Masked Farmer

“In April [1933] there were rumblings from the West, and resounding echoes of them in Washington. The nation’s farmers were in a state approaching open revolt. Prices paid for their output had fallen piteously low—the index of wholesale farm commodities stood at about 40 percent of its 1926 level—and as a result, they were caught in a seemingly hopeless bind. Even though they sold every crop they grew, the prices were insufficient to meet their mortgage payments, and they were being dispossessed by the tens of thousands. There began to be incidents of violence; one day late that month, in Le Mars, Iowa, a mob of masked farmers dragged a judge from his bench to a crossroads and nearly lynched him in an effort to force him to promise to stop signing mortgage foreclosures. But criminal assaults on legal authority could serve no purpose; what the farmers chiefly needed was the classic remedial measure for debtors in hard times—a deliberate governmental inflation of the currency such as Bryan had preached so long and so eloquently, that would raise prices and enable the farmers to pay off in cheap money the debts they had contracted in dear money.”

John Brooks, Once in Golconda (1970).