Today's selection -- from Dreams of El Dorado by H.W. Brands. The uneasy, often adversarial relationship between farmers and bankers:
"For Western farmers, the depression that followed the panic of 1893 -- the worst depression in the nation's history until then -- merely added to the stresses they had been feeling for decades. Since the 1870s farm prices had been falling relentlessly, pushing prosperous farmers into the ranks of the marginal, and marginal farmers into ruin. Ironically, a principal cause of the price decline was the farmers' very success; they produced more corn, wheat, cotton, pork and so on than the markets for those commodities could absorb. Some of the overproduction was the result of the increase in farm acreage, notably under the Homestead Act. Some was the consequence of the mechanization of the farm process.
"But farmers didn't like hearing this explanation. It demeaned their labor and accomplishment. They were suffering because they had succeeded too well? It made no sense. And it implied that some of them -- maybe very many of them -- would have to go out of business.
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