PLAYING WITH BLOCS Rain is such a simple thing.
Yet,for want of such a blessing, entire lives and careers can swerve unsteadily, even be destroyed. The loss of a promised crop can spell disaster for many people even now in modern times.
We used to hear a great deal more about such agricultural concerns years ago when our population included farm dwellers - workers, owners, lease-holders, and associated industrial and commercial business firms in towns, villages and cities build around farmland cores. They made up a political force well worth consideration by any candidate for whatever office rural or urban, local, statewide - even national. To avoid it called for extreme caution.
Rural elements gained new respect in the "New Deal" - F.D.R..era -when it,too, changed to alphabetical designations for each and every segment so that they lost their meaning for most folks. When treated as a political unit it began to fade away. Joined together as a union concepts it started to fade away - it fragmented into grape growers, wheat behemoths, corn cabals ranging from solid trough liquid renditions, sugar cane
, rice growers - et al - each classified, re-shaped and coded to be exclusive, self-regulating and coded to work as something it never really became. The family "community" withered and was swept away,in part as a physical entity, by a momentous, natural tragedy of the time, known by today's "social studies" booklets as "The Dust Bowl" era.
I remember one subtle little mechanism by which the new way was nudged or forced to go along and unlikely path. The Editor-Publisher-Owner of our local weekly newspaper and print shop in our rural town, by out of the reasonably blue haze of the New Deal sky shielding new concepts, was suddenly named to be Undersecretary of the Something in the of agricultural maze in ,around or near the Foggy Bottom of . He was, as I recall, from Iowa or some mid-western state, and understood what "great, n big farmin'" as all about. Lesser powers took over at
home and I don't recall ever hearing from him again, other than a weekly boilerplate handout column he did for home town publications - plus reams of press releases. When told to do so, our paper was emblazoned with "Blue Eagle" artwork - symbols of our rural unity strength and loyalty.
Many years later I found other instances where rural editors had been chosen to augment the undersecretary forces in Washington. I don't have any idea if it worked or not, but it does show how the farm bloc vote was to political planners of that day.
The agricultural person of today is quite a departure
from the one of just a few decade ago. The simple fact that it can be either to wet or too dry for him to function in his present-day role as producer of a product useful to mankind which society about him wants, needs and is willing to make a proper payment.
A.L.M. May 11, 2006 [c504wds]
