Chapter 5: Raise Less Corn and More Hell

Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Amazon, or via our RSS feed: (https://feeds.megaphone.fm/onlythingthatlasts).

Transcript

INTRODUCTION - Unlikely Bedfellows

Sarah Mock: If I asked you to guess about the political leanings of the majority of rural America, what would you say?

What if I narrowed the scope a bit- what about people in the rural South? What about people in rural Georgia? If you’re guessing that rural Georgians are a group that skews conservative, you’re right. Parts of rural Georgia have been won by Republican candidates in recent elections by as much as 80%. In fact nearly all farmland in the state is located in counties that reliably lean right.

Senator Raphael Warnock: And among those Georgians was my then 82 year old mother. She grew up in Waycross, Georgia. Do you know where that is? It’s way across Georgia. She grew up in Waycross, Georgia, where she picked other people’s cotton and other people’s tobacco. But because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton and somebody else’s tobacco picked her youngest son to be a United States senator. 

SM: That was Reverend Raphael Warnock, and he’s not a conservative at all. In fact, after he took office in 2021, after a hard-fought election, he became the first Black Democrat ever elected to the Senate from a Southern state. On first blush, his words here might seem kind of wasted– if this story about a rural Georgian voting for a Democrat is meant to inspire others to do the same, that message, well, might be falling on deaf ears. Because rural Georgians, overwhelmingly, don’t vote for Warnock’s party.

Of course, the point of this anecdote isn’t really to persuade rural Georgians as much as it’s an illustration of local bonafides and a heartwarming story of generational advancement. But the reason it caught my attention was because it harkens to another moment in history, a time when many of the modern pillars of the Democratic party platform would have been popular in farm country, in Georgia, or anywhere else. If anything, today’s Democrats probably would have been seen by many farmers as insufficiently radical, too friendly to business, not beneficial to those who tend the land and the rural communities that support them. In this era, small farmers, tenant farmers, farmworkers, and their communities were so angry, so politically active, and so progressive, that they created one of the few powerful third parties America has ever seen. And for the better part of 40 years, the People’s Party, also called the Populist Party, was the vehicle by which America’s agrarians pushed and prodded the nation towards stricter regulation, the creation of state-run industries, and even fundamental shifts in the nation’s financial system.

The agrarian roots of populism in American politics is what we’ll cover today, and from the often obscure history of rural radicalism, we’ll track the long arc of its impacts, from the turn of the last century right through to today’s political platforms on both sides of the aisle. At the core of this movement was, and is, questions about farmland and wealth, the powerful few and the poor many, owners and labor, that still resonate with rural and urban communities today, not just in Georgia, but throughout the country. And the answers to these questions may well shape America’s political future.

This is The Only Thing That Lasts. I’m Sarah Mock.

PART 1: Populists Rising

SM: The story of agrarian populism in America begins, like many of the stories we’ll talk about today, with a meeting of farmers.

Robert Cherny: In the 1870s, the Grange was started as essentially a rural counterpart to something like the Masonic Order. It was a secret society, but it was for farmers, and it was launched with the hope that it would help farmers to become educated to current practices in farming.

SM: That’s Dr. Robert Cherny, professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University. Robert spent much of his early career studying Nebraska politics of the late 19th and early 20th century. He’s talking here about an important Nebraska staple, the Grange, a group that, from its founding in the late 1860s, was focused on issues affecting agricultural and rural lives.

And this was a wild time to be a small farmer in America. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the nation entered an era of unprecedented uncertainty. Reconstruction began in earnest in 1865, setting off a wave of optimism. But by 1873 the first Great Panic struck, when the government shrunk the U.S. money supply with the stroke of a pen, setting off a devastating economic depression that would last for six years.

Just 15 years later, the economic Depression of 1893 would cause the unemployment rate to stay above 10% for most of the decade. This era, from the 1870s to the 1890s, later became known as “the Long Depression.” And it meant that for a generation, wages were stubbornly low, jobs were scarce, and prices for farm commodities slipped lower and lower. The struggle for small farmers, who at the time comprised about half the U.S. population, seemed endless. In the face of the Long Depression, American farmers hung on for a while, until, unfortunately, the weather turned in their favor.

RC: In 1889, in Kansas and Nebraska, they had a bumper corn crop. And, with a big bumper corn crop, farmers thought, oh boy, you know, I’m gonna be able to pay off the mortgage this year. But what happened, of course, supply and demand, supply went way up, prices went way down. And prices really got so low that in some parts of Kansas and Nebraska, it wasn’t even reasonable for them to sell their corn.

SM: When Robert says it wasn’t “reasonable” to sell their corn. This is in part because the price was so low, they couldn’t even justify harvesting it. The price was too low to in turn be able to afford the mortgage, or seed for next year. But another big reason it wasn’t reasonable was because it might well cost more to ship it to market than the corn was actually worth.

RC: The rates that railroads charged farmers were a source of concern to many farmers, that they felt they had to pay railroad rates to ship their goods to market. They had to pay railroad rates on the equipment and the supplies that they had to buy, and they felt the railroads were gouging them.

SM: In a given rural area, railroads were shipping monopolies, and cash crop farmers had no choice but to work with them, and pay whatever fees they might charge. Grange members, called Grangers, agitated for railroad rates to be regulated, often at the state level, and many of these so-called Granger Laws became official.

While the Grange may have been the prototype of early agrarian radicalism, the forces they unlocked were much bigger than one organization or one issue. As the movement began to take shape in the 1880s especially, radical newspapers were established across the countryside, to air grievances, share information, and to amplify the messages shared by the growing number of activists and organizers that were sprouting up on farms all over the place.

RC: One of the campaigners for the Farmers Alliance and then the Populist Party was Mary Ellen Lease. And she was quite an orator, best remembered for telling the farmers, “Raise less corn and more hell.” 

SM: Mary Ellen Lease was a fixture at populist parades, events which would prove wildly popular and effective. Farmers would paint the sides of their wagons and wave signs and flags as they marched through town, loudly demanding regulation of monopolies, even as they passed by the office of the railroad or the local bank. These parades would end at picnic grounds or schoolhouses, where public meetings led to heated political debates. The activism this created was unprecedented, especially for rural communities, a population that had in the past prided itself on being anti-government intervention.

But the Grange, along with another formative group taking shape at the time, the Farmers Alliance, was triggering a change in how these farmers saw themselves, and in whether their value came from being landholders or land-workers.

RC: The Grangers and other groups later saw themselves as producers. Producers in the sense that labor produces value. So urban workers, as well as farmers, are part of the producing class. But who is not? Landlords, bankers, lawyers. All of these people were seen as not producing value, but only transferring value. Transferring the value that the producers created, and of course, keeping some of it for themselves. They were parasites. 

SM: If this is starting to feel a bit radical to you– you’re not alone! Though these agrarian organization of the late 19th century didn’t book themselves as radical, these were the concepts that they held dear– that they wrote about in their newspapers, talked about when they climbed on their soapboxes at rallies and parades, even wrote catchy campaign songs about, like the populist anthem “A Hayseed Like Me,” sung here by Pete Seeger:

Pete Seeger: I once was a tool of oppression

As green as a sucker could be

And monopolies banded together

To beat a poor hayseed like me.

The railroads and the old party bosses

Together did sweetly agree

They thought there’d be little trouble

In working a hayseed like me

In working a hayseed like me

In working a hayseed like me…

SM: By 1891, members of the Grange, Farmers Alliance, and other groups founded a national political organization, the People’s Party. By the following year the party had hundreds of thousands of members and won dozens of congressional elections, in addition to holding majorities in multiple state houses, largely in the Midwest. The party’s platform was decided at the 1892 Omaha Convention: It demanded government ownership of the railroads, since, in their view, regulation hadn’t gone far enough. They wanted credit from the government, rather than through private banks, because like the railroads, many banks operated as local monopolies, able to reportedly charge farmers as much as 35% interest for things like mortgages and operating loans.

RC: So they were seeking through their new political party to use the power of government to address the kinds of problems they were facing, and there was a third dimension to this. They thought the government had to be more directly under the control of the people.

SM: For the sharp-eared listeners out there, this era and movement are the origin of the word “populism.” The central tenet of populism was a desire to make things more democratic. In many cases, that was by way of state-owned industries, be they railroads or banks, which they believed needed to be more swayed by the needs and desires of the populace, rather than the ambitions of the rich and powerful few.

This vision extended well into the government itself. Another key goal of the populists was direct elections of senators and presidents, which was not the case at the time. Senators in this era were chosen by state representatives, and their selection was often heavily influenced by the very industries the populists despised. All of these aims, and a few others, made it into the populist platform, unified by the goal of protecting producers against those trying to benefit from their labor.

These policies which appealed to farmers particularly in the midwest also resonated with other laborers, like miners in Nevada and Colorado, helping spread the movement even further afield. The party drew enough support to nominate a candidate for President on multiple occasions, the most popular of which was William Jennings Bryan, who first won both the Democratic and the Populist nomination in 1896.

His barn burning speech at the convention that year – entitled Cross of Gold– attacked what he, and many others, understood to be the root cause of two decades of rural struggles: the Coinage Act of 1873 that, in short, abandoned a joint silver and gold standard. In Bryan’s view, the crime of abandoning silver, and shrinking the U.S. money supply, which he called “the Crime of 1873,” not only crashed the economy and helped impoverish a generation of workers, it also favored the rich, urban holders of government bonds at the expense of poor and especially agricultural laborers.

William Jennings Bryan: They tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. We reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city of the country.

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world. Supported by the commercial interest, the laboring interest, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.”

You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

SM: As Bryan delivered this last line, he extended his arms straight out to the sides, offering himself as a Christ-like sacrifice. Among the thousands in the crowd, you could hear a pin drop. He lowered his arms, and descended from the podium, and there was only silence.

When the cheering started, it took nearly 25 minutes to regain any kind of order in the hall. The Washington Post reported that, “bedlam broke loose, delirium reigned supreme.” William Jennings Bryan, at only 36 years old, had just made one of the most important political speeches in American history, because for many poor and disaffected farmers in the crowd, they had never heard a politician speak so directly to their interests and experiences, never heard a leader promise to fight for them against the rich and powerful.

But despite his Midwestern and Western popularity, Bryan did not win the election in 1896, nor in 1900, nor in 1908. William Jennings Bryan never became president, but he did become Secretary of sSate under Woodrow Wilson, and he and other Populist leaders would be instrumental in establishing the federal reserve system to help regulate banks. They pressured Teddy Roosevelt to establish regulation of rail rates, and under both these administrations populists help advance antitrust regulations on a national level.

As the millenia turned, the Populist and Democratic parties became increasingly entwined, and the meteoric rise of populism began to wane.But still, the Republicans took notice. The fact that rural homesteaders had turned on them marked an unwelcome sea change for the Grand Old Party. Homesteaders had traditionally stuck with the Republicans, not least because it was Lincoln who’d signed the original Homestead Act that enabled them to get their land in the first place. But for the first time, something other than religion, identity, and historic loyalties was motivating American voters.

RC: What I found was that in the 1890 Census, that low farm income was the best predictor of Populist voting on a county by county basis. The higher-income counties still split between the Republicans and the Democrats based on ethnic identities. But the Populists were motivated by economics. And as you see the progression of American politics, that becomes an increasingly important part of political identification.

SM: Today the idea that people vote with their pocketbooks seems almost too obvious to point out, but at the time, it was a revolutionary act. Though Robert is quick to point out that this movement stopped far short of later critiques of American political and economic systems.

RC: It wasn’t at all a critique of capitalism because they were small capitalists, right? They were property owners. They weren’t about to threaten the ownership of private property. They wanted to protect the ownership of private property. Wanted regulated capitalism.

SM: This fact– that groups advocating for this radical populist agenda might have been poor, but were also landowners, and therefore capitalists, is one of the key paradoxes of the American agrarian radical movements.

PART 2: Tenancy, Populism, and Sharecroppers

And at the same time, however, while many small farmers did own their land, many others didn’t. Consider that in 1900, many small farmers were homesteaders and their direct descendants. They’d received the land handed out by the government, and the land being sold by private companies and the railroads. But many that came after that were tenants.

When the free and high quality farmland was largely claimed, farmland owners who’d managed to buy up large spreads, or in some cases, who’d gamed the Homestead Act programs to assemble huge swaths of private property, were generally limited in their ability to put all that land to use themselves. These landowners rented out their excess, so that by 1935, about 30% of all farmers in America were tenants, owning no land of their own.

Regional variations were significant. In the South, more than 50% of all farmers were tenants, and nearly 75% of all cotton farms in the country were tenant-operated. And the thing is, this precarious tenure system, and the system of sharecropping that went along with it, was not a given after the Civil War. There were other visions of how farmland would be held in the South.

Alex Lichtenstein: Formerly enslaved African Americans across the South aspired to own their own land, and some did gain their own land. This is the great aspiration of Emancipation and Reconstruction, right? Forty acres and a mule.

SM: That’s Alex Lichtenstein, professor of history and American studies at Indiana University.

AL: Which was a kind of shorthand for saying, to make freedom a reality for Black people in the South, they, we, they would say, need land, because that’s the only thing that will keep them independent from the power of white landowners.

SM: This assumption would prove correct, and when the promise of “40 acres and mule” gave way, and wealthy, white cotton planters held on to their grand plantations, the landless farmers of the South became, to some witnesses, little more than slaves, as part of the sharecropping system.

There’s a key distinction here between traditional tenants and sharecroppers. Where tenants pay their landlord annual rent, generally in cash, sharecroppers, especially Southern cotton sharecroppers, had a more insidious deal. Landowners owned their sharecropper’s houses, “lent” them seeds and equipment, sold them food and clothes in the plantation store, and at the end of the season, the farmer and landowner then quote unquote “shared” the profits. Which for the vast majority, meant the farmer ended every season in debt, or if they were really lucky, they broke even, and ended up with nothing. Sharecroppers and their families toiled in the fields from dawn till dusk, and for their efforts, the vast majority were too poor to afford school, clothing, shoes, or food. They and their children were starving to death picking someone else’s cotton.

The sharecropping system took root before 1900, but what happened after the turn of the century made things worse. The 1910s and 20s were the dying days of the Gilded Age, and brought massive wealth to the titans of major industries, profits of which often went to acquiring land. When the third event in 60 years to claim the title “The Great Depression” kicked off, it led to a massive amount of foreclosures and evictions of small farmers, especially in the South where the bottoming of cotton prices hit farmers hard.

AL: If you look at simply tenancy rates in this region, that is in eastern Arkansas from 1880 to 1920 in 1880, most of the people, Black and white in these counties, 75 percent of them own their own land. And by 1920, only 25 percent of them do. So that sort of progress of land loss and then consolidation and big holdings was a real social transformation in this region.

SM: Large land owners bought up some of this newly available land, but even more was snapped up by timber cutters, insurance companies, and banks. This double era of consolidation and disinheritance led to a massive population of tenants and day laborers in the South. And for many of these tenants, their new land insecurity was a fundamental injustice. It was the key factor that motivated them to consider unconventional alliances.

So at the same time that the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist Party were petering out, a new type of agrarian radicalism was brewing amongst the sharecroppers. A revolt, some might call it, led by a group that Alex has studied intimately:

AL: The Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which was an interracial movement of sharecroppers and tenants and particularly spoke for and to the most dispossessed people really in the country in the 1930s, which were the deeply impoverished sharecroppers and tenants working other people’s land. Especially on large plantations in the Cotton Belt.

SM: Especially for the Black sharecroppers and tenants in this union, the dangerous and deadly work of bringing this organization together was, in Alex’s mind, an act of hope, of striving for the aspiration that their grandparents and great grandparents had at the dawn of freedom– to own their own land instead of working someone else’s.

There were also white sharecroppers in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which made this organization incredibly unique. In the years before, the Farmers Alliance had had to form separate white and Black Alliances in the South in order to maintain the strict racial segregation that Jim Crow norms demanded. But the Tenants Union members, desperate to reclaim some measure of power in a system that was literally starving them to death, resisted.

Howard Kester, journalist and activist, recorded the union’s first meeting where an unnamed Black man stood and argued that quote, “The same chains that holds my people holds your people too. If we’re chained together on the outside we ought to be chained together in the union,” unquote. This was surely not an easy argument to make, or for many in the room to hear.

AL: in this region of Arkansas in 1919, so we’re talking only 15 years before. So this is definitely within most people’s living memory. There had been a racial pogrom carried out by whites against a Black farmer’s organization in a town called Elaine, Arkansas. And this was a vicious pogrom that killed over 200 black people. And it was carried out by whites at the behest of white landowners, but plenty of poor whites joined.

SM: But despite the barriers between, Black and white tenant farmers did come together in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, not least because they had a lot in common. Both were at the mercy of landholders and their violent riding bosses. Both were effectively disenfranchised– Black people by Jim Crow, and poor whites by the poll tax. And perhaps most importantly, both felt fundamentally abandoned by Department of Agriculture programs that were meant to help them.

These programs, part of the nascent New Deal, paid landowners to reduce the supply of cotton, by plowing up fields that had already been planted. The letter of the program required that landowners pay tenants their share of this government relief payment, though enforcement of this requirement was nonexistent. In practice, this program was a windfall for wealthy planters, and an eviction notice for tenants who often were not only denied their money, but were thrown out of their houses and off the property, since the landowner no longer needed them to harvest their plot.

Though sharecroppers of all races often faced this kind of ill treatment ,and the extreme poverty that came with it, there are many ways in which the experiences of Black and white sharecroppers were not similar. White sharecroppers still had the many privileges their skin color granted them in a deeply white supremacist culture, and white sharecroppers were less likely to be murdered due to their work in the Union.

AL: People who joined the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, especially if you were black, you were risking your life to participate in it. And which also meant it was very unusual in that white and Black people in the rural South, they interacted a lot, but it was always in positions of subordination and dominance by the white people, no matter how poor.

SM: The Southern Tenant Farmers Union was officially incorporated in July of 1934, and was initially dismissed by planters who were quoted as saying that, “Sharecroppers are too lazy and shiftless to ever amount to anything worthwhile.” It wasn’t long before the tide started to turn against them,

As the organization began to look beyond demands for New Deal payments, towards goals of becoming a collective bargaining organization, and eventually, an avenue to recover lost land, in 1935 the STFU carried out its first strike, which allowed cotton pickers to refuse the 41 cent wage the planters offered, winning for them 75 cents after a few days, and in some cases a dollar.

But after this first action and more organizing efforts, planters began to respond with violence. News reports of the day note that union members and organizers were regularly harassed, and in multiple cases threatened and murdered, by planters and their agents, in retaliation for their work with the union.

The challenges for the STFU continuing their work were many. For one, most sharecroppers were too poor to afford to eat, let alone pay union dues. But more fundamentally, the union was simply not a very effective tool, for attaining what most of the membership wanted– land.

Part of the STFU did join with a larger federation, leading to a name change, and many more evolutions in the years to come. The other part of the STFU largely disbanded during World War II, when the union encouraged its members to leave the land and migrate north to newly in-demand factory jobs. Department of Agriculture payments, which many planters used to invest in labor-replacing tractors, hurried this exodus.

Even though the Southern Tenant Farmers Union did not reach its goal of getting land for its members, its work marks a critical mid-point between the Civil War and the civil rights movement. And calls for land sovereignty and food sovereignty for BIPOC communities continue to be essential components of civil rights activism through today.

Tenant farmers, too, are still part of the landscape of rural America, though a much smaller part of that landscape than they’ve perhaps ever been. Though around 40% of American farmland is rented today, the vast majority is rented by farmers who also own land. Today only around 10% of farms are operated by tenants, according to USDA. That means a century ago there were nearly 2.4 million tenant farmers in America. Today, there are fewer than 200,000.

The rural radicalism of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union was distinct from that of the Grangers, the Farmers Alliance, and the Populists, but the commonalities between these movements are striking. They were both part of a rural political awakening that occurred between 1870 and the 1930s, during which poor, vulnerable, and often landless farmers realized that they might be individually powerless in the face of extraordinary wealth and influence, but together, they were not.

To my mind, this explains the unity of the populist movement, but not the radicalism. Only one thing explains why these people and groups were willing to buck longstanding tradition, resist social norms, and in some cases put their life on the line: Land. The possession of land is what egregious rail rates and predatory mortgages threatened, and the possession of land was the dearest hope of tenants throughout the country. Whether land was being threatened or promised, the possibility was enough to radicalize, at times, a majority of the American countryside.

Arguably no other issue in the nation’s history has so united ordinary people, leading them not into an existing political tribe but to create something totally new. Something that defied the two-party state that ruled U.S. politics before and since this era. But what can America’s history of rural radicalism teach us about our current political moment and the future of rural politics?

That’s after the break.

[BREAK]

PART 3: Populism 2024

SM: Today, rural politics are not synonymous with populism. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have been widely labeled as “modern populists,” which for most will probably raise some eyebrows about what the modern definition of this word could possibly be.

On one hand, “populist” is a word that is often sloppily, used to simply mean “popular,” as in favorable to a wide swath of the population. Another similar idea is that a modern “populist” is simply a volatile candidate, willing to change their stance on a given issue to align with thinking that’s perceived to be popular. Neither of these usages align with the agrarian populism we’ve discussed today, but there are modern American politicians that claim that older populist title. One such politician is J.D. Scholten.

JD Scholten: You felt this movement happening in places that, traditionally Democrats were, either bullied or scared in these rural areas. They were putting yard signs, barn signs. And it was a whole movement.

SM: J.D. currently represents Iowa House District 1, serving the people of Sioux City as a state representative. But his experience running for office started with a different race, one for a highly conservative congressional house seat in one of America’s most agricultural districts. A seat that, at the time, was held by a long-sitting congressman, Representative Steve King.

JDS: And there’s this assumption that, oh, he just ran against Steve King and people don’t like Steve King. That’s part of it, but it’s also this populist message. And I always, every town hall, I talked about fix, fight and secure, fix healthcare, fight for an economy that works for everyone and secure our democracy from the special interests that are dictating it right now. And I felt that really resonated.

SM: For all that this populist message really resonated in JD’s district, these ideas were not the main focus of our national discussion about rural America in the years after 2016. Mostly because there was another issue that many people were hearing about for the first time, and that many believe explained so much of what happened in that historic election. That issue: the urban-rural divide.

This idea of the urban-rural divide is that while no one was looking, the social, cultural, and economic distance between urban and rural spaces had grown so large that citydwellers and country folk not only could no longer see eye to eye, but did not even occupy the same reality.

Analysts pointed out that rural counties and political districts in many areas never really recovered from the economic devastation of 2008. Rural communities had hollowed out due to the lack of opportunity, limited by closing factories and mines and cratered ag commodity prices, which brought them so low that they were at times on par with what farmers’ fathers might have received in the 1980s and 90s. Any of this sound familiar yet?

This was the stage set for JD’s return to his childhood home in Sioux City, Iowa, where he was the first in his family to grow up in town. In the late twenty-teens, JD’s grandmother had told him it was time to come back and take care of the family farm, and after feeling inspired in the wake of the 2016 election, he was ready to do something more in the community that raised him.

By his own admission, JD was a little naive, so he jumped into campaigning for Steve King’s seat, following his instincts to get his boots on the ground, buying a used Winnebago RV to spend all his time traveling around the large and rural district. He went into that process with some personal beliefs about universal healthcare and getting money out of politics, but beyond these core ideas, he was ready to hear and platform what his constituents were telling him.

JDS: In 2018, we had five consecutive years of low commodity prices. And the number one thing I heard from farmers was health insurance. And that was a light bulb to me. And then I started doing some more research and seeing like, Oh, farmers are getting squeezed on the input side and on the market side. And Oh, it’s these corporations that are getting these huge profits and bragging about their profits. And you’re just using our farmers as pawns and using our land but you’re extracting all the wealth.

SM: The more people he talked to and the deeper he dug, the more he realized that the common theme amongst all these issues was not that there was too big of a divide between ordinary urban and rural people, but that corporations have too much power, that they are using that power to extract wealth from farms and rural communities, and that no one was doing anything about it.

The formal Populist Party may have failed in the early 20th century, but populist ideas and politicians continued to flourish without the official trappings. JD is part of that legacy, and he found it to be a successful strategy that translated across the urban-rural divide. Being able to talk about the cost of medical debt, the need to invest in public education, and in particular, monopoly power in agriculture, and how it’s hamstringing the independence of America’s farmers and endangering the stability of America’s food system.

JDS: Our farmers complain all the time that, you know what, we finally get a decent price on corn, and all of a sudden our fertilizer price goes up. And you just hear the sense, and Oh, you know how many people own seeds, corn seeds, or how many companies own seeds? And it’s three or four. How many companies own a fertilizer three or four? That’s a monopoly, and light bulbs go off.

SM: Obviously, this does not resonate with every farmer, especially not in the ruby red district that JD ran in. But he was quick to enlighten me that despite the stereotype, farmers, even large, conventional farmers, are not a monolith.

JDS: I would say, a mentor politician of mine said you’ll work your tail off for farmers and 75 percent of them will vote against you almost every single time. And I found that to be true. But the reality is when you just talk about these things that I’m mentioning, these populist things, being anti-monopoly, knowing that corporations have too much power, knowing that there’s too much special interest, all this stuff, they are almost a hundred percent on board with all that stuff. And it’s only when you get into the cultural wars or the labeling of Democrat or Republican, that’s when there’s the divide.

SM: This, I’d argue, is a fundamentally populist idea. Agrarian radicals across the spectrum believed that they had more in common with urban labor than they did with the representatives of monopolist power in their rural communities. They believed that if there was an urban-rural divide, it was a question of culture and preference, and not a question of fundamental concerns.

William Jennings Bryan felt confident saying that “toilers everywhere,” workers across the nation, would stand against the elite in the interest of free and fair markets and an equality of opportunity. In part this is because even in agriculturally dense areas like the Iowa district where JD lives, there are more people employed by Dollar General and Walmart than there are farmers today. And rural workers and urban workers have a lot in common.

To skip to the middle of the story, JD did not win the election for one of the staunchest Republican congressional seats in Iowa. But he did learn a lot, and he landed in the state house, where he continues to raise hell about things like John Deere sending Iowa jobs to Mexico, and the need to help Iowa farmers do more to feed their fellow Iowans.

JDS: Sioux City is the fourth largest city in the entire state. And yet we don’t have a food hub. What is helping that local farmer have more of a market to do something different to diversify a little bit and to have that urban-rural connection, and that’s money that stays in the community too. I feel we need to create that infrastructure.

SM: As I wrapped up my conversation with JD, we talked a bit about the challenge of using the term populist today, when pundits and academics often mean it as a warning or an insult. JD’s not too worried about the label, but he thinks the different ways that major parties and political figures traffic in populist ideas is something to watch.

JDS: I talk about these issues because the people are there, the people are ready for this movement to happen. It’s out there. I did an event about a fertilizer merger. And we had over a hundred people show up at an event that was thrown together last minute. And it was just, it was, people are feeling it. And it was on fertilizer prices, like not the sexiest topic out there. But at the same time, like when people feel things, that’s when you know, okay, there’s something here. So where do we go from here? I don’t think anybody knows. But at the same time, we’re reliving something that happened over 100 years ago.

SM: Now as ever, populist ideas are often painted as anti-capitalist, anti-free market, even anti-American, despite the long history of American populism, and rural populism in particular. Alongside these critiques and rebukes from across the political spectrum exist populist institutions. In North Dakota, the political descendents of the Grange and Farmers Alliance

managed to establish a state-owned bank and flour mill, both of which still exist. In Nebraska, similar groups created the state-owned power system. In these conservative strongholds, the paradoxical existence of these government-owned industries are accepted generally without question. They are the legacy of small farmers, farm tenants, and farmworkers, and the rural communities which both supported them and that they supported.

The assumption in our modern political landscape is that farmers, and rural America more broadly, are a monolith. Of course, if the recent history of politics in this country has taught us anything, it’s that no group of Americans is a monolith, and that the more fervently their uniformity is talked about and the more certain the way they vote is assumed, that’s the exact moment that they surprise you by changing their minds.

Farmers have changed their minds before, and radically so, along countless lines– owners and tenants, rich and poor, Black and white. And as long as farmers have been changing their minds, they have been a source of great political power in the U.S., not least because farmland, as much as any other kind of wealth, is a tremendous, and very direct source, of political power in this country.

Most Americans have probably been confronted once or twice in their life with the fact that Wyoming, with its half million or so residents, and California, with its 20 million plus, have the same amount of power in the U.S. Senate. Voters in more rural and agricultural states, which in turn have lower populations, have outsized power, then, to shape federal politics. And without question, they use it.

And there is no better evidence about the long term impact of populist values than the fact that populists remain successful, often unexpectedly so, today. JD is not alone. An independent candidate in Nebraska, Dan Osborn, a union mechanic and economic populist, has been neck and neck with GOP Senator Deb Fischer who, in this staunchly conservative state, was expected to win handily.

And what’s more, the fact that rural and agrarian communities are not monoliths ,is often what makes a swing state a swing state. Republicans might be confident in winning most rural parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, even Georgia, but the reason these sections can swing the other way, is because there remain rural voters and communities who are motivated by the party that promises most fervently to fight for the small farmer, for union workers, for toilers everywhere, against the industrialists and monopolists who prey on their labor. And sometimes, that desire to be seen, to have someone stand up and talk about your issues, your needs, your dreams, it leads to some, well, some unlikely bedfellows.

JDS: I have several Republican farmers who reference my Substack. And I think that’s the greatest thing. They’re like, do you read this? He talks about this stuff every week and I warned them all, I’m like, you know, I’m a Democrat, right? Just be like, Oh yeah, yeah, we’re no, you’re good. You’re good.

SM: JD’s newsletter on Substack, which I’ll link in the shownotes, is called You’re Probably Getting Screwed.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

Pete Seeger: But now I’ve roused up a little

Their greed and corruption I see

And the ticket we vote next November

Will be made up of hayseeds like me.

PART 4: Conclusion

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

SM: America’s politics, like its economy, in many ways is a product of American farmland. Since the homestead era, rural radicalism and populist sentiment has ebbed and flowed. Populists have won victories and suffered defeats, accomplishing important work that’s helped protect and enrich agricultural interests, and falling out of favor when the eye of the nation turns elsewhere.

Despite the fact that formal Populist Party was on its deathbed in the 1930s, this was certainly not an era where the country’s attention was turned elsewhere. In fact, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the midst of crises at home and abroad, took time not only to deliver a Fireside Address on agricultural issues, but actually toured around the Western United States, visiting farms and ranches, meeting with farmers and their families who were suffering the catastrophic ravishes of the Dust Bowl. But the ‘30s were no time for dwelling on what was lost, and FDR, along with his young, populist-rooted Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, stepped up to the plate without the prompting of a rally, a parade, or a song.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: No cracked earth, no blistering sun, no burning wind, no grasshoppers are a permanent match for the indomitable American farmers and stockmen and their wives and children who have carried on through desperate days and inspire us with their self-reliance, their tenacity, and their courage. It was their father’s task to make homes. It is their task to keep these homes. And it is our task to help them win their fight.

SM: How the first Farm Bill transformed American agriculture, and how it fundamentally transformed farmland, food, and the American economy. Next time, on The Only Thing That Lasts.

SIGN OFF

SM: Before we sign off, I talked through information from a number of sources and experts today, so if you want to dig into it yourself, check out the shownotes, or our website for links.

While you’re there, make sure you head over to ambrook.com SLASH research to stay up on the latest reporting from the Ambrook team on agriculture, land, and environmental issues like the ones we talk about here on the show. After you subscribe to the podcast, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter, and follow @AmbrookAg on socials for news about upcoming projects and stories. And we can’t wait to hear what you think! If you like what we’re doing, let us know, and don’t forget to share.

The Only Thing That Lasts is an Ambrook Research production. This podcast is written, produced, and mixed by me, Sarah Mock. Our editor is Jesse Hirsch, with support by Ali Aas. Technical support by Dan Schlosser, and general support by Mackenzie Burnett and the whole team at Ambrook.

A final note, Ambrook Research, the media outlet that produced this podcast, is 100% editorially independent from Ambrook, the fintech company that funds it.