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   stretches and easy availability. (Though a perceptive observer of the US’s   
   slaveholding economy and a supporter of the early abolitionist movement,   
   Martineau failed to mention the removal of Indigenous nations, the   
   genocide that made the land available in the first place.)   
      
   In her book Society in America, Martineau described a “great danger” that   
   Americans seemed on guard against. “They have always had in view the   
   disadvantage of rich men purchasing tracts larger than they could   
   cultivate,” she wrote. “They saw … that it is inconsistent with republican   
   modes that overgrown fortunes should arise by means of an early grasping   
   of large quantities of a cheap kind of property.”   
      
   That attitude did not last. In 1862, the Homestead Act opened hundreds of   
   millions of acres of land to settlement, most of it in the western US and   
   taken from Indigenous nations by force. The law stipulated that the land   
   be doled out in parcels of up to 160 acres, but thanks to loopholes,   
   fraud, and poor enforcement, land speculators and companies were able to   
   obtain much larger tracts on the cheap. Cattle barons acquired huge land   
   holdings. Their herds overgrazed the range, and in the course of just a   
   few decades, desert began to replace grassland and enabled the spread of   
   cheatgrass and other invasive species that now fuel the wildfires that   
   flare each summer.   
      
   By the late 19th century, erratic commodity markets were afflicting   
   midwestern grain farmers, while in the south, Black and poor white tenant   
   farmers were trapped in extortionist credit systems, working land they did   
   not own. Agrarian anger fed the populist movements of time, which formed,   
   in part, as a response to emerging monopolies in the meatpacking and milk   
   industries. Successive waves of consolidation followed in the 1920s and   
   1930s, caused by low crop prices and the Great Plains drought that led to   
   the Dust Bowl.   
      
   All of these issues – market consolidation, farm prices, the cost of food   
   for an increasingly urban and unionized workforce – converged in the   
   Roosevelt administration’s response to the Great Depression. In crafting   
   the New Deal, the administration ultimately prioritized the interests of   
   commercial farmers, subsidizing their incomes while implementing   
   production caps. In the south, communist and socialist organizers had some   
   success building coalitions between poor white and Black farmers, bonded   
   in their resistance to the cotton and tobacco companies that dominated the   
   land.   
      
   But in the end, big business won out. Agricultural corporate empires –   
   including some, like Tyson Foods, that persist today – formed, while   
   federal policy bankrupted thousands of small and tenant farmers. Though   
   today the New Deal is seen as a pinnacle of progressive policymaking, its   
   impact on rural America is mostly ignored. In many ways it was the dawn of   
   modern agribusiness, the historian Shane Hamilton writes, which brought   
   with it “the acceptance of a certain degree of monopoly power within the   
   farm and food economy”.   
      
   These trends accelerated after the second world war, with the advent of   
   industrial farming and its new pesticides, combine harvesters,   
   fertilizers, and seed technologies. Federal agriculture policy facilitated   
   these changes in the form of large subsidies and enormous, publicly funded   
   water infrastructure projects, which made large-scale irrigation possible   
   in arid regions. In 1973, as global grain prices soared, Richard Nixon’s   
   agriculture secretary Earl Butz told farmers to “get big or get out”. By   
   the 1980s, commodity prices had declined, endangering the farmers who had   
   taken on debt in order to get big, as instructed. Drought compounded these   
   difficulties.   
      
   At the height of the farm crisis, more than 500 farm properties were   
   selling every month at foreclosure auctions. In 1985, a larger number of   
   agricultural banks failed than in any year since the Great Depression, and   
   by the end of the decade, hundreds of thousands of farmers had defaulted   
   on their loans. During at least one protest, they wore paper bags over   
   their heads to hide their faces from creditors.   
      
   Neither major party did much to halt the crisis. Perhaps the most   
   prominent voice defending the interests of small farmers was Jesse   
   Jackson, who ran for president in 1984 and again in 1988, when he won 11   
   states in the Democratic primary. His success shocked the party   
   establishment. With Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign as   
   direct inspiration, Jackson tried to build a broad-based movement that   
   emphasized the specific obstacles facing Black Americans, while drawing in   
   struggling farmers under the banner of shared economic interest.   
      
   At a 1985 rally in rural Missouri, Jackson gathered angry white farmers,   
   Black supporters from Kansas City, and union locals to attempt to stop the   
   foreclosure and sale of an 120-acre family farm. “This is a rainbow   
   coalition for economic justice,” Jackson told the crowd. In the end, the   
   farm sold, Jackson lost the primaries, and Ronald Reagan vetoed a relief   
   package for farmers, though he would ultimately sign a farm bill that   
   included aid money.   
      
   In Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of   
   the US Working Class, Mike Davis connects the “consolidation of local   
   citadels of capitalist power on a state or municipal basis” in this period   
   to Reagan’s rise. In the 1970s, voter participation plummeted abruptly, a   
   pattern that mostly broke down along class lines. The lowest-income   
   earners were substantially more likely to be non-voters, which holds true   
   today, according to Pew Research Center.   
      
   Meanwhile, middle and upper strata earners became, if anything, more   
   politically involved, throwing themselves into single-issue campaigns like   
   bussing and abortion, and financing the emergence of business Pacs. Put   
   another way, as economic forces broke down rural communities, those left   
   behind became less inclined to participate in a system that did not help   
   them. Those who benefited, naturally, continued to find electoral politics   
   worthwhile. Members of the gentry became the so-called “median voters” and   
   frequent donors, shaping a system that enriched them while punishing their   
   neighbors.   
      
   The next major Democratic attempt to take on consolidation in rural   
   America would not come for another two decades. It can be hard to remember   
   now, but during his first campaign, Barack Obama combined talk of hope and   
   change with sharp criticisms of monopoly and trade deals like Nafta.   
   Democrats hadn’t talked like this since before the Clinton administration.   
   He promised to “strengthen anti-monopoly laws” and fight market   
   consolidation in agriculture industries, and the political payoff was   
   substantial. Not only did Obama sweep the Rust Belt, but he also took Iowa   
   and North Carolina. He lost Missouri by a mere 0.13 percentage points – a   
   margin unthinkable for a Democrat today.   
      
   It’s easy to see why Obama’s anti-monopoly message caught on. To take one   
   example, by 2010, a few large corporations like Tyson and Perdue   
   controlled more than 90% of the poultry industry. Nominally independent   
   farmers were subject to the whims of the large chicken packers, who   
   offered barebones contracts that locked in low prices, required farmers to   
   constantly purchase new technology, and denied them the right to negotiate   
   with other buyers. Oftentimes, farmers didn’t even own the chickens they   
   raised. All of this remains true today.   
      
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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