Carroll M Nearmyer

From "The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream" by Studs Terkel (1988) CARROLL NEARMYER A farm in lowa, twenty-four miles southeast of Des Moines. Instantly, you sense hard times. It isn't that the place is neglected; it’s precisely the other way around: the farm’s well-kept appearance evokes the image of the proud working poor, tatteredly neat and clean. It is the old house itself that gives away what is now an open secret: the desperate circumstances of the farmer. It is an especially soft and easy twilight in May. His wife Carolyn is preparing a meal: not a farm supper of tradition and legend, but a bit of this, a dab of that, and more of something else. Thanks to her skill and care, it turns out to be wholly satisfying and filling—hunger, of course, being the best sauce. It will be ready by the time their son Chris gets home from his factory job in Des Moines. Eight-year-old Caree, a good talker, is ready any time. "This kitchen is part of the old house. My great-grandparents bought the place around 1895 or somewhere in there. I'm fourth-generation. Chris is not about to be the fifth. Just like all kids that lived on the farm, he followed me around quite a bit and was driving a tractor at, oh gosh, what age! Eight or nine, just old enough to touch the brakes and the clutch. The reason he’s not working at that, I could not help him get started in farming. It does look like the beginning of the end. I can go up and down the road and point you out the neighbors that is in the same predicament that their sons won’t farm and that means the end of the family farm. Dad was always telling me about it, and I didn’t listen to him. The older I get now, the smarter my dad gets, even after he has passed away. “Don’t trust a bank.” He says they’ll do anything when things are going good, but the minute it turns around and starts going bad, they’ll jerk the rug from out under you. The particular bank I dealt with was in Newton, Iowa. The Prairie City Bank, right by here, closed just eleven months ago. It went belly-up. I believe about three hundred here in the state of Iowa that has went down. Oh, the bigger banks are getting bigger. You want to go in there and borrow $50,000, they won’t talk to you. But if you wanted to borrow 2 or 3 million, then they’ll talk to you. When problems started coming up, I went to talk to my banker. I knew him personally and he knew me. But he had pressure from up above and so he was putting the pressure on me. He was trying to convince me I was a bad manager and for me to come home and write up a sale bill, list everything, and sell out. If I did that, 1 could pay them off and they, therefore, would not have had the pressure from up above. Being’s as I’m a fourth-generation farmer, I wasn’t about to just come home and sell out. They come at us with, You gotta have a cash flow, you gotta do a better job on your bookkeeping, a better job on your farming. But still when you sell that bushel of corn for less money than you produce it, you can only cut so far. Our taxes kept going up, interests kept going up on us. At one time, I was paying eighteen percent interest on my farm notes. I came up more short on payments. If I don’t make a go of it now, the Newton National Bank will take it. They’ll turn around and sell it to someone else. It will probably be a corporation. We call ’em vultures. I’ve been involved in farm activism for three years. There is less people now than there were then, involved. They just gradually fall by the way. It’s just like a cancer. Pretty soon one goes, then there’s another one gone. I would say in three years’ time, we lost somewhere around forty percent of them. Some of them don’t have the money to come. It takes gas to go somewhere. If it comes to the choice of feeding your family and buying gas, you're going to feed the family. When I was really down and out, I couldn’t find a job. You talk about prime of life, I’m forty-six years old. That went against me. I was already too old. If we’re forced off the farms, we'll have to take jobs like ridin’ on the outside of the garbage truck. Carrying garbage for a minimum wage. What we’ll really become is white slaves and just barely livin’. When they’re coming down here after ya, you really feel what happens to a person on the inside. When you realize you’re losing everything and be forced out of your home, you get mad. Damn mad. I kept the whole problem to myself. She didn’t know and the kids didn’t know that I was having problems. There was times that I got suicidal. I would be driving and didn’t know how I got there. There was several times that I had the gun to my head and she didn’t know that. And then I got damn mad. I got to thinkin’ about it and I got madder. These people don’t have the right to do this to me! I have worked, I have sweated, and I have bled. I have tried out there to keep this place goin’. And then they tried to take it away from me! I worked out there to keep food on the table for the people over this whole nation. Nobody has the right to keep me from doin’ that! I got so damn mad that I would have picked up arms to protect myself and the family. I would have shot somebody. Then I got involved with this farm group, and there is people just like me. They get tagged as radicals right away. Cause we’re supposed to be civilized now. It’s all right for some S.O.B. in a white shirt and tie to come along and take our farms away from us on paper. But it’s not all right for us to try to keep him from doin’ that. The minute we say we’re not gonna let him do that, we become radicals. We have went to farm sales and helped farmers that was being sold out, to keep their machinery and stop the sale. Again we get tagged as radicals. I’ve helped organize farm sales to stop the sheriff’s sale. Most of the time it’s in winter. He stands out in the cold, the farmer being sold out. Sheriff comes. If you shout him down he still knocks off the farm to the bank. The farmer’s sold out and they try to put the guilt on you. My banker even suggested, “You don’t want to let your neighbors know that you’re having financial trouble, ‘cause you’re the only one that’s having trouble.” I know several other farmers he’s told that to. There’s a neighbor down here two miles, we was meetin’ each other on the road, we’d wave at each other but we wouldn’t stop to talk to each other. He thought I was doin’ all right and he was wonderin’ how come, and I was wonderin’ the same thing about him. There is a neighbor across the road. He’s a lot bigger than I am, but last summer when the Prairie City Bank foreclosed, they took his son down, too. The only thing his son saved was his wife and his kids. But they won’t come and speak out. I don’t know why they don’t. The next neighbor down the road is just a young guy. Him and his wife both work in town. He farms evenings, after he gets home. Just to survive. There’s another neighbor down the road, he was borrowing money from FHA. They turned him every which way but loose and he still hasn’t said anything. There’s one here last winter, wasn’t able to put any food on the table, and he still hasn’t ever said anything. I’ve had some farmers argue with you that they have the right to go broke. When our administration is ruling out what we can get for our product, then we don’t have that right. There ain’t one farmer in the state of Iowa that says he voted for Reagan. They just won’t admit it! FHA was supposed to loan you money and stretch it out to ten or fifteen years or however long it took. When people started having trouble, first thing we heard from FHA was that they were running out of funds. They accelerated some notes on farmers, even if they was keeping up on their payments. Demanded payment in full. They would call it high-risk, so they would raise the interest two percent each time. There’s a big bunch of money the Pentagon has, unspent, unobligated. All they’d have to do is transfer just a very small percentage of it to FHA, and it would save thousands of small farmers. I’ve got a reputation of talking. I’m trying to get them to understand. They will listen a little better than they did six months ago. I have been called crazy: “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” I’ve even been told if I get to talking about Reagan or the Federal Reserve, I am not an American any more. Yes, I’m a troublemaker. A year ago last winter the governor of lowa was to give his State speech. We wasn’t allowed to go in there and listen to him, but we could be in the rotunda. We decided to do a demonstration there, 250 of us farmers. As he come off the legislative floor, I stopped him. I asked him to listen to us and we would tell him the real state of the state. He refused, of course. Slowly, real slowly, we got the American Ag Movement started in Iowa. You will get people that will say, “I’m supportin’ what you’re doing, but I can’t afford to join.” It costs one hundred dollars a year to be a member. To a lot of people, it is a difference between putting food on the table and spending money for something like that. I can see support coming faster and faster. Knowing what the administration has planned for us, we’re going to see more people finally stand up and say, Enough is enough. Let’s change this thing. How much can a man take? I’ve seen it cause a lot of divorces. I can name you family after family that have split up. It has caused problems between me and my wife. Sometimes I take off and travel from one state to the other and she accuses me, and rightly so, of putting this ahead of the family. I’ve got an older daughter—is she twenty?—that no longer lives with us. She couldn’t stand the stress. As soon as she was out of school, she moved to Des Moines. Me and my son have at times exchanged words. I know fathers and sons where the son has took off on account of the stress. You bet it affects families. Our youngest, who is eight—when they had the sheriff looking for me to give me a repossession notice on the machinery — she stood out there on the deck as a lookout. He come down on me after dark, we started moving and hiding the machinery. Anytime she saw car lights, she told us and we scattered. We caught her one time hiding her bike. She said she didn’t want the sheriff to find it. That’s the kind of stuff families go through. Take this situation here in Iowa, with a banker shot by a farmer. I knew this man. This particular farmer had two days before deposited money into his checking account. His wife told me that day they didn’t have groceries in the house. He was going to write a check at the bank for sixty dollars so they could have food on the table. You understand, if a guy is going to bounce a check, he doesn’t go into the bank to write a check. He handed the check to the teller and she told him she couldn’t cash it. There wasn’t any money in the account. He said he just deposited two days ago. She told him it had been seized by the banker—the guy that he shot—put on the note that “you owed here at the bank.” That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. That story has not been told publicly. How come? If we don’t stand up as citizens and as farmers, we're going to become second-class citizens. We're going to be fighting over jobs. At the same time, prices in the grocery store are going to skyrocket as soon as the corporations take over. Even the people that’s got good jobs now are going to be struggling just to keep food on the table. It’s not only what’s gonna happen to us farmers, it’s gonna happen to us as a nation and a world. I see labor coming together with the farmers. For a long time they kept us separated. Whenever a farmer complained about a high-priced tractor, they say the labor man is the cause of all that. We come to find out, you take a $100,000 combine, the labor man got eleven percent of that. That includes his benefits, even his parking-lot cost. So it wasn’t him that was causing it. They was trying to keep us split, but we have got ourselves educated. We’re coming more and more together. I went to the line a lot of times on different things. We was picketing the Board of Trade in Chicago. They are the ones that control our prices. They can sell one bushel of beans that we grow fifteen times on paper. We was trying to get them to change that policy. We had a tractorcade to Omaha, Nebraska, last September. That’s about 130 miles. It took four days to get there. We tractorcaded for four different directions. There was some four hundred tractors when we all got there. My tractor and our bunch barricaded the main street downtown to keep the traffic out. We was kickin’ off the Harkin-Gephardt bill to give us parity. During the 130 miles, we got horns and waves supportin’ us and some was givin’ us the finger. Those was thirty-year-old people. The young guy that lives on his mother-in-law’s farm over there doesn’t speak out. But he privately supports us. He donated fifteen dollars for diesel oil for the tractorcade. The older guy right by here won’t publicly back us. But I’ve talked to him in his shed. He got so mad, he was takin’ the wrench and beatin’ it on the corn picker. He was almost in tears as he was doin’ this. His son just went through a foreclosure. When we protested the Board of Trade in Chicago, he said we should have drove a loaded gas tanker through the front door. It takes a lot of time and a lot of studying to get insight into what is going on. And that’s another thing. Time. A farmer is just like a bird. When it comes spring, a bird flies north, and a farmer is the same way. When it comes spring, he’s gonna go out and plant his corn. He don’t care if he’s gonna lose money. It’s born in him, it’s a natural instinct. When it comes time to go to the field, I throw away whatever I'm reading to educate myself, and go out there. Even at times when I should be someplace screaming and hollering, I’ll still be in the field. Every one of us is like that."