Monthly Archives: May 2018

Memorial Day, and the Cost of War

After the Great War, master glass artist Frederick Carder created the beautiful memorial to Corning’s war dead, now exhibited at city hall. Among 30 names was that of Carder’s own son.

*If in 1920 you had killed every man, woman, and child in the state of Nevada… then killed another 40,000 in Delaware… then maimed every person in Wyoming… then wounded 10,000 more in Delaware… you’d just about equal America’s losses in the First World War.

*World War II, of course, was even bigger. Simon Winchester wrote, “The remains of sixty thousand young seamen now lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. More men had died there in the six years of the Second World War than in all the conflicts in the ocean since the first Romans had set out on their invading expeditions nearly two thousand years before.”

*By the 1940 census you’d need to add up the populations of Wyoming, Nevada, and Alaska to make up America’s dead in that war, while the wounded could be paired one-to-one with the people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

*Others suffered worse. You’d have to kill the entire populations of 22 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia to reach the LOW estimate of Soviet deaths. They had more civilians killed in a single city than we had TOTAL deaths worldwide, and Winston Churchill claimed that residents of London were killed at a higher rate than American military personnel were. Fifty percent of the World War II dead were civilians, compared with 10% in World War I.

*But even here in mostly-shielded America, the cost was still heartbreaking. The small Hammondsport school endured the deaths of 14 alumni. All four of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons fought in the First World War, where one died. The three survivors fought again in the Second War, where two of them died. Joseph P. Kennedy had three sons and a son-in-law in World War II. Two died, and one was gravely injured. The five Sullivan brothers all served, and all died, on the same ship.

*While the Second World War was a time of great unity and great opportunity, it also stressed Americans to the breaking point. Divorce went up, and so did illegitimacy. So did premarital sex, extramarital sex, prostitution, venereal disease, and juvenile delinquency. Some families gingerly stitched themselves back together afterward, but others broke into shards, or spewed forth rancor for decades. Race riots broke out as bigots murderously tried to hammer African Americans back into “their place,” even if it hurt the war effort.

*For the almost 900,000 Americans who were wounded in the two world wars, at least their pain was obvious and to some extent comprehensible. Emotional and psychological suffering did not even have a vocabulary yet. Those who suffered were considered moral failures, and looked on with pity or contempt. These were the men sitting by themselves at opposite ends of the bar, speaking to no one and self-medicating with alcohol. The highest veteran suicide rates were not from Vietnam vets, or Gulf War vets, but from World War II vets.

*Some estimate the financial cost of the War at almost 15 trillion in today’s dollars. But THOSE bills are long since paid off. And they count for nothing beside the human cost. The bills for THAT are still falling due.

The Farming Story Part 6: Post-War Change

Like the Great War and the Civil War, World War II was again a boom period for agriculture, as America and Canada fed their European allies in addition to themselves. If you were farming, you could ALSO get a draft deferment! And, of course, there were always black market opportunities.

*Both World Wars revived a product whose use had been fading… maple sugar products. (Cane sugar was rationed, but maple wasn’t.) Maple had traditionally provided a cash crop in a slack season, when the cows stopped giving and the hands stood idle. But it was murderous work, and folks considered it fuddy-duddy peasant food when compared with cane sugar – the reason that the highest grades are the versions that are the LEAST mapley. Now UNrationed maple sugar supplemented rationed cane.

*World War II was also the last gasp of the horse, as tires and gasoline were rationed off the road. The war ended in ’45 and by ’50 we were embarked on major social change. Rural Electrification was soon completed. The one-room schools were closed, even as Corning Community College opened. TV came in. Factories boomed (Corning, Mercury, the Rand). TB and polio began to disappear. By 1950 more women were working than had been the case during the war. By 1960, they had the birth control pill. The New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the G.I. Bill were gigantic social engineering programs, and they guaranteed that the postwar recession was short and shallow, and our economy boomed.

*In 1919, as World War I was ending and Prohibition beginning, Walter Taylor had bought the Columbia Winery. Since so much of his business was in grape juice and sacramental wines, he was somewhat insulated from Prohibition. In 1936 (after Repeal) they began the manufacture of champagne, and in 1940 dropped non-alcoholic products. A stock offering in 1961 raised capital to buy the Pleasant Valley Wine Company, and Taylor became the second-largest employer in Steuben County, until closing out in the early ‘nineties.

*Joe Paddock told me that when he began his veterinary practice in the mid ‘fifties, there were 300 dairies in the Town of Bath… half a dozen of those within the Village limits. If you had one cow and sold the milk, that constituted a dairy, and I’m sure that many of these were small family operations supplementing a small general farm, or a small specialty farm, OR a factory job.

*For about 30 years after the war, an annual influx of migrant workers was a prominent feature of Steuben life and farming. Still, the family farms in general were going out. Many of the farms and ranches out west in the 1800s were large-scale corporate operations. Their success ruined the farmers of eastern Europe, who then immigrated over here in huge numbers. Now that was catching up with farmers here in the northeast, along with the reality that the children now had other options. If they stayed farming it’s because they wanted to, not because they were stuck with it. But even if they wanted to, cruel economic realities often forced them out.

*The farms went back to scrub and forest, and the deer came back as the trees grew up. Pheasant population dwindled but the deer came back, and then the turkeys, then the beaver and then the bear, and now the bobcat. Hunting became big business for Steuben. The hunter and the hiker often came upon old foundations, long-neglected stands of apple trees, and long-since forgotten graves.

The Farming Story Part 4: Prohibition, Depression, Floods, and War

As in the Civil War, so in World War I. The young farm hands went into uniform even as agricultural demand boomed. (We were helping feed France and Britain, as well as ourselves.) There was local agitation to create a Farm Bureau, which as we know was effective, and the Farm Bureau quickly set up tractor workshops. Farms mechanized, BUT the war ended unexpectedly in 1918. Farm prices crashed, and many farmers were now left struggling with time payments on their equipment.

*Then, at the same time, Prohibition came in! This closed the wineries and ruined the grape growers. We think of the Great Depression as starting in 1929. But for many farm families it started ten years earlier, in 1919. With widespread use of the motorcar, community and economic life began to dry up in the hamlets. They had had their own stores, schools, doctors, churches, undertakers. But who needed the little store in Coss Corners or Harrisburg Hollow when you could drive to Bath… or from Perkinsville to Wayland, Bloomerville to Avoca, Hornby to Corning? The rich man of Risingville now ran a shabby little shop in the sticks, with an outhouse in the back, and a kerosene lamp on the counter.

*This is the period in which thousands of Steuben people joined the Ku Klux Klan, which then as now exploited fear and turned it into hate by telling lies about people who are Not Like Us, and blaming THEM for all the trouble.

*When the Great Depression truly set in, one bright star locally (besides the evaporation of the Klan) was the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Charles Fournier came from France to revive Gold Seal with up-to-date practices. Taylor, which had eked its way through the dry years, expanded its operation, and new wineries opened. Every Labor Day growers and buyers met in Penn Yan to hammer out “the grape deal,” establishing prices that would be paid that year.

*This is also the period in which County Agent Bill Stempfle took the lead in reviving and modernizing potato production in the mucklands, bringing in growers from Maine and Long Island who were grateful to find lower land prices, and whose intensive farming practices could offset worn-out land. And, of course, there were New Deal programs to help the farmer.

*BUT this is the period in which the bill came due for almost 150 years of short-sighted land use practices… especially when catastrophic floods struck in 1935, 1936, and 1946. The ’35 flood, which killed 44 people regionwide, was in many ways far worse than the ’72 flood. One Avoca sharecropper in 1935 received as his share for the year one calf. Avoca became a pilot program for New Deal soil conservation practices. From this period we get diking and re-routing of the Conhocton and Canisteo Rivers, the Almond Dam, the Alfred Dam, tree plantations, drainage ditches… much of the work carried out by Civilian Conservation Corps lads from their main camp in Kanona.

*When the New Deal started, 10% of American farms had electricity. When it ended eight years later with the advent of World War II, 10% of farms did NOT. However, that 10% included Steuben County. R.E.A. got about 50 miles of wire strung before the needs for another world war cut off their materials. But demand for farm producrs, once again, went up… even as, once again, the prime workers were siphoned away.

The Farming Story Part 4: Grapes, Dairy, and Potatoes

The 1860 gazetteer told us that Steuben folks annually produced over 1.5 million bushels of grain; 60 thousand tons of hay; more than a quarter-million bushels of potatoes; almost 300 thousand bushels of apples; 2 million pounds of butter; and 200 thousand pounds of cheese.

*So what’s missing? Grapes. The 1860 gazetteer gives grapes exactly three sentences, in a footnote, saying that in 1857 Urbana had 30 acres in vineyards, and double that the following year, with about 2000 acres suitable for the purpose.

*Eight years later the county directory shows 117 related opreations… vineyards, wineries, boxmakers, etc. – in Urbana along, plus 36 in Pulteney and 15 in Wayne.

*Folks started experimenting commercially with grapes just as an Ohio grape region was wiped out by blight, leaving immigrant workers and winemakers from Europe available. This may help explain the European feel of the earliest wineries. Grapes and wine became a very big deal in Steuben, Yates, and Schuyler Counties, with Hammondsport and keuka lake being the heart of the region.

*Another feature of late 19th-century agriculture in Steuben was the appearance of small creameries and cheeseries scattered across the map, and often run as co-ops. As ever, the original producer got the least out of his efforts, while those higher up on the chain got more. These small operations were a way of keeping some of that in the community.

*Tobacco too became a noteable product at this time.

*Likewise we experience the advent of Grange, or the Patrons of Husbandry. (Francis McDowell of Wayne was one of the eight original founders.) While out west Grange was an active political force, here in the northeast it often served more of a social purpose. But Grange worked hard to educate the farmer and improve practices, AND it fought a decades-long battle for Rural Free Delivery. Until that was well in place, a little after 1900, the only way you could get your mail was to go to the post office and ask for it. It’s hard for us to recognize how isolated the farm family was. R.F.D. helped change that.

*The second force for education was the Steuben County Fair. It’s been continuous since before the Civil War, when the new Ag Society took it over, and bought the curremt sire while the war still raged. In the next few years the first permanent facilities went up, notably the gatehouse, the fair building, and the track. Hornell, Troupsburg, and Prattsburgh also maintained annual fairs for many years.

*And, of course, there was Cornell University, thanks to the Morill Land Grant College Act, providing federal support to help each state create a college for the teaching of agriculture, mechanics, and the useful arts.

*By 1900 or so there were over 8000 dairy farms in Steuben County, and Steuben was the second county in the United States for potato production. But the small family farms on the hilltops had become uncompetitive, and people started walking away from them, not even attempting to sell because there were no buyers. Many of these were eventually taken for taxes, and formed the basis of our vast system of state forests and state game lands.