128 



AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



Once the Wisconsin Society of Equity was under way, it began to level 

 a barrage of criticism against the state agricultural college. The school 

 was as obnoxious from the farmer's point of view, Equity critics said, as 

 the middlemen, the grain gamblers, and the corporations. As far as the 

 average farmer was concerned, the university was a "cold-storage institu- 

 tion of dead languages and useless learning which costs several millions 

 of bushels of wheat each year." Furthermore, the college of agriculture 

 was too "productive-minded." Its traditional policy was to encourage the 

 farmers to increase production on the theory that agriculture, like industry, 

 had to be made as efficient as possible. Equity leaders insisted that this 

 attitude on the part of the college not only failed to better the farmers' 

 position, but actually hurt them because of the heavy surpluses which it 

 promoted. According to one Equity spokesman, who insisted that the 

 society had no desire to "cross swords" with the college, there was pertin- 

 ence in the thought that peach growers were interested not so much in 

 Bordeaux mixture, while peaches were rotting, as they were in selling 

 their products at profitable prices. 39 



Equity critics also charged that the college offered courses which were 

 not only far removed from the economic needs of future farmers but 

 actually made students lose their taste for rural life. Thus as a result of 

 their college experience, farm youths drifted to the city instead of returning 

 to the farm. The same critics held that professors of agriculture lacked 

 practical farm experience and were unsympathetic with farm difficulties. 

 The college of agriculture remained aloof from farm organizations and 

 did nothing to help solve the farmers' marketing problems. Indeed, why 

 should one not assume that it was actually doing the bidding of the cor- 

 porations ? 



The Wisconsin Equity News made innumerable demands for a legisla- 

 tive investigation of university courses and university expenditures. When 

 it was announced in 1909 that the university baseball team was planning 

 a trip to the Orient, this journal remarked protestingly : "It is time for 

 the investigation. Also, for the passage of laws that will protect the public 



39. Frederick C. Howe, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy (New York, 

 1912), p. 164; C. A. Lyman, "The Cooperative Society in Wisconsin," in National 

 Conference on Marketing and Farm Credits, Marketing and Farm Credits, 1915 

 (Madison, Wis., 1916), pp. 41-42. 



