“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” - A.J. Liebling
My father Bob Wilson took this to heart, and bought one and started his own newspaper, the Prairie Post of Maroa, Illinois in 1958, and ran it until he died in 1972. It never had a circulation of more than 2500 or so, but every week, he would fire off editorials at everyone and everything from local events to the actions of the nations of the world.
He may have been a Quaker peace activist in a Republican district, but his love and support of the farming communities garnered him enough respect that he eventually ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, though he lost. (He might have tried again, had he not died of an accident while only 49.) Many of his views ring true today. And he might have been willing to change the ones that fell behind the times. Although raised in the casual racism of the 1920s and 1930s, at the age of 15 he took stock of what he was being taught and discarded much of it as being wrong, and lived his life with respect for all.
I decided to transcribe his old editorials (I may make a book for some of my relatives) and every once in a while I will repost one here, as a view of how the world has changed wildly, or remained stubbornly the same.
May 28, 1959
FARM MAGAZINE OR FICTION MAGAZINE?
We understand that FARM JOURNAL magazine has conducted a poll which claims to show that farmers do not want price supports for their crops.
We are happy to shed a little light on this subject. The owners of FARM JOURNAL, the Sun Oil Company and the Pew family of Pennsylvania, are as famous for political meddling as they are for the distillation of motor fuels.
FARM JOURNAL, which has made itself the willing tool of all the interests that profit by gouging the farmer, is conducting a systematic campaign of propaganda to convince the farmer that lower prices are good for him.
It must be kept in mind that FARM JOURNAL is not a “farm” magazine. A larger percentage of its readers are city and suburban dwellers than actually are farmers. All these readers received the questionnaire, and you can imagine the answers they turned in.
Were it not for this factor, we should be forced to assume the editors of FARM JOURNAL were professional liars. We hesitate to do that, as their efforts thus far have been pretty amateurish.
The division in the ranks of farmers would be tragic if it were not so small. Whatever his own opinion, we doubt whether anyone believes, as FARM JOURNAL claims, that 78% of America's farmers want either no supports or less supports. The only really impartial polls we have seen, showed that over 90% want SOME KIND OF SUPPORT PROGRAM kept in effect to protect us from the ten-cent corn of the Thirties.
Far from living on subsidies, the farmer has been subsidizing the entire country with cheap food. Small wonder our young people leave the farm, when they see their fathers and grandfathers working a sixteen-hour day for just enough to meet the mortgage and pay the gas bills!
Meanwhile, the Sun Oil Company and its friends think they are BRAINWASHING the farmer; from where we stand, it looks more like HOGWASH.
June 11, 1959
THESE MAGICAL DAYS
If the season has been favorable there comes a time – perhaps about now – when the corn is all cultivated over once and perhaps the beans too.
The farmer wakes up some morning with muscles stiff from a two-months' endurance contest, stretches agreeably, and looks out on a mild June-day in which he does not intend to turn a wheel.
No man alive enjoys his leisure more than the man who sweats to earn it.
Drive along a gravel road at eight o'clock on such a June evening. You may see a man sitting on his porch, shirt off and shoes off, while dusk and the soft wind of dusk flow like a clear liquid over the land, and a red ball of sun stands in a dust-haze in the western sky.
Or there may be a string of cars in the drive, and starched white shirts stinging the boys' sunburned necks, and the ten year-olds taking turns cranking the old ice-cream freezer.
This is the season when the fried chicken is king. In January, maple syrup flows in the maple trees; in June, lemonade flows under them.
If it be nectar, that old-fashioned home-made ice cream certainly is ambrosia. The Editor is not yet old; but old enough, Thank Goodness, to remember church ice-cream socials as they once were, with rows of lights glowing yellow in the soft darkness, and old friends clustered beneath them eating ice-cream from big soup-bowls... and the small boys standing in line, arguing over which flavor is best.
Much will be lost if family farming as a way of life disappears from America.