I've seen this place from the side of the road quite a few times, although its in a remote location. It wasn't until earlier this fall that I realized that it's all on Federal Land.
I walked in, as you have to do, while hunting doves. I only saw one.
It's a full homestead. Barns, outbuildings, and a substantial house. This is very unusual as a lot of work went into this, but for some reason, it wasn't proved up. I'll have to see if I can figure out the history of it. So far I've had no luck.
It was well thought out, and sheltered. A substantial hay field, on Federal Land, worked by the current leaseholder remains. What's really surprising, however, is the house. It was very well built. So much so, that for a time I debated it if was a school, but it was better built than rural schools by quite some margin, and frankly larger. It's a house.
Usually, although not always, when you walk up on an abandoned homestead, they're on private, not Federal, land. And that makes sense. It only took five years to prove up a homestead, and proving it up was one of the first things the people eligible to do so did. It protected their investment, which was substantial, both in terms of time and labor, but moreover in actual cash outlays, which were actually quite a bit more extensive than people imagine.
The peak year for homesteading was 1913, during which 11,000,000 acres were claimed. I"m a bit surprised by that, as I thought it was 1914. World War One caused a massive boom in homesteading which was aided by the weather. A lot of people took up dry land farming in that period, following the naive popular assertion of the time that "rain follows the plow.
Abandoned wagon.
It doesn't.
A large part of what inspired homesteading entries at the time was the Great War. With Imperial Russia off of the farming export market, which was a huge portion of its GNP at the time, and with European farming massively impacted by the war, grain production, beef production, and horse production turned to the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Trouble began to set in after the war, although interestingly not immediately so. 1919 was the last year that American farmers had economic parity with those who lived in municipalities. That started changing soon thereafter, however, and its never reversed. The Agricultural Depression of the 1920s set in early in the 1920s, and basically carried on until the Great Depression hit in 1929. Having said that, people continued to attempt to file homestead entries, some people naively believing that if they couldn't make it in town, they could as a farmer or rancher.
The buildings on this spread, however, are too nice to be a late homestead entry. I've seen a few comparable ones that were abandoned, but they were all earlier homesteads in which the owners became over extended and couldn't make their bank payments during the Great Depression. A lot of money went into some houses and whatnot while things were going well. That must have been the case here. So what happened?
That is, at least right now, impossible for me to say. But what seems clear is that a lot of money went into this spread during good times, and the owners pulled out when hard times hit. That, and the fact that the abandoned equipment is horse, not vehicle, drawn would suggest that the homesteaders were doing okay during World War One but didn't weather the change in the economic climate of the Agricultural Depression of the 1920s. If I had my guess, this was probably a World War One vintage homestead which collapsed, after a huge investment of time, effort and money, soon after the war.
They didn't last long enough in order to prove up.
Their dreams must have been crushed. I hope, and pray, that the rest of their lives went well.
I'd also note that, more than ever before, when I see places like this I have a maudlin tinge of regret. My dream was something like this too. At age 62, I won't make it.
Well, okay, clearly its strayed way beyond that, but it's retained that purpose and is focused on the period from around 1900 until around 1920, which makes a lot other things, indeed most things, off topic.
But this past week there were a collection of things we ran across that really do sort of focus in on that a bit, and given us an example of how things have changed.
Taking them in no particular order, we have the story of baseball player Tommy Brown, about whom we noted:
Tommy "Buckshot" Brown as born on December 6, 1927 and January 15, 2025, and gives us a really good glimpse of the world of the late 1930s and 1940s. He'd dropped out of school at age 12 in 1939 and went to work with his uncle as a dockworker. Being a longshoreman is a notoriously dangerous job and frankly the occupation was heavily influenced by the mob at the time. There's no earthly way that you could be hired as a longshoreman at age 12 now, nor should there be. But life was like that then. My father's father, who was born in 1907, I think, went to work at age 13.
People did that.
If you are a longshoreman at age 12, you are a 12 year old adult.
He must have been a good baseball player to be hired on in the Majors at age 16. If that happened now, you'd have to be one of the greatest players alive in the game. But this was during World War Two, and baseball was scraping.
It was scraping as the military was. The service had taken pretty much all the able bodied men who weren't in a critical war industry. We don't like to think this about "the Greatest Generation" now, but by 1944 and 1945, the Army was inducting me who were only marginally capable of being soldiers in normal times. Men who were legally blind in one eye and who were psychotic were being taken in, and I'm not exaggerating. The recent incident we reported here of a soldier going mad and killing Japanese POWs makes sense in this context. It's relatively hard to get into the Army now. After World War Two men inducted were in good physical and mental shape. By the last days of the Second World War not all were and we knew it.
Brown's story also tells us a lot about what economic life was like mid century. Obviously, baseball didn't make Brown rich, and there was no post baseball career associated with sports. He went to work in a factory.
Going to work in a factory, in the 50s, was a pretty solid American job, and another story we touched on relates to this.
Americans of our age, and indeed since the 1950s, have really convinced themselves that American Ingenuity and native smartness caused us to have the best economy in the world in the third quarter of the 20th Century, and that if only we returned to the conditions of the 50s, we would again.
Well, the conditions of the 1950s were a lot like the conditions of the post war 1940s. Every major city in the world, save for American and Canadian ones, had been damaged, and many had been bombed flat. It's not as if Stuttgart, Stalingrad, or Osaka were in good shape. We would have had to nearly intentionally mess up not to be the world's dominant economy and that went on all the way into the 1970s. The UK did not really recover from World War Two, in part due to bad economic decisions, until the 1960s. West Germany, ironically, recovered much quicker, but in no small part due to the return of refugee German economists who intentionally ignored American economic advice. Japan emerged from the devastation in the 70s. Italy really started to in the 60s.
Many of these countries, when they did, emerged with brand new economies as things were brand new. Japan is a good example, but then so is Italy, which had been a shockingly backwater dump until the mid 50s.
Russia, arguably, has never recovered, helping to explain its national paranoia.
The thing is, however, that the myth as been hugely damaging to Americans, who imagine that if we were only whiter and had "less regulation", etc., we'd be back in 1955. It's not going to happen, and we can't tariff our way back to the Eisenhower Era.
Of course, a lot of that post war era wasn't all that nifty. We had the Cold War, for example, and we often dealt with significant inflation, in no small part to inflate our way out of enormous Cold War defense budgets. . .which is probably a warning of what's to come when we realize we have to do something about the national debt.
Finally, we had posted on women and careers. Well, sort of. Anyhow, right after that we saw a Twitter post in which a young woman who posted on TikTok was being discussed for say:
I'm just so tired of living and working and doing this every single day, and having nothing — I don't know how I'm gonna get childcare when I have to work 40 hours a week because I can't even afford to feed my family as is. I'm having medical problems. I can't even get into the doctor because X rays and MRIs are 500, let alone a colonoscopy and endoscopy that I need. Like, I can't afford anything. My doctors cancel my appointments.
This world is just not meant to be like this, we need to make change for us, for each other. Please.
She's right.
This was under the heading, on her post, of "This world is a scam".
The world? Well, that's a little too broad. But the modernized industrialized Protestant work ethic world of the West? You bet.
Interestingly, one of the things she took flak for was buying some sort of baby bottle washer. It's been a long time since there were infants here, but when there were, I recall we tended to use sort of a disposable system, not real bottles. Having said that, I looked bottles up, and I can recall that we had some of the ones that are still offered, so I'm likely wrong. Anyhow, washing bottles is no doubt a pain.
The irate people, who are probably generally irate simply because she had children, and therefore is not fully lashed to the deck of the economic fraud everyone is participating in, seemed to think that this therefore meant she was rich. Not hardly.
FWIW, I looked up baby bottle washers too, and they really aren't that expensive. They no doubt probably save time. Time is money and of course we need to get those wimmen's out in the workplace where they can serve the machine.
Indeed, this tends to be the one area where the right and the left are in agreement, and will yell about how society needs more baby warehouses, um daycares. The left, of course, goes further and discourages having children at all, and would indeed expand infanticide if it could, one of the issues that gave rise to the culture was and the populist revolve that we're still in.
At any rate, she's right. The world is not meant to be like this. We made this horror, and others. We can fix it.
Really interesting. I hadn't given much thought to when electric stoves really entered the scene, but I would not have guessed it was this early.
The conversation that follows is really interesting too, especially the item noting that electricity wasn't common for rural homes until the 1930s when rural electrification came in as a Depression Era project.
The Przyszowice massacre began in Upper Silesia, Poland. It carried into the next day, during which the Red Army killed between 54 and 69 civilian Poles in the community. The Soviets may have mistaken the Poles for Germans, which still wouldn't justify their actions.
The Battle of the Heiligenbeil Pocket began on the Eastern Front.
The Battle for the Kapelsche Veer began in the Netherlands.
Lt. Audie Murphy performed the actions that resulted in his winning the Medal of Honor. His citation reads:
2d Lt. Murphy commanded Company B, which was attacked by 6 tanks and waves of infantry. 2d Lt. Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to prepared positions in a woods, while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, 1 of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machinegun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from 3 sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2d Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad which was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued the single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack which forced the Germans to withdraw. His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. 2d Lt. Murphy's indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction, and enabled it to hold the woods which had been the enemy's objective.
Murphy is famous, of course, for having been the most highly decorated US soldier of World War Two, although that is no longer the case or at least not clearly the case. He was, undoubtedly, heroic.
His life was, overall, quite sad. He came from an impoverished background in which his father abandoned his large family. He acquired hunting skills as a child in part for that reason, as that provided necessary food for the table. His education ended at the 5th Grade level. Seemingly a natural born soldier, he wanted to stay in the post war Army and even contemplated trying to attend West Point, but his lack of an education and physical injuries precluded it. He did remain in the Texas National Guard. He had an explosive temper even as a child, and suffered from PTSD after the war.
After the war, he worked as an actor and songwriter.
He died in 1971 in an airplane crash. His father outlived him, dying in 1975. His beloved mother died in 1941.
I've been seeing some political signs around town that say "America First!"
Americans are, I'm afraid, notoriously dense about history, which doesn't keep Americans from citing it. Just recently, for example, as I already noted here, the state's populist's caucus cited Operation Overlord as a great example of American virtue and heroism, apparently dim to the fact that Operation Overlord was made necessary by the US sitting out the post 1917 to 1941 world stage's drama and that the heroism was made necessary by the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, not the US waking up one day to the dangers of fascism. Indeed, recently populist have been itching to repeat the betrayal of Czechoslovakia, in the form of Ukraine, so we can finally bring World War III about, although they are dim to the fact that's what they're doing.
Part of that late 1920s and 1930s drama that it seems people have forgotten (in addition to massive tariffs being a horrific idea, and that taxing upper income levels at the 50% rate actually doesn't hurt the economy at all) was the rise of the America First idea, which was that the US could just sit around and ignore the world, safely. It turned out, of course, that ships going down daily in the Atlantic, numerous people being murdered due to their religion, and the Japanese fleet proved that concept wrong in a bloody fashion, but populists are imagining it again. This time its pretty likely, I'd estimate in the 75% range, that the Chinese navy and ballistic missile force will prove that idea wrong again.
Anyhow, when I read "America First!" on political signs, having a sense of history, I can't help but recall this Woody Guthrie song:
While I suppose it's not directly applicable to the current times, I love the last line of the song:
And I'm gonna tell you workers, 'fore you cash in your checks
They say "America First, " but they mean "America Next!"
The other night on the local news, some guy from some environmental outfit was yapping about "wild horses", equating them "with other wild animals like deer and elk", and suggesting that cattle need to be removed from the range.
One of the things he brought up about cattle were their numbers, in comparison to "wild" horses.
His argument was intellectually bereft, but then arguments in this area often are.
Winslow Homer painting of a (fairly thin looking) plow horse. Lots of "chunks" were let go in the 30s when their owners droughted out, their descendants still roaming the range today.
There are no wild horses in North America at all.
None, nada, zippo, "0".
There are a little over 64,000 feral horses, all in the West, in the Western United States. If we include burros, which at least nobody pretends are a wild animal, there are 82,000 feral equines.
All wild equines stem, at the very oldest, from animals that were brought on to the continent in 1519. Quite a few probably don't really have any Spanish blood in their veins at all, and hail from horses much more recently brought in. There's fairly good evidence that in the upper West horses came down out of Canada, not up from Mexico.
Some poor coureur des bois awakened one morning, in other words, and thought "Chu dans marde! Mon cheval est parti!"
"Bourgeois" W---r, and His Squaw" by Alfred Jacob Miller, depicting a coureur des bois and his Native American spouse. This is a famous painting, but we're not supposed to like it now. One art museum notes about it: "These words, which shaped how Miller's contemporaries viewed the watercolors, reveal the racism and sexism embedded in 19th-century exploration and colonization of the western part of what is today the United States." Oh, horse crap. Most trappers were culturally French, and the French had intermixed with the native population from day one. This could just as easily be "guy and his wife." The comment itself imposed an Anglo-American view on a Franco-American and Native American landscape.
Moreover, the introduction date to the Native Americans, at least on the Northern Plains, is much more recent than supposed, and even then, they didn't take them right up. Indeed, among the Shoshone it produced a big argument, with the arguers, mostly young men, taking off and acquiring the name "The Arguers", i.e., Comanche.
In the 1930s, a lot of farmers in the West droughted out and simply let their horses go, including stocky draft horses, i.e., "chunks". Then again, in the 1970s the numbers of wild horses expanded as recent imports abandoned pasture pets out on the range and went back to their homes in Port Arthur, or wherever, and even now some of that happens. The majestic broom tail of the range today may have been Little Becky's 4H project before she left for UW, died her hair purple, and started protesting for Hamas.
Okay, so what about cows?
Long horn in a herd of Angus or Black Baldies. I'm not really sure how this bovine ended up in this herd.
They came in at just about the same time, or earlier. Cattle were brought to the Caribbean as early as 1493 by Columbus, which is really early. "In 1492 Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue", but in 1493 the livestock truck, basically, pulled up to the dock. Cows can and do go wild, but nobody gets very romantic about it, and there isn't a Wild and Free Ranging Cow Act. Nobody goes by the moniker "Wild Cow Annie". A wild cow we had went rogue and recruited other cows to her rogue wild cow band, which shows how wild they can get. A neighboring rancher, caught her and shipped her as a menace. We got the check, and were happy for that end.
There are about 90,000,000 head of cattle in the United States as of this past summer, down from 100,000,000 in 1998.
Okay, that's a lot of cows.
Which bring back our ignorant protagonist's point. Before Columbus came and said "let's stock this range and lose some horses doing it", he seems to argue, the rangeland was empty of large ungulates.
Um, nope.
There were something like 50,000,0000 to 75,000,000 buffalo.
But, gee, Yeoman, that would mean that the entire ungulate supporting range of North America has always had a lot of large ungulates on it. . .
Yep, that's what it means.
Currently, there are about 20,500 Plains bison in wild herds and an additional 420,000 in commercial herds, which we are supposed to pretend are wild herds.
Given our inability to accurately state how many head of anything were on the Pre Columbian landmass, what this basically tells you is the ungulate population hasn't changed very much. Overall populations of large wild animals, i.e., "big game" are way up, however, due to water projects and farmed fields.
So the entire Cow Bad/Horse Good argument is pretty flawed.
Now, the line of last defense on this is that cows cause global warming. That's because cows fart.
Buffalo don't.
Umm. . .
Well, buffalo do, but only Febreeze.
Well, no, they fart methane too.
In reality, all mammals fart, but some fart more than they otherwise would due to diet. You already know this due to your coworker who has, every day, the Lumberjack Special at Hefty Portions for breakfast, followed by the Ejército del Norte special at El Grande Conquistador for lunch, a quart of scotch around 2:00 p.m., and goes home and has his spouse's Roast Wildebeest Surprise for dinner (all Keto approved, of course). The only real argument here, therefore, is that maybe cattle ought not to be finished off on corn, which they probably wouldn't normally do unless somebody left a gate down. That likely makes them gassy.
Lascaux painting of aurochs, approximately 36,000 years ago. Note also the deer/roebucks and horse depicted.
Taking this out worldwide, I'd note, cattle are native to the entire rest of the planet in some form, save for Australia. Wild cattle ranged Europe, Asia and Africa. They aren't new here, and they've been wondering around chewing their cuts and farting for longer than we've been a species.
So back to environmental destruction.
The first real notable example of it was Cottonwood bottoms in the American West. During the winter, buffalo hang out in them. Feral horses took it up. And mounted Native Americans, who previously had a pretty limited impact on the environment, did too.
Wyoming's second, in its history up to that point, special legislative session convened in Cheyenne to address its state farm loan provisions.
Magnus Johnson of the left-wing Minnesotan Farmer-Labor Party was elected to the U.S. Senate in a special election. This meant that both of Minnesota's senators were members of the party.
The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party was a hugely successful third party in that state, coming to control the legislature during the Depression, as well as providing the bulk of Minnesota's Congressional representation. During the Depression, however, the American Farm Bureau became the primary representative for farmers, and it was hostile to the party. In 1944 Hubert Humphrey took the party into the Democratic Party, and it ceased to exist. Humphrey, moreover, expelled the Communists from the organization, whose presence showed how radical it actually was.
The Democratic Party in that state is technically the Democratic Farmer Labor Party
The Depression arrived for farmers in the U.S. before the rest of the general public, which likely explains the rise of the Farmers Labor Party in Minnesota, which was heavily agricultural and also heavily influenced by the left wing politics of Scandinavia where many of its residents had roots.
Johnson was Swedish born and had a semi successful political career, winning and losing. He was also a farmer.
Italy and the UK agreed to call an international conference on German reparations, irrespective of whether France would participate or not.
Fairbanks, Alaska presented President Harding with a special collar for Laddie Boy.
Annual agricultural show at the state experimental farm at Presque Isle, Maine. Prizewinning "baby beef", raised by a daughter of a Farm Security Administration client.
Stanley Baldwin became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom following Bonar Law stepping down due to rapidly failing health.
The Distillery Bandits, who were apprehended after a gun battle, were all veterans of the U.S. Army's cavalry branch.
William Jennings's Bryan's motion that the Presbyterian General Assembly cut off financial support for any Presbyterian body teaching evolution was voted down.
The Mark dropped enormously.
The President played in a newspaper golf tournament.
A short thread just pondering some things in the news, or the zeitgeist, that are portrayed as "new".
1. A war between Russia and Ukraine?
This is a horrible event, to be sure, but Russia's been trying to shove itself on Ukraine since 1917, or probably well before.
Russia is really like a giant bully in its neighborhood, which is why this is important. It's not new. Russia grabbed Ukraine back after the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and then fought its guerrillas in the early 20s. It fought guerrillas again from 1943 into the 1940s. Ukraine wants to be an independent state. Russia doesn't like any of the neighboring countries to have that status.
2. Adult children living at home.
This is constantly portrayed as new, but it's the historical norm due to limited resources.
It really only began to change in the 1930s, at first due to economic desperation. That trend was amplified by World War Two, and the massive economic boom after the war really changed the situation.
A constructing economy has reversed it, as it has. . .
3. Delayed marriage
Marriage ages have traditionally been higher than they were in the1940s to 1970s time frame. The reason is noted above.
Reich claims that Joe Biden has restored the economic paradigm that governed from 1932 until the Reagan Administration. He's certainly correct that that Democratic Capitalism, or Market Democracy as it is sometimes called, governed American economic thinking in that period, and he's also correct that Reagan attacked it upon coming into office.
And he's also correct that Milton Friedman, when he was head of the Fed, aggressively attacked inflation. Indeed, Friedman was absolutely correct to have done so, and I wouldn't hold that Reagan's economic policies were wrong at the time.
Of note, some will site to St. Pope John Paul II the Great's encyclical Centesiumus Annus, issued in 1991, as support for a sort of Democratic Capitalism.
Reich's argument, while I'm not wholly convinced by any means, is an interesting one. In essence he argues that the economic system of 1932 to 1980 was the correct one, and the one we went to since that time is unjust.
Louis-Alexandre Taschereau retained his position as Premier of Quebec, as he would all the way through 1936.
Taschereau was a member of the Liberal Party (Parti libéral du Québec) and had been elected in 1920 as the Canadian economy started to sink, in advance, into the Great Depression. He was an opponent of Roosevelt's new Deal, comparing it to fascism and communism, and instead encouraged private enterprise to develop Quebec's forest and hydroelectric potential. As he did so, his policies challenged Québécois agrarianism, which would begin to lead to its end.
And therefore, I am not a fan.
That may sound silly, but agrarianism is what allowed the Québécois to remain that. Their agrarian separation and close association with the Catholic Church is what allowed them to remain a people for two centuries of "English" domination.
Taschereau was not a disloyal Francophone or Catholic, but by attacking the agrarian nature of Québécois society he was by default attacking its essence in favor of money. Ultimately that attack would succeed, leading to the downfall of Québécois agrarianism and ultimately to the undercutting of the culture itself. It remains, of course, but badly damaged by the experience.
This impressive art deco courthouse was built in 1937 and serves Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. Apparently it was loosely inspired by Mayan temples, which is unusual.
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:
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.
