Farmers (1927)
Let us understand this agitation for farm relief. We Negroes who take our thinking from provincial New York and who in darkest Mississippi and environs are dumb and blind perforce to the great movements of the world are being led to think that the Western demand for the protection and financial relief of farmers is nonsense—the Bloc devil raised against the Great God Party. But wait: remember that the tillers of the soil have always been exploited; always the dumb, driven cattle who filled the fat bellies of the rich merchants, kept the artisans from starvation and starved themselves. Well we the black peasants of sugar, rice, tobacco, corn and cotton know that. Why are we poor? Because the things we raise are filched from us for a song or a kick and sold at prices which enrich everybody but the farmer. When as in Germany and Austria great Agrarian parties have arisen to wresk a part of the loot from Commerce and Industry, it has been the land monopolists and not the ragged peasants who have gained. But because of the land policy of the United States in the West during the 19th Century a New Farmer has arisen: a farmer who owns his one hundred sixty acres, can read and write and think and who knows that in the past every human endeavor has received government aid except farming; toward farming we have the primitive psychology which is determined to exploit to the limit the man who raises food and clothes for the sake of the man who eats and dresses. “No,” says the Western American farmer. “This profit which makes millionaires of manufacturers and bankers is hereafter going to be divided in some part with us who feed and shelter them. Stand by us, Labor, and don’t let them subtract our just share from your all too low wages.”
The only rift in the lute is that the Southern Farmer cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with the West, for he is a land monopolist and slave driver whose history makes him the tool of Commerce and Industry.
But let the black peasants and laborers lift up their ears to the meaning of the Farm Bloc and the McNary-Haugen Bill.
Citation: Du Bois, W.E.B. 1927. “Farmers.” The Crisis. 34(2):69.