Western Farmers and Ranchers and the GOP? Why the loyalty? Part 1.

Dust Bowl farmers, from an era when the GOP would have done pretty much nothing.

TRIBUTE TO HARRIET HAGEMAN

Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, it is fitting that Harriet Hageman will be inducted into the 2011 Wyoming Agriculture Hall of Fame. Harriet is known across Wyoming and across our Nation as a stalwart promoter and defender of agriculture. With this honor, she is following in the footsteps of her father Jim Hageman, who was previously inducted in the Agriculture Hall of fame in 2002.

Harriet comes from a long history of agricultural producers. Her great grandfather homesteaded in Wyoming in 1879 and her parents bought their first ranch near Fort Laramie in 1961.  Harriet grew up on the family’s cattle ranches in the Fort Laramie area. Rather than pursuing a career in agriculture, she earned a law degree from the University of Wyoming. Yet she did not stray from the agriculture industry. Much of her legal practice has been focused on protecting agriculture’s land, water, and natural resources. She uses her Ag background coupled with her fine mind to effectively argue on behalf of Wyoming’s ranchers and farmers in courtrooms at all levels of the judiciary.

A few of her many accomplishments should be noted. Harriet was the lead attorney for the State of Wyoming in protecting its share of the North Platte River. She fought the USDA to protect Wyoming’s access to national forest lands. She successfully defended Wyoming’s Open Range Law before the Wyoming Supreme Court. Her clients include ranchers, farmers, irrigation districts and grazing permitees. Harriet represents them with a passion that can only come from love of agriculture.

I have had the honor of working with Harriet Hageman and have benefitted from her wisdom. I would ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating

 Harriet on this well-deserved honor. 

John Barasso in the Congressional Record, August 2, 2011.¹ 

CHUCK TODD:  You know, you actually vote less with Joe Biden than Kyrsten Sinema does. You're comfortable being a Democrat in Montana. Why is that?

SEN. JON TESTER:  Look, I'm also a farmer. And I can tell you that we would not have the farm today if it was not for the Democratic politics of FDR. And my grandfather and grandmother talked to us about that, my folks talked to me about that. And I will tell you that I am forever grateful for that, because I'm blessed to be a farmer, I love agriculture, and I wouldn't be one without the Democrats.

Meet the Press, December 11, 2022.

I wouldn't be a rancher but for the Democrats.  No Wyoming rancher born in Wyoming would be.

Harriet Hageman, born on a ranch outside of Ft. Laramie, Wyoming, wouldn't have been born on a ranch but for the Democrats.  If Herbert Hoover had won the election of 1932, she'd have been born in a city somewhere else, if she'd been born at all (and likely would not have, given the way twist of fates work).  She sure wouldn't have been born on a ranch/farm.

The Democrats saved agriculture in the 1930s in the West, Midwest and North.  They didn't do it any favors in the South, however.

My wife's grandfather, a World War Two Marine, and born on a ranch, remembered that and voted for the Democrats for the rest of his life.

So why do so many in agriculture vote Republican, even though Republican policies would have destroyed family agriculture in the 1930s and still stand to destroy family agriculture in the US today?

Well, a lot of reasons. But it'd be handy if people quit babbling the myths about it.

Indeed, when a person like Hageman states "I'm a fourth generation rancher", or things that effect, it ought to be in the form of an apology followed by "and yet I'm a Republican. . . "

Let's take a look at the reality of the matter.

Farm Policy from colonization up until the close of the Frontier.

Puritans on their way to church.  Something that's often omitted in depictions of the Puritans is how corporate early English colonization was.  English Colonists may have had individual economic and personal goals, and no doubt did in order to set off on such a risky endeavor, but they were often also sponsored by backers who had distince economic goals and expectations.  They remained heavily dependent upon the United Kingdom in that fashion. They also did not, at first, exist as individualist, but part of a community that featured very strict rules.

Up until January 1, 1863, farmers didn't acquire "virgin lands" by the pure sweat of their brow, as the myth would have everyone seemingly believe.

Let's start with a basic premise.

When the Spanish founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and the English Jamestown in 1622, there were already people here.

I don't think that's a shocker for anyone, but in recent years, the political right has taken this as a bit of a threat for some reason.  It's simply the truth.  Natives occupied the land.

The concept of the settlers, very loosely, was that the natives didn't have as good of a claim to the land as Europeans did, as essentially their agricultural exploitation, if existent at all, was not as developed as that of the Europeans.  In English colonies, it led to the concept of Aboriginal Title, which recognized that Indian nations did in fact have certain sovereign rights, including title, to land, but that it was inferior to that of the Crown, which was a more developed, civilized, sovereign.  The Crown could and did extinguish aboriginal title.²

After American Independence, this concept endured. The United States, not the states, but the United States Government, held title of lands.  States could hold title, but their title was co-equal with aboriginal title, not superior.  Generally, however up until 1862, the United States extinguished most, but not all, aboriginal title prior to a territory becoming a state, and upon statehood ceded the unoccupied public lands to the states. This gave rise to the wackadoodle concept in recent years that the Federal government retains an obligation to do that and must "turn over" Federal lands to the states, a position which should return the adherents of those asserting it to Kindergarten to start all over again in their educations.

After the Mexican War the United States found itself with a double land title problem. For one thing, it wasn't at all certain how to deal with the titles of New Mexicans and Californios who had title from Mexico or Spain.  That had to be recognized, of course, but the government was troubled by it in part because in defeating Mexico it hadn't acquired all of the Mexican administration along with that.

The other problem, in its view, is that it acquired a big swath of territory that nobody except wild aboriginals and nearly as wild courier du bois wanted to reside in.

The Homestead Act of 1862 was the answer.

It's no mistake that the Homestead Act was a Civil War measure.  In addition to the other problems the US now had a big population of rootless people it wasn't sure what to do with, and this provided a relief valved.  And the Southern States being out of the government temporarily opened up the door for the (then) progressive Republicans to really emphasize their use of the American System, which as a semi managed economy with lots of Federal intervention.  The Democrats, much like the current GOP, opposed government intervention in the economy.

So the GOP backed a new concept in which the US would directly give the public domain to homestead entrants if they put in at least five years of labor.  This too really struck at the South, as the pattern in the South had come to favor large landed interests which destroyed a farm through cotton production agriculture, and then bought new land further west and started again.

Note the essence of this here.  Prior to 1863, a farmer seeking land, or a would be farmer, had to buy it from somebody, or the Federal government, or the state.  Yes, people moved west and cleared land, but they didn't just get it for nothing.

After 1862 they could, by putting in the labor.

That system massively favored small, and poor, farmers, and disfavored large monied interests.  You could still buy the public domain, but entities doing that were in direct competition with those getting it for their labor.  It weighted things in favor of the small operator.

Which gave us, for example, the Johnson County War.

We don't think of the Johnson County War as an economic class struggle, and indeed it makes a person sound like a Marxist if you do, but it was.  Perhaps in Chestertonian terms, it was a contest between production agricultural and agrarians, which would be closer to the mark.  We've discussed the Johnson County War before, and will simply loop that dicussion in:

Sidebar: The Johnson County War

Over the past week, I've been running the events of the Johnson County War on a day by day basis.  This event may be the single most significant event in Wyoming's history, if measured in terms of popularity.  It's been the subject of several books, most recently Davis' "Wyoming Range War", and it's formed the basic plot outline, in a highly developed and adulterated way, for endless novels and movies, including such famous ones as The Virginian (the only one to really take the large stockman's side) and Shane.

The popular concept of the war is that it represented an armed expression of unadulterated greed.  While greed cannot be dismissed as an element, the larger question remains.  What was it all about?

The cattle industry, as we know it, didn't really come about until the conclusion of the Civil War.  Prior to that, the most significant meat livestock in the US was pork.  Swine production produced the basic farm meat for most Americans, which is not to say that they didn't eat cattle, they did, but cattle production was fairly small scale in the East, and much of it was focused on dairy and mixed production.  Meat cattle were more common in the South, and while it's popular to note that American ranching was a development of Mexican ranching, it was also very much a development of Southern ranching practices.  This, in fact, partially gave rise to the Johnson County War, as will be seen.

At any rate, the American Beef Cattle industry was born when the railroads penetrated into Kansas after the Civil War, and returning Texas cattlemen found that the herds in their state had gone wild, and greatly increased.  Cattle in Texas, up until that time, had followed the Mexican practice of being raised principally for their hides, not for meat, but the introduction of rail into Kansas meant that cattle could now be driven, albeit a long ways, to a railhead and then shipped to market.  An explosion in urban centers in the East provided a natural market, and soon the cattle industry in Texas had switched over to being focused on shipping cattle for beef.

The Texas industry spread north as well and by the 1870s it was making inroads into Wyoming, although really only southern Wyoming for the most part.  At the same time, and often forgotten, a dramatic increase in herds in Oregon, the byproduct of early farm herds and pioneer oxen herds, produced a surplus there that caused herds to be driven back east into Wyoming at the very moment that northern Wyoming opened up for ranching.

But what was ranching like here, at the time?

It was dominated by the fact of the Homestead Act, a bill passed during the Civil War in order to encourage western emigration into the vast public domain. But the bill had been written by men familiar only with Eastern farming, and it used the Eastern agricultural unit, 40 acres, as a model. That amount of acreage was perfectly adequate for a yeoman farmer, and indeed after the Civil War "40 acres and a mule" was the dream of the liberated slave, which they hoped to obtain from the Federal government.  But 40 acres wasn't anywhere near adequate for any sort of livestock unit in the West, and most of the West wasn't suitable for farming.  In the West, additionally, the Federal homesteading provisions oddly dovetailed with State and Territorial water law.

Water law was the domain of states or territories exclusively, and evolved in the mining districts of California, which accepted that claiming water in one place and moving it to another was a necessary right.  This type of water law, much different from that existing in the well watered East, spread to the West, and a "first in time, first in right" concept of water law evolved.  This was to be a significant factor in Western homesteading. Additionally, the Federal government allowed open use of unappropriated public lands for grazing.  States and Territories, accepting this system, sought to organize the public grazing by district, and soon an entire legal system evolved which accepted the homesteading of a small acreage, usually for the control of water, and the use of vast surrounding public areas, perhaps collectively, but under the administration of some grazing body, some of which, particularly in Wyoming, were legally recognized.  In the case of Wyoming, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association controlled the public grazing, and had quasi legal status in that livestock detectives, who policed the system, were recognized at law as stock detectives.

This was the system that the large ranching interests accepted, developed and became use to in the 1870s and 1880s.  Large foreign corporations bought into Western ranching accepting that this was, in fact the system.  It had apparent legal status.

But nothing made additional small homesteading illegal.  And the penalty for failing to cooperate in the grazing districts mostly amounted to being shunned, or having no entry into annual roundups.  This continued to encourage some to file small homesteads.  Homesteading was actually extremely expensive, and it was difficult for many to do much more than that.  Ironically, small homesteading was aided by the large ranchers practice of paying good hands partially in livestock, giving them the ability to start up where they otherwise would not have been.  It was the dream of many a top hand, even if it had not been when they first took up employment as a cowboy, to get a large enough, albeit small, herd together and start out on their own.  Indeed, if they hoped to marry, and most men did, they had little other choice, the only other option being to get out of ranch work entirely, as the pay for a cowhand was simply not great enough to allow for very many married men to engage in it.

By the 1880s this was beginning to cause a conflict between the well established ranchers, who tended to be large, and the newer ones, who tended to be small.  The large stockmen were distressed by the carving up of what they regarded as their range, with some justification, and sought to combat it by legal means.  One such method was the exclusion of smaller stockmen from the large regional roundups, which were done collectively at that time, and which were fairly controlled events.  Exclusion for a roundup could be very problematic for a small stockman grazing on the public domain, as they all were, and this forced them into smaller unofficial roundups. Soon this created the idea that they were engaging in theft.  To make matters even more problematic, Wyoming and other areas attempted to combat this through "Maverick" laws, which allowed any unbranded, un-cow attended, calf to be branded with the brand of its discoverer.  This law, it was thought, would allow large stockmen to claim the strays found on their ranges, which they assumed, because of their larger herds, to be most likely to be theirs (a not unreasonable assumption), but in fact the law actually encouraged theft, as it allowed anybody with a brand to brand a calf, unattended or not, as long as nobody was watching.  Soon a situation developed in which large stockmen were convinced that smaller stockmen were acting illegally or semi illegally, and that certain areas of the state were controlled by thieves or near thieves, while the small stockmen rightly regarded their livelihoods as being under siege. Soon, they'd be under defacto  siege.

This forms the backdrop of the Johnson County War.  Yes, it represent ed an effort by the landed and large to preserve what they had against the small entrant.   But their belief that they were acting within the near confines of the law, if not solidly within it, was not wholly irrational.  They convinced themselves that their opponents were all thieves, but their belief that they were protecting a recognized legal system, or nearly protecting it, had some basis in fact.  This is not to excuse their efforts, but from their prospective, the break up by recognized grazing districts by small entrants was not only an obvious threat to its existence (and indeed it would come to and end), but an act protecting what they had conceived of as a legal right.  Their opponents, for that matter, were largely acting within the confines of the law as well, and naturally saw the attack as motivated by greed.

As with many things, the conflict in systems of laws gave each side a basis to see their own acts as fully valid. The small stockmen had the high side of the fight, but the fight itself was more ambiguous in motivations, to some degree, than it is typically portrayed as being.

The fight didn't start with the invasion at all, but actually a campaign of assassinations was started by somebody.   It cannot be assumed that the WGSA had ratified this, but certainly whoever commenced it was on that side of the fight.  It proved unsuccessful, and if anything it made Johnson County residents nervous, but all the more opposed to those aligning against them.  Finally, as we have seen, events transpired to the point where the WSGA actually sponsored an invasion, albeit one of the most ineptly planned and executed ones every conducted by anyone.

The invasion, as we've seen, was a total failure in terms of execution.  It succeeded in taking the lives of two men, with some loss of life on its part as well, but it did nothing to address the perceived problem  it was intended to address.  The invaders were much more successful in avoiding the legal implications of their acts, through brilliant legal maneuvering on the part of their lawyers, but the act of attempting the invasion brought so much attention to their actions that they effectively lost the war by loosing the public relations aspect of it.  For the most part, the men involved in it were able to continue on in their occupations without any ill effect on those careers, a fairly amazing fact under the circumstances, and, outside of Gov. Barber, whose political career was destroyed, even the political impacts of the invasion were only temporary.  Willis Vandevanter was even able to go on to serve on the United States Supreme Court, in spite of the unpopularity of this clinets in the defense of the matter.  Violence continued on for some time, however, with some killings, again engaged in with unknown sponsors, occurring. However, not only a change in public opinion occurred, but soon a change in perceived enemies occurred, and a new range war would erupt against a new enemy, that one being sheep.  The range itself would continue to be broken up unabated until the Taylor Grazing Act was passed early in Franklin Roosevelt's administration, which saved the range from further homesteading, and which ultimately lead to a reconsolidation of much of the range land.

That got ahead or our story a bit, but consider this.

The homestead act brought the small operators in. The big operators kept coming in. When small operators were the beneficiaries of a Federal land program.  When the inevitable contest between the two came, the Federal government sided with the small operators through the intervention of the U.S. Army.

Now let's consider the role of the Army.

All this land was available in the first place as, after the Mexican War, the Federal Government had provided the Army to "deal with" the Indians. Dealing with them meant removing them onto Reservations.  Prior to the Mexican War, Native Americans were mostly "dealt with" by the states or even simply by individuals, which made the Indian Wars prior to the Mexican War ghastly bloody affairs, something amplified by the fact that the invention of the Rifle Musket (not the musket, or a rifle, but the Rifle Musket) gave industrialized Americans a real weapons advantage over the Natives for the very first time.

Now, in complete fairness, the Army didn't enter the West like a German SS Division, and the Army spent a lot of time just trying to keep the age-old warfare between European Americans and the Natives from going on.  But it was a massive Federal intervention with the result of removing the Natives from their lands even if the reality of what occurred wasn't seen that way, fully, or by everyone, at the time.

The net result is that agriculture in the west was the beneficiary of a massive, liberal-progerssives set of agriculture policies that favored poorer agriculturalist, if not necessary poor agriculturalist.

Put another way, it wasn't the rugged pioneer finding unoccupied virgin soil in the west and creating a farm or ranch out of the pure sweat of their brows and dirt on their fingers.  That was involved, but they were given the thing they needed the most, the land, for nothing but that work, and their presence was backed up by the Federal Government, including in an armed fashion if necessary.

The close of the frontier until the 1920s.

The US has always had some sort of farm policy and a lot of it is monetary in nature, and I'm not qualified to really expand on that.   What I can say there I basically already have.

In 1890 Frederick Jackson Turner, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the frontier was closed.  This was one year after the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush which had opened up a vast amount of Indian lands to settlement again on the basis that they weren't in productive use, as European Americans saw it.  In 1890, they all were, according to the Census Bureau.

At that point, the Homestead Act should have been repealed, having succeeded in its goal, but its in the nature of Federal programs that they always live on well after they should die.  Guaranteed Student Loans provide a current example.  So nothing changed

Then came World War One.

World War One sparked a global agricultural crisis.

Little noted, by and large, the world's economy had globalized to an extent which was only recently reestablished (and probably surpassed, maybe).  The Great War destroyed that, and part of what it destroyed was global agriculture.  The massive Russian and Ukrainian wheat supply was removed from the market as part of that, and this in turn started a massive American homesteading rush, with people who had little knowledge of farming flooding the prairie's to be dry land farmers, something which boosters insisted couldn't fail.  At first, in fact, it didn't.  The crisis carried on through the war, along with a massively boosted demand for agricultural commodities of all kids.  The 1910s saw the largest number of homesteads filed of any decade, and 1919 saw the last year in which farmers had economic parity with urban dwellers.

And then it collapsed.

The Farm Crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression

For farmers, the Depression really started in 1920, not 1929.  Farms were failing, and yet homesteading, at a smaller post Great War rate, continued.

Then came 1929. 

Still suffering from a post-war economic crisis, 1929 brought a flood of new homesteaders as desperate town and city dwellers left their homes, having lost their jobs, and sought to try to homestead, not knowing what they were doing.  This was destroying the farm and ranch lands of the West.  Finally, with Franklin Roosevelt's administration having come in, the Federal Government stepped in to save the situation by repealing the Homestead Acts and passing the Taylor Grazing Act.

The Taylor Grazing Act protected the existing farms and ranches against new homestead entrants, meaning that they could keep grazing that part of the Federal domain which they were, in exchange for a reasonable preferential lease. That's the system we've had ever since, and its what keeps real ranchers in business to this day, although here too times have caught up with the system and at least some farming states, like Iowa, have passed laws preventing absentee corporate ownership of farms. Wyoming should do the same, but wedded to a blind concept of property rights that doesn't meet the reality of our history or the situation, it hasn't and likely won't. 

The Roosevelt farm policy went far beyond that.  The Agricultural Adjustment Act dealt directly with prices, although it was ruled unconstitutional at the tail end of the Depression in 1936.  Programs that resulted in some crops being "plowed under" took products off the market that were depressing prices, and price supports for landowners were put in place, which helped farmers in the West and North, but which were devastating to sharecroppers, who didn't own their own land, in the South.

And now today.

The net result of this, once again, is that the Republicans, by now the conservative party, were doing nothing for agriculture and would have let the occupants of the land go under. The Democrats, now the liberal party, saved them.

Since that time, it's been largely the same story, except not that much help has been needed.  The Defense Wool Subsidy was passed in 1954, for defense wool needs, under the Eisenhower Administration, so there was an example of a Republican program that helped farmers, although it was designed to really do so, and it was eliminated in 1993 while Clinton was in office, so a Democrat operated to hurt sheep ranchers.  This gets into the complicated story of subsidies, which are not as extensive as people imagine, and which have been part of a Federal "cheap food" policy that came in after World War Two and which is frankly a little spooky when looked at.  Overall, the policy is unpopular with free marketers, who tend to be Republicans, but it's been kept in place with it sometimes being noted that the overall post-war history of "cheap food" is an historical anomaly.  Anyhow, it gets a bit more complicated at this point.

Which takes us to this.

Looking at the history of it, Progressives and Liberals have kept ranchers and farmers on the land.  When Harriet Hageman notes she's a fourth generation Wyomingite from an agricultural background, she's implying that she's a direct beneficiary of a massive government program that 1) removed the original occupants of the land to open it up to agriculture; 2) opened it up to the poorer agriculturalist and kept its hand on the scale to benefit them; and 3) operated to save them in times of economic distress.

Given that, it's been the Democrats that have really helped that sector since 1914, when they became the liberal party, and Republicans before that, when they were.

But that doesn't comport with the myth people have sold themselves very well.

There are lots of reasons not to be a Democrat.  I'm not arguing that economic self-interest should dictate how a person votes, nor am I stating that the history of a party should control present votes.

But what I am stating is the current Agricultural loyalty to the GOP is misplaced based on its history.  When a person states that they're fourth generation in agriculture, they're stating that they've benefitted from the Democratic Party, and really not so much from the Republicans.  A lot of Republican loyalty is therefore based on something else, including a multi generational grudge against policies that saved them.

What else might be at work?

Footnotes

1.  I don't know the circumstances of the Hageman's purchasing a ranch in 1961, but the date is interesting, as it would put this within a decade of the last era in which average ranchers in Wyoming could still buy land.  This is almost impossible now, something that the current holders of family ranches often completely fail to appreciate.

It's also interesting in that Hageman, who is married but who retains her maiden name, doesn't work on the family farm/ranch, as Sen. Barrasso's accolade noted.  She's followed the path of many younger sons, which of course she is not, in agriculture of entering into a profession as there really was no place else to go.  This has been less true of women, who often marry into another agricultural family.

Hageman started off following an agricultural career, going to Casper College on a meat judging scholarship, something often oddly omitted in the biographies of her that I've seen, although it is occasionally noted.

1879 is a truly early Wyoming homestead entry.

2.  In spite of all the criticism that various European colonist have received, it's worth noting that French and Spanish colonization was quite a bit different than English colonization.

French colonization particularly was.  It was done on the cheap, for one thing, and almost all of the French colonist came from Normandy alone, bringing Norman culture, which was much more independent than English culture, with them.  French colonist, like Spanish colonist, were also devoutly Roman Catholic, and it was emphasized in their faith that the natives were co-equal to them as human beings, endowed with the same rights before God.  For this reason, French colonist mixed much more readily with the Natives than the English did.

This is true of the Spanish as well, who began to take Native brides (and mistresses) almost immediately upon contact.  Spanish colonization is more complicated than the French example, however, as it was not done on the cheap and was part of a massive economic effort.