Tractors at the gates: institutionalizing dissent to neoliberal agriculture

In 1977, an explosive agrarian movement swept through Colorado and later the entire United States. The American Agriculture Movement (AAM) sought a simple solution to chronically low farm prices, persistently high farm debt, and worsening rural livelihoods: a call for 100% parity prices as established during the New Deal. This article situates the rise and fall of the AAM within the dismantling of the New Deal agricultural apparatus in the early 1970s in favor of broader market oriented reforms within agriculture. The fundamental alterations in the mode of production resulted in the creation of a mass organization that viewed the state as a critical tool in upholding accumulation dynamics. Despite its broad support among farmers, established farm organizations tried to subvert the rising organization. I argue that agrarian discontent was largely channeled into formalized state mechanisms for reproaching rural concerns, thus limiting rural organization in transformative politics. This essay contends that state power remains underexplored and critically informed agrarian class dynamics and organizational aims.

ABSTRACT In 1977, an explosive agrarian movement swept through Colorado and later the entire United States. The American Agriculture Movement (AAM) sought a simple solution to chronically low farm prices, persistently high farm debt, and worsening rural livelihoods: a call for 100% parity prices as established during the New Deal. This article situates the rise and fall of the AAM within the dismantling of the New Deal agricultural apparatus in the early 1970s in favor of broader market oriented reforms within agriculture. The fundamental alterations in the mode of production resulted in the creation of a mass organization that viewed the state as a critical tool in upholding accumulation dynamics. Despite its broad support among farmers, established farm organizations tried to subvert the rising organization. I argue that agrarian discontent was largely channeled into formalized state mechanisms for reproaching rural concerns, thus limiting rural organization in transformative politics. This essay contends that state power remains underexplored and critically informed agrarian class dynamics and organizational aims. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii INTRODUCTION 1 THE NEW DEAL STATE 8 “WE WILL STRIKE” 18 MOVEMENT TO ORGANIZATION 28 FROM TRACTORS TO TERRORISM 34 CONCLUSION 37 iii 1 INTRODUCTION A cold winter settled into East Texas. The serene pastures and resting croplands stretched for miles around, patiently awaiting the renewal in the coming spring of 1979. Arthur Chauncy had grown up on his grandfather’s small farm and became enamored with farm life. While attending classes at East Texas State University, Chauncey rented several smaller farms in hopes of one day farming full time. However, Chauncey, like thousands of others, entered the industry at a time when optimism in farming wanned. Upon graduating, “the head of the Ag department down there, and he was the job placement counselor. He had me a job, working for International Harvester [a tractor company]. I told him I wanted to farm, and he looked at me, said a four-letter word, and said, ‘Didn’t we teach you anything here? You don’t want a farm. You’ll go broke. I’ve got you a good job lined up.’ And I told him, ‘No, I want a farm,’ and he just shook his head.”1 Undeterred, Chauncey farmed. After a few prosperous years in the early 1970s, the winters of 1977 and 1978 saw Chauncey and several farmers meet to discuss their grievances with the state of agriculture. Prices had fallen precipitously and were exacerbated by a successive wave of federal farm bills that further supported lowering government-guaranteed prices and other agricultural supports issued by federal legislation. After attending a brief meeting with other farmers in December of 1978, Arthur Chancey and two neighbors became resolved. They attached a mobile camper and a pickup truck to the back of their John Deere 4430 tractor and in January of 1979 departed for Washington, D.C. Chauncey and thousands of other farmers had been rallied by the American Agriculture Movement (AAM) founded just a year and a half prior in a café in Campo, Colorado. A large “tractorcade,” as they came to be known, had previously been staged in a similar protest at the 1 Arthur Chancey, interview by Elissa Stroman, January 10, 2020, transcript, American Agriculture Movement Oral History Collection, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, 6-7. 2 Capitol a year prior in 1978. Like the previous protest, organizing spread by word of mouth drawing farmers across the country to manifest at the Capitol to call for a swift change to agricultural policy. Along the way Chauncey met up with loosely organized bands of farmers and truckers converging on Washington, forming large slow-moving columns on several interstates across the country. Chauncy recounted: “I think [the column] was thirty-five miles long. But now, we had pretty good intervals between us. I mean, we would have several hundred yards. Now, that included tractors and support vehicles, which there was a lot of pickups, campers, motorhomes, whatever.”2 They first assembled in front of the United States Department of Agriculture [USDA] building and eventually came to rest in the National Mall. The Washington, D.C. police “surrounded us with all these old trucks and everything they could find, and kind of blocked us in, which was the best thing that ever happened. I mean, here we were, in the middle—you couldn’t have been in a better spot in Washington D.C., and we couldn’t leave, so there we were.”3 The group stayed for weeks speaking to representatives, senators, as well as Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland and President Carter. Outright violence during the protests was minimal but tensions flared when 20 farmers were arrested for chaining their tractors together and lighting an old tractor on fire outside of the USDA building. Yet when a snowstorm blanketed Washington, farmers lent a helping hand and cleared snow from the streets with their tractors.4 A new farm organization had been mobilized and was again on the streets of Washington, D.C. For the second time, the American Agriculture Movement (AAM) had staked its claim. 2 Arthur Chancey, interview by Elissa Stroman, 14. Arthur Chancey, interview by Elissa Stroman, 17. 4 Seth King, “20 Farmers Arrested as Hundreds of Tractors Jam Traffic in Washington: Criticism of Protest Origin of Movement,” New York Times, February 6, 1979. 3 3 The AAM’s formation and tactics have largely fallen into a wider historical discussion on postwar farm movements. Scholars of American agriculture have typically recognized sustained periods of low farm prices as the ultimate cause of agrarian organization. The eminent agricultural economist Willard Cochrane famously described the 20th century agricultural experience as a “treadmill” where adventurous “early-bird farmers” initially invested in new equipment that lowered costs and increased scale, thereby, increasing their security in farming.5 However these gains were only short-lived as other neighbors kept pace. Consequently, agriculture generally is plagued by an in-built crisis of advancing productivity that keeps prices low, and forces the state to try to regulate agriculture to avoid discontent and erratic swings in prices. Cochrane himself fit the AAM protesters into this methodology and passively theorized them as falling off of the “treadmill” when they accumulated too much debt following the markedly better years of the early 1970s. In his words, the protesters decried that the “government of the United States was willing to place a price and income floor under their industry but not willing to give them the tools, the monopoly power, to force prices in the marketplace up to the levels that they deemed fair.”6 Other scholars have largely reproduced this causal identification but reflected on the organizational tactics of the AAM in comparison to various other farm movements and their public perceptions. This literature contrasts the AAM’s highly decentralized organizational structure and publicized tactics against the backdrop of more organized attempts at building rural solidarity. For example, the AAM’s failure to effect widespread agrarian change is contrasted with the marketing prowess of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), the public violence of the National Farmers’ Organization (NFO), and the high 5 Willard Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis (University of Minnesota Press 1993), 427. 6 Cochrane, 329. 4 politics of the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF).7 Since their formations, these organizations had developed highly ritualized relationships with Congress. The AFBF has received particular attention, and criticism, for cultivating very favorable linkages with large agribusiness companies and lobbyist organizations. Despite Cochrane’s convenient parable, the 1970s in agriculture represented a more profound change. The rise and eventual downfall of the AAM occurred as the New Deal state entered a period of withdrawal from agricultural support and instead forging a path toward the construction of a distinctly neoliberal agriculture. The AAM protesters framed their idiosyncratic production experiences fully cognizant of the reorientation of American agricultural policy to world market imperatives. The dichotomy identified rhetorically by the AAM protesters posited a shifting agriculture away from “family farms,” sheltered by state controlled parity prices, and the growing power of agricultural corporations. Yet, the eventual fracturing and defeat of the AAM’s goals also reflected the emergent neoliberal state’s ability to recapture and institutionalize dissension among rural producers. Like the AAM, other farm organizations had started as mass movements and later went on to create centralized organizations and often accumulate capital for their own disposals. Yet with the domestic sphere saturated with competitive institutions, the only redress for the AAM protestors rested in state action, where the organization was largely outmatched by established farm organizations that resisted the sudden growing power of an emergent organization and had largely professionalized rural discontent through the quinquennial farm bill process. Using the rise and fall of AAM in the late 1970s and 7 See for example: Jon Lauck, American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly: The Political Economy of Grain Belt Farming, 1953-1980 (University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Patrick H. Mooney, and Theo J. Majka, Farmers' and Farm Workers Movements: Social Protest In American Agriculture (Twayne Publishers, 1995). William P. Browne and John Dinse, "The Emergence of the American Agriculture Movement, 1977—1979," Great Plains Quarterly (1985): 221-235. 5 early 1980s this essay seeks to situate the formation and role of the AAM following the withdrawal of the New Deal state in the early 1970s. Following Howe, I argue that the period represented a fundamental alteration of the relations of production between producers and the state that was reflected in the subsumption of agrarian discontent into increasingly formalized channels. I further contend the central role of the state has been undertheorized in agrarian class formation and conflict. Carolyn Howe conceptualizes agrarian discontent by identifying capitalist penetration of the agricultural process. Writing about the agrarian mass movements in the nineteenth-century, Howe’s theory posits that the relations between capital and farmers is a central determinant informing farm movements with this “relationship [being] mediated by cycles of economic expansion or crisis, on the one hand, and interventions of the state, on the other hand.”8 The three sectors of agricultural production, input markets, the processes of farming itself, and output markets have each been transformed by improvements in productivity, greater capital investment, and access to improved transportation to domestic and international markets.9 Howe argues that with transformations in agrarian production and capitalist penetration of these sections, “the new class relations that emerge account for the internal dynamics and historical transformations of farmers’ movements.”10 As the agrarian class becomes split, new demands restructure agricultural production. Naturally Howe’s focus on the nineteenth-century is well before the creation of the Farm Board in the Great Depression that would come to inform the postwar policy of the USDA yet, the state in Howe’s theory is still seen in a simple regulatory light rather than in a structural light. Even during the nineteenth century agricultural 8 Carolyn Howe, “Farmers’ Movements and the Changing Structure of Agriculture” in Studies in the Transformation of US Agriculture ed. A. Eugene Havens, Gregory Hooks, Patrick H. Mooney, and Max Pfeffer (Routledge, 2019): 123. 9 Howe, 124. 10 Howe, 123. 6 accumulation and access to the vast interior was arbitrated by state power. The state apparatus supporting American agriculture during the postwar period represented a fundamental force regulating capital accumulation in agriculture. State provisioning of price supports and other regulatory checks on price fluctuations were critical factors in regulating the stability of agricultural production and the maintenance of prices for family farmers. Two interdependent processes, namely the near completion of American agriculture as a capitalist institution and the state’s buttressing of the agricultural community created a situation in which agrarian discontent could only be expressed through the existing legislative process. The interest in agrarian movements together stems from their unique position in the productive process within industrial society. The role of agriculturalists has deep roots in Marx’s conception of simple commodity production, that is, co-equal and self-sufficient producers engaged in a system of co-equal exchange. The creation of a surplus for exchange with the market renders agriculturalists and other “petty bourgeoisie” in an intermediary class between capital and labor. Even well after the full penetration of market imperatives into agriculture following the Second World War, farmers represented a force neither fully proletarian nor fully capitalist. The irony identified by both administrators and scholars of resistance by recalcitrant farmers to beneficial collective actions such as mandatory or voluntary crop reductions, the formation of cooperatives, or even broadly supported farm strikes derives from the difficulties in attempting to centralize a class of producers that may share similar class-identifying concerns but do not share in equal experiences in the production process. Indeed, as thoroughly as the state has regulated agricultural accumulation, the state has also enforced a regulatory structure on petty producers. The role of farm organizations operating within civil society often represent different commodity or geographical interests, but most of all, class antagonisms. Antagonisms 7 that are maximized during periods of recurrent overproduction. The social character of postwar agriculture remained far from a simple flood of too small or too inefficient farmers confronted with the reality of new more productive technology, instead the shifting structure of agriculture often rested in emergent class divisions between independent producers. These fissures between producers are reflected in civil society. Antonio Gramsci conceptualizes the modern state as both a mediator between groups as well as an arbiter of power within a given mode of production. Civil society, for Gramsci, absorbs dissension by fracturing power among competing interests and balances the forces of state coercion with consent among the interests. The power wielded by the modern state serves to limit dissension and thereby instability within the system of production. The potent agrarian mass movements of the nineteenth-century took place in a class system where agricultural workers represented a majority of the population whose politics and at times revolutionary rhetoric was appropriated by various political parties, far from the cloistering of agricultural policy among legislators and the “farm block” during the New Deal. The strike actions and mass movement qualities of first the NFO and the AAM represented serious breaches of the consent process. By contrast, organizations like the NFU, the Grange, and the AFBF quietly arose and gained seats at the table due to their exterior connections as quasi-market institutions. The AFBF largely specialized in insurance and the NFU was the founder of the Farmers’ Union Grain Terminal Association, the largest domestic grain cooperative. Both the NFO and the AAM attempted to replicate this success but ultimately failed to cultivate any permanent exterior market presence. Both were quickly dismissed by the ruling farm coalition and ridiculed for falling outside of established channels. 8 THE NEW DEAL STATE In the midst of the Great Depression, the federal agricultural apparatus was entirely overhauled by two closely linked farm bills: the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (AAA) and the Agricultural Act of 1948.11 The bills gave the secretary of agriculture the power to mandate the number of acres farmers were to plant of one crop, established a soil conservation service in the wake of the Dust Bowl, and created an organization, later chartered in 1948 as the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), tasked with “maintain[ing] balance between the production and consumption of agricultural commodities…[by] reestablish[ing] prices to farmers at a level that will give agricultural commodities a purchasing power with respect to articles that farmers buy” in a base year.12 This approach termed “parity pricing” gave farmers, in essence, a minimum wage as the CCC absorbed unsold crops at a rate consistent with what farmers would have received in the “base period” of 1910-1914. In simple terms, the CCC offered farmers cash loans using farm commodities as collateral. If the farmer failed to pay back the loan, the CCC could collect the harvested commodities while the farmer could keep the remaining cash. Together these two policies, acreage reduction and loan rates became the bedrock tools in supporting prices. Frequently the parity price for most crops typically exceeded the world price and acted as a domestic price floor for grain in the United States. One of the guiding principles, and expressed fears, behind the parity concept remained the equivalence between the industrial and rural economies. New Deal architects feared industrial wages and output superseding farm income and thus sought to provide additional 11 Though the AAA of 1933 was found unconstitutional by the Hughes Court for charging a processing tax on private companies to pay for price supports, the law was partially revised and reissued as the Agricultural Act of 1938, establishing direct federal support for the purchasing of surpluses. 12 Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, P.L. 73-10, 48 Stat. 31 (1933), https://nationalaglawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/farmbills/1933.pdf. 9 protections for hard-hit farmers.13 The usage of a base period was meant to support farmers by taking production costs into the calculation of the parity ratio and over the years, other factors were added when computing the parity index. Thus several farm organizations felt that parity pricing reflected an essential equilibrium between the economies of the rural and urban, one capable of exploiting the other. Consequently, in times of decent harvests or low demand, the CCC accumulated massive stockpiles of grain that were stored in government warehouses and distributed by USDA officials. Despite low prices beginning in the 1950s, the collections by the CCC created wide price stability for farmers. Despite the steady erosion of inflation on farm prices, the price of wheat, corn, rye, sorghum, and other field crops remained comparatively unchanged for the period 1950-1970. Over time Congress gradually amended the calculations for parity, shifting to a 10-year average and at times abandoning the metric altogether for particular crops, yet the CCC still acted as the buyer of last resort for program crops and the 1910-1914 base period acted as a fall back in the calculation of the price index.14 Stability came at a steep cost however. Despite several attempts at using the stockpiles for Food Stamps and school lunches, the cost of storing CCC surpluses skyrocketed from less than $1 billion in 1952 to $4.5 billion in 1965.15 The issue of managing the grain surpluses became the preeminent political focus for several secretaries of agriculture and the wider USDA. In early 1953, President Eisenhower selected an intense anti-Communist farmer from Idaho, Ezra Taft Benson, for the position of Secretary of Agriculture. Benson decried federal involvement in supporting farm prices and instead recommended a “flexible” price support system. Benson’s administration under Eisenhower sought to turn to the export market to dispose of reserves 13 Davis C. Chester, “The Agricultural Adjustment Act and National Recovery.” Journal of Farm Economics 18, no. 2 (1936): 230. 14 Geoffrey S. Shepherd, Agricultural Price Analysis, 5th ed. (Iowa State University Press, 1963): 267. 15 Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture, 140. 10 abroad and lower the cost of USDA programs. Benson believed parity itself supported, as one biographer noted, “artificially high prices, which he…believed functioned primarily to subsidize farming inefficiencies.”16 By this time however, American agricultural supremacy was being challenged by new international agricultural agreements, an agriculturally protective Europe, as well as declining demand for wheat following the Korean War resulting in a subsequent rise in CCC stocks. Benson faced substantial criticism from domestic farmers, especially the emergent NFO, and farm-state Democratic legislators for threatening to broadly change the farm program and lower parity prices.17 However, Congress too looked abroad to fix the surplus issues. In 1954, under the sponsorship of Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphery, Congress passed the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, known widely as Public Law 480, or simply P.L. 480 and later as the “Food for Peace” Act, which “enable[d] the President to furnish emergency assistance…to friendly peoples in meeting famine or other urgent relief requirements…and to friendly but needy populations without regard to the friendliness of their government.”18 Under this law, the CCC, under the supervision of the State Department, was able to sell reserves at an annual loss of $700 million to “friendly” countries. Benson toured several Latin American and Asian countries promoting American agricultural commodities in hopes that maximizing exports would augment farm income, yet several countries issued formal complaints decrying what they felt amounted to American dumping.19 Yet the scale of P.L. 480’s effects were massive. Legislatively strengthened in the 1960s, the exportation of P.L. 480 stocks, labeled by census authorities as “USAID,” represented a 16 Gary James Bergera, “‘Rising above Principle’: Ezra Taft Benson as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 1953-61, Part 1,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41, no. 3 (1 October 2008): 94. 17 Lauck, American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly, 118. 18 Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, P.L. 480 Stat. 68 (1954), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-68/pdf/STATUTE-68-Pg454-2.pdf. 19 Bergera, “‘Rising above Principle’: Ezra Taft Benson as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 1953-61, Part 1,” 100. 11 plurality of all the wheat traded globally with 31.8% of all world traffic from 1956 to 1960 being subsidized grain and 35.6% later in 1961-1965. The wheat surplus held by the CCC dropped sharply. In 1961 the stock stood at 1.24 billion bushels, in 1964 the amount stood at 828.9 million bushels and dwindled to just 126.6 million by 1967.20 Put most succinctly by food scholar Harriett Friedmann: “American food aid was conceived simultaneously as a solution to domestic farm-support problems and as a part of Cold War economic and political strategy. The wheat surpluses engendered by New Deal policies had become an overwhelming burden by the end of the war. Getting rid of them through food aid was one alternative that emerged through Cold War economic and military policies.”21 P.L. 480 and government price supports for farmers were a consistent battleground on international agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and International Wheat Conference as well as the source of a furious trade war between the emergent European Economic Community and the United States. Nevertheless, the farm economy in the grain frontier of the United States had largely been sheltered by state support and American strategic alliances had been supported by food. Despite the passage of P.L. 480, Congress still struggled with finding a solution to the overproduction of farm commodities. In 1961, John F. Kennedy appointed Democrat Governor of Minnesota, Orville Freeman, to Secretary of Agriculture. Sensing the huge expenditures levied by the CCC needed to uphold farmers, Freeman opted for an entirely opposite regulatory approach to limit the supply of agricultural commodities. Under the AAA, the secretary of agriculture was given explicit power to issue new mandates for limiting the amount of land planted with one crop. Freeman correctly assessed that more stringent controls on farmers would 20 United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Statistics 1970 (Washington Government Printing Office): 10. 21 Harriet Friedmann, “The Political Economy of Food: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar International Food Order,” American Journal of Sociology no. 88 (1982): S260. 12 limit the supply of farm goods and subsequently yield better incomes for farmers. Yet critics decried Freeman’s “set aside” approach as intensively bureaucratic.22 Tony Dechant, longtime President of the NFU, testified before Congress advocating for Hardin’s resignation for “advocating a farm bill that would further reduce price protection, scrap parity, and abandon the acreage allotment system under which we have obtained a measure of supply management.”23 During this period the NFO also began staging their infamous “holding actions” to raise the price of livestock by withholding livestock from the market though with limited success and highly publicized acts of violence and wastage by farmers. During this period roughly 50 million acres of available farmland was set aside in an attempt to limit the supply of farm goods.24 Despite the increase in reserve acreage, Hardin’s plan proved to be ineffective in reversing the slow decline of farm income and Congress acted by passing the Agricultural Act of 1970, greatly limiting restrictions on planting, and changing reimbursement payments for farmers. As Hardin left office and the NFO actions dissipated, the 1960s experienced the most severe decline in farm numbers, from 5.6 million farms in 1950 to 3.9 million in 1960, a 30% decline.25 In 1971 Richard Nixon handpicked Purdue University professor Earl L. Butz to the office of secretary of agriculture. Butz served as assistant secretary of agriculture under Benson and deeply reflected his views that “the freedom to farm” included a minimized role for the government and a maximized role for agricultural exports.26 His appointment came as a shock to 22 Coppess Jonathan, The Fault Lines of Farm Policy: A Legislative and Political History of the Farm Bill (University of Nebraska Press 2018): 120. 23 Statement by Tony T. Dechant, President, National Farmers Union at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. October 23, 1970, COU 1127, Box 5, Item 8, National Farmers Union Records, Rare and Distinctive Collections Reading Room, University of Colorado Boulder Norlin Library. 24 David Nispel, “The Growth of U.S. Agricultural Exports: The Role of Government,” Wisconsin International Law Journal (1982): 111. 25 United States Department of Agriculture Statistical Reporting Service, “Number of Farms and Land in Farms,” Crop Reporting Board, Washington, D.C., January 17, 1964. 26 Ezra Taft Benson, interview by Dr. Maclyn Burg, May 21, 1975, transcript, National Archives and Records Administration, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. 13 farm organizations, especially the NFU. Dechant argued that Butz favored a diminishing of the loan rate and excess storage capacity. He further argued that Butz was “philosophically and politically dedicated to the advocacy of [the corporate farming] cause.”27 Indeed, several rural newspapers and Congressmen feared the appointment of Butz due to his experience working on corporate boards of agribusiness companies and owning substantial stocks in the Ralston-Purina Company, an animal feed company.28 In December of 1971, Butz squeaked into office on the closest ever vote for secretary of agriculture with a tally of 51-44.29 Naturally Butz gained fast friendship with the Farm Bureau and regularly spoke at AFBF functions promoting farmers to be “loose to produce.” He began early in his tenure and championed a policy of maximizing agricultural exports to reduce federal farm supports that had been enacted during the New Deal which Butz, like Benson contended, exacerbated farming inefficiencies. Butz commended the “spirit of the 1970 Act, [is] to continue making adjustments necessary to remain efficient, to seek out and develop new market outlets, to encourage the freest possible movement of resources where needed to achieve greater efficiencies” in the farm economy.30 The watershed years of agriculture came from an unlikely source. The Soviet Union had promised both increased meat consumption to its population but experienced a devastating harvest of grain in 1972. A team of Soviet diplomats encamped in the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C., discussing large grain purchases with private grain traders and the USDA. A deal was struck between the Soviet team and Butz, and with Nixon’s blessing, Secretary Butz, 27 William Blair, “Butz Says He’ll Speak for All Farmers,” New York Times, November 18, 1971. Statement of Tony T. Dechant, President National Farmers Union in Opposition to Senate Approval of Earl L. Butz as Secretary of Agriculture, November 17, 1971 , COU 1127, Box 5, Folder 19, National Farmers Union Records, Rare and Distinctive Collections Reading Room, University of Colorado Boulder Norlin Library. 29 William Blair, “Butz Confirmed as Farm Chief, 51 to 44,” New York Times, December 3, 1971. 30 Statement of Earl L. Butz Secretary of Agriculture Before the Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, March 11, 1974, MSF 64, Box 21, Item 3, Earl L. Butz Papers, Purdue University Archives and Special Collections, Purdue University Libraries. 28 14 Secretary of Commerce Peter G. Peterson, and Soviet First Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade Mikhail Kuzmin signed an agreement extending $750 million worth of American agricultural commodities to be bought over a three-year term from private grain traders.31 On July 8th, Nixon announced the largest single agricultural transaction in human history and forever changed American farming and world agriculture. The size of the Grain Deal with the Soviet Union depleted American grain stocks virtually overnight. The international dominance of the low-price Food for Peace Act evaporated to just 5.2% of world exports in 1971-1975.32 As needy nations recovered agriculturally and with the commercial success of the Soviet Grain Deal, institutional pressures began to change within the USDA. The enactment of the grain deal and the resulting commodity boom created a temporary large-scale depletion of world grain stocks. Still, they revolutionized American agriculture by exposing it to new global market imperatives. With the new detente under Nixon, Butz simultaneously resolved the issue with overbearing surpluses and fast-tracked farmers into a new world of exports. Butz criticized the sheltering of American farmers by protective New Deal settlements and in his eyes these programs served to make farmers inefficient with their resources.33 Butz reduced several income supports while encouraging agricultural investment. The subsequent reduction in Federal income support for struggling farmers was masked for two or three years when global grain prices were high, despite controversy over the nature of the Soviet grain deal specifically. Butz defended the sudden sale as “good for American farmers–they have stronger markets, higher prices and more freedom to plant…this agreement between the world’s two leading nations helps measurably to move American agriculture down 31 Philip Shabecoff, “Moscow Agrees to Buy U.S. Grain for $750-Million,” New York Times, July 9, 1972. Friedmann, “The Political Economy of Food: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar International Food Order,” S271. 33 Earl Butz, interview by Tim Naftali, April 13, 2007, transcript, Nixon Presidential Oral History Project, The Richard Nixon Library & Museum, 13. 32 15 the road to an expanding agriculture with expanding markets where our farmers have a chance to expand their production.”34 Net farm income did increase from $14.36 billion in 1970 to a high of $34.35 billion by 1973 while simultaneously allowing for USDA subsidies to descend from $3.71 billion to a record low of just $530 million in 1974.35 Exports represented a mind-bending shift from a stable medium of around $6 billion annually for nearly all of the 1960s and later increasing exponentially to $23.53 billion on the verge of AAM’s formation. The prices received by farmers in terms of parity increased seemingly overnight due to the Grain Deal, reaching 91% in 1973 and followed by 86% in 1974.36 However, a renewed expansion of the farm sector soon followed. The value of land and machinery soared while labor productivity in the farm sector increased dramatically. The Soviet Grain Deal and the pressures applied by Butz to the American food system represented a sea-change in farm policy domestically and food policy abroad. The intense exposure to production for the foreign market left American farmers with renewed market imperatives toward further capital accumulation. In the intervening years, Butz’s triumph in the grain deal allowed for a wholesale reorientation of American agricultural policy. Nixon signed into law the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act of 1973 on August 10th. The transformative bill had been championed by Butz in a whirlwind of supportive speeches urging farmers and farm organizations to support the Act that would “turn our farmers loose to produce.” The bill introduced “target prices” to support farmers, a measure that sought to reduce government payments when prices of crops 34 Address of Earl L. Butz at the Butz DeKalb County Farm Bureau Barbecue, Malta, Illinois, September 27, 1972, No. 120, MSF 64, Box 20, Item 3, Earl L. Butz Papers, Purdue University Archives and Special Collections, Purdue University Libraries. 35 United States Bureau of Economic Analysis, Net Farm Income, USDA (March 18, 2025), https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B1448C1A027NBEA. 36 United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service, Parity Ratio, https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/graphics/data/parity_ratio.txt. 16 were high.37 Under the new directive, a price, tied to the wider market, was chosen and if market prices did not exceed the mandated price, farmers were reimbursed for their loss contributing to the market. Ideally, the Act hoped, that in times of high demand like Butz and Congress were witnessing in the aftermath of the Grain Deal and subsequent high food-price inflation in the early 1970s, the USDA would not need to issue any new support payments to farmers since the market price superseded the mandated target price. The law explicitly urged the Secretary to take “into consideration competitive world prices of wheat” when issuing new target prices and payments to farmers of certain program crops.38 Butz opened up millions of USDA administered conservation acres to be planted. From 1973 to 1977 prices for agricultural inputs and outputs experienced an unprecedented crescendo and briefly reached 91% of parity.39 Butz boasted that the act of 1973 allowed CCC operating costs to be reduced from $265 million to just $18 million “as agricultural commodities move in the marketplace directly to consumers instead of into CCC inventories.” Despite his initial uncertainty, planted and harvested acreage exploded. Wheat acreage alone jumped from a steady low of 49 million acres for the whole decade of the 1960s, and a particular low of 47.3 million in early 1973, to 65 million for the crop year 1974-1975.40 The act in conjunction with the USDA’s reductions of cropland quotas ushered in a marked change for the whole decade: real farm output increased 32.5% just between 1972 and 1973, 37 Claude T. Coffman, “Target Prices, Deficiency Payments, and the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act of 1973,” North Dakota Law Review 50, no. 2 (Winter 1974): 305. 38 Agricultural and Consumer Protection Act of 1973, P.L. 93-86, 87 Stat. 221 (1973), https://nationalaglawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/farmbills/1973.pdf. 39 United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service, Parity Ratio, https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/graphics/data/parity_ratio.txt. 40 United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, Wheat Data (March 12, 2025), https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/wheat-data/. 17 with a real change of 22.7% for the whole decade, and total acres planted increased from 227 million acres in 1970 to 289 million in 1980.41 Butz resigned in 1976 after a particularly lurid racial remark and was replaced in quick succession first by John A. Knebel, who served for a year, and later a Minnesota farmer, Bob Bergland. Farm income quickly peaked in 1973 following the grain deal but subsequently sunk in the latter half of the decade. Inventories of wheat held by the CCC, however, remained substantially low for the whole decade despite a tentative return to normalcy for farmers. Inventories peaked in 1970 with 364 million bushels and were completely drained until 1977 when collections again gained a paltry 58 million bushels.42 Wheat donations by the Federal government also decreased dramatically, although P.L. 480 sales for foreign currency remained more consistent. Butz’s goal had been completed. Excess inventories stayed consistently low up until 1980 as American agricultural markets began the transition to world market imperatives. 41 Jonathan Coppess, “Gardner Policy Series: A Brief Review of the Consequential Seventies,” Farmdoc Daily, 9, no. 99 (30 May 2019): 4. 42 United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Statistics 1980 (Washington Government Printing Office, 1980): 7. 18 “WE WILL STRIKE” The winter of discontent arrived. The years following the period of high demand quickly gave way to a new crisis in farm income. In early fall of 1977, a group of farmers met in café Campo, Colorado in Baca County. Complaints of poor prices quickly turned into talk of a mass farmer strike and soon the yet unnamed movement was born. Farmers Alvin Jenkins, Jerry Wright, Darrel Schroder and his son Gene Schroder, as well as Lawrence “Bud” Bitner quickly emerged as the burgeoning movement’s spokespeople and published a strike bulletin distributed around eastern Colorado. A new meeting among farmers was quickly organized. Steve Close recalls that on a day in early September “at the coffee shops in Walsh and Campo and Springfield, the guys were talking, you know, we need to go to this meeting. And when it actually came down to it, I’m guessing that—I don’t know—about three-fourths of the farmers in 19 the county showed up at the high school in Springfield that day.”43 In the meeting Gene Schroder, described as “cerebral” by Close, sharply criticized the 1977 Farm Bill that lowered domestic price supports to match world competitive prices, undercutting American farmers to support foreign buyers. Jenkins, the Schroders, and several pro-AAM commentators would direct substantial attention to the Carter administration’s “cheap food policy,” criticizing the placating of urban residents at the degrading expense of rural areas. The meeting was a success and a larger meeting was held soon after that included the state commissioners for agriculture in Colorado and Texas. Close again recalls “I bet you there were sixty-five hundred people in that building.”44 Soon a resolution appeared and a date for a general strike was set: “American Agriculture producers REJECT the current farm program and instead demand the following: 1. 100% of parity for all domestic and foreign used and/or consumed agricultural products. 2. All agricultural products produced for national or international food reserve shall be contracted at 100% parity. 3. Creation of an entity or structure composed of agricultural producers to devise and approve policies that affect agriculture. 4. Import of all agricultural products which are domestically produced must be stopped until 100% of parity is reached, thereafter imports must be limited to the amount that the American producers cannot supply. 5. All announcements pertaining to any agricultural producing cycle shall be made far enough in advance that the producers will have adequate time to make needed adjustments in his operation. Unless our demands are met by midnight, December 13, 1977, we will be forced to implement the following measures: WE WILL NOT SELL AN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS WE WILL NOT PRODUCE ANY MORE AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS. 43 Steve Close, interview by Elissa Stroman, June 27, 2013, American Agriculture Movement Oral History Collection, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, 16. 44 Steve Close, interview by Elissa Stroman, 19. 20 WE WILL NOT BUY ANY AGRICULTURAL EQUIPMENT, PRODUCTION SURPLUS, OR ANY NONESSENTIAL ITEM.”45 Within the span of a few months, hundreds of strike offices soon established themselves across the country, especially concentrating in Colorado and rapidly spreading to the west, south, and later establishing itself in New York and Michigan. Local meetings proliferated as interested farmers rallied to the movement and the AAM’s five-point plan. By late September Secretary Bergland was met with 2,000 sneering AAM supporters in his visit to Pueblo, Colorado calling for 100% parity and a rejection of a proposed land insurance scheme with cries of “WE DON’T WANT IT. WE’LL STRIKE.”46 As the date of the strike approached several demonstrations and tractorcades ensued in the following months. Publicity quickly followed. In early December the AAM central office in Springfield, Colorado, and the state office of Texas planned a benefit concert at the Texas Stadium in Dallas although it suffered from unexpectedly low turnout. William Robbins, writing for the New York Times, reported the gathering as “representing all 50 states…with a sizable share of the nation’s food production among those gathered in the stands.”47 Though a small gathering, the rapid, somewhat unorganized, growth of the organization was celebrated by the AAM members. Still undeterred, strike momentum continued to increase with several regional tractorcades at state capitols, public demonstrations, and picketing at rail depots and grain terminals, with some shutting down in solidarity for a few days. Calls for a mass tractorcade in Washington, D.C. were slowly beginning to transform into action. 45 Strike Bulletin, 1978, Box 2, S 1807.1 American Agriculture Movement Records, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection Archive, Texas Tech Libraries. 46 Preston Dean, “Ag Secretary Booed in Pueblo Visit,” The Pueblo Chieftain (Pueblo, Colorado), September 23, 1977. 47 William Robbins, “Leaders of Planned Farm Strike Voice Optimism After Texas Rally,” New York Times, December 2, 1977. 21 Within less than three months, the AAM had cultivated a robust media presence, dedicated participants, and had garnered the support of the AFL-CIO.48 Critics, both contemporary and recent, derided the organizational strategies of the AAM with particular relation to the enforcement mechanisms of the looming strike. Anecdotal evidence gathered by the AAM leadership as well as local papers gave a hazy but optimistic attitude for the strike variously encouraged by the spokespeople, yet they remained adamant that the AAM was to have “no officers and no dues…every individual has the opportunity to express his ideas.”49 William Browne argues that without any membership records on a national level, no hierarchical establishment accepted by the founders nor the members, and the various independence of state offices and individual strike offices, the movement rather attempted to base its “efforts toward assembling what was intended to be perceived by relevant observers as a short-term, yet potent, economic threat.”50 Patrick Mooney and Theo Majka identify that a strike action was probably immaterial from the beginning.51 Contemporary doubts of the strike reigned with many feeling that the farmers would fall in line during spring, similar to other previous attempts at striking or collective bargaining previously, simply due to the independent and regionally-minded realities of farming. No agrarian organization could collude to obtain “monopoly power” over agricultural prices.52 Though the strike organization remained lacking, the information campaign waged by the AAM remained more robust. The central office in Springfield, Colorado remained receptive to the actions and opinions of the regional offices and 48 Code-a-phone, January 4th 1978, Box 1, Folder 5, S. 1807.1, American Agriculture Movement Records, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection Archive, Texas Tech Libraries. 49 “From National Headquarters…,” American Agriculture News (Iredell, Texas), February 28, 1978. 50 William Browne, “Mobilizing and Activating Group Demands: the American Agriculture Movement,” Social Science Quarterly 64, (March 1983): 21. 51 Patrick H. Mooney, and Theo J. Majka, Farmers' and Farm Workers Movements: Social Protest In American Agriculture, 103. 52 A sentiment shared by agricultural political economist Willard Cochrane. See Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture, 324. 22 communicated daily with county-level strike offices. As one farmer recounts: “Every county by then that had much farming at all in it had a strike office.”53 The use of “established phone trees,” code-a-phone machines, and an AAM newspaper acted as additional networks to rally supporters to individual protests or actions while other strike-related efforts such as picketing processing plants were commonplace.54 The AAM activists were clear that they were not seeking increased government expenditures on behalf of the rural economy as many contemporary journalists levied. Instead, the cry for a 100% parity ratio reflected a virtual end to the myriad of complicated USDA-administered farm programs in favor of a simple price floor to act as a minimum wage. In the eyes of many AAM members, rather than payments made to farmers to support the prices they sold crops at, Congress could simply prohibit any sales below a certain amount to ensure the farm economy operated within a profitable boundary. As House Representative Larry Pressler succinctly put their position: AAM farmers were “not looking for a handout or that they are depending on the Federal Government to bail them out. What the members of the American Agriculture Movement are demanding is equal treatment with all other sectors of our economy on the domestic, and international front.”55 Indeed, later in the organization’s history, an almost ideological deification of the parity concept emerged. Economist Charles Walters amplified the AAM’s insistence on the parity concept for the broader economy, arguing that “the parity price level is the level at which there is the greatest distribution of goods. It is the key to 53 Don and Carolyn Kimbrell, interview by Katelin Dixon, January 10, 2020, transcript, American Agriculture Movement Oral History Collection, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, 22. 54 David Senter, interview by Andy Wilkinson, January 5, 2014, transcript, American Agriculture Movement Oral History Collection, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, 22. 55 “Introduction by Mr. Pressler of the American Agriculture Movement’s Policy Statement,” Congressional Record, February 15, 1978, 3584, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1978-pt3/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1978-pt3-5-2.pdf. 23 distribution…without parity for agricultural raw materials…there is unsound debt expansion.”56 The lack of agricultural parity was intimately linked into the discussion of the increased national debt and heightened inflation during the Carter administration.57 It is difficult to argue with certainty to what degree all AAM members conformed to an ideology of “agrarian fundamentalism” with parity as the core ideological tenant yet the rhetoric surrounding parity manifested itself in several reports from the Springfield central office and in the personal repositories of long-time AAM activists.58 December 14th finally came and the farmers were officially on strike. Farmers continued to organize tractorcades locally, enveloping over 30 state capitals with long tractorcades.59 Signs and slogans dotted the vast grain heartland of the United States. Winter also brought increased organization for a mass tractorcade to Washington, D.C. Although overshadowed by the negatively publicized tractorcade in 1979, the 1978 tractorcade was the AAM’s largest protest. In mid-March, an estimated 30,000 farmers marched on Washington with a renewed strategy of lobbying for the passage of a “flexible parity” program supported by Senator Bob Dole from Kansas. AAM member Gerald McCathern recalls at the time “most everybody that was involved was looking more to the Democrat Congressmen for help. But of course Senator Dole, he sponsored our bill.”60 The Dole Flexible Parity program allowed for improved parity for farmers given a reduction in acres. The program was succinctly described by longtime AAM member 56 Charles Walters, Jr., Parity is the Key to Prosperity Unlimited, (Acres, USA Publishing 1982): 8-9. Code-A-Phone, October 6, 1978, Box 1, Folder 5, American Agriculture Movement Records, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection Archive, Texas Tech Libraries. 58 Patrick H. Mooney, and Theo J. Majka. Farmers' and Farm Workers Movements: Social Protest In American Agriculture, 102. 59 William Robbins, “Tractors Carry Farmer Protest to Washington and 30 Capitals,” New York Times, December 11, 1977. 60 Kolleen and Gerald McCathern, interview by David Marshall, June 13, 2013, transcript, American Agriculture Movement Oral History Collection, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, 30. 57 24 David Senter as: “if you planted fifty percent, you’d get ninety percent parity loan rates. And if you planted sixty percent, you’d get eighty, if you planted seventy— in other words, it ratcheted down…It was received by farmers pretty well, because everybody— nobody was required to do anything. They could make their own decision each year.”61 Despite the enthusiasm and the presence of “four thousand farmers,” the bill in its original, favorable, form was defeated in the House of Representatives at a vote of 150-268.62 Senter put the blame squarely on Carter and more specifically, his “economic advisor,” presumably Charles Schultze, who feared flexible parity would augment inflation.63 A somber but resolute code-a-phone on April 12th read: “we have all just heard the voice of big government and big money.”64 A highly watered-down version was signed into law by Jimmy Carter but detested by the AAM. During the legislative fury over the new farm law, Bergland received countless farmers to the point of exhaustion. At one point, Bergland was forced to hide from the farmers in Washington, D.C., and later made a “hasty exit through a window of his own department to escape” the “warm attentions” of AAM protesters.65 The demands for 100% parity were met with a flurry of criticism from the USDA, from President Carter, and the president’s wider cabinet. Carter made clear his discontent with the idea of a 100% parity backed by the federal government. In January, he staunchly defended the 1977 Agricultural Act, arguing it “will go a long way to meeting the legitimate need of the American farmer…greatly expand[ing] financial benefits for the American farmer, increased support prices 61 David Senter, interview by Andy Wilkinson, January 5, 2014, transcript, American Agriculture Movement Oral History Collection, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, 20-21. 62 Code-a-phone April 12, 1978, Box 1, Folder 5, S. 1807.1 American Agriculture Movement Records. Texas Tech University Southwest Collection Archive, Texas Tech Libraries. 63 David Senter, interview by Andy Wilkinson, 21. 64 Code-a-phone, April 12, 1978, Box 1, Folder 5, S. 1807.1 American Agriculture Movement Records, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection Archive, Texas Tech Libraries. 65 Jay Richter, “Ag Secretary Ponders Problem of Grain Prices,” Farmland News, September 15, 1978. 25 and target prices.” Carter additionally remained worried that 100% parity would also have a concurrent effect of making “the price of American farm products extraordinarily high and noncompetitive in the international markets.”66 The USDA produced two policy briefing papers in response to the AAM program in which they predicted “retail food prices rising about 20 percent from fourth quarter 1977 to fourth quarter 1978, compared to 4-6 percent currently projected.”67 The report additionally warned of a 30% decline in wheat exports and a disproportionate accrual of wealth “to the present owners of land since share and cash rental arrangements adjust over time and since less than half the cropland acres are farmed by owner-operators.”68 Bergland too sided with Carter yet remained a more ambiguous character. In November he praised the AAM’s demonstrations as “an appropriate way to call attention to their plight” and even took a mild view on the strike action.69 As a former congressman he had expressed support for a 90% parity level in 1976.70 However, acting as secretary, Bergland had no sympathy for a proposed 100% parity idea and after countless meetings, run-ins, and unruly behavior at his events by AAM protestors, Bergland became exhausted with the strikers. The ability of the administration to turn a blind eye to the protest politics of the AAM strikers during their zenith in 1978 came in large part to the political fracturing of agrarian protest, especially at the national level. The established farm organizations that operated as semi-permanent lobbying groups had established solid relations with legislators and felt that the 66 “Transcript of President's News Conference on Foreign and Domestic Affairs: Questions and Answers 16. 100% Parity Demand,” New York Times, January 31, 1978. 67 United States Department of Agriculture, “Analysis of American Agricultural Movement Proposal,” Office of Governmental and Public Affairs, March 3, 1978: 1. 68 Office of Governmental and Public Affairs, 2. 69 United Press International, “Bergland Backs Farmers’ Strike But Doubts Effect,” Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1977. 70 Letter from Joe D. Barnes to Jay Naman, April 4, 1978, COU 1127, Box 37, Folder 18, National Farmers Union Records, Rare and Distinctive Collections Reading Room, University of Colorado Boulder Norlin Library. 26 AAM would largely subside under unreasonable demands. This division of power among multiple competing sources is largely neglected by the argument of Mooney and Majka who take a markedly more simplistic view of farmers losing interest in the organization when farm income briefly rose in 1979. The NFU refused to ally themselves with the protesters despite harboring the same grievances against the USDA. In fact, Dechant sharply criticized an earlier version of the USDA’s publication rebutting increased parity prices in a formal letter of complaint from the publication’s author James Webster.71 Dechant strongly disapproved of the attempt at overwriting the parity laws but curiously found no common cause with the AAM activists. Private correspondence among top NFU officials reveals that they felt the strike and mass mobilization tactics employed by the AAM represented a serious threat with potential to discredit existing farm organizations. A press release from the Washington Farm Beat sent by a member of the NFU, Reuben L. Johnson, summed up the NFU’s attitude well: “Congress decided it is running the country instead of militant, demonstrative minority groups who tie up traffic, bang on doors, stage demonstrations and break windows and doors of cabinet members…Now it is going to take months for the farm fraternity as a whole to erase the bad taste a few farmers left in Washington.”72 The following summer the NFU even released a parody press release mocking the activists and labeling the organization the “American Agriculture Bowel Movement” lead by “Alvin Jerk” who advocated for the “abolition of the national income tax, fixed agricultural markets at 100% parity, violations punishable by crucifixion…[and] an armed regiment of farmers to oversee the work of the USDA.” The release 71 Letter to James C. Webster from Tony Dechant, April 16, 1979, COU 1127, Box 37, Folder 10, National Farmers Union Records, Rare and Distinctive Collections Reading Room, University of Colorado Boulder Norlin Library. 72 Memo to the State Presidents from Reuben L. Johnson, April 25, 1978, Box 37, Folder 10, National Farmers Union Records, Rare and Distinctive Collections Reading Room, University of Colorado Boulder Norlin Library. 27 also mocked Bob Dole portraying him as “introducing ‘sunset legislation’ to abolish all farm organizations more than a year old.”73 Although the radical rhetoric and actionable demands of the organization attracted thousands of members from other farm organizations into the ranks of the AAM, the power to inform farm legislation lay largely concentrated in the national bodies of farm organizations. The NFU under Dechant had been raising the issue of parity pricing since the mid-1960s but the national body of the NFU saw the strike and the activism as unproductive at best and damaging to the image of farmers at worst. Naturally the Farm Bureau’s national body too conflicted with the AAM protestors. Although many AAM members were members in the Farm Bureau as well, the national body of the Farm Bureau largely supported Bergland’s status quo. The Farm Bureau’s infancy was spent representing regional interests in crafting the Agricultural Adjustment Act and later developing into a rural insurance network with interests aligning with agribusiness companies and large commercial farmers, any upset to large-scale, export-oriented agriculture or agribusiness at large were clear threats to the organization.74 The President of the Farm Bureau, Allan Grant, refused to endorse the AAM stating “I came away satisfied that the President understands that problem and that he supports a free enterprise approach to solving it.” Additionally, Grant too remained worried about the foreign sales increasingly becoming the mainstay in farm income: “my organization doesn’t want the support levels raised because this would hurt American farm exports.”75 Tensions between the two organizations flared in March when debate over Dole’s flexible parity program was presented in Congress. Although securing near-unanimous passage in the Senate Agriculture Committee, the one opposing vote was cast by Dick Clark, a 73 NFU Press Release, July 21, 1978, Box 37, Folder 10, National Farmers Union Records, Rare and Distinctive Collections Reading Room, University of Colorado Boulder, Univers 74 Coppess, The Fault Lines of Farm Policy, 23. 75 Seth King, “Farm Leaders Dismayed After Talks With Carter,” New York Times, February 15, 1978. 28 Democratic Senator from Iowa. A code-a-phone report alleged that “when American Ag members showed up, presenting their Farm Bureau membership cards, they were not allowed admittance to the meeting. The feeling is that Senator Clark was pressured by the Iowa Farm Bureau to stay off the Dole bill.”76 MOVEMENT TO ORGANIZATION As winter turned to spring of 1978, the mass farm strike began to falter. The initial enthusiasm for a farm strike met with the raison d’etre of the actual protest: chronic debt in the farm sector, the need for income, and insufficient numbers to effect a complete strike. Several regional offices began submitting revised proposals to Springfield, eventually pressuring the national office to change course and instead, issue calls for local offices to sign up members for a 50% reduction in planting.77 This was hoped to act as a mechanism to raise prices nationally by restricting supply but again depended on national cooperation. This strategy, a reduction in acreage as a form of price control, was granted to the USDA through the institution of “set-aside acres” in 1933 but the AAM’s calls for a voluntary set-aside represented the first modern agricultural protest of this method. Several offices kept records of farmers and acreage to be “plowed down.” Aside from raising prices, AAM argued the voluntary set aside was “the best way we have to apply pressure on Congress.”78 In place of crops, the Hamilton, Texas strike office argued that farmers participating plant nitrogen-fixing legumes in the acres to improve the soil quality. 76 March 15, 1978 QWIPS Report, Box 1, Folder 5, S. 1807.1 American Agriculture Movement Records. Texas Tech University Southwest Collection Archive, Texas Tech Libraries. 77 “Washington Report,” American Agriculture News (Iredell, Texas), March 28, 1978. 78 Lori Schroder, “From National Headquarters…The All-Important Set-Aside,” American Agriculture News (Iredell, Texas), March 14, 1978. 29 Despite the faltering of the strike effort, a renewed campaign of mass demonstrations and tractorcades continued to protest imports. Some of the first actions of the AAM was to stop cattle from entering the United States from Canada, but attention soon shifted south. Going beyond simple protectionism in the name of parity, the AAM protested the relaxed country-of-origin labels on Mexican produce, known to be grown with the then-banned insecticide DDT in Mexico and shipped to the United States. Protestors blocked and picketed roads and bridges in Texas and Arizona hoping to draw attention. Yet the protest in McAllen, Texas proved to be the most violent action in the AAM’s history. In late February, roughly 200 AAM protestors blockaded the Hidalgo bridge linking the United States and Mexico. A code-a-phone report on March 2nd indicated police surrounded the farmers on the bridge and pelted them with tear gas, “then the police began gathering the farmers, beating some with nightsticks, and herded them into a fenced area…[where] they were then loaded into border patrol buses and moved out to several different jails.”79 Two men were hospitalized for broken arms and a fractured rib cage leading to the creation of the “Battered Farmers Fund.”80 The incident caused a massive tractorcade representing “every state” joined by a walkout of migrant farmworkers in the surrounding area. Eventually the jailed farmers were released though while in prison having “developed a little camaraderie with the jail people.”81 The following winter in January and February of 1979 would witness another large tractorcade to Washington. Organization for the trip had taken months with the Springfield office sending out reports followed by increased meetings as the winter approached. This tractorcade was much more organized than the one prior and with higher turnout. In January and February of 79 Code-a-phone, March 2, 1978, Box 1, Folder 5, S. 1807.1 American Agriculture Movement Records, Texas Tech University Southwest Collection Archive, Lubbock, Texas. 80 “McAllen Bridge Case Enters Next Phase,” American Agriculture News (Iredell, Texas), March 11, 1980. 81 Don and Carolyn Kimbrell, interview by Katelin Dixon, 24. 30 1979, an estimated 2,000 vehicles slowly crawled to the National Mall, including Arthur Chauncey, with again the same aims: 100% parity for all farm goods.82 Inflation had been crippling farm income further and the Farmers Home Administration had drawn conspicuous contempt from AAM leaders and became the guiding focal point for the tractorcade in 1979. Again farmers met with an unenthused Bob Bergland, who described the tractorcade as an “unmitigated disaster.” Unlike the first tractorcade in 1978, the farm movement seemed to have less legislative guidance than under the enthusiasm for the Dole-backed flexible parity legislation. Keith Sebelius, a Republican Representative from Kansas did introduce the “Agricultural Parity Equity Act of 1979” that essentially copied the earlier version of the flexible parity act to the house but with no success moving forward. Commentators described the atmosphere as hostile and tense with critically low amounts of public appeal that rendered the movement sympathetic to the public. Additionally, without a guiding legal battle, publicity too was limited. As summarized succinctly by Representative John Brademas: “at a time of rising food prices and rising income for farmers, it’s unreasonable to assume that a protest in support of more government spending to boost prices would be effective.”83 Again, although a common misconception of the AAM’s purpose it was nonetheless a public message. A looming agricultural crisis was clearly present however. Debt amongst farmers had increased dramatically and lobbying efforts by all organizations had increased. In April of 1980, Bergland called for a public hearing to discern the “structure of agriculture.” All major organizations attended and gave their proposals. The attendant organizations, including the AAM, NFU, AFBF, NFO and the Grange largely fell into three factions. Despite derogatory polemics launched by the NFU to the AAM, both pointed to falling prices as the primary 82 83 Associated Press, “Farmers Get OK for Final Tractorcade,” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1979. Steven V. Roberts, “Mass Protest Has Simply Gone Out Of Style,” New York Times, March 18, 1979. 31 difficulty in farming and called for a rectification of government price supports. Owing to the stark advantage in grain production held by the United States, Bob Lewis, writing for the NFU, argued that “the international market is controlled and manipulated by foreign governments, with the assent and collaboration of the government of the United States” and “subjects the farmers of the United States to the cheapest prices in the world.” Marvin Meek, presenting the AAM’s position, largely agreed with the NFU that the “international price-making system for grain is entirely a creature of governments.”84 By contrast, the NFO and the Grange singled out land transfers and barriers to cooperative enterprise as the cause of the crisis. The Grange remained skeptical of parity pricing as a tool to support farm income and questioned “whether there is a need for federal payments to be made to above-average income farmers.”85 The NFO’s previous, albeit limited success in mobilizing cooperative institutions followed suit arguing that producer bargaining power had wanned. The Farm Bureau stood alone. In a short prosaic statement, the Farm Bureau laid the blame solely on inflation and government regulation. All farm organizations with the exception of the Farm Bureau decried the purchasing of farmland as a speculative investment, though the Farm Bureau argued that this only occurred among “nonagricultural investors to seek ownership of farmland as a hedge against the government’s policy of continued inflation and currency debasement.”86 Abandoned by the NFU, ignored by the NFO, and wholly contrary to the Farm Bureau, the AAM continued to press forward, but began to lose its mass organization. The AAM 84 Economic and Social Issues Affecting the Structure of American Agriculture and Rural Life, November 1, 1979, Box 37, Folder 14, National Farmers Union Records, Rare and Distinctive Collections Reading Room, University of Colorado Boulder Norlin Library. 85 Statement by Edward Andersen Master of the National Grange to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, May 1, 1980, Box 37, Folder 14, National Farmers Union Records, Rare and Distinctive Collections Reading Room, University of Colorado Boulder Norlin Library. 86 Statement of the American Farm Bureau Federation to the U.S. Department of Agriculture with Regard to the Structure of Agriculture, May 1, 1980, Box 37, Folder 14, National Farmers Union Records, Rare and Distinctive Collections Reading Room, University of Colorado Boulder Norlin Library. 32 attempted to create its own farm marketing cooperative as the NFO had done in the late 1960s entitled “Parity, Inc.” and found some success in marketing to regional markets within the central plains, although it failed to rival larger cooperatives.87 The 1980 presidential election saw AAM leadership organize the “Dump Carter” movement, both in response to the failures of the tractorcades as well as a wheat embargo on the Soviet Union in response to the invasion of Afghanistan.88 A small “paritycade” consisting largely of trucks and other small vehicles visited Washington in 1980 although with a “milder tone…its antipathy toward President Carter and Bob Bergland…appeared no less intense.”89 AAM activists greatly welcomed Reagan’s victory as he promised to overturn the Soviet embargo on wheat, yet tensions between the now more militant-activist base of the organization continued to criticize their perceived unimportance in the eyes of the federal government. The election of Ronald Reagan brought the passage of the 1981 farm bill which brought a temporary respite on falling parity prices. Though far from an improvement on the parity front, the bill did allow for increased price supports. As Cochrane writes of the law: “it may be asked how the farmers and their congressional allies were able to defeat a popular president. Part of the answer is to be found in the food stamp plan and related food assistance program. Senators and congressional representatives from urban areas were willing to vote for…farm price and income support programs, in return for rural congressional support for the food stamp plan.”90 Farm subsidies increased from $1.28 billion in 1980 to $9.29 billion by 1983 aided by both the law and by emergency measures. The Agriculture Act of 1981 87 “Marketing Coop Growing Strong,” American Agriculture News (Iredell, Texas), April 10, 1979. Dan Morgan, “United States: Administration Is Facing Grain Embargo Backlash Administration is Facing Grain Embargo Backlash,” Washington Post, April 6, 1980. 89 Seth King, “Farmers Rally Quietly in Capital, in a Contrast to '79: Paritycade Replaces Tractorcade,” New York Times, February 19, 1980. 90 Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture, 166. 88 33 served as perhaps a final federally-backed buttress of nearly half a million farmers later displaced that fell under the highly competitive pressures and, often, dumb luck of grain farming.91 Despite the hopes of the AAM for a more solid farm policy, the Reagan era was inaugurated with a looming farm crisis and renewed efforts by the Reagan administration to remove the state from agricultural regulation. By 1982 and 1983 land values had begun to sink for the first time since 1972 and foreclosures became rampant as farm income began to dry up. Farm organizations stood powerless to stop the momentum of sporadic exports, sinking prices, and high farm debt. The early half of the decade saw a renewed enthusiasm for the AAM as it became a leader of several groups pressuring for immediate farm relief. The organization had lost substantial membership in 1979 with Browne and Denise arguing that the organization could only muster twenty-eight state delegations and “an almost completely inactive system of locals.”92 Yet by the early 1980s, Marvin Meek had fully established himself as president and foremost spokesperson of the AAM and simultaneously solidified a greater shift toward more permanent lobbyist efforts as had taken place by other agricultural groups. The call for 100% parity nominally led protests but the sense of urgency witnessed the AAM top leadership attempting to raise loan rates by any measure possible. Sporadic protests around the nation would continue for much of the early 1980s, the AAM’s newspapers continued to circulate, and the creation of a more official national body helped to expand the movement’s reach yet no further calls for mass strikes or organized protests to the scales of the tractorcades were resummoned. By the mid-1980s, the AAM appeared to be strengthening in numbers as the farm 91 See Barry J. Barnett, “The U.S. Farm Financial Crisis of the 1980s,” Agricultural History 74 (2000): 366-380. 92 William P. Browne and John Dinse, "The Emergence of the American Agriculture Movement, 1977—1979," Great Plains Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1985): 228. 34 crisis gripped the rural economy in the mid-1980s, yet the premier elements of its mass organization that propelled it into the national spotlight seemed to be more relaxed.93 FROM TRACTORS TO TERRORISM The AAM’s carefully cultivated image of sympathetic family farmers would later be rocked by scandals. Local offices in Campo distributed conspiratorial pamphlets concerning the Trilateral Commision, formed in 1973, arguing that domestic agricultural policy was largely being usurped by international conspirators. Like the conspiratorial distrust of the “cheap food policy” of the Carter administration, the Trilateral Commision, for many farmers, became a realized cause of concern; one that profiteered from farmers while consciously disregarded the preservation of parity and fairness for agriculture. Articles and member’s opinions of the “Trilateralists” were printed in the AAM’s official newspaper distributed from Iredell, Texas. Mooney and Majka identify that AAM members, at first excited for Reagan’s victory, later buckled under Reagan’s more stern emphasis on trade compatibility with foreign countries under negotiations with the Trilateral Commission.94 As farm foreclosures increased in the early 1980s, radicalism followed. The Rocky Mountain News, published in Denver, reported in January of 1983 that several business owners in Springfield, Colorado had been harassed with “local boycotts and threats” by AAM members.95 A few weeks earlier police clashed with 250 farmers and reports of threats against loan officers of the USDA and local police were well known within Springfield. In February of 1983, The Sunday Denver Post alleged that Eugene Schroder and Alvin Jenkins attended a 93 Keith Schneider, “Farmer Groups Seen Affecting 1986 Elections,” New York Times, January 5, 1986. Patrick Mooney and Theo J. Majka, Farmers’ and Farm Workers' Movements, 107. 95 Deborah Frazier, “Springfield Bullied by AAM Radicals,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver, Colorado), January 16, 1983. 94 35 “three-day ‘survival school’ in Weskan, Kansas” that taught participants skills like knife fighting and lessons on how to construct black powder pipe bombs. The scandal was intensified when the Kansas Bureau of Investigation labeled the AAM as a part of a violent far-right coalition including the Ku Klux Klan and linked the AAM to the high profile murder of two federal marshalls by members of the Posse Comitatus, a loose anti-tax organization. One participant of the survival course interviewed claimed that the AAM “has a right to use violence” to fight against unjust laws.96 The resulting scandal caused a schism within the movement pitting the “grass roots” movement against a more professionalized AAM, Inc. lead by Marvin Meek and coordinated by David Senter. The “grassroots” faction, typified by Alvin Jenkins, remained a broader organization that held to the AAM’s original principles of decentralized organization and mass branding but had been rocked by radicalism. The grassroots faction attempted to take control of the organization during a national convention but could not gather enough support resulting in a schism between those who supported a more centralized structure in AAM, Inc. and the more movement-oriented grassroots faction. AAM, Inc. thus emerged as a permanent professional lobby group somewhat distrustful of the grassroots base. Senter publicly denounced those who participated and lamented that “it is a shame we must waste our valuable time when there are so many things happening here on the Hill.”97 The grassroots faction would go on to organize protests and networks to combat farm foreclosures yet the schism combined with the intensifying farm crisis began to chip away at the organization’s already tenuous influence. The schism between the organizations created two separated organizational structures throughout the early to mid-1980s. Sensing the need for more robust leadership and public 96 William Ritz, “Farm Militants Study Bomb-Making,” The Sunday Denver Post (Denver, Colorado), February 13, 1983. 97 “AAM, Inc. Distances Themselves from Grass Roots,” American Agriculture News (Iredell, Texas), March 8, 1983. 36 image, the AAM, Inc. solidified its office of presidency under Marvin Meek, and later Corky Jones, along with David Senter as the national director. By this time AAM, Inc. had begun collecting dues and lobbied furiously in the creation of emergency farm legislation to help end the ongoing crisis. AAM, Inc. sent its leading members around the country to garner support from local AAM chapters. The presidents, as well as David Senter acting as national director, contributed to numerous Congressional hearings and lobbying against foreclosures in hearings throughout the country. The tour and the solidification of the national institution under AAM, Inc. did help to repair its image with lawmakers. Strikes, walkouts, and marches were all organized randomly through local chapters of the organization, still intimately connected to the original goal of increasing loan guarantees to higher parity prices. In 1985, around 700 AAM demonstrators marched around Washington, D.C.98 The AAM formed several amicable partnerships with Farm Aid and the National Save the Family Farm Coalition to spread its activism to urban voters. By the mid-1980s, few actions taken by the Federal Government or any major farm organization could avert the ongoing crisis and pressures from the incoming Reagan administration to balance Federal budgets through market reorientation ideologically precluded desperate action. By mid-1983, the AAM newspaper began running more sombering literature discussing how to choose bankruptcy lawyers and how to navigate farm foreclosure. As foreclosures of farms throughout the grain belt began to increase the AAM staged various protests against Farmers’ Home Administration offices and farm auctions. Public pressure began to mount, leading Federal judges in winter of 1983 to halt the ongoing foreclosures for various states. Nominal income among farmers in 1983 had returned to pre-1972 levels, a cut of nearly 98 Associated Press, “Farmers Rally in Washington,” New York Times, March 5, 1985. 37 half of total income from just two years prior while farm debt reached a high of $172 billion.99 American agricultural exports declined relatively since 1972 but remained high in absolute terms despite low world demand and falling prices.100 The 1981 Farm Bill proved to have little sway in protecting farmers against the farm crisis and additional reforms to the policy front loomed as Congress shifted toward “target pricing” mechanisms in place of traditional production controls and commodity loans. The finalized Food Security Act of 1985 allowed for lower loan rates while target pricing allowed the USDA to issue direct payments to producers to make up shortfalls in farm income, though both the target price was tied to wider trends in production and subject to a limit of $50,000 of payouts.101 Additionally, deregulation of banking as a part of the Reagan administration’s restructuring of the economy pressured thousands of rural banks to integrate into larger urban markets, passing costs to farmers in the form of higher interest rates and thus higher costs to borrow funds.102 Consequently, farmers leaned more heavily into financing structures from the USDA. The Reagan administration’s push to keep the government out of farming witnessed the wholesale selling off of CCC assets as the old regulatory apparatus succumbed to a new form of market regulation. CONCLUSION The AAM would eventually continue to act as a small lobbying organization throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, but firmly declined during the crisis. Calls for parity were quickly falling out of the repertoire of lawmakers and the USDA. The ascendent rise and subsequent 99 United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, Farm Sector Income & Finances: Assets, Debt, and Wealth, (February 6, 2025), https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=4041. 100 Ronald D. Knutson, "The 1985 Farm Bill--A Review and Analysis," Alabama Law Review 38, no. 3 (1987): 554. 101 Knutson, 556. 102 Kim Norris, “The Farmers Home Administration: Where is it Headed?,” Economic Review 71 (1986): 26. 38 fading of the AAM occurred as a reaction to a broader structural transformation of agriculture during the 1970s would put American farmers in line with emergent global market imperatives for food around the world. In a telling way, the AAM failed to replicate the survival of other farm organizations that became permanent voices in the legislative process, likely less due to stringent organizational policies from the outset, but likely because those organizations that survived often merged with capital to buttress their lobbying organizations. The Farm Bureau’s wide network of insurance collection, the NFO’s marketing cooperative, and the NFU’s giant Grain Terminal Association, becoming the largest marketing cooperative in the country, buttressed the legitimacy and fiscal power of these organizations in approaching Congress to inform new agricultural legislation. The crisis politics of the AAM and its division into a formal and informal faction, coupled with their failure to court the established farm organizations reflected the recapturing power of the state against protest politics and mass organizations. Unlike the concurrent success of various civil rights organizations in maintaining broad appeal, the fracturing of agrarian protest was a concern of capital. The farm organizations, with the AAM included, represented the higher levels of legislative formations that had become formalized in the farm bill process and the goal of parity specifically linked to a hegemonic state. The highly ritualized relationships with Congress, typified by the near permanent positions of people like Tony Dechant and Allan Grant within the Farm Bill process, gave power to the established organizations to disregard an emergent threat to their power. Eventually the descent into the non-ritualized politique of far-right politics, the loss of the AAM’s critical public image, and the eventual failure of the 100% parity cause further distanced the group from establishing itself as a permanent feature of agricultural power. 39 Extending Howe’s analysis, the changing mode of production was thus reflected as a dynamic political force among petty producers. The organizational tactics and political aims of the AAM were informed by the very advancement of market forces that lead to their accumulation of wealth but a desire to return to state support against the excesses of competitive markets. What the AAM members visibly perceived went beyond simply low prices for farm commodities or the drying up of viable export markets, but perceptible threats that challenged the concept of a nation-state regulated agriculture for the good of that state. Members’ fears of the eventual ascendency of corporate agriculture was, and is, the same fear that grips rural activists of all stripes today, namely, the proletarianization of agriculture and the decline of the petty producer as a viable way of life. Additionally, the coterminous cultural character of the movement represented the complex role of petty producers in their quest to influence state policy and public opinion. On one hand the far-right conspiratorial politics mobilized farmers in the name of defending the rights to private property against malicious global actors and upheld an imagined system where equitable private enterprise existed between urban and rural areas within a national context. On the other hand, the astute concerns regarding wealth inequality, corporate takeover, as well as soil health, the rights of farm workers, and political equality are indicative of the complicated class characteristics of the organization. However, the power of the state to subordinate rural discontent into formalized channels clashed with the centuries of rural organizational experience that openly challenged state and corporate action, often employing violence or large, persistent, demonstrations away from state authority. In the years leading up to the AAM’s formation, agricultural organizations had been successful in putting economic power in the hands of farmer-owned cooperatives, thus combining capital with ritualized legislative connections, yet no such opportunity was afforded to the AAM. Thus the goal of 100% parity 40 through state action became a necessity that Arthur Chauncy was willing to dedicate years of activism for. 41 Name of Candidate: Brennan Stock Date of Submission: 31 March 2025