Hogs and Hominy 157 



printed on paper which, left in its natural state, would have 

 saved their farms. 



None of these events was planned; they just happened. 

 They might have been foreseen; and a few men did foresee 

 them and prophesied. But their prophecies were received about 

 as Jeremiah's were. People just wouldn't, or couldn't, believe 

 that the American soil could be exhausted. Or that overcrop- 

 ping without manuring would invite famine. They treated 

 such warnings with scorn and righteous indignation, as though 

 to foretell these things threatened the great American tradition 

 of inexhaustible wealth and plenty. As though the warners im- 

 plied that Americans were subject to the same laws that gov- 

 erned other peoples. 



So nobody listened to the voices crying of a future wilder- 

 ness. The people in the towns shrugged and asked what the 

 farmers mattered to them; they bought their food at the A & P. 

 The packers did not see any cause to worry while hogs were 

 plentiful, and there was a market for pork. The farmers replied 

 that there were always good years and bad ones. And the good 

 ones, when they came, made up for the drought and the frost 

 and the floods and the dust storms and the grasshoppers. You 

 had to expect such things when you went to farming. 



In 1910, the farmers received $7.24 per live hundredweight 

 of hog, which, actually, was 59 cents less than the value of the 

 corn which had gone into the making of those hundred pounds 

 of pig. The next year the loss was $1 per hundred pounds. 

 Alarm began to sweep over the corn belt. The packers pushed 

 the export trade in pork and lard Germany was buying heav- 

 ily of the latter. The next two years showed profits, and a great 

 sigh went up from Iowa. Farmers in that state, in Nebraska 

 and in the two Dakotas began to add to their corn acreage. 



Then came two years of loss. 



The corn crisis was already on one horizon when the Great 

 War broke on the other. World markets for produce acted on 

 the farmers of the corn belt like an injection of vitamin B 



