EPILOGUE 539 



Later events show that the two decades of relative good times were 

 followed by almost two decades of depression and ceaseless agitation. 

 During the first half of the i92o's, the farmers complained of the high 

 prices they paid for what they bought and the low prices they received 

 for what they sold. Beginning in about 1926 the tide shifted a little in 

 their favor and they continued to enjoy these better times until the crash 

 of 1929. But from then on until 1933 falling prices, crushing debts, the 

 lack of foreign markets, heavy surpluses, and pleas for bigger and better 

 farm programs became the order of the day. The forthcoming federal 

 aids, coupled with bad weather and short crops, helped raise prices and 

 farm incomes from 1933 to 1937. Then came the relapse of late 1937 and 

 1938, the New Deal defeat in the congressional elections of the latter part 

 of the year, the outbreak of the European war in 1939, and finally the 

 surging prices which temporarily drowned out many of the farmers' 

 complaints. 



The fact that agrarians from the western Middle West appeared as 

 conspicuously as they did during these years can easily create the impres- 

 sion that the area was strictly an agricultural one. But the most cursory 

 examination disproves this. The states in this area were neither the most 

 rural nor the most urban part of the country; they occupied a sort of 

 middle ground. As late as 1940 the total population accounted for less 

 than 25,000,000 people, a figure that took in the city dwellers of Illinois 

 and the substantial number of urban residents in Wisconsin, Missouri, 

 Minnesota, and Iowa. The most rural states were North Dakota and 

 South Dakota. 1 



Even though urbanism and industrialism made heavy inroads into the 

 western Middle West, and granted that in 1939 this area was far from 

 being exclusively an agrarian one, the fact is that it played a leading 

 role in the agricultural thinking of the country. The bulk of its wealth 

 consisted of wheat, corn, livestock, dairy products, and the various factors 

 that went into production of these commodities. Depressed or not, it was 

 the spokesmen for these groups who, through their legislators, farm lead- 

 ers, and nonfarm sympathizers, took the lead in campaigns to get higher 

 prices, to gain better credit facilities, to adopt surplus-control measures, 

 to establish more efficient methods of marketing and purchasing, and to 



i. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1941, p. 7; ibid., 1930, p. 46. 



