“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” - A.J. Liebling
My father Bob Wilson took this to heart, and bought one and started his own newspaper, the Prairie Post of Maroa, Illinois in 1958, and ran it until he died in 1972. It never had a circulation of more than 2500 or so, but every week, he would fire off editorials at everyone and everything from local events to the actions of the nations of the world.
He may have been a Quaker peace activist in a Republican district, but his love and support of the farming communities garnered him enough respect that he eventually ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, though he lost. (He might have tried again, had he not died of an accident while only 49.) Many of his views ring true today. And he might have been willing to change the ones that fell behind the times. Although raised in the casual racism of the 1920s and 1930s, at the age of 15 he took stock of what he was being taught and discarded much of it as being wrong, and lived his life with respect for all.
I decided to transcribe his old editorials (I may make a book for some of my relatives) and every once in a while I will repost one here, as a view of how the world has changed wildly, or remained stubbornly the same.
June 8, 1961
OVER THE HILL
It causes us some pain to discover that, still on the sunny side of forty, we are becoming in many respects what may be called an “old fogey.”
Perhaps the new things all represent progress, and we are losing touch with the generation in which we live. We maintain sneaking suspicion, however, that some of the old ways were best.
If a woman is going to attempt to feed a family for strong bones and ruddy cheeks, she had better bake the family's bread out of whole wheat. Very little real bread is sold in the stores, and the chemical-loaded substitutes that appear in bread wrappers are hard to define as food.
We cannot understand why women torture themselves with needle-point heels. The resulting strut is supposed to make them more alluring to men. The same excuse is given for the barbaric colorings which women smear on their faces, in many cases concealing the fresh and lovely glow of health.
So they want to attract men? They may look very kissable indeed, but once you have asked them to wipe off the lipstick and throw away that vile cigaret, is it really worth the trouble? Many a man has discovered to his sorrow that your modern American girl concentrates so much on the wrapping that there is practically nothing in the package!
You will have us spotted as an old fogey for sure when we say it is frightful for girls to shiver through the winter in short skirts and nylon stockings. (Of course, though they do not put on enough clothes in the wintertime, they do not take off enough in the summer! Sunlight is good for the skin.)
Modern music in general leaves us absolutely cold, and modern art in many cases is simply lazy art, looking for a shortcut to meaning.
Our cities are too big; they smother the essentially human qualities of the people in them.
Our cars are too fast. The same old human model, with its horse-and-buggy reflexes, is trying to handle jet-age super automobiles. Did you lose a relative or a friend on Memorial Day?
In farming we have reached an age where we do not take to every new poison that is supposed to make our work easier. For one thing we are leery of upsetting the balance of Nature by destroying the natural enemies of some insect with unsuspected potentials for damage. For another, we dislike throwing money away; last year there was a big advertising push to put a molybdenum product on soybeans. When the extension service had an opportunity to test it, they reported it was worthless and even depressed yields in some cases.
The same with six-row, eight-row, etc. farming. Increasing bigness does not always mean increasing efficiency.
Television is the picture window of modern life, and we think most of it foolish and inane.
Our old-fashioned views are nowhere more apparent than in the handling of money. Money is a tool, and it should be borrowed and put to work if you have constructive uses for it. Buying consumer goods on credit is a different thing. The old-fashioned feeling persists that one ought to pay for it first, and then enjoy it.
Consumer credit has become one of the biggest and most profitable businesses in the country. The “modern” method is to buy everything NOW that you can pay for with the income from next month or next year. The cost is unbelievable. Most credit cards not only add a surcharge which amounts to a staggering rate of interest; they also encourage loose spending. “Rotating” charge accounts in the department stores levy minimum charges which vary, state to state, from 20% to as high as 180% interest on the money actually used.
Nowhere are the abuses more rampant than in financing automobiles and appliances. You can afford to pay a bank a fair rate of interest on money which is going to make you more money... but who can afford to pay 12%, 18%, 24% and more for the privilege of spending next years income now on consumer goods that do not earn you money?
How can people who ever had an arithmetic book in their hands sign time payment contracts which bleed them for those rates of interest? “It's a straight six percent interest”, the salesman says, “Just like at the bank!... Then there is a slight service charge.” (interest by definition is a charge for the use of money, including the handling of the paperwork, this is just disguised interest.)
“Add it together, divide it by the number of months, and there you have the amount of your monthly payment! Is that right?”
It is not right; it is a swindle. During the final month, you have given back nearly all the money, but you are still paying interest on the whole sum!
A bank might make you a loan, and reduce the principal – and the interest – every ninety days. Figure the savings; it will astonish you!
In a time when space exploration is all the rage, we are even tempted to observe that we had better leave the moon alone and concentrate on food, schooling and justice for Earth's own children.
It is plain to see we are hopelessly out of style.
June 22, 1961
THE KINZUA DAM
We love America. It is our land and our people.
We will not pretend, however, that everywhere in every time America has presented the spotless face of virtue.
In our treatment of the First Americans, the Indian tribes, we were brutal, and treacherous, and dishonorable. We slaughtered their women and children, and scalped their warriors, quite as often as they did ours. We took their chieftains under the white flag of truce, and then murdered them.
“Force is the only thing they understand”, we declared, because we are a righteous people, and must first prove our enemies are evil before we destroy them.
We signed treaties of peace with them, and tore up the treaties when it suited us. We ceded them reservation lands we considered of no value, and stole those lands without a second thought when we discovered otherwise.
Our westward growth was a time of national triumph – and of lasting shame. Often we have blushed for that shame, but we thought it was all in the past.
Now we learn to our dismay that our government is about to award the Army Corps of Engineers another pork-barrel of graft and corruption by constructing a flood-control dam on the Allegheny River above Pittsburgh.
The Kinzua Dam is to be built squarely in the middle of the Seneca Indian Reservation, drowning two-thirds of their usable valley land.
When America was very young, she needed friends. On the North, we feared that the mighty Iroquois Confederacy might ally itself with British Canada.
George Washington sent his personal emissary, Thomas Pickering, who in 1794 signed a treaty with them. The word of President George Washington, and the Great Seal of the United States, guaranteed that we WOULD NEVER CLAIM a certain small portion of land in New York and Pennsylvania ceded to the Seneca Nation, nor would we ever disturb them in the free use and enjoyment thereof.
The Seneca Nation has shrunk now to 800 people. They are weak, and we no longer need their help. The treaty by which they have lived for 167 years is about to be thrown aside as scrap paper.
The Senecas themselves, with remarkable forbearance, have declared that they will withdraw their objections to this dam “if no reasonable alternative exists.”
The Kinzua plan is the more tragic because Dr. Arthur E. Morgan, that nationally-known engineering expert, has proposed an alternative Conewango project which can be built quicker, for less money, and will impound vastly more water for both water conservation and flood control than would the Kinzua dam. The Conewango dam would violate no treaty rights.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that the Army Corps of Engineers, besides being too stiff-necked to admit they have been wrong for twenty years, also does not wish or intend to build anything either the quickest or the cheapest way.
We quote the Honorable Clarence Cannon of Missouri, long-time Chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, who described in this way the Engineers Corps request for 1960 funds:
“...the Corps of Engineers (who) were invariably in favor of the largest expenditures the Committee could be prevailed upon to make. Much of their testimony was wholly unreliable. When they were consulted on the cost of a proposed project they invariably underestimated the cost... It is impossible to escape the conclusion that they were either incompetent or deliberately misleading.”
No-one in executive authority, nor any court, has yet face up to the moral question involved in repudiating the oldest treaty on record.
The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, to which this writer belongs, feels in this matter a particular responsibility. The Iroquois Indians in 1794 called upon the Quakers for advice, they being the only white men of that day whom the Indians felt they could trust, and against whom the Indians never made war.
The Quakers risked a prediction that the new federal republic would honor its word, once given.
We are still confident they will do so in this instance. Did not President John F. Kennedy make all the Indian Nations a pre-election pledge that “There would be no change in treaty or contractual relationships without the consent of the tribes concerned?”
Do we not, in America, feel a moral compulsion that the strong should look out for the interests of the weak?
We ask only that the government should hear both sides of the story. If the Army Corps of Engineers are simply out to soak up one hundred million dollars of tax money on an unnecessary dam, as Dr. Morgan claims, it might pay us to think twice.
We do not want to believe, however, that Americans must be shown a profit in it before they will honor their treaty obligations.