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"Penny Auction" at a farm, with a noose as a warning to bank agents who might attempt to bid, Michigan, USA, Great Depression, 1936
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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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The “West”, Kansas and all those farming states, was actually liberal back in the day. They understood the need for government aid and services. Farmers were still regular people, farming was hard work, you weren’t gonna be rich, and having help if things went badly was important.
Shit, even West Virginia was a reliable Democrat state until the 1990s.
... conservative mass media and politicized religious revivalism has been a fucking plague.
Gotta be careful with liberal = democrat. The democrats absolutely were not the liberals of more modern times a century ago.
I mean, sure, but the Dems have been the (relatively, since standards here are fucked) economically left party since 1896 saw the last of the 'pro-business' hardliners marginalized, and the (again, relatively) socially left party since 1964 saw a definitive break with the Dixiecrats after ~15 years of distancing.
It's just straight up modern slavery
I think it’s worth noting that many farmers THEN were what we would call “self employed” now. Farmers NOW are probably more closely aligned with the Starbucks barista - because they now work for Epstein class. The Man at the bank who owns the loan is no different than the CEO who writes the check. Both the barista and the farmer are being taken advantage of the Epstein class.
Politicians who have a spine now are putting themselves on record if whether they are standing publicly for the people (people living paycheck to paycheck, or season to season) or the financial class - the bankers; the tech-first, human-second Epstein class elite.
I wish I had the courage to speak out like they do…
Yep. They were family farms in the real sense. As self-made as it gets (while acknowledging here that a lot of land was stolen, offered for cheap or free by the government).
That’s absolutely fair. The conversation of who owns the land, can land actually be owned, and what of the indigenous population is just as valuable.
It really depends, "farmer" can mean like a seasonal farm hand or someone who owns a ton of land and works some of it sometimes. It's a super ambiguous word.
Those people were probably as far as can be from being liberal. I get nowadays "liberal" doesn't mean anything in the USA but in a historical context this is misleading. 20th century fascism didn't rise in opposition to liberalism