Consumerism on the Farm

Previous Intro Note: Consumerism and The Home

Some sectors of the population were not able to participate in the consumer economy at the same level of prosperity enjoyed by others. The financially pressed farmers, white and black, in rural areas where electrification was slow in coming, were one such group.

The rule of thumb, for 1922 to 1929, is that those of so-called "low income" earned less than $2,000 a year. In Our Master's Voice (not included in this collection), his 1934 study of advertising in the early early years of the Great Depression, which casts a backward eye into the 1920s, James Rorty places 77 percent of the population in 1925 at this level. Middle class families, who could afford comforts, earned between $2,000 and $5,000 a year. The well-off and wealthy had incomes of $5,000 a year and upwards. In Prosperity: Fact or Myth? (1929), Stuart Chase's figures (pp. 83-87) are more or less in line with Rorty's. America's Capacity to Consume (not included in this collection), a 1934 study by Maurice Leven, Harold G. Moulton and Clark Warburton funded by the Maurice and Laura Falk Foundation and published by the Brookings Institution, gives information, in terms of families, for the end of the decade.

The Brookings study notes that farm families in 1930 constituted "23 per cent of all families of two or more persons. With very few exceptions their incomes were less than $6,000 and a large proportion of them had incomes of not more than $1,500. Their incomes therefore cover about the same range as that of wage earners, skilled workers, and the business and professional families discussed" (p. 75). (INTRO NOTE Labor)

Included in the collection are selections from Coolidge's case file on the agricultural crisis, the McNary-Haugen Bill 1923-28, reflecting both congressional and popular debates on the bills by which progressive Republicans in the Senate and House proposed to alleviate distress in the farm economy. President Coolidge vetoed the bill twice, however, in 1927 and in 1928, primarily because he feared it would further encourage overproduction. (DETAIL NOTE McNary- Haugen)

Farmers also tried the less controversial measure of cooperative marketing as a way to improve their standard of living, as described in the Coolidge Papers case file Co-operative Marketing - Agriculture, 1923-28. (DETAIL NOTE Cooperatives)

The government publication Farmer's Standard of Living: A Socio-Economic Study of 2,886 White Farm Families of Selected Localities in 11 States (1926) furnishes statistics for white farm families. Another government publication, Extension Work Among Negroes Conducted by Negro Agents, 1923 (1925), by surveying the system of black agricultural extension agents appointed to serve African- American farmers, provides a sense of life on the farm for black families. The August 1926 issue of Southern Workman, published by Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, attended primarily by black and Native American students, further fleshes out the picture of "The Farmers' Standard of Living."

Thrift for Women. Presented by the Household Science Department of the Illinois Farmers' Institute (1930), contains stories, in the farm women's own words, of how they brought extra money to the family income during the late 1920s. Their use of leisure is surveyed in Leisure-Time Activities of a Selected Group of Farm Women (1932), based on a survey conducted by The Farmer's Wife (not in the collection) April 1927 to January 1932.

Despite the connotations of its name, the farm journal included in the Coolidge-Consumerism Collection, The Country Gentleman, catered to the interests of mainstream farm families, not gentlemen farmers. The February 1926 issue focused on farmers' cooperatives, farmers and credit, the farmer's lagging standard of living compared to that of the industrial worker, and farmers and radio.

It is worth observing that according to Paul K. Edwards in The Southern Urban Negro As a Consumer (1932), Country Gentleman was one of a relatively small number of "white magazines" to which African-American households subscribed (p. 179).

Students of the inter-war period may also wish to consult the widely read Wallace's Farmer, published by the long-standing farm family of Henry C. Wallace who, until his death in 1924, was secretary of agriculture in President Coolidge's administration. Wallace's Farmer was not selected for inclusion in the Coolidge-Consumerism collection because it is available at the Library of Congress only in the form of a microfilm published by University Microfilms, Inc. (UMI).

Merchandising New England Farm Products, published by the New England Council in 1928, a regionally-based study of the farmer as producer, rather than as would-be consumer, is leavened by a strong sense of individual voices.

Previous Intro Note: Consumerism and the Home