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One Man, One Voice, Bill Hirth By James D. Ritchie
He started a paper that started a movement.
William A. Hirth came early to his life’s calling. As young as 15, Hirth was a passionate advocate for economic equality in agriculture and began lecturing on the benefits of building a cooperative network of farm clubs. Those would remain his chief interests for the next 50 years, until Hirth died at age 65.
A New Yorker by birth, Bill Hirth was born March 28, 1875, near Tarrytown, to German parents who had migrated to the U.S. a few years earlier. When Hirth was three years old, his family moved to a farm in central Missouri.
There were early clues that Hirth might someday become a one-man farm movement. While still a teenager, he joined the Farmers Alliance of Audrain County (Mo.), and by 16 was secretary and chief spokesman for the Alliance. It was during this period that Hirth developed what would be his lifelong mantra: “That farmers be paid production costs plus a reasonable profit.” He soon came to believe that the best way to insure this was to have farmers own and control the agencies through which they marketed their products.
Hirth was educated in public schools, attended McGee College at Macon for a year and spent two years at Central College in Fayette. Then, he studied law briefly. However, he never graduated from any institution of higher learning. Hirth used his publication, The Missouri Farmer, to build support not just for MFA, but also for rural life in general. His message was constant: Through cooperation, farmers could improve rural life. This is from the front page of The Missouri Farmer, January 15, 1914
Let’s pull together for a greater Missouri
The farmer who reads the above heading understands the value of his team whether it be a two- or a six-horse team pulling together. Whether a team is made up of two or many horses, they are hitched so every one must do his part—it is impossible to find a satisfactory individual hitch for a team of two or more animals. The better each individual animal is, the stronger the whole team as a matter of course, but unless the teamwork is good—that is unless each individual animal cooperates with his mates—the amount of work is largely reduced.
What is true concerning the team strength of a number of horses, mules or oxen is also true of a body of men. Just as one horse can accomplish little when his work is compared with a good team, so is the work of one man of little experience, no matter how efficient it may be, when compared to the organized effort of a whole community.
No one man, however great, ever built a school or a church—that is impossible. Because of great wealth, he might erect the building, but it takes more than a building. It takes a community of people pulling together, working harmoniously in well-balanced team strength to create a society of any great worth or merit. In all our great schools, in fact with great organizations of any kind whatever, teamwork is the first important factor; but of almost equal value is for each man individually and for all collectively to be imbued with the right spirit—with an enthusiasm born of courage, confidence and a determination to win.
Show me the neighborhood with good roads, well-kept farms, good schools and country churches, and I will show you good teamwork and the right community spirit every time. In the community where every man finds fault with every other man—no matter how good the intentions of the individual members of society may be—there is nothing accomplished because one man’s energy is used to kill that of another whereas the one should help the other.
What we need most in Missouri is good teamwork, the right sprit for the betterment of our great state institutions of all kinds, for the building of good roads and for the development to the highest possible degree of our agricultural and other great natural and business resources. |
Hirth grew into a stolid, even-tempered young man (described as “Bismarckian” by one writer) who tirelessly tackled whatever chore he put his mind and hand to. Not completely humorless, he nevertheless took seriously those matters he saw as serious issues. He decidedly was opinionated and had short patience with those who disagreed with his opinions.
He took an early interest in state and national politics. In 1896, barely of voting age himself, he worked hard in the presidential race of William Jennings Bryan, selling maps, books, seed and shares of loan stock to help finance Bryan’s campaign. Bryan lost the election, but Bill Hirth never lost his allegiance to the Democratic Party.
After college, Hirth sold insurance for awhile and apparently was good at it. He made the insurance company’s “$200,000 Club” at least two years. But he left the insurance business to buy the Columbia Statesman, a struggling weekly newspaper. Hirth published the Statesman for six years. Still, his main concern continued to be the plight of the American farmer, and in March, 1908, he began publishing The Missouri Farmer and Breeder (the forerunner publication of Today’s Farmer), a twice-monthly tabloid, because, as he said, “it would be impossible to organize farmers without a mouthpiece of some kind.”
In print, Hirth lost no time. From the first issue of the magazine, he expounded on his favorite theme that farmers should “organize a Farm Club in as nearly every school house surrounding a given shipping point as possible.” Further, Hirth wrote, these clubs should make the nucleus for county- and state-wide associations. Once a dozen or so clubs were organized in an area, the next move was to hire a local manager.
Hirth’s ideas attracted attention. On the evening of March 10, 1914, seven farmers met at Newcomer School in Chariton County to discuss how Hirth’s notion of Farm Clubs might apply to them. Before the meeting ended, the Newcomer Farm Club had been formed and the seven farmers had pooled their purchase of 1,150 lbs. of binder twine at considerable savings over buying twine individually at retail prices.
With Bill Hirth fanning the flames, the Farm Club idea caught fire all over Missouri. By July, 1916, the number of Farm Clubs in the state neared 500, with a total membership of about 40,000. It was time to take the next step.
In early January, 1917, the Farm Clubs formed a temporary state association. On August 28, about 340 Farm Club delegates from 38 counties met at Sedalia to form the Missouri Farmers Association. The motto they adopted was vintage Hirth: “Production costs, together with a reasonable profit, for the fruits of the farmers’ sweat and toil.” The first MFA board of directors adopted the following resolution: “We direct the attention of Farm Clubs of the state to the building of farmers’ cooperative elevators and also to the forming of livestock shipping associations.”
Bill Hirth was elected president of MFA and renamed his magazine The Missouri Farmer (and added a subtitle, “Missouri’s Greatest Farm Paper”). It was adopted as the official publication of MFA, Inc.
In several ways, MFA was unique among farm cooperatives. For one thing, most cooperatives were organized, and then some time later, began a publication as the official organ of the organization. With MFA and The Missouri Farmer, it was the other way around—the publication, in effect, started the organization.
The years shortly after World War I were heady times for farmers. In war-ravaged Europe, demand boomed for U.S. products. Prices climbed to record levels. For example, in 1919, corn sold for an average $1.39 per bushel and wheat brought $2.09.
But it was a boom that wouldn’t last. By the early 1920s, the price of corn averaged 68 cents per bushel; wheat brought $1.11 and other commodities were similarly hit with drooping prices. Meanwhile, production costs and taxes continued to climb. Farmers found that the “Roaring Twenties” industrial boom in the rest of the country kept prices high for goods they needed to buy. Hard times hit the country nearly a decade before the Great Depression flattened the rest of the economy. In the beginning days of MFA, the modern world saw one of its most profound and wrenching moments—World War I. Aside from the destruction and upheaval of wartime, and partly because of it, mechanization would begin to arrive in the years after. Both would shape agriculture for the coming decades. In the May 15, 1919 edition of The Missouri Farmer, Hirth explained the situation to his readers.
Farmer facing a future of uncertainties
…The trouble is that the average man does not realize the world that we knew prior to August 1914 has disappeared as effectively as if it had been sunk in the sea. When the armistice was signed, too many of us not only murmured a prayer of unutterable joy, but mentally we washed our hands of the whole mess. But in reality, only the firing and the killing has ceased while the financial and economic aftermath will hang like a millstone about our necks.
…The first thing the farmer should realize is that we face a bankrupt Europe that will not in the future, as in the past, be able to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of surplus farm products in this country—a fact which more than any other single factor during the last 50 years has made ours the richest nation in the universe.
…What will we do with the surplus that we sold before and during the war? In our humble opinion, that is the most profound problem that has ever confronted American agriculture.
…Here and there one still finds those gentle dreamers who insist that there “can be no overproduction so long as there are hungry mouths to feed or baked backs to cover”—but evidently this pretty theory had its inception before the advent of the hobo, the I.W.W. and other gentry who go on the theory that the world owes them a living. During the winter of 1916 and 1917, potatoes sold as high as $6 and $7 per bushel. A speculative price, you say? True enough, but potatoes were sufficiently scarce to make this profiteering possible. And then the following spring everybody planted potatoes, with the result that they went begging at $1 per bushel while hundreds of thousands of bushels were fed to hogs.
…No other one thing is so tremendously important at this hour as the building up of a powerful farmers organization through which the farmers of this country will be able not merely to demand but to enforce their decrees. Only through such an instrument will we be able to sail the uncertain seas of the future—and this article was written in the hope that this profound truth may sing deep into the Farm Club leaders of this great state. |
At the same time, property taxes more than tripled. In 1913, state, county and local taxes averaged 14 cents per acre on rural land. By 1928, rural property taxes averaged 47 cents per acre.
Despite hard times, MFA continued to grow. By 1930, Farm Clubs numbered about 2,500. MFA was operating 375 exchanges, 300 shipping associations, poultry and dairy sales offices in Chicago and New York, two milk plants, one feed mill and an oil company with 24 bulk stations. The plight of American farmers continued to worsen. By 1932, cash income for many farmers had fallen below what was needed just to pay taxes. From 1930 to 1932, the forced transfer (foreclosures and tax sales) of 2.7 million acres resulted when more than 18,000 farms were seized. Hirth railed against what he saw as the inequity slanted against farmers. “It is when it requires four hours of a farmer’s labor to match one hour of the other fellow’s labor that we protest against an inequity which menaces the very existence of agriculture,” he wrote in The Missouri Farmer.
By the 1920s, Bill Hirth was attracting national attention and wielding considerable influence. A copious letter-writer, he stayed in close contact with other farm leaders, state and federal lawmakers and a great many others.
In 1923, he was elected chairman of the Corn Belt Committee, a coalition of Midwestern farm groups. Hirth circulated his editorials from The Missouri Farmer widely among Midwest newspapers and many of them were reprinted.
And he was taking a more active role in state and national politics. Hirth was fervently anti-Coolidge and anti-Hoover. Hirth had lobbied for passage of the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill, which called for the establishment of a federal farm board that would purchase surplus farm production at pre-World War I prices. Congress passed the measure four times between 1923 and 1928, only to have President Coolidge veto the bill each time. Hirth never forgave “Silent Cal.” As chairman of the Corn Belt Committee, Hirth said that the million farmers represented by himself and his colleagues “would make a last stand for equality of opportunity…if either Mr. Coolidge or Mr. Hoover are nominated, it would result in a wholesale bolt of the [Republican] party by the farmers.”
In 1926, Hirth was urged by several people, including state Senator E. M. Zevely, of Linn, Mo., to run for Congress. Hirth declined, writing to Zevely: “I don’t think I could consider going to Congress at this time. In the first place, I have become widely involved with the agricultural fight [and] I think I can serve it more effectively on the outside than on the inside.”
Hirth had fires to extinguish inside MFA. He had been re-elected president annually since the association was formed, but now was facing real challenges. Bill Hirth was sometimes impatient with parliamentary procedure; he often took it upon himself to make decisions that more properly should be made by the board’s executive committee. A group of MFA members in northern Missouri (some of them board members) objected to what they saw as Hirth’s high-handedness.
At about this time, Howard Cowden was a rising star in the MFA firmament. Cowden had organized Farm Clubs in Polk County and, at 26, was secretary of the Polk County Farmers Association when Bill Hirth noticed the young man and began grooming him for bigger things. But the two men had a falling out, whether because of Cowden’s growing ambition or Hirth’s growing jealousy of Cowden (probably some of both). Cowden left MFA to form Union Oil Company, a cooperative venture that eventually grew into Farmland Industries, the largest “cooperative of cooperatives” in the country.
Hirth also hit heavy weather with his “Producers Contract” program, which would bind a majority of producers in each area to a contract for marketing their commodities. Hirth set a goal of 75 percent participation in the contract. Thousands of farmers did sign on, but not in the numbers Hirth had hoped. Peeved, he suggested that those Farm Clubs with less than 75 percent participation in the Producers Contract program be ex-communicated from MFA. This did not sit well with many MFA members.
But Bill Hirth was not to be distracted too long by these internal struggles. Long objecting to Missouri government’s taxing and spending policies, in 1932, he initiated a petition drive to get a referendum on the ballot that would make wholesale changes in the state constitution. One of Hirth’s purposes in amending the constitution was to require more money to be earmarked for rural roads. “We are spending money like drunken sailors on our 7,000 miles of state roads, but we have entirely forgotten more than 100,000 miles of dirt roads…upon which the farmer must haul his commodities to market,” he wrote. We look at the Great Depression in a compressed hindsight. But in 1930, it still rolled darkly in time. In the pages of The Missouri Farmer, July 15, 1930 edition, Hirth urged for action in the face of economic straits.
Hell to pay generally
Frequently during the last 7 or 8 years I have prophesied in these columns that, sooner or later, the cities would be compelled to “pay the fiddler,” and evidently that hour has arrived with a vengeance, for as I write it is estimated that we have some four million idle men, and this at ordinarily the busiest season of the year. Likewise, in the spring of 1928, I predicted that the farm depression would, sooner or later, precipitate the greatest crisis that organized labor had ever known, and this has also come to pass, for the army of unemployed at this hour very largely represent those who have been driven off the farm since the great Agricultural Depression set in following the World War—in other words, if during this period between five million and six million farm workers had not been compelled to migrate to our industrial centers, employment in those centers would be close to normal at the present time; and therefore, on the one hand, the collapse of agriculture has flooded the cities with men and women for whom there is no work, while on the other hand, the constantly weakening buying power of the farmer is dealing a deadly blow to the industry in the hour of its greatest need.
…The simple truth of the matter is that our cities have been on a big industrial drunk, and are experiencing the “dark brown taste of the morning after.”
Meanwhile, what are we farmers going to do about it? With the cities crowded with idle thousands, we might as well make up our minds, once and for all, to root hog or die on the farm, and this being true, why not realize more powerfully than ever before that organization is the only way out?
If [on a hot] day when I am unconsciously praying that timely rains will save the corn crop I should halt the first Farm Club member I encounter and ask him to take a few days off to get his community signed up on our new Producers Contract, nine chances to ten he would wipe away the sweat, yawn, and say, “I’m too busy just now—maybe I can do something later.” And meanwhile, agriculture is sick unto death because we use our hands, legs and backs instead of our heads. Some day we will, of course, see the light—someday we will realize that it is senseless to toil blindly—some day we will awaken to the fact that agriculture is bleeding to death because we have not organized and concentrated its selling power, and in that hour the “Crossroads” will find a new contentment and happiness and that good fortune will spill over into the cities and start up their mills and factories. |
In 1932, Republican President Herbert Hoover faced a challenge from New York’s Democratic governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Bill Hirth began campaigning for FDR before Roosevelt had even hinted at what his farm platform would contain. When the Democratic Platform Committee met in Chicago in June, the committee chairman wanted a platform of no more than 1,000 words. Hirth contacted the committee to protest. “If we put out a platform with only 1,000 words or so, I think it would become a matter of jest [to many people]…the national ills cannot be adequately discussed thus briefly.” After FDR was nominated and began putting together his proposed cabinet, he invited Bill Hirth to Albany, N.Y., for a “chat.” It’s unclear whether Hirth accepted the invitation, but he did make major inputs to the FDR farm program, and objected to features with which he disagreed.
Many of Roosevelt’s farm advisors wanted a program to severely curtail farm production as a way to get prices up. Hirth did not think so.
“To blame our [economic] troubles on overproduction is…unsound, for when millions are dependent upon public charity to keep from starving in this land of plenty…indicates a lack of purchasing power, rather than that we have produced too much,” Hirth wrote in a Missouri Farmer editorial.
Despite these differences, Bill Hirth was at the top of FDR’s short list of candidates for secretary of agriculture. He was endorsed by the entire Missouri congressional delegation, from both sides of the political aisle. But Hirth declined, and Iowa’s Henry Wallace became the New Deal cornucopia tender.
In 1936, Bill Hirth jumped into the Missouri gubernatorial race, campaigning primarily against the state’s tax policy and what he saw as mismanagement by several agencies, such as the state insurance commission. Hirth was narrowly defeated in the August primary by fellow Democrat, Lloyd C. Stark, who also campaigned on an “absolute honesty” theme. After the primary, Stark wooed the support of Tom Pendergast, the party machine boss in Kansas City, and handily won the general election in November.
Bill Hirth was aging, but his mind and his pen were as sharp as ever. He continued to be elected MFA president, and to serve as editor and publisher of The Missouri Farmer, until shortly before he died at his Sunshine Valley Farm near Columbia in 1940. Click here to respond to this article Top of page
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