504 TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



fall when the crop came on this year — they had a good crop out there this 

 year, and we sent out our men and set up our organization to collect 

 those loans; wherever a man had a crop so that he could afford to pay, 

 we asked him to pay, because it was a loan and not a gift. Where he 

 did not have a crop we extended it another year unless somebody else 

 was going to come in there and take his money, and in that case we 

 thought Uncle Sam ought to have it. 



Well, the reports from some of those men were not pleasant reading. 

 For example, he wrote of one family that I remember particularly, where 

 the banker was pressing for the last cent, and he had a mortgage on 

 everything, including the one cow that he had left. And they took every- 

 thing, and then the banker went out to take that cow, sent two men out, 

 rather, to take that cow. And that farm woman got out the shotgun and, 

 with two children holding to her skirts, she served notice on them that if 

 they touched that cow they would not be able to get the cow very far, 

 and that they were more likely to stay there than the cow was to leave 

 the farm — and they went away and left the cow. You know, I don't 

 know any task I would more dislike to go up against than undertake to 

 take the last cow from a woman who had two children clinging to her 

 skirts and a shotgun in her hand. I would about as lief tackle a grizzly 

 bear as to go under conditions of that kind. 



But you people here in Iowa have no appreciation, I think, of the 

 real downright hardship and poverty that has been experienced by some 

 of the people in the northwest and in the southwest, where their depend- 

 ence is one cash crop and where they, as in the northwest, have had a 

 series of three practically entire crop failure years. 



You know when I wakened this morning and looked out on Iowa and 

 Iowa corn fields and saw the Iowa homes, I thought what a blessed thing 

 it is to live in a state where the rainfall comes, sometimes varying in 

 amount, but always enough to make a crop, and where social conditions 

 are so much better than in some of the country in the United States the 

 opportunities for the young, the contacts with good neighbors — I thought 

 what a blessed thing it is to live in a state of this sort. 



I know you have had difficulties here. I know it very well. I know 

 that a great many people have had to quit. Possibly others will have to. 

 But when you look back and compare our conditions here now with con- 

 ditions a year ago or a year and a half ago, we have made tremendous 

 progress. Prices of Iowa farm products are not where they ought to be 

 in comparison with the things we have to buy in comparison with the 

 prices of other things, but Iowa has been blessed with big crops this 

 year and prices have advanced from 50 to almost 100 per cent in some 

 cases, and you can see the way out. And, as I say, you are infinitely 

 better off than in some of the country through the northwest and the 

 southwest where not only have prices not advanced as much because of 

 the higher freight rate they must pay, but where crops have been short 

 and where they are having real hardships to go through this year. 



Now, I spoke to you, I think, last year about what we have been trying 

 to do in Washington in the way of legislation, and I am not sure but 

 most of the legislation that was passed was before that time. I think I 

 spoke of the revival of the War Finance Corporation, of the extension 



