Evening star., 1937-04-11
Strike Effects Bring Worry
To Farmers Ouer Market
Grunbling in Many Sections Accom-
pa,,ies Administrators Failure to
Act in Economic Crisis.

EMPOR1A, Kans., April 10 (N.AN.
A0.-With the riot at Hershey, Pa,
this week enters the tertium quid,
making at least a dramatic triangle
in the industrial conflict. It is prob
ably rectangle. Indeed, as the quar-
rel becomes more acute between labor
and capital it may develop not only
between labor and capital on two
sides and the farmer on third. Per-
haps not only among labor and capt.
tai and the farmer and the public
For the public may be subdivided, and
we shall have an octangle with eight
fairly well-divided points struggling
for supremacy.
But now, quite apart from the con-
sumer, the farmer has begun to enter
the contest. All over the West, Presi-
dent Roosevelt's friends who support
ed him so heartily in the Missouri
Valley, in the Ohio Valley, and par
ticularly in the South, are beginning
to make themselves vocal. They, more
than the consuming public just now,
are asking why the President is silent.
The farmer is, of course, the pri-
mary producer of new wealth. Nomi-
nally he sells more than he buys. He
is therefore concerned more with the
market for his output than he is with
the price he has to pay. In the de-
preston, when he might have bought
at bottom prices, his own market was
so bad that he actually couldn't pay
for his needs. Even at bottom prices
the farmer Is out as a consumer OF
store clothes.
just now Missouri Valley farmers
and, for the most part, farmers
around the Great Lakes and in the
Ohio Valley receive prices for their
product more than a third higher
than they were during the Utopian
decade before the close Of the World
War. But also things the farmer buys
today are nearly 80 per cent higher
than they were in that prosperous
decade Therefore, given good crop
this year, with the inevitable slump
in farm prices, If the prices of indus
trial products remain as they are or
keep on climbing, the farmer knows
that he is once more up against the
old inexorable situation: Low prices
for what he sells, high prices for what
he buys.
Grumble About Strikes.
These lines are written in a country
newspaper Office in county where
three farms out Of five voted for
Roosevelt last year, and four farmers
out Of five today who come into the
Gazette Office are growing about the
strikes. In the first place, they have
property sense. Farmers are the
last group to develop a proletariar
consciousness. Theirs is pure middle
class blood.
The farm for centuries has bred
those one-gallused, hard-boiled Amer
lean aristocrats, who for time, by
reason of their acquisitive and some
times predatory faculties, have riser
out Of the middle class into economic
and industrial dominance and who
form our plutocracy. So the farmer
has no use for one big union. He
doesn't care for Lewis social dialetic
concerning the labor class. He has
heard the word "kulack" and it pains
his neck.
The farmer is to the core property
minded. He can see his own hired
man sitting down on a milk stoo.
in the big dairy barn, and when the
embattled farmers in Hershey made
labor run a gantlet, fighting hoe
handles, pitch forks and farm scraI
iron, the farmers of the Missouri Val.