USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 52
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AGRICULTURE IN THE EMPIRE STATE
If the farmer is a wholesaler in the marketing of farm commodities, he is a retailer in what he has to buy. As such, he feels that he is victimized by the prices he has to pay for supplies and equipment. When he pur- chases a milking machine or spraying equipment, for example, he does not determine the price. Prices are fixed by forces over which he has little or no control. The average New York State farm is so small that it does not make sufficiently large purchases of supplies to obtain quantity discounts. In fact, it has often and rightly been said that farmers are the only economic group which buys at retail and sells at wholesale.
Of the co-operatives serving the farmers of the state, the Patrons of Husbandry, organized in 1867, has been most successful. Its local units were called "granges" and its members "grangers." Farm co-operatives during the last century have had a checkered career. Without question their influence for farmer betterment has been healthy. Among other things, they have directed their activities to providing larger and more efficient local plant facilities for handling produce, the lowering of dealers margins, better grading and packaging of farm products, and the educa- tion of their members as to how agricultural products are actually mar- keted and prices determined. In 1953-1954 co-operatives in the state numbered 396, with a total membership of 160,367. The dollar volume of their net business-covering marketing of farm products for their patrons, furnishing patrons with farm machinery and equipment, feed, fertilizer, petroleum products, seed, and other supplies (including build- ing materials, containers and packaging supplies, sprays, dusts and other farm chemicals, meats and groceries, and miscellaneous supplies ), and services such as storage, feed grinding, trucking, machinery repair and credit facilities-was approximately $450,000,000.1
The third pressing economic problem confronting the farmers of the state and nation is the matter of agricultural credit. They have long felt that they were exploited by bankers and other moneylenders. Credit requirements for farmers necessarily differ from those of many kinds of business. Many farming operations are seasonal, and the time ele- ment in credit needs is subject to various conditions. Thus a ninety-day note would fail to fit the needs of a farmer whose crops, planted in the spring, yield no returns until harvest, which may be as much as four or five months later. An apple orchard represents an investment for several years before it begins to bear fruit. Similarly, the dairy farmer must house, feed, and otherwise care for his young stock for a period of two and a half years until they become milk-producing cows.
1 See Anne L. Gessner, Statistics of Farmer Cooperatives, 1953-54: Marketing, Farm Supply and Service (U.S. Department of Agriculture, General Report 23, June 1956), App. 1. This seventy-one page report is indispensable for anyone interested in farm co-operatives.
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
Prior to World War I, short-time credit was frequently extended by the country merchant from whom the farmer bought his supplies and sometimes his equipment. There was no signed contract, but merely a verbal stipulation that when the farmer harvested his rye or potato crop he would settle for his spring purchases. If interest was charged, it was included in the purchase price. The principal drawback to this arrange- ment was that it compelled the farmer to sell his produce as soon as harvested, even though the price might be low. The farmer was the loser and the dealer the gainer.
Farm credit arrangements in the state today are far better. Banking institutions, especially in rural areas, are increasingly taking greater con- cern in farm credit problems. The president of the bank or some other officer make farm loans his speciality. When a prospective farm borrower comes to the bank for a loan, the bank is in a position to pass sound judgment as to the borrower and the project for which he desires the loan.
The farmers of the state may, of course, obtain loans from private individuals, such as well-to-do neighboring farmers. Farmers have an- other source of credit in the local credit associations set up and directed by leading farmers and affiliated with governmentally assisted regional and national farm credit associations.
Perhaps the most striking change one observes when one compares the agriculture of the state in 1865 with that of the 1950's is the extent to which New York has become primarily a dairy land. In 1950 no less than 50 per cent of farm income was produced by the dairy industry, principally from the production of fluid milk.
Prior to the Civil War the cheese and butter industry had become important in New York agriculture. The fluid milk industry did not be- gin to grow until after the war, although in the middle 1840's farmers within convenient distance of New York City established milk wagon routes. Up to this time the city had been consuming chiefly unsanitary distillery milk, which was not completely eliminated until the turn of the century. About the same time a group of farmers known as the Orange County Milk Association began shipping milk by rail to grocers in New York City. In 1853 the city milk supply was the target of a blast in the interest of public health in a volume entitled The Milk Trade in New York County, which denounced the widespread adulteration prac- tices employed by both producers and distributors. A statute of 1864 permitted the adding of ice but not water! Despite this act the Board of Health in 1869, alarmed about the extent of adulteration, estimated on the basis of tests that New Yorkers drank 40,000,000 quarts of water with its 120,000,000 quarts of milk consumed annually. In 1875 it was shown pretty conclusively that adulteration was netting milk dealers
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AGRICULTURE IN THE EMPIRE STATE
$4,000,000 a year. When a customer of one upstate dealer found a minnow in her milk container, the dealer freely admitted that the spring in which he cooled his milk was the most profitable cow he ever owned. The ques- tion of adulteration was one of the problems which confronted the State Dairy Association created in 1884.
The first organization for the purpose of negotiating milk prices was made in 1882, when the Milk Exchange Limited was formed in New York City. Organized under the laws of New York State, it was sup- posed to represent both producers and consumers; in reality it was a powerful combine of dealers designed to keep prices to producers low. Its activities led to the state's first milk strike, in 1883. The strike lasted eight days and was settled by a price compromise and a promise on the part of the Exchange of better prices to the producers. The ultimate result was higher prices for consumers but not to producers.
With the growth in population and increasing demands for more milk, the producing area was expanded and shipping plants were established in Ulster, Sullivan, Delaware, and Chenango counties. Dealers soon dis- covered that they could play one section against another and thereby not only keep prices low but forestall the threat of farmer combinations.
Dealers continued to keep prices so low that many dairy men felt justified in adulterating their shipments. They also formed a Milk Pro- ducers Union for the purpose of controlling production and securing fair prices. The farmers efforts in these directions were thwarted by means of dealer (exchange) spies and emissaries who kept dealers forewarned. By 1891 the practices of the Milk Exchange League had become so ruinous to both producer and consumer that, following action by the attorney general of the state, the Exchange was dissolved. Within six months the same officers, directors, and stockholders formed the same kind of an organization under the laws of New Jersey. Only the name was changed-it was then the Consolidated Milk Exchange. It rented the same offices and followed the same practices as before.
Meanwhile several large distributing companies were coming into the New York area. Most important were the Borden Condensed Milk Com- pany, second largest milk and dairy products company in the United States, and the Sheffield Farms-Slawson Decker Company, a subsidiary of the National Dairy Products Corporation. The prices paid by these newcomers were virtually identical with those of dealers belonging to the Exchange. In other words, the dealers had a monopoly. To combat the dealers, the producers organized a Five States Union, including pro- ducers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Its objectives were to sell milk directly to the consumer and to take care of surplus milk in its own creameries. It attempted too much and, faced with conditions growing out of the depression of the
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
1890's, failed in 1898. It was soon succeeded by the Five States Milk Producers Association. Almost constant warfare went on between this organization and the dealers, culminating in a five-day strike in 1902, which collapsed because the producers did not stick together. The as- sociation never recovered and went out of existence in 1907.
Though their pioneer efforts had failed, dairy farmers had gained much valuable information and experience. The need for some kind of milkshed-wide association became ever clearer to thousands of farmers as the resistance of the dealers became more solidified and their prac- tices more offensive. To meet this need, the Dairymen's League, Inc., was born in 1907. Sponsored by the Pomona Grange of Orange County, it had at the outset a membership of 691 dairymen. During its first ten years the new organization marked time. It desired to avoid the mis- takes of its predecessors of moving too fast and of trying to accomplish too much too quickly. By 1916 it had a membership of sixteen thousand. Milk prices at the time were unjustifiably low, and in June of that year the league asked for a minimum price effective October 1. The dealers refused, and an eleven-day strike ensued which resulted in a victory for the league. Dairymen now flocked to the organization by the thou- sands. In January 1919 another milk strike occurred. This lasted eighteen days and resulted in a second victory for the league. Its membership by this time had soared to ninety thousand.
During the interval between these two major strikes, the mayor of New York City appointed a commission to investigate the milk situa- tion. Shortly after it issued its report, which was very critical of the league, the officers of the league were indicted by a New York County grand jury on the charge of conspiracy in trying to raise the price of milk in New York City. Immediate pressure on the legislature by the dairy farmers of the state associated with the league resulted in statutory changes making it lawful for farmers to co-operate in a marketing or- ganization to secure better prices for their products. On May 21, 1921, the Dairymen's League was superseded by the Dairymen's League Cooperative Association, Inc. Its predecessor had been a price-negotiating agency; the new league was a full-fledged selling agency.
The decade of the 1920's was not an encouraging one for the farmers of the state. It was a period of almost constant warfare between the new league and the New York City milk dealers. With the downward swing of the business cycle and the coming of the Depression milk prices tumbled. The Class I price dropped from $2.90 to $1.79 per hundred pounds. By 1933 producers were averaging less than one dollar. In August of that year a general strike ensued, as producers blockaded highways, dumped milk, and threatened to blow up milk plants and to derail milk trains. In the "Battle of Booneville" north of Utica, forty
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AGRICULTURE IN THE EMPIRE STATE
state troopers hurled tear-gas bombs and wielded riot sticks; no less than four hundred strikers were beaten unconscious.
It was obvious that the existing situation in the milk industry could not be permitted to continue and that government control was neces- sary. As a first step in this direction the state legislature a year before the strike of 1933 had appointed a committee headed by Senator Perley Pitcher of Watertown to inquire into the causes of the spread in prices between producers and consumers of milk. The committee, after holding hearings in many parts of the state, recommended the establishment of a state Milk Control Board with authority to investigate the production and distribution of milk in all its phases, to license milk dealers, and, as an emergency measure, to fix the price to be paid farmers for milk for a year. The big distributors opposed the proposal openly and strenu- ously. The dairy farmers fought for it. One of their spokesmen said:
We are now in desperate straights. Our taxes and interest on the mortgages are due. Our feed bills are unpaid. Our credit is exhausted. We have no money to buy seed or other essential supplies and the Spring season's near. Every can of milk we sell leaves us further in debt than we were before we pro- duced it. This robbery must stop soon or reform will be too late to help us.
Debate on the Pitcher bill was stormy. As finally passed, it provided for minimum prices to producers on a classified basis and also set whole- sale and retail prices in the market. It also made provision for a Milk Control Board. Many dairymen felt that the producers had been tricked, and a hearing before the board almost immediately after its organiza- tion proved to be one of the most stormy farm meetings on record at Albany.
Almost from its inception the Pitcher Law was doomed to failure. In the first place the law was challenged by the dealers on the ground that the legislature of New York could not regulate interstate com- merce, and in the famous Seelig case the court explicitly stated that the New York Milk Control Board had no control over prices paid to pro- ducers for milk moving in interstate commerce. Under this ruling New York metropolitan dealers were quick to desert plants in New York State and establish additional facilities in other milkshed states, as, for example, Vermont and Pennsylvania. (To guard against outside com- petition, the dairy interests of the state had repeatedly resisted the at- tempts of the milk producers of the north central states to widen the boundaries of the New York metropolitan "milkshed," which is largely confined to the state. ) Some rerouted New York-produced milk so that it became interstate milk. Secondly, the law lacked provision for the producers to share markets and proceeds.
The Pitcher Law was superseded in 1937 by the Rogers-Allen Law.
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
Its chief feature was the provision that all bona fide co-operatives re- gardless of size or type be legally permitted to function together in establishing and enforcing prices and marketing programs. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission, after a study of the New York Metro- politan milk situation, submitted a report in 1936 indicating that monopoly conditions virtually prevailed on the distributive side. A year later the Metropolitan Cooperative Milk Producers Bargaining Agency was established. Charges were now made by many dairy farmers and others that the league had now become a subsidiary of Bordens. On September 1, 1938, after approval of the dairy farmers of the New York City metro- politan milkshed representing seven states, a new federal-state milk- marketing program went into effect. Under it farmers were promised a fair and stable price for milk, unfair competition among dealers was to be prevented, and consumers were assured an adequate supply of milk at a reasonable cost. Though challenged on the ground of con- stitutionality, the state-federal marketing agreement administered by a market administrator was upheld by the United States Supreme Court. Although the dairy farmers of the state continued to have their ups and downs occasioned by weather conditions, inflation, and fluctuations of the business cycle, their economic status during the last fifteen years was vastly better than during the period of the 1920's and 1930's.
Although agrarian discontent emerged at times in the state, especially during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, it was never as widespread or as deep-seated as it was in the South and Middle West and other parts of the nation. Even so, there was general rural agree- ment that the farmers' ills, like those of the dairymen, stemmed primarily from monopolistic avarice.
If, in the course of the last hundred years, the technical side of New York State agriculture has undergone revolutionary change, so also has New York rural life. Those of Jared van Wagenen's generation or those who have read his highly informative and delightfully written volume, The Golden Age of Homespun, can fully appreciate this change.
During the decades following the Civil War and, indeed, up to the close of World War I, farm life in New York was very different from what it is today. As already observed, the hours of work were from be- fore daylight to dark. Farmhouses were heated only by stoves and an occasional fireplace. Only the more affluent could afford coal for fuel. The wood fires, not replenished at night, might mean frigid homes until the fires were rekindled in the morning. Bathrooms were a rarity in most farm homes, and bathing facilities were limited to the wash basin or wash tub. Outside toilets prevailed. Water for house and barns, unless the farm was so situated that it might be piped by gravity from a moun-
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AGRICULTURE IN THE EMPIRE STATE
tain or hillside spring, was pumped from wells-by hand unless the farmer could afford a windmill. Kerosene lamps and lanterns, which re- quired frequent filling and wick-trimming, afforded the only artificial light. The one-room country school, which for many farmers' children was at a considerable distance from their homes, furnished the beginnings of educational opportunity. Aside from the local weekly newspaper and a copy of the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress and one or two other books, there was no reading matter in most farmers' homes. These were the horse and buggy days, and not many farm families journeyed far from home. Roads were poor-clouds of dust in summer, sloughs of mud in the spring, and snow-blocked in the winter.
Not all of course was on the dark side. In summer there was the "old swimming hole," picnics, the circus, and the county fair. Many of the farm families went to church, where they saw friends and neighbors and gossiped, as well as listened to the sermon. In fall and winter, when there was less rush, neighbors gathered for a game of dominoes, "authors," or cards. And despite all the hard work there was time, energy, and enthusiasm for the country dance, the corn-huskings, the school enter- tainments, and the skating and sleighing parties where friendship ripened into courtship and ultimately into marriage for youth and where many members of the older generation relived their younger days.
Then came the age of electricity and the motor. Not only has the farmhouse undergone transformation, but every aspect of rural life has changed as well. Electricity is now available to practically all farms of the state and up-to-date facilities and appliances are rapidly being in- stalled. Every farm home will soon have a telephone, a radio, and a television set. This, with the automobile and good roads, means that rural isolation is a thing of the past. Rural life in New York State has not only become mechanized and specialized but urbanized.
Chapter 36
A Century of Industrial Enterprise
Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests upon our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly hu- man .- LEWIS MUMFORD
FOR more than a century, New York has been the most important in- dustrial and commercial state in the nation. Its manufacturing industries outrank those of every other state in number of establishments, volume of employment, size of manufacturing payrolls, and value added to raw material by manufacture.
Although in 1952 New York was the leading manufacturing state- employing 1,942,000, or 300,000 more than Pennsylvania, the second- ranking state-its economy is less dependent upon manufacturing than that of any of the other leading industrial states. In 1950 there were 117 manufacturing wage earners in New York State for every one thou- sand population as compared with 95 per thousand in the United States as a whole and 182 per thousand in Connecticut, the most highly in- dustrialized state in the nation. In 1953 the state's manufacturing firms added $14,410,234,000 in value to the raw and semifinished material they purchased for processing, compared with $3,313,649,000 in 1939.
There are many factors which over the years have been responsible for New York's industrialism: (1) proximity to raw materials, (2) prox- imity to the world's most important industrial and consumer market, (3) availability of labor supply, (4) "Yankee" ingenuity and organiza- tional ability, (5) abundance of capital, (6) comparatively low transporta- tion costs, (7) abundant water power, (8) geographical location of the
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A CENTURY OF INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE
state with its great port of New York, and (9) the stimulation of war. The Civil War marked a great turning point in the history of American industry, and although, contrary to popular belief, it did not cause what is popularly known as the American Industrial Revolution, it did speed up a process that had been evolving at a relatively slow rate during the antebellum period. Before the Civil War almost all of the features of a modern industrial nation existed in isolated and embryonic form within the United States. The war stimulated northern industry through its demands for war materials and, more fundamentally, it transformed the American productive processes. As a result of the war, merchant capital- ism gave way to industrial capitalism. Henceforth, manufactures in New York, as elsewhere in the nation, moved steadily in the direction of big-scale establishments, having many of the features of present-day enterprise: mechanization, mass production, concentration of capital, cor- porate enterprise, divorce of ownership from control, and ultimately the increasing combination of finance capitalism. Similarly, both world wars of the twentieth century were stimulating and powerful agencies in affecting changes in methods and processes, if not in control.
From the Civil War to the present New York's pattern of manufacturing activity has differed markedly from that of the rest of the nation. Non- durable goods, for example, have always been in the lead. In 1950 the nondurable-goods industries employed 64 per cent of all the state's manufacturing workers, compared with 48 per cent in the rest of the nation. The most striking divergence is found in the proportion devoted to clothing manufacture. Apparel trades account for 21 per cent of all manufacturing employees in New York State in contrast with only 6 per cent for the rest of the nation. About a third of the clothing workers of the country are employed in the needle-trade shops of the state. An- other peculiar character of New York industry is that in most of the state apparel manufacture is organized on a small scale and not on a corporate basis. The New York industry is not dependent upon finance capital and is free from banker control. This is the more interesting when we remember that the apparel industry is primarily concentrated on Manhattan Island in the shadow of the banking and financial capital of America.
New York has long been famous for its variety and diversity of manu- factures. Consequently the state enjoys a degree of economic stability notably lacking in those states which are largely dependent upon one or two industries, and particularly on the heavy industries. On the other hand, emphasis on nondurables subjects the state and especially New York City to seasonal variations. Despite the fact that the manufacture of nondurable goods has long overshadowed durable goods, the latter is making steady headway, as Table 13 indicates:
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
Table 13. Ten leading manufactures in New York State in order of importance of value.
1860
1880
1930
1950
Flour and meal
Men's clothing
Women's clothing
Apparel
Men's clothing
Women's clothing
Printed and pub-
Printed and pub- lished materials
Refined sugar
Flour
lished materials
Leather
Foundry and
Men's clothing
Food
Liquors
machine-shop
Foundry and
Machinery
Lumber
products
machine-shop
Chemicals
Printed materials
Textiles
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