Blast from the past: Hightower Confronts the 1980s Farm Crisis

"It's the same old story—Reagan helps the rich, and Lord help the rest of us."

Our friends over at Barn Raiser, an independent source for rural and small town news, shared this piece of Hightower history with their readers this week, and we thought you all would enjoy it, too. It’s part of two-article package which includes rural political strategist Matt Barron’s “To Reach Rural Voters, Democrats Need a Place-Driven Strategy,” which we hope you’ll also have a look at—and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Image from C-SPAN footage of Texas Agriculture Commissioner and chair of the Democratic National Committee Agriculture Council Jim Hightower speaking at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. (Courtesy of C-SPAN)

The 1980s farm crisis was disaster for America’s family farmers and by extension the communities in which they lived. As land values that had boomed during the 1970s fell,  farmers, saddled with debt, faced high interest rates, surging inflation, declining crop prices and a shift toward global-scale commodity production that saw net farm income drop to its lowest point since 1910.

During the 1980s, more than 1,000 farmers who lost their farms to foreclosure committed suicide. By end of the decade, an estimated 300,000 family farmers had defaulted on loans, and more than 250,000 farms went out of business. This put a huge stress on rural banks, with more banks failing in 1985 than in any year since the 1930s.

In the following speech delivered at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, Jim Hightower, then Texas Agriculture Commissioner and chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Agriculture Council, denounced the Reagan administration for its failure to address the farm crisis. “At a convention marked by speeches that ranged from highly emotional to boring, Hightower’s one-liners came as a welcome relief Wednesday,” wrote Tim Sheehy for United Press International.

Seven months later, in March 1985, newly reelected President Reagan vetoed a farm bill that, while criticized by both Democrats and Republicans, would have provided debt relief to American farmers. By the end of the year, Reagan would sign a farm bill that included cuts to farm aid programs that had been protected since the 1930s.

Here is what Hightower told his fellow delegates back in 1984:

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