Word: farmers
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Billy Fulton, 25, had been a West Texas cotton farmer since 1977, when he bought 300 acres near Floydada. This year he quit. "For months," he says, "I've been trying to figure out what I did wrong. You get angry. You can cuss Reagan, you can cuss [Secretary of Agriculture John] Block, but there's no one to blame...
Roughly a quarter of America's 2.4 million farmers are substantially in debt, and a fair share of them are in serious trouble. In the first ten months of the current fiscal year, there were nearly 7,000 farm failures. Even many secure and usually prosperous farmers are feeling the pinch. "You've heard farmers bitching all your life," says Chappel Sides, 53, a cotton, soybean and peanut farmer near Coffeeville, Miss. "But when an above-average farmer makes an above-average crop and loses a pile of money, you know something's wrong...
...People of New York and San Francisco," droned a Radio Moscow announcer in a broadcast beamed across the United States the next day. "The Pittsburgh steel smelter, the California farmer...and the Harvard student, you may be drafted and sent to the front." No other American university was mentioned in the ominous warning which continued: "The flames of war may creep in from the Caribbean and engulf your home...
...this is not just an appealing character speaking his own epitaph; it is Henry Fonda's annunciation as an actor, that moment when he began to shed the first impression he had made in films like The Farmer Takes a Wife-that of a shy, likable but lightweight piece of homespun-and take on the raiment of authority. Looking back now, we see that there was no one else who could have played Tom Joad, no one else who could do what Fonda did-drain the sentiment and literariness out of that speech with his drawling directness...
Even if he had done so, the immediate effect on grain prices would have been negligible unless the Soviets had signed on for astronomical amounts of grain. The farmers' central problem is that bumper crops and record surpluses have put grain prices at dismal lows. In Kansas, where farmers have just harvested a record wheat crop of 440 million bu., grain is selling at a meager $3.65 per bu., down from $4.05 a year ago and from over $5 in 1973. In Oklahoma, where wheat is selling at $3.20 per bu., farmers invest nearly $6 to harvest each bushel...