NATIONAL FARMERS UNION (NFU)

The National Farmers Union (NFU), founded in Texas in 1902, was one of the three most important farmers' organizations in the United States during the 1930s. The NFU's base of support could be found among various small producers, including small family farmers, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers, as well as undercapitalized wheat growers in the Midwest. In 1930, John Simpson of Oklahoma was voted in as president of the NFU. In this position, he worked hard to convince Washington to provide credit relief to farmers and to stop the farm foreclosures that were forcing small producers off the land. Simpson also insisted that the long-term problems of farmers could only be solved with legislation that would directly raise farm prices. To that end, he proposed that Congress pass a cost-ofproduction plan to provide minimum prices for farmers. According to this plan, each farmer would be allocated a certain production quota, with surpluses sold overseas in the open market.

Simpson's cost-of–production plan placed him at odds with other factions within the NFU, most importantly those who advocated the strengthening of large marketing cooperatives and those who were hostile to state intervention. Simpson was also at odds with the Roosevelt administration. Simpson's premature death in 1934 catapulted E. H. Everson of South Dakota to the presidency of the NFU. Everson mostly continued Simpson's anti-New Deal policies by supporting William Lemke for president in 1936. (Lemke was running as the official candidate of the Union Party, created by Father Charles E. Coughlin.) Everson's own tenure in office proved short, and he was succeeded by John Vesecky of Kansas in 1937. Vesecky's rise to power marked a turning point for the NFU and its relationship to Roosevelt and organized labor. Beginning in 1937, the NFU abandoned its calls for currency inflation and cost-of-production measures, and the union began to support Roosevelt's agricultural policies. This allowed the NFU to forge a closer relationship with the Roosevelt administration and marked a transition in NFU ideology from one of agricultural fundamentalism (the idea that production and farmers formed the base of society) to one of agricultural liberalism (the idea that consumption, full employment, and state-directed fiscal policies determined the well-being of society).

See Also: AGRICULTURE; FARM POLICY; UNION PARTY.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crampton, John A. The National Farmers Union: Ideology of a Pressure Group. 1965.

Flamm, Michael W. "The National Farmers Union and the Evolution of Agrarian Liberalism, 1937–1946." Agricultural History 68 (1994): 54–81.

Mast, Charles Anthony. "Farm Factionalism over Federal Agricultural Policy: The National Farmers Union, 1926–1937." M.A. thesis, University of Maryland. 1967.

Saloutos, Theodore, and John D. Hicks. Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900–1939. 1951.

Kathy Mapes