The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1926-12-10
Government Facts Show
Farmers Losing Land in
Plunge into Peasantry
BY J. LOUIS ENoDAHL.

600, 900 war debt to this country.
Wall Street forces its washington
government to settle with the Euro
pean debtors on easy terms, so that
the overseas debts of the interna-
tional bankers will be paid, and new
loans made possible. The same
bankers will only permit such farm
relief as will safeguard their own
interests, and these interests do not
permit the escape of the farmer
from the plunge into peasantry.
Thus the ownership of the farms
passes out of the hands of the
farmer into the lands Of the alb
sentee landlords and profit takers in
the cities.
In the early days of the nation
the discontinued workers in the in
dustrial bells of the east sought the
free land of the west. The pioneer,
the more active and aggressive sec
ton of the population, sought the
opportunities the west was supposed
to offer. Horace Greedy, the New
York editor, coined the slogan, Go
West, Young Man, Go Vest" thus
indicating that the setting sun
called to the youth of the nation.
But now the drift is back again,
from the land to the city, from the
farms into industry, of the youthful,
intelligent, pioneering section of the
farm population. Campbell says:
Recent investigation which l
have made personally, in rural COM
munities in Maine, Delaware, Vir-
ginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Ohio,
Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin. Min
nesota, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisi-
ana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Ne
braska and the Dakotas reveal a
momentous fact. They show that
the young people from farm homes
who have intelligence and enter
prise and spunk enough to get a
high school education-the cream1o of
the young people of the community
who are sufficiently competent and
well-educated to be offered other
opportunities-tha from 80 to 95
per cent of them quit farming be-
cause they can find better opportu-
mites in other lines"
But Campbell offers no solution.
He lists organized labor" with cor
ganized capital" in the cities as two
of the leeches that feed off the farm
ers. This is only another tune of
the malicious and untruthful kept
press propaganda that the prices of
the things the farmer must buy are
higher because of the wages re-
ceived by workers in the cities. This
helps, of course, to create a barrier
between the city and land workers.
Farmers drifting into the cities and
into industry learn to their many re-
grets that the reports of high wages
have little basis in fact, especially
in the great basic and in the highly
specialized industries.
Campbell urges the panacea of
cooperative buying and co-opera-
tive marketing. This organization
Of the selling and purchasing power
of the farmers will help the land
workers battle their problems and
win concessions, but it offers no
nermanant sollfion Of tho farm
problem, any more than the organi-
cation of the industrial workers in
trade unions completely solves the
struggle between the employing
class and the working class.
In their bitter struggle the farm
ers, like the wage workers, will
learn that their enemy is the profit
social system that continues to OPP
crate in spite of the strongest CO.
operative organizations, no matter
how efficiently they battle the forces
Of capitalism entrenched within the
battlements OF the capitalist state.
Even large numbers of the farm
| ers attached to the American Farm
Bureau Federation will grow to
learn that their enemy Is this CAPT.
tallst state, that they must unite
with the city workers for its aboli-
ton, and that one Of the first steps
that must be taken is the organiza-
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