he sat down after supper with his books and figured out how much money he would have to borrow. He needed a little over two hundred bushels of seed, for he always planted the optimum amount—roughly a bushel and a half to the acre. It would be around a hundred and fifty dollars for seed alone. Considering all the other things he would need cash for, including the biggest expense—paying the threshers—he didn’t see how he could possibly get by on less than three hundred dollars cash between now and September.
He must not count on more than forty dollars from cream between now and then, for the prices always dropped in the summer when the market was glutted from all the freshening cows. His five-year record book showed that the year before the Wall Street crash a decent cow, producing around a hundred and fifty pounds of butterfat a year, had brought in sixty-nine dollars cash just for her cream, not counting the skim that had gone to pigs, calves, and chickens. But last year, just four years later, a herd of six cows had netted him less than a hundred and fifty. Last year, of course, had been the worst year in history, but even so, when he put the two sets of figures together, they were hard to take.
“Rachel!” he called out to the kitchen. “Do you realize that a man could make as much money with
two
cows in 1928 as he can make with
six
now? It just works out almost to the last penny. A man sweats just as hard and grows just as much feed and cleans out just as much manure and he makes a third as much money. It just don’t figure, does it?”
“Nothing makes sense,” she said.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing
makes sense!”
It bothered him to have her agree with him. “Yes it
does
make sense! It’s just the same old story. Just the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Just Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan and Jim Hill and all the rest of them getting crookeder and richer every day. Why, these senators are
proving
it on them every day—what they all did on the stock market, and the way they got their monopolies on the railroads!
They’re
the only ones to blame for the crash—all those birds on Wall Street.
They’re
the fellows we have to thank for getting twenty-six cents a bushel last fall. But you don’t see any of those big guys losing their shirts, do you? No. Only the little guy.”
But even with the farmer’s market ruined, cream prices were a little better this spring because of the drought. George thought he was safe in counting on forty dollars cash from cream between now and when the wheat checks came in. He would ask Will for two hundred and fifty dollars. Four years ago that much money would not have looked like the fortune of half a lifetime.
He wouldn’t have been quite so reluctant to borrow if he could have done it a little later in the season—June or July, with a stand of growing wheat as security. But this way he was borrowing against ground that still froze every night—ground that wasn’t even his—ground that he was utterly committed to, though it was in no way committed to him. His operating margin had narrowed into a wedge that was threatening to pinch him to death. Everything and everybody had a hold on him, and
he
had a hold on nothing. So long as rich men wrote the laws, what could a little man do?
Wednesday, April 12
George awoke in the prairie dawn at four in the morning, too hot under the quilts that had been just right when he went to bed, knowing what that hot feeling meant—that the south wind of spring had come and that today was the day he would finally have to borrow money from his father-in-law.
Money became more confusing every day. There were forty bills in Congress calling for some kind of inflation. There was an embargo on shipments of gold from American shores. But rich American citizens who knew the revolution was imminent had already sent so much gold to Switzerland in the last three years that the Swiss, feverishly building vaults, had
He must not count on more than forty dollars from cream between now and then, for the prices always dropped in the summer when the market was glutted from all the freshening cows. His five-year record book showed that the year before the Wall Street crash a decent cow, producing around a hundred and fifty pounds of butterfat a year, had brought in sixty-nine dollars cash just for her cream, not counting the skim that had gone to pigs, calves, and chickens. But last year, just four years later, a herd of six cows had netted him less than a hundred and fifty. Last year, of course, had been the worst year in history, but even so, when he put the two sets of figures together, they were hard to take.
“Rachel!” he called out to the kitchen. “Do you realize that a man could make as much money with
two
cows in 1928 as he can make with
six
now? It just works out almost to the last penny. A man sweats just as hard and grows just as much feed and cleans out just as much manure and he makes a third as much money. It just don’t figure, does it?”
“Nothing makes sense,” she said.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing
makes sense!”
It bothered him to have her agree with him. “Yes it
does
make sense! It’s just the same old story. Just the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Just Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan and Jim Hill and all the rest of them getting crookeder and richer every day. Why, these senators are
proving
it on them every day—what they all did on the stock market, and the way they got their monopolies on the railroads!
They’re
the only ones to blame for the crash—all those birds on Wall Street.
They’re
the fellows we have to thank for getting twenty-six cents a bushel last fall. But you don’t see any of those big guys losing their shirts, do you? No. Only the little guy.”
But even with the farmer’s market ruined, cream prices were a little better this spring because of the drought. George thought he was safe in counting on forty dollars cash from cream between now and when the wheat checks came in. He would ask Will for two hundred and fifty dollars. Four years ago that much money would not have looked like the fortune of half a lifetime.
He wouldn’t have been quite so reluctant to borrow if he could have done it a little later in the season—June or July, with a stand of growing wheat as security. But this way he was borrowing against ground that still froze every night—ground that wasn’t even his—ground that he was utterly committed to, though it was in no way committed to him. His operating margin had narrowed into a wedge that was threatening to pinch him to death. Everything and everybody had a hold on him, and
he
had a hold on nothing. So long as rich men wrote the laws, what could a little man do?
Wednesday, April 12
George awoke in the prairie dawn at four in the morning, too hot under the quilts that had been just right when he went to bed, knowing what that hot feeling meant—that the south wind of spring had come and that today was the day he would finally have to borrow money from his father-in-law.
Money became more confusing every day. There were forty bills in Congress calling for some kind of inflation. There was an embargo on shipments of gold from American shores. But rich American citizens who knew the revolution was imminent had already sent so much gold to Switzerland in the last three years that the Swiss, feverishly building vaults, had
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