AGRICULTURE: No Sale

“There ain’t going to be any bidders!” said an ominous, overalled farmer last week when a crowd of 500 pushed into the County Treasurer’s office at Logan, Iowa. Scheduled for public sale for nonpayment of taxes were 2.000 pieces of property. But even as the spokesman had predicted, none was bid on, none bought. Within the next two days, treasurers of 15 other Iowa counties met with the same stubborn resistance when trying toconduct tax sales. Sales had to be postponed from 30 to 60 days. Backed by the Farmers’ Holiday Association, which did its best last summer to prevent the movement of agricultural products until price levels were upped, agrarian civil disobedience spread across the plains of tall corn.

At Le Mars, centre of the holiday movement, occurred the first definite ugliness. Eight hundred embattled farmers surrounded the court house steps to watch the farm of John A. Johnson go on the block. Their leaders dangled a long rope in their hard fingers. As menacing growls rose about him. Lawyer Herbert S. Martin, agent for New York Life Insurance Co., screwed up his nerve and offered $30,000 for the property. When the sum bid became known, $3,000 less than the face value of the mortgage held by the company against the Johnson farm, people began shouting: “Lynch him! Tar and feather him! Ride him out of town on a rail!”

Lawyer Martin was cuffed over to a telegraph office, made to request the insurance company to increase its offer, with the significant postscript: RUSH ANSWER MY NECK AT RISK. New York Life raised its bid to $33,000. Meantime, District Judge C. W. Pitts, who ordered the sale, had tried to reach a telephone to summon aid. He was gently but firmly held prisoner by the mob. Released, he wrote Governor-elect Clyde LaVerne Herring (see p. 13), recommending that power to decree foreclosures and tax sales be withdrawn from the State’s district courts (i. e., a mortgage moratorium), until the Legislature could enact agricultural relief legislation.

5¢ Horse. Simultaneously, canny Eastern agrarians were accomplishing in their tax problems the same results as their Western brethren, by a somewhat different stratagem. Organized by their Farmers’ Protective Association, a crowd of neighbors went over to John Hansel’s place near Doylestown, Pa. to attend a sheriff’s sale. Sheriff Horace Gwinner’s deputy first asked for bids on a five-year-old plow horse. Somebody bid 5¢. Nobody raised it. Next a Holstein bull was put up. It was not worth more than 5¢ to anybody. Tough-muscled farm boys circulated in the crowd to make sure that no outsider thought three hogs worth more than 5¢, or two calves more than 4¢. Farmer Hansel’s entire property brought $1.18. Nobody took anything away. Instead, the neighbors collected $25 for him and his three motherless children, went home singing a hymn. Sheriff Gwinner doubted if the Court would accept the return. Two days later at nearby Sassamansville, outsiders were “invited” not to bid on the household goods of C. H. Renninger. Someone bought them for $4, deeded them back to Householder Renninger for 99 years.