Locust (13 page)

Minnesota’s next governor was the consummate paternalistic politician. In John Pillsbury’s view, the role of the state was to protect the poor from their own weak natures and to bring them to account for their failings. He created a wicked Catch-22 for the locust victims: If they were truly upright and deserving, then they would never deign to grovel for, let alone accept, public assistance. And so, those who asked for aid were surely lacking in moral character and demonstrably
unworthy of charity. However, it is not fair to portray Pillsbury or the other western governors as utterly lacking in compassion. Indeed, the extent of the efforts by the states to assist their people suggests that the “tough love” rhetoric was a cover for what turned out to be rather soft hearts.

 

The states provided assistance in various forms to locust-ravaged farms and communities, with direct aid in the form of monetary payments and loans being perhaps the least politically palatable approach. In Kansas, Governor Thomas A. Osborn told the lawmakers that 32,000 people—5 percent of the state’s population in 1875—needed help. The legislature initially considered selling bonds to fund relief efforts, but the bill failed because of a conflict over whether the moneys should be gifts or loans. After lengthy debate, the legislature authorized $73,000 in state relief bonds and authorized nineteen counties to issue bonds in specified amounts up to $5,000.

Minnesota legislators were more frugal in their aid, reflecting their ambivalence as to the legitimacy of government involvement and the status of the indigents. Although the state was urged to appropriate $100,000 to locust-ravaged farmers in 1875, lawmakers pared the amount down to $20,000. Furthermore, they added a harsh means test to the bill, linking a family’s destitution to the degree of funding. This put farmers in the horrible position of having to sell their last cow or draft horse—the essential means back to self-sufficiency—to garner full assistance. Many refused to put themselves in a position of such complete vulnerability.

Settlers realized the woeful inadequacy and inconsistency of the state’s support and often decided to make do with whatever scraps of food and shreds of pride they could retain—thereby eroding their share of public assistance to a pittance but keeping their dignity. Consider, for example, Hiram Clark, his pregnant wife, and their six children, who chose to keep a yoke of oxen and a cow as vestiges—and hopefully precursors—of autonomy. The state provided this struggling family with $5.95 worth of flour, sugar, dried apples, and tea. Such niggardly aid reflected the visceral discomfort that welfare elicited in the nineteenth century. Direct handouts in the form of cash
or food were simply too progressive for the political leaders and electorate of rural America. The agrarian ideal was starting to crack, but the cultural values of hard work and fierce independence had not yet crumbled.

The proverbial injunction regarding the relative merits of feeding a man a fish versus teaching a man to fish was surely on the minds of legislators when they considered ways of assisting their hungry constituents. To help farming communities recover from locusts the states turned to a most obvious and logical form of indirect assistance: seed grants. In 1874 and 1875, the governors of Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas appealed to their legislatures to purchase seed for farmers left destitute by the locusts. At one end of the political spectrum, the same Minnesota legislature that hacked the funding request for direct assistance increased the appropriation for seed from the recommended level of $50,000 to $75,000. At the other end of the spectrum, an odd game of political cat-and-mouse emerged. Dakota lawmakers authorized $25,000 in bonds for direct relief and seed, whereupon the governor vetoed the appropriation to protect the Territory’s image while claiming that there was no precedent for issuing bonds for such a purpose. However, the legislature overrode the veto, an act that seemingly would have been the end of a more typical political story. But for reasons that remain somewhat obscure, the bill was never implemented, so the worst of all possible situations was created: The Territory gave the impression of being plagued by locusts to potential homesteaders and gave no assistance to the existing settlers.

Despite the political palatability and moral virtue of providing seed, this program was nearly as underfunded as the efforts to provide direct assistance. For example, Minnesota farmers needed an estimated 60,000 bushels of seed, but the state could provide less than a third of this in 1875. Consequently, the typical allotment of 15 bushels, enough to plant just ten acres, fell far short of what homesteaders needed to get back on their feet. The state’s efforts were also criticized on the basis that the program provided seed for only one crop, wheat—the locust’s favorite food. In 1876, the legislature appropriated funds for twenty-five dollars worth of seed per
grantee, enough for thirteen acres. This acreage was still far below that needed for a viable enterprise. And to rub a bit of salt in the wound, the state required recipients of this meager gift to demonstrate their complete destitution. But conditions had become so dire that 3,000 farmers applied for seed grants within a month of the bill’s passage.

 

Providing farmers with seed solved parts of the problem created by the locusts—hunger and poverty—but this program did nothing to directly combat the enemy. There was, however, an approach that employed people, dead locusts, and political precedent—the bounty system. Just ten years after the first colonists landed at Plymouth Rock, a bounty was offered for wolves. As Americans moved west, bounties for killing unwanted creatures moved with them. Finding legal precedent for seed grants might have been difficult, but locust bounties were a logical extrapolation of a familiar practice. Indeed, providing payments for killing locusts was rooted thousands of years earlier in Western history. Citizens on the Greek island of Lemnos were required to pay a locust tax, each citizen delivering his tribute in the form of dead locusts. Minnesota and Missouri developed less coercive approaches than the Greeks, choosing to pay their citizens for gathering locusts.

The payment systems developed in the 1870s were tailored to deliver the biggest bang for the buck. Missouri offered five dollars per bushel of eggs and no more than a dollar a bushel for nymphs. The logic was twofold: Many more locusts were represented by a fixed volume of eggs than the same volume of nymphs, and excavated eggs represented a complete nullification of damage, whereas captured nymphs had already begun to feed. A sliding scale for nymphs further refined the bounty system. A bushel in March brought a dollar, in April fifty cents, and in May twenty-five cents. To receive payment—the costs being split evenly between the state and the county—a locust hunter had to provide the clerk of the county court with the amassed locusts and swear an oath that the creatures had actually been gathered within the particular jurisdiction making payment. The state didn’t care about the source of the bodies, but
the counties had no intention of paying residents to collect locusts from neighboring districts. The law also mandated that the clerk ensure that the eggs or nymphs would be destroyed by burning, presumably so that a bushel of locusts did not show up at the courthouse more than once.

For all of its apparent merits in providing meaningful work and honest wages for destitute farmers, the bounty system could not make much of a dent in the locust populations. And there were other grumblings about this strategy. The May 31, 1877, edition of the St. Paul
Pioneer Press
sarcastically articulated a growing concern with the payment-for-locusts approach:

The paper’s critique of the perverse incentives created by the bounty payments was probably accurate in some districts. However, given the available tools and tactics, there was little basis to contend that failure to defeat the locusts was primarily a result of indolence.

 

While the Protestant work ethic was being supplanted by the emerging standard of material wealth in the industrial segments of society, this conversion of values came slowly to rural America. And so, if honest labor was the solution to life’s trials on the frontier and if folks were reluctant to roll up their sleeves and fight the swarms, then the western legislatures had just the program to induce, even coerce, a bit of hard work. Kansas, Minnesota, and Nebraska passed laws allowing road districts, townships, or counties to conscript able-bodied
men, excluding “paupers, idiots, and lunatics,” for the purpose of fighting locusts. These locust armies were rarely called up, but the legislation allowing communities to force their residents into unpaid labor demonstrates the severity of the situation and perhaps the desperation of the states. Minnesota sweetened the deal by providing materials for constructing hopperdozers, while the other states primarily relied on the efficacy of digging ditches.

The qualifications for conscription reflected frontier life and demo-graphics: Kansas set the youngest range (between twelve and fifty years of age), and Minnesota established the oldest (twenty-one to sixty years). The term of service amounted to no more than ten days in any case, but the states included fines or even imprisonment for noncompliance. Minnesota and Kansas allowed men to commute their service by paying a dollar per day, an amount preferable to the fine of three dollars per day for desertion. As with bounties, drafting men into battling locusts had an ancient precedent in Western culture. Two thousand years earlier, the Greek colony of Cyrenaica in North Africa adopted laws enjoining the extermination of locusts and punished violators with the brutal severity normally reserved for military deserters.

 

Ultimately, the states found themselves in the same situation as the private charities, relief societies, and counties—overwhelmed by the scale and intensity of the locust invasions and appealing to the next higher level of government for assistance. The western states tried to cajole, entice, embarrass, and coerce federal involvement in the unfolding disaster. The governors argued that the federal government was already enmeshed in agricultural assistance, spending immense sums to improve transportation systems and strengthen interstate commerce to facilitate the movement of farm products. Given the existing programs and the undeniable value of agriculture to the nation, the expenditure of federal money to save farmers and crops from the locusts was a perfectly logical policy. Congress was unconvinced.

Kansas led the next charge on Washington. If the governors couldn’t sway the country’s leaders, then perhaps the state legislature
could wield some muscle. So the Kansas House and Senate passed a concurrent resolution directed at Congress. They called upon their national counterparts to appropriate federal funds for assistance in the locust disaster. This plea elicited no response.

Minnesota went on the offense with a multistage political assault on the nation’s capital. The state’s first tack was to ask for permission to beat federal swords into state plowshares. Governor Davis wrote the Secretary of War with a novel request: “Many thousands are now suffering for food, and I am using every public and private source to send immediate supplies for food. This State is entitled to two years quota of arms, estimated at $8,160. I respectfully request to turn over to me, instead of arms, a quantity of rations, equivalent in value.” This plea having apparently failed, the legislature turned up the heat.

The state’s next approach was a joint resolution by the legislature calling upon their senators and representatives in Washington to “secure, without delay, such legislation by Congress as will furnish a liberal bounty for the destruction of grasshoppers, especially for the destruction of their eggs, under such restrictions as may be necessary to prevent fraud.” This appeal was premised on the seemingly plausible but ecologically flawed argument that “this scourge, if not arrested, may extend in time to all parts of the Union [including, by inference, agriculture in the politically powerful South and East], and thus produce disastrous results of national importance.” The federal government took no action to subsidize locust bounties, so the state tried one more approach—shame.

Good old Lutheran guilt turned out to be an effective means of persuading Congress to take corresponding action. During what came to be called the Grasshopper Legislature, Minnesota lawmakers voted to extend the state’s deadline for payment of property taxes in nine locust-afflicted counties. Setting aside their own acrimonious debate, the legislature issued a joint resolution asking Congress to apply similar Christian compassion to the homesteaders. Chagrined—or perhaps sensing that the political pressure from the West, like the locusts, would be unrelenting—the federal government was drawn into the turbulent mix of insects, agriculture, and politics.

The locusts had become salt in the wound of the nation as the country nearly bled itself to death during the Civil War and then struggled to heal itself during Reconstruction. And so it is no wonder that the federal government had failed to turn its attention to hardships of the frontier in the 1860s and ’70s, when the heart of the nation was suffering so greatly. Confronted by the strife and aftermath of war and the persistent tumult caused by locusts, the U.S. Congress struggled with the nature of its duties to the people. The nation’s leadership had to resolve the same issues that the state governments confronted—natural disasters, agrarian values, and needy people—along with some uniquely federal conflicts.