6. Music Lessons

You can make that trip in your car today in less than an hour. It took all forenoon for us to do it on foot and by rail. I had never seen such crowds of people as were massed along the principal downtown business street. Luckily for us the garish parade had made most of its tour and was on its way back to the show grounds when we joined the spectators. We saw all of it.

The procession was headed by a big man with a broad-brimmed hat, riding the most beautiful white horse I ever saw. The bridle and saddle were covered with silver ornaments and the horse seemed to be having fun, for he would dance with mincing little steps and nod his head. A short distance behind this man who, I thought, must be either Mr. Barnum or Mr. Bailey, came a large troupe of riders in gaudy costumes, mounted on frisky horses of all colors; bay, gray, black, white and spotted.

Trotting and tumbling along on foot, on either side of the company of riders, came a couple of clowns, one of them dressed like a fat, shapeless old lady from the country, wearing a gingham sunbonnet and carrying a parasol that had been completely demolished, all but the ribs. She pretended to have got lost from her family and kept peering into the crowd and calling “Hiram!”

Later in the parade another clown with whiskers and a battered straw hat was making a bewildered search for “Tildie.”

It was very funny, the way he ran through the parade, rushing from one side of the street to the other, getting himself almost run over by the circus horses who paid no attention to him.

I wondered whether the country people who lined the streets, some of whom bore more than a slight resemblance to these clowns, thought this caricature of themselves was so very amusing.

All my life until I was fifty or thereabouts, the farmer was considered a fair target for comedians. It was not much wonder if youngsters brought up in the country wanted to live in town. Doubtless the ridicule heaped upon the farmer accounts for the swollen populations of our cities.

In my childhood many a young fellow forsook his independent life in the country and went to Chicago to work in the huge meat-packing industries, found lodgings in shabby, crowded tenements, and toiled like a slave; all because he resented being called a hick.

Happily for the farmer, he has come into an unprecedented prosperity. No pale, anemic, city-grown snob cackles “Hey, Rube!” at the farmer today. As a matter of principle, this writer is firmly against Government subsidies. We have had much too much of that. But if any class of people in this country ever deserved substantial encouragement, surely it was this hapless tiller of the soil. No matter how hard the poor guy and his family worked to raise their crops, they were always in jeopardy, menaced by forces beyond their control. One season, the excessive rainfall in spring would keep the farmer out of his fields until it was too late for his corn to mature before the frost caught up with it. Next year, a six weeks’ drought would burn up everything he had planted.

Every so often, the grasshoppers would move in on him and devour his crops.

When there was a good year, and everything matured in abundance, the prices for his products fell until he could hardly give them away. Farmers in the prairie states would often use their worthless corn for fuel to heat their houses in winter.

I think the farmer deserved assurance that his toil and sweat would earn him a good living. It is a pity, though, that he has been obliged to surrender his traditional freedoms in order to be eligible for these benefits. Now he takes orders, how much and what he shall plant, and when and where and how. Time was when the farmer bragged that he wore no man’s collar; that in his business, although it was risky, he could look any man straight in the eye and tell him to go to the devil. He can’t do that any more. He has a master now.

But the big cities have lost their allurement. People who thought it smart to live in the city think so no longer. They have been moving out to the suburbs in such numbers that even the suburbs are no longer fashionable. They are going back to the country now to get out of the dirt and the din… “Hey, Rube!”

I believe that if the farmer’s age-old predicament were sensibly explained to the nation as a whole, a majority of the people of other less hazardous occupations would willingly consent to a federal stabilization of prices for farm products. Nobody wants the farmer to starve.

The objection arises at the point of the wanton, wicked waste of the surplus food which the Government accumulates through these expensive subsidies. On one hand we allocate a thousand millions of the taxpayers’ money to feed the starving in foreign countries while three thousand millions are invested in food that lies rotting in caves. A six-year-old child could figure that one out. We are supposed to be in a representative form of Government. I want to declare, here and now, that no Government official who consents to such shameless folly represents me!

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