running right now on the verge of bankruptcy," said Ray McKaig of the Idaho State Grange, "any proposition to take city dwellers and put them on farms is utterly asinine."

P: New Hampshire warned off immigrants who had heard of a bill introduced into the General Court which would stock and sell abandoned farms to jobless heads of families for $1.

P: Indiana's Governor McNutt signed a one-year moratorium whereby no property will be sold for back taxes. P: Iowa's Governor Herring appealed by proclamation for a halt on foreclosures until the General Assembly could act. P: Distressed agrarians, members of the Root Hog or Die Club, marched to St. Paul, Minn., demanded land tax reductions from Governor Olson. Their story: "We were promised years ago that the gross earnings tax would cut the levy; that the gas tax would cut the levy; that the auto tax would cut the levy. . . . These taxes have never cut the levy. We protest this terrible cost of State government. To give just a mill or two less ... is but trifling with the problem."

P:At Grand Meadow, Minn.. Arthur E. Hoover, first cousin to the President, who is trying to help all debtor farmers with a revision of the bankruptcy law, was saved by the skin of his teeth from eviction from his 200-acre farm. The Des Moines Joint Stock Land Bank threatened foreclosure on a $14.000 mortgage which it held on the Hoover farm. Flanked by Farm Holiday leaders, Farmer Hoover worked out a plan whereby, if he could raise the back taxes for 1931, the bank would accept a deed to the farm in full settlement of its mortgage and rent him the place for 1933.

P: In Shelby, Neb. while 500 grim, silent men shuffled to & fro, a farm complete with livestock and equipment was sold under foreclosure for $49.50. The bank holding a $4,100 mortgage protested without avail.

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