AGRARIAN PARTIES AND THEIR POLICIES 193 



for this is not hard to understand when one recalls 

 the radical utterances of some of the farm leaders. 

 "One heard at St. Paul," says Robert Morss Lovett 

 in The New Republic of July 2, 1924, "of a sheriff 

 setting out from Green Bay, Wisconsin, to serve 

 six foreclosure notices in one morning; of a farm in 

 Minnesota worth $40,000 sacrificed on a mortgage 

 of $5,000, by a family which has owned it for two 

 generations; of a three weeks' trip through South 

 Dakota in ramshackle cars, not one of which boasted 

 a top or a windshield. Unemployment in the indus- 

 trial centres is tragic enough, but it has alleviations 

 which are absent in the case of a family with nine 

 children evicted from their farm and adrift on the 

 countryside. It is this condition which is respon- 

 sible for the recruits to the Communists among the 

 farmers. Combatted by the trade union organiza- 

 tions, the Communists have apparently made no 

 great progress among industrial workers. The 

 American labor movement is not revolutionary. 

 How long this can be asserted of the farmers of 

 the Northwest is, it must be admitted, a question." 

 The nomination of R. M. La Follette and B. K. 

 Wheeler for President and Vice President, respec- 

 tively, by the Third Party movement, gave deep 

 concern to the candidates of the Democratic and 

 Republican parties. The decline in the price of 

 wheat in the fall of 1923 had created widespread 

 dissatisfaction which had culminated in the Farm 

 Labor movement of 1924. The Democratic and 



