What Do You Kow About the Great Depression?
Corn hogging • Civilian conservation.
If you were born after Pearl Harbor took us into World War II, chances are you have little awareness of how it affected millions of Americans. Memory fades with the passing years.
Perhaps somewhat as women forget the pains of giving birth in the joys of seeing their children develop delightfully, Lilburn’s painful memories of the Great Depression effects upon the Boonslick Community seem to have eroded with the passage of time and the joy he found riding his hobby horses. This is suggested by his “Lilburn Says -Depression” column in the Boonville Daily News, April 7, 1975.
High school, even Central Methodist college students have, over the years, come to ask me to relate incidents of The Depression. (One of the benefits of being middle-aged.) They seemed to expect to hear of heart-wrenching experiences suffered by people of New Franklin or myself. But I knew of nothing of the kind. A good percentage of the men in town worked for the railroad and their pay went right on. The government came to the rescue of others. Many geared their living to the rescue of others. Many adjusted their living to the times and made the best of it like Dr. Moser whom I asked last week how he weathered the storm.
“Well,” he said, “every morning I would lay a dollar on the table and say to my wife, ‘Now, Jessie, make this go as far as you can. Maybe before the day is over, I shall be able to give you another.’ Some days the other dollar would materialize, sometimes not. It was remarkable what she did with the first one.
“I had plenty of work but I got so I knew before a man got inside the office he was going to say he needed some work very much but he didn’t have any money and hoped I’d credit him until he lay hands on some. I didn’t turn anybody down except a lady who brought an old set of teeth to trade as down payment for a new set! But I felt pinched to pay for new materials which I had to have and ordered. With a dribble of dollars paid me now and then, we managed to get by without any memorable hardships.
“The first good crop year after the depression began, 95 percent of those I had credited came in and paid what they owed. It was wonderful. I wonder sometimes if people are as honest today as then!”
Personally, as I recall, my insurance patrons kept their insurance premiums paid up. If any failed it wasn’t enough to make a lasting impression on my mind. I lived in the country where we raised enough of almost everything to supply the table. Other things were to be had in needful quantities. We had a large apple orchard and generally good crops. While prices for apples were low, the crop was large and brought in sufficient funds to pay expenses and buy necessities. Mrs. Robert Kingsbury, my sister-in-law, remembers people who bought a bushel of apples and got mad if we didn’t throw in the basket.
So I was fortunate that the depression left no scars on me to show the inquiring students who wanted to know about those “terrible days.”
However, there were people who felt knocked down and stomped by depression incidents. I learned this when I casually mentioned to a lady the inquiring students who had been given the assignment of writing essays about it, whom I had not been able to help.
“You should have sent them to me,” she said. “I could have filled their note books. It was a nightmarish time for me. My husband and I had made a trade to purchase a farm in 1929. Thinking we had completed arrangements to borrow the money to close the trade, we cashed in every holding we had and made the down payment. However, some other parties were desirous of buying the land, and influence must have been brought to bear on the parties who were to lend us the money. They advised they were unable to let us have it.
“We tried everywhere to get the loan without success. Without it, we were in a position to lose all life savings we had used for the down payment.
“Do you know what I did? I wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt telling him of the situation, described the land, related the circumstances which had kept us from getting a loan on the place we had hoped to make home for the rest of our lives, and about us being in a position now to lose everything we had saved.
“To my dying day, I shall revere the memory of President Roosevelt. In our behalf he wired the people who held the old mortgage to be patient, their money would be forthcoming: and to the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City to send a representative at once to inspect and appraise the land, to show us every consideration, and if the value of the land supported the amount requested for the loan, to make it immediately. In our estimation, Eleanor and Franklin could never do anything wrong!
“Of course, during the depression it was difficult to sell farm products enough for us to take care of the interest on the loan plus general expenses. We had a hard time, but we made it.”
“How long did the Depression last?” I asked her.
“For us, until we got into World War II and farm prices began to go up.”
The depression had affected millions by 1931. The job my brother Bill Kingsbury expected to return to at the Nashville Tennessean after a year in Europe was no longer available. He had been hired to edit the weekly paper Edgar Nelson of Boonville was establishing in Marshall. Lilburn writes of this to Lillian Agnew, September 10, 1931:
Edgar Nelson has sold his paper in Marshall and that put Bill out of a job. Jere is not returning to school owing to a shortage of funds to maintain his university fraternity life this fall, so there were William, Warren, and Jere all unemployed. The day before Bill left Marshall he learned of a vacancy in the high school English department, so he phoned Warren to come post-haste and apply. The point of it was Warren got located at $150 a month, so unexpectedly they were quite shocked with pleasure. I don’t know where Jere is, but a friend hoped to locate him in the oil business in St. Louis. Bill, his mother and father went down to the cabin on the lake last Sunday and expect to be there for some time. Business matters got so stringent in the farm business handled by Billie and his partner, Billie was forced to sell out and did at a great loss and has been terribly upset over it. Personally, I think it was the best thing that ever happened, for running a string of farms can be a constant drain which will dry you up sooner or later and his drying might just as well be now as later.
This foreshadowed Billie’s tragic death, and about a year later Lilburn wrote:
With the increase of postage coming up, it behooves me to write all the letters to even up my scores. I suspect a good many letters will be written for that reason. I heard Julia (Billie’s widow) say she was busy trying to get a good many off. That she had so many the “tax” would amount to a good deal. She is counting the pennies for didn’t the Boonville National just turn up its toes last Thursday and keep all the people’s money that was therein? She had saved out from investment enough for a year’s expenses. This was every cent she had. Fortunately she was selling a piece of property she had in Huntsville. The deal had not been closed and she will have that to fall back on. Of course, Julia is only one of hundreds who were hurt. Luther Lee, Horace Kingsbury, Horace Blankenbaker and Albert Smith all were bank stockholders and, aside from losing the amount of their stock, will be required to put up an equal amount to meet the deficit. Uncle Charles had sold some hogs, banked the money there and given a check on it for more hogs. The check had not been cashed before the close.
There is talk of reorganization but some say they doubt if they can do it for practically every cent can be counted as lost. Reorganization had been practically completed but the Reconstruction Finance Company which had practically agreed to furnish about $150,000, decided to advance only $70,000, and the top blew off.
One of the bank directors got scared and took $10,000 he had in the bank out of the Boonville National and put it in the other Boonville Bank. This move contributed to the decision to close. Well, the directors of the Boonville National were on bond to guarantee the money which the other bank had in the Boonville National, and when the other bank saw this director who had brought his ten grand to them was a signer on the bond, they just proceeded to tie up the $10,000. So the man who tried to protect himself will probably lose anyhow. Some of the other directors on that bond will not be able to pay.
By the spring of 1933, some of Lilburn’s nieces and nephews had had to drop out of college, cousins had lost their farms and some friends were jobless. When Work Program Administration jobs were created, those taking them could only work half time so more families could have some income. I think it probable some of the apples from Lilburn’s orchard may have found their way to the peddlers on street corners of the big cities.
Charles van Ravenswaay became a beneficiary of the Federal Writers’ Program - becoming director of the Showme States Guide Book.
Roosevelt’s election in 1932 launched the depression-fighting New Deal programs which affected the lives of many. Lilburn became a founding committee chairman for the Agricultural Adjustment Act designed to stabilize farm prices in a manner which would assure farmers a profit. He wrote of this to his Cousin Lillian on March 9, 1934:
Corn Hogging
Such corn-hogging as I have been doing! We thought when we rounded up the farmers and helped them make out and sign their papers the big job was over. Really, the work is just commencing. In the main office, they have clerks who checked over the papers and marked the errors. I am amazed at my inaccuracies. And what I didn’t err on, somebody else seemed to have. We are overhauling all of our 90 applications, correcting what we can. The rest will have to be attended to when we go to see the individuals. We have to go back over the farms of every one of those men, and got underway yesterday afternoon. We appraised five, and as it was muddy, we had to do all of the exploring on foot. We had to go to one end of it to see where the corn had been grown last year and then to the extreme northeast corner to inspect the acres they are renting to the government. So we made a complete circle of the farm with much mud balling up on our shoes. We are hoping for more favorable weather before getting off the hard surface roads and tackling the outlying farms.
We had a meeting a few days ago and decided we would pay ourselves $5 a day for this work, and it will take each of us about 50 days to complete the job. So I am willing to walk over some farm land. If I don’t get to do it that way, I might have to walk over some of it behind a plow. Through the CWA, the old orchard at the Agnew place was cut down this winter and cleaned up, quite a saving to the owner and a Godsend to Mr. Baker, who has his fine commercial orchard just up the road, where he fights coddling moths to a finish and the moths have had a harbor for years. The Agnew orchard has not been sprayed or cleaned up for several years. I was in line for aid, but thought they would never get to me, so we had our own men cut down the trees. It is slow, as they allow the men, who aren’t worth their salt anyway, to work only 24 hours a week. Unless the owner stands and watches, they cease work and warm and talk around the burning brush pile.
About 25 tobacco growers of the county have formed an association to reduce their tobacco acreage. And there are a lot more who haven’t joined up who are going to grow tobacco regardless. A good deal of the Estill land just north of us, which has never grown a stack of tobacco is going in this summer. It looks like there will be more tobacco acres this year. On hogs, it is likely there will be a reduction because people are sick and tired of raising hogs for less than nothing anyway.
I wish you would tell me the sense of reducing acreage in the country which will produce crops naturally, and increasing acreage where they will have to irrigate, and spend millions of dollars to build a dam to hold the water in reserve. It looks to me like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Instead of giving the farmers a lot of money on hogs and wheat and corn, why didn’t they devise some plan to let the farmer have his land and loan him the money to hold it with, at about 3 percent, say? The land would always stand for the debt. But with all these corn and hog papers, we have people claiming more than they ought to have, and the government has to stand over them with a club to see if they keep sufficient land out of cultivation as they have agreed to do, whether they let their livestock eat off some of the grass that is not intended to be pastured, etc. The greatest benefit of these Federal farm programs goes to the people who need the least help.
Do you know shortly they will begin to work on the reduction of beef cattle, then dairy products, then poultry, and then sheep?
The women clerks in the county office said today, “If we aren’t all crazy by the time this is over, it will be a wonder.”
But let ‘er go! I can hold on as long as anyone, I guess, and whatever happens none will hate it worse than I, if it is bad. I can’t see that business is so hot on the upgrade, but I do think the morale of the people is better. They have their faith and hope bolstered up.
Civilian Conservation
Towards the end of the year he wrote to Cousin Lillian:
I have corn-hogged until I am worn to the nub. The three of us committeemen for this township have had the visiting of farms and examining the soil to attend to and it has necessitated so much walking and climbing of hills and hollows I was glad of a day in the office to meet those who had to come in to make changes in their papers. But we had a beautiful warm week in which to work and I was delighted to get first-hand information about the farms all about us, and delighted to find most of them are in such excellent condition so far as soil is concerned, though on many farms, the improvements are in bad condition. Luther Lee told me there were only two good gates in the entire river bottom. Be that as it may, people are not building new fences at a rate which would delight the men who sell wire. I find most of the land promises good yields. That simplified things as we had thought the claims made by the applicants in many cases were exorbitant. I hope we can get the job finished before long and have the papers off to Washington so we can get a little spending money.
Corn is selling high as are most farm products. I paid $1.03 a bushel for a hundred bushels the other day and that is mighty little corn. It is all right about the price when one is the seller but it is terrible when one is on the other end, with hogs to fatten. We gamble on the prospect of having a higher price for our next fat hogs, but my, what a price they would have to have to pay for the high-priced feed. It won’t work out on paper. And, I get no satisfaction from the figures in black and white when I put down on one side the benefits to be derived from this AAA government and place against it the costs including the processing tax, which you know the farmer pays. Along with all the others, I am sailing on the ship of state, hoping to come to port, but I feel very much as I did on the old mule boat in the middle of the hurricane when the plates creaked and wondered if we’d make it. As one who knows, I say the money which comes from the government is an incentive to go along with the administration, whether it comes to one on the relief roll, from the triple A, or from the jobs which have been created. Our palms have been warmed with the coin of the realm, and it has a very heavy persuading influence. One gets nowhere saying anything against the New Deal, it is such treason.
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