Red meat: Angry guy dressed as Founding Father calls for march on D.C. or something

In the summer of 1977 some farmers in western Oklahoma joined representatives from southeastern Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Kansas to discuss their mutual problems. They talked about staging a farm strike and refusing to plant any crops if Congress did not pass legislation to raise farm prices. Farmers sharply criticized the recently passed Food and Agriculture Act of 1977 for doing nothing to help farmers as they struggled with low prices and heavy debts. An office was set up in Springfield, a small town in southeastern Colorado, to publicize the organization and its demands. By late summer the movement had spread to about twenty states. Members demanded prices equal to 100 percent of parity, prices that were considered favorable to farmers in relation to nonfarm prices.

Farmers in this movement concluded that only by direct and dramatic action could they achieve their goal. On September 22, 1977, some two thousand angry farmers drove their tractors and trucks around the auditorium in Pueblo, Colorado, where U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Robert Bergland was speaking. The protesters demanded federal legislation to raise farm prices. Many of the trucks carried Oklahoma license plates. This was only a prelude to huge tractorcades around the nation. Hundreds of farmers drove their tractors to Amarillo, Texas, and in and around Plains, Georgia, Pres. Jimmy Carter’s hometown. In Atlanta, Georgia, they drove their tractors up the steps of the state capitol, and in Washington, D.C., on January 18, 1978, tractors and trucks damaged the grounds of the National Mall.

Remember when all the farmers came to DC with their tractors during Carter’s administration?

Wethal on March 18, 2009 at 8:54 PM