The University of Missouri Agriculture During the Reagan Years A Dissertation Submitted to The Faculty of the Department of History In Candidacy For The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Jay Ward Columbia, Missouri May 2015 Copyright 2015 by Jay Woodward Ward All rights reserved. The undersigned, appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled Agriculture During the Reagan Years Presented by Jay Woodward Ward In Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy And hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. ______________________________________________________________________ Dr. Robert Collins ______________________________________________________________________ Dr. Mark Carroll ______________________________________________________________________ Dr. John Frymire _______________________________________________________________________ Dr. Catherine Rymph _______________________________________________________________________ Dr. Patrick Westhoff Dedication To Rose, Kelly, Brian, Janelle, Mickey, Lauren, Payton, Addison, Evelynne, and Gibson— the center of my world. Acknowledgements I owe undying gratitude to my advisor, Professor Robert M. Collins, who is a renowned scholar and an award-winning teacher, and without whose patient guidance I could not have completed this remarkable journey. I also want to thank my committee, Professor Mark Carroll, Professor John Frymire, Professor Catherine Rymph, and Professor Patrick Westhoff, all of whom lent me their considerable expertise and wisdom, but more importantly to me, they treated this very non-traditional student with extraordinary kindness. And my gratitude to my sister, Deborah Haseltine, my computer expert, who always was able to lead me out of the morasses into which I stumbled almost every time I sat down at the computer. ii Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Tables iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Second Agricultural Revolution 20 Chapter 2. Federal Policy on Agriculture 51 Chapter 3. The Reagan Approach to Agriculture 83 Chapter 4. The Food Stamp Program 111 Chapter 5. Political Considerations in the Farm Bill of 1981 139 Chapter 6. Circumstances Change: The Farm Crisis of the 1980s 169 Chapter 7. The Reagan Response to the Farm Downturn 194 Chapter 8. The Reelected Administration Envisions a New Beginning 218 Chapter 9. The Farm Bill of 1985 242 Chapter 10. The Agricultural Credit Crisis 265 Conclusion 290 Epilogue 302 Appendix 309 Bibliography 327 Vita 397 iii Tables Table Page 1. Number of Farms Producing Each Commodity. 45 2. Farm Labor. 47 3. Farm Characteristics. 50 4. Shares of Farm Acreage and Sales Accounted for by Farm Size. 51 5. Percentage of Parity. 83 iv Introduction The current understanding of the Reagan years does not include details of the seven- year battle between the administration versus Congress and agricultural interests over how much income from America's taxpayers would support U. S. farmers. The burgeoning academic literature on Reagan and his presidency does not mention agriculture. For example, when the important conference held to assess Reagan-era scholarship in 2002 resulted in the acclaimed volume The Reagan Presidency, edited by W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, agriculture or agricultural policy did not appear in the table of contents.1 Similarly, when the agenda-defining National Bureau of Economic Research symposium American Economic Policy in the 1980s completed its study, agricultural policy merited not a single word.2 That silence is a problem, because the "Farm Crisis of the 1980s" occurred during the Reagan administration; there are important insights to be gained from that episode about the president, federal farm policy, the workings of Congress, and the evolution of farming and farm life in twentieth-century America. That silence surrounding Reagan and the Farm Crisis is the impetus for the current study. However, if one is to write of agriculture in the United States, there are several popular misconceptions about farming and farmers that must be identified and 1 W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic conservatism and Its Legacies, (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003). 2 National Bureau of Economic Research, American Economic Policy in the 1980s, edited and with an introductory essay by Martin Feldstein, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 1 dispelled before the topic can be clearly understood. The concept of the yeoman farmer and the “family farm” has been central to the American self-image for over 200 years. Most Americans, especially urban Americans, are strongly influenced by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson called farmers the most valuable of citizens. In fact, Jefferson envisioned the United States as one huge agrarian society. 3 Later, during the Romantic Period of the nineteenth century, both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau wrote that nature was a formative element in the American national character. They argued that hard physical labor was necessary for self-realization. Farming provided both closeness to nature and hard physical labor.4 Populist rhetoric beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to this day also extolled American farmers. The populists maintained that farms were an important “safety valve” that preserved individual liberties and were repositories of the family values that defined the traditional American worldview.5 3 “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who, not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on causalities and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances; but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any State to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.’ Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by North Carolina Press, 1955), 303. 4 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Fall River Press, 2008); Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healy, 1999); William P. Browne et al, Sacred Cows and Hot Potatoes: Agrarian Myths in Agricultural Policy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 9. 5 For Populism, Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); James Turner, “Understanding the Populists, Journal of 2 The "image" of farmers and family farms in the minds of Americans has been an important factor that consistently influenced Congress as it deliberated federal farm policy through the years. Unfortunately, many of the images projected in 1981 were false. Scholars argued that the concentration of population, media influence, and popular culture on the East and West Coasts created a sort of informational vacuum about what went on in between. Scholarly studies confirmed the existence of such a bias. Those living on the coasts had a variety of false images about how farming really operated. If one is to deal effectively with agriculture during the Reagan tenure, those false images must be identified and dispelled.6 This coastal bias suggested that there was a uniform Middle America containing red barns and tall corn or golden wheat growing in flat, featureless landscapes collectively described as “farm states.” The reality was that the great middle was, and is, a highly diverse environment. Each state’s agriculture was distinct; it is impossible to talk of a typical farm state. While the economies of the states in Middle America historically depended on agriculture, they did so less each year. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City reported in 1987, for example, that fewer than 12 percent of rural families received the majority of their income from farming.7 Nevertheless, agricultural processing, finance, and services were still substantial employers. Many international American History, 67, no. 2 (1980): 354-373; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books a Division of Random House, 1955). 6 Willard W. Cochrane and C. Ford Runge, Reforming Farm Policy: Toward a National Agenda (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1992), 20. 7Mark Drabenstott, Mark Henry, and Lynn Gibson, “The Rural Economic Policy Choice” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Economic Review, 74 no. 2 (1987), quoted in Cochrane and Runge, p.20. 3 companies such as Hormel, International Multifoods, Pillsbury, and General Mills were headquartered in “farm states.” Misconceptions, however, led to the idea that federal farm programs uniformly benefited farm