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.
January 4, 1962
WE TAKE THE STEP
As you may note elsewhere on this page, the editor of this newspaper has announced for public office. [transcriber's note: US House of Representatives, Illinois 22nd District] We want to assure you of two things; first, more helpers have been and will be trained so that these weekly papers will continue to grow in coverage and to improve in quality even if the editor is elected and must be away for a time.
The next thing we want to assure you is that we will continue to have opinions and continue to express them in these columns. Politicians as a breed are renowned for a kind of language we might call “Electionese”. In order to please everyone, the professional politician attempts to straddle the fence, carry water on both shoulders, and talk out of both sides of his mouth while keeping his ear on the ground and one eye on the big chance.
The resulting gobbledegook may keep a lot of voters half-satisfied, but it convinces thinking people he is insincere.
We believe the voters would rather have people with convictions, who are not afraid to express them. Even if those convictions are not in all cases their own, they know they have a man who believes in things and stands by what he believes.
January 11, 1962
FARMERS, LOOK OUT
We have at hand a “Farmers Outlook Letter” from the University of Illinois which has shocked up almost beyond expression. It pretends to be a summary of the findings of a law student who visited Denmark and came back claiming that the Danish system of cooperation between farmers and government “Perpetuates poverty” on the farm.
We have often heard that figures do not lie, but liars can figure. This report reveals thinking of so diseased and perverted a nature that the net effect is a lie. No farmers need be surprised that the University should lie to him; what IS interesting is just exactly WHY they should tell him this particular lie? The reason is that the big people in the food processing industry have become frightened that they will no longer be able to control the farmer, once he has learned THE TRUTH about farming as it is practiced in Denmark and Sweden!
This writer has toured almost the entirety of the “Garden Country” of Denmark, with especial interest in farming conditions. This writer's wife was raised in Sweden, within sight of Denmark; speaks the language, and is almost as much as home there as in her native Sweden. Mr. Mann, Mr. Simerl, Mr. Howard; kindly step back and listen to the facts!
The idea of “Poverty” in Denmark is believable only to someone who has not been there. We ate in good restaurants, and we ate in common homes, and there is probably no nation of people in the entire world that eats better food, more tastefully prepared. Danish ham and Danish butter are world standards. The people wear better clothes and own better furniture than Americans do; fewer ephemeral changes in style, but wonderfully handsome and durable materials. There are no beggars, no breadlines, almost no unemployed. “Socialized medicine” is almost free, and equal to any in the world. The rosy cheeks and sturdy limbs of Danish children – city and country – are an embarrassment to “healthy” Americans who feed their children devitalized foods out of packages, and permit them to watch television five hours daily. The level of culture and of education is one of the highest in the world, things that come only with a prosperous economy, not with poverty. Please remember that all this was accomplished while maintaining individual rights and personal freedom, in one of the most democratic nations on earth!
The University report gives dollar figures showing what the Danish farm family has to spend. They are almost meaningless, for several reasons. Nearly everything is reasonable in price, and a dollar has tremendous purchasing power. Nobody is buying color television sets on the installment plan, or four-thousand-dollar automobiles. The farmer rides a bicycle. What you must remember is, the city man ALSO RIDES A BICYCLE. (There is only one America in this world, with its gigantic resources.) Denmark has neither mineral wealth nor colonies in Africa to bleed white. They have only their good black soil and their sturdy people, their factories and their ships. It is not a question of Danish farmers having everything we have, but of a fair balance within a country of very modest means, so that farmer an worker all have a share of what there is! This was accomplished mainly by the farmer's own efforts, NOT BY GOVERNMENT. The farmer organized his own production through his own cooperatives, until the packer and processor had to come to the farm organizations which marketed 90% of the food in the country, and ASK THE FARMERS, “How much will I have to pay for rye, for pork, for milk, for potatoes?” The government sits in as mediator on yearly price negotiations between farmer representatives and industry representatives, and they agree on prices on the crop for the coming year. This is free negotiation between equals, and this is what scares the giants of the food industry in this country, BECAUSE THEY KNOW IT IS COMING.
The University propaganda blast claims it is bad that the size of Danish farms has no grown larger. Do they think those 28 acre farmsteads worked by horses are INEFFICIENT? If so, how do they ship their food products clean across the Atlantic Ocean, unload them here, and still compete with the food raised in this country by farmers who break their backs trying to pay gas bills and machinery repairs?
The University wants us to feel outraged because the Danes cause their land to support families of people instead of bigger and bigger machines. The farm operator must live on it, the house and buildings must be maintained, and there are limits to the land one family or one corporation can purchase. (They have taken no land away from people who already had it.) Is this really bad? Isn't it one of the problems in our farm picture that we are ripping out the fences, burning down the buildings, and turning over the care of our greatest resource, the soil, to men who may soon cut thirty-six feet of ground every time through with giant tractors, and may even live in town? The owner to match this kind of farmer is a corporation that gathers up sections and townships into vast farm factories that buy everything wholesale and no longer support good little country towns with banks and hardware stores and feed mills and implement dealers and clothing and grocery stores. Is this what you want? Farmers have long discussed it, and reasonable men in the professions have begun to realize it, that the time may come here when we must forbid doctors and dentists and lawyers (yes, and newspaper publishers) from sinking their profits into farmland and driving prices beyond the point where a good farmer who inherits no land cannot in his lifetime expect to earn his way into ownership of the acres into which he has put his life's work!
Again, though their farms ARE a little small, the Danes had a lot of people and only a little land; what are they to do with the people, make them ragpickers in the slums, as we do? Export them? Start a war and get them killed off? That one bears some thinking about.
Can the men who shuffle these figures in their offices over a the University seriously claim we are better off than the Danes? They show only a few hundred dollars of net profit per year over there; do the Professors realize that during the eight years of Ezra Taft Benson, many American farmers not only showed NO NET PROFIT but actually worked at a loss year after year, a loss that came out of their capital as their machinery grew old and they were unable to replace it? The University of Iowa made a study a couple of years back on five University farms stocked with the right animals, the necessary equipment, the proper fertilization and crop varieties, together with farming practices overseen by the best people available. THREE OUT OF FIVE LOST MONEY EVERY YEAR.
The same is true in Illinois, but the people at the College of Agriculture have told us only that we had to become more efficient, more efficient!! They have pretended that speaking out for higher prices was “Political”, and “Improper” in their position. Here in this Outlook Letter they have unloosed a blatantly political attack on farm proposals now before the United States Congress in an attempt to discredit and defeat them.
How shall the farmers of Illinois ever make progress toward economic freedom to act together in their own interests, if all the influence of our own Land-Grant Colleges of Agriculture is used as a propaganda weapon against them? The letter was signed by L.H. Simerl and by Dean Louis B. Howard. Do we need a new orientation of purposes at the University, or simply new personnel? Otherwise the farmer will have to read these “Farmers' Outlook” letters to mean FARMERS, LOOK OUT!... Here they come again!