The Farm Home

By Mrs. A.J. Wilder, Rocky Ridge Farm

“The Price of Sugar May Go to 20 Cents!” was the headline that stared me in the face from the pages of the paper I had picked up. “Unless Congress continues the sugar equalization board during 1920, the price of Cuban sugar to the American consumer will increase to 15 or 20 cents a pound, Attorney General Palmer says,” I read on.

If the sugar equalization board is any curb on the sugar trust, it is devoutly to be hoped that the board will be continued, especially when one remembers that five persons are said to control the sugar output of the world.

Congress was asked by the President to continue the war boards in operation until conditions had adjusted themselves to peace, but with that spirit of hostility to the executive branch of the government, Congress immediately discontinued some of the most important. Among there was the labor board, which I know from private, inside information was working desperately to be in a position to handle the labor situation. The labor troubles from which we are all suffering may not be the direct result of dismissing the board, but it is plain that all the help that could have been had in the trouble would not have been too much.

Since the removal of the restrictions on the packers and stopping of the investigation, the price of cattle and hogs has gone down and down. The situation reminds me of a flock of crows descending upon a corn field when the man with the gun is gone.

Also, it makes me wonder if the man was right who said to me, “They may talk about the Bolsheviki and the I.W.W., and imprison and deport them, but we have the sme thing, in only a littler different form in high places and we won’t have peace until we settle them both.”

Is one any more a lawbreaker, I wonder; for trying to take that to which he is not entitled from those above him in the social scale than is the one who takes more than he is entitled to from those below him?

Some public speakers and some editorials are saying that the farmers hold the balance of power and will have to take control and handle the situation, but farmers are only partly organized and it will be difficult for them to handle anything so few understand, besides they are all divided among political parties and stand by their particular party regardless even tho by so doing they lower the price of hogs.

I heard some farmers talking politics not long ago and they violently disagreed, passing insults on one anothers’s popular leaders. In this they were following the lead of their daily papers.

I wonder again—I wonder if that correspondent of the Saturday Evening Post was right when she said,”The world has simply lost its kindliness and its courtesy. It has lost the ability to gauge the fitness of things.”

Some writers are expressing the hope that the women will “clean house” in politics, sweeping out from both parties those who only clutter up the place, and hinder the day’s work.

I think the idea of a woman’s party, a political division on sex lines, is distasteful to women, especially farm women. It seems as if the time had come to reason together instead of dividing into another antagonistic group.

If farm women would make a study of just where and how the action or refusal to act, of Congress affects their interests, talking it over in the home and then vote accordingly I am sure that they would find themselves and their men folks supporting the same candidates and defeating, for re-election, those who have sold them out to any interests whatever, whether the higher or the lower Bosheviki.

If women, with their entrance into a free discussion of politics, can do away with the “hot air” and insults, with “making the Eagle scream,” and “twisting the Lion’s tail,” and “shaking the bloody shirt,: and all the rest of the smoke screen, bringing politics into the open air of sane, sensible discussion—a discussion of facts and conditions, not personal discussions of leaders, they will have rendered the country a great service.

Mrs. A.J. Wilder. "The Farm Home." Missouri Ruralist (December 5, 1919): 33.

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