EPILOGUE 545 



finance its minimum price efforts. Many members gave lip service to the 

 formula of "cost of production plus a reasonable profit." Its program was 

 buttressed by an educational program which revolved around such topics 

 as farm credit, land tenure, and marketing. 



The Farmers' Union appears to have suffered greatly from the want 

 of cohesion. No doubt other farm groups had the same trouble, but these 

 difficulties seldom broke into the open as often and as melodramatically 

 as they did in the Union. Its spokesmen tried to palm off these outbreaks 

 as being nothing more than the attributes of independent thought and 

 action. 



During the late twenties and early thirties, the Union seems to have 

 been split three ways. One small group, conservative and aggressive, 

 spearheaded by an element in the Nebraska Farmers' Union, did not stop 

 with a protest against all forms of state and federal aid, political and 

 central controls, but went further and demanded the return of a decen- 

 tralized economic order in which cooperatives and small business would 

 play a leading role. No special mention was made of how this decen- 

 tralized economic order was to come into being. Suffice it to say that this 

 element took its clues from the old-fashioned liberalism of Adam Smith 

 and that it was out of step with the statist views of the majority in the 

 Union. A second group, headed by the northwest Farmers' Union states 

 Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Wisconsin was 

 equally enthusiastic about cooperatives, but perhaps it was just as enthu- 

 siastic, if not more so, about federal aids and the perfecting of legislative 

 techniques to gain these aids. This tier of Farmers' Union states functioned 

 with great proficiency in both these fields; the cooperatives which rooted 

 themselves in these states were among the most successful in the country, 

 and the legislative committee that represented them in Washington 

 exerted an influence considerably beyond the numerical strength of its 

 members. A third faction, headed by the Iowa Farmers' Union and in- 

 cluding parts of the Illinois, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and other state bodies, 

 reverted to the faith of "the founding fathers": "cost of production plus 

 a reasonable profit." 



By the very late thirties many Union members had become ardent sup- 

 porters of parity, which is not surprising in view of the apparent break 

 between the Farm Bureau high command and the administration on the 



