EPILOGUE 54 1 



This does not mean that the eastern farmers were a submissive, docile 

 lot. Hardly; they had their grievances and they spoke out in protest, but 

 even in doing this they showed little affection for the farmers farther 

 west, which goes a long way in explaining why they failed to support the 

 McNary-Haugen measures. Some easterners with a dimmer view of the 

 future felt that if they cooperated with the westerners they would be 

 encouraging a type of competition which in the long run would work 

 against their interests. Some of the older farmers in the East remembered 

 quite well how in their earlier years the opening up of the cheaper, fertile 

 lands of the West put them at a competitive disadvantage. They remem- 

 bered that this had worked greater hardships on them than had the rise 

 of manufactures and industry and the growth of commerce and finance, 

 the agencies against which the westerners aimed some of their sharpest 

 complaints. 



As for the South, it seems that the reasons why it failed to assume this 

 leadership are to be found in the demoralization and poverty which fol- 

 lowed the Civil War, the complications that arose out of the race difficul- 

 ties, and the prevalence of tenancy and production problems which 

 differed from those in the western Middle West. Not to be ignored is the 

 general suspicion and antipathy which still persisted in many quarters 

 toward programs originating with the federal government. 



The South, to be sure, supported federal programs like the A.A.A. as 

 perhaps no other part of the country did. It also gave rise to its own farmer 

 organizations and produced its own leaders. The beginnings of the Grange 

 are attributed in part to the deplorable conditions that Oliver Hudson 

 Kelley saw in the South after the Civil War; the Farmers' Alliance was 

 partly southern in its origins and the Agricultural Wheel entirely so; 

 while the Farmers' Union, which was organized in Texas and which 

 spread across the South with amazing speed before it invaded the Middle 

 West, was also the product of southern distress. Then, too, southern spokes- 

 men were heard from in the halls of Congress. Farm leaders like Edward 

 A. O'Neal and Charles S. Barrett, the heads of the American Farm Bureau 

 Federation and the national Farmers' Union, both southerners, were in- 

 fluential in Washington. Yet when all is said and done, the fact remains 

 that most of these organizations either were longer-lived or most influen- 

 tial among the farmers of the western Middle West. 



