Farmers Mutual Insurance Association

and headlights, and punctured tires with their pitchforks. The newspaper reported that the “effects of the blockade were strikingly apparent at the stockyards.” The only livestock on the market had arrived by rail, and the stockyards were nowhere near capacity. With blockades at every entry to Sioux City, stockyard and produce markets receipts plummeted. The Sioux City Milk Producers Association met with striking farmers and negotiated an 80 percent price increase, and the farmers began allowing dairy trucks though the blockade, but produce and livestock shipments were still turned away. The sheriffs of Woodbury and Plymouth counties maintained a force of several hundred deputies to escort trucks through the lines, but no truckers asked for assistance as farmers who were not a part of the movement were reluctant to risk personal injury or loss of product. Farmers in Wisconsin went on a “milk strike,” dumping the commodity rather than sell it below the cost of production. Emboldened by their success in Sioux City, farmers expanded their picket blockades to include railroad stations. Furthermore, 400 farmers meeting in Missouri Valley, Iowa, voted by a 90 percent majority to picket highways leading into Council Bluffs. One farmer said, “I’m over 60 years of age, and I’ve lost everything but my tongue, but I’m sure going out and use it.” In Nebraska, where farmers carried placards reading “Be Pickets or Peasants,” strikers halted a freight train and took off a carload of cattle. In Iowa, the Farmers Holiday movement spread to 33 local groups representing 88 counties. Reno declared there was “nothing revolutionary or un-American in the move,” and that they hoped only to “bring consumers to a realization of the importance of the farmer in the economic system.” It was estimated that half a million Midwest farmers had signed the Farmers’ Holiday pledge. Protests took other forms, too. In the first two months of 1933, there were at least 76 instances in 15 states of so-called penny auctions, in which groups of farmers gathered at foreclosure sales and intimidated legitimate bidders into silence. One penny auction in Nebraska drew an astounding crowd of 2,000 farmers. In Wisconsin, farmers bent on stopping a farm sale were confronted by deputies armed with tear gas and machine guns. In April 1933, the storms of protest reached a crescendo in Plymouth County when 600 farmers marched on the courthouse in Le Mars to ask the judge to stop signing foreclosure notices. Judge Charles C. Bradley sympathized with farmers who had lost their property, but he was firm in his conviction to enforce the law.

Men who didn’t like this answer dragged Bradley out of his courtroom and he was taken to a crossroads outside of town, where his trousers were removed and he was threatened with mutilation. A noose was pulled tight around his neck, and the mob demanded that the strangling judge promise no further foreclosures. The 60-year-old Bradley bravely replied: "I will do the fair thing to all men to the best of my knowledge." Bradley was just about to be hanged when he was saved by a local newspaper editor who had just arrived in his car. Iowa Gov. Clyde Herring declared martial law and sent troops to Le Mars. The protest catapulted the farm crisis to the front

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