I know I used to have one, but it’s disappeared, along with the cause it celebrated—one of those old black-mesh American Agriculture ball caps. I thought about it this week as I was working up, for a historical journal, a little piece about the American Agriculture Movement and its Washington tractorcade of 1979. It always makes me feel a little queer when someone calls on me to treat events that I remember personally as history. Oh well, I did it.
To date there is no book-length, authoritative treatment of the AAM in print; perhaps there never will be; and if not, it will for the same reason that the AAM itself faded from view after only a brief efflorescence: because its public appeal was no longer viable in America. It was a lost cause.
The American Agriculture Movement emerged in the 1970s as a grassroots phenomenon, but one with a definite origin: a coffee klatch of three large-scale wheat farmers at a gas station cafe in Campo, Colorado, during the summer of 1977. Early AAM activists created no hierarchy, collected no dues, but effectively networked discontented farmers of the plains through person-to-person contacts, flyers, rallies, and local tractorcades.
The issue was the failure of the 1977 farm bill and the federal government to bolster falling commodity prices and support farm incomes. This followed a period of profitable prices, rapid expansion (“fencerow-to-fencerow” planting, in the phrase of the day), and heavy borrowing at high interest rates. The best farmers, as defined and encouraged by the 1973 farm bill, found themselves in the most trouble, and they were angry—specifically with Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland and President Jimmy Carter.
There are identifiable and somewhat venerable tropes in the rhetoric of the American Agriculture Movement. First is the invocation of farm fundamentalism, the belief, often credited to Thomas Jefferson, that farming is the most virtuous of human occupations, the essential basis of a democratic republic; that if farmers do well, the country does well.
Second is the belief in a Golden Age of Agriculture during the early years of the twentieth century and the enshrinement of the concept of parity; that is, the principle that the purchasing power of farmers producing agricultural commodities should maintain that established during the years 1909 to 1914.
Third, the rhetoric of AAM has deep roots on the Great Plains, particularly in the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist Movement of the 1880s and 1890s. Oldtime Populists traced their problems to non-farm interests profiting at their expense: bankers, transportation providers, processors, and the notorious middle men. They were conscious of their place as a (virtuous) modest people of the land. Such rhetoric does not mesh well with the appearance of heavily capitalized agriculturalists driving expensive equipment though the streets. Tractors were the wrong symbol for the capture of public sympathy.
More than fifty North Dakota farmers participated in the tractorcade to Washington in 1979. They brought four tractors. Two of the tractors were impounded by police during a street demonstration when a scuffle broke out. The other two dropped out on account of dead batteries. It all sounds kind of symbolic. Afterward, AAM leaders resolved to be more conventional and low-key in their lobbying, and then the organization faded. I am not saying, based on this experience, that the farmers remaining on the Great Plains cannot make a successful claim on public support and esteem. They can, and should. But the American Agriculture Movement is a map of the wrong way to go. I’d like to find one of those caps, though.
