The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, December 10, 1917, Page 4

NE day, in the spring of 1904, a tobacco trust buyer was driving near Milton, Wiscon- sin. He saw from the road a farmer hoeing some sugar He had noticed, too, that some tobacco had been grown on the farm, for this is in the tobacco section of the Badger state. So he got out of his buggy (this was before there were any Henry Fords to speak of) and went up to the farmer, “Got any tobacco to sell?” he asked. “I sure have,” said the farmer, and took the buyer into his shed. There, wrapped in neat bales, was several hundred pounds of leaf. The tobacco grower looked it over. They were fine, long, evenly colored leaves. “That's good ‘stuff,” he said. “What do you want for it.” % “Bight cents,” said the farmer. “It's really worth more. But I have some debts hanging over me and I need the money.” It may be explained here that the actual cost of raising tobacco, at this time, was between seven and eight cents a pound. So an eight-cent price didn’t mean much profit for the farm- er; just about breaking even for him. WOULD REMIND HIM OF HIS FOLLY beets. But the tobacco buyer laughed. “Five cents is what we'll pay this vear,” he said. “No use to hold it; you won’t get any more. What! You won't sell for that? What are you going to do with it, then? You can't manu- facture it. What good is it to you?” “It will be just this much good,” said the farmer, who was heginning to get a little hot under the collar by this time. “I'll just keep it hanging here and every time I feel an itch for rais- ing tobacco again I'll come here and look at'it any say to myself, ‘You've had enough of raising tobacco, you darned fool'.” “You farmers have got it wrong,” the tobacco buyer came back. “You farmers have done too much worrying over prices. But it’s all going to be changed now. “All you farmers will have to do from now on will be to raise the tobacco. ‘We'll fix the prices; you needn’t werry about them any more. And that tobacco will rot in your shed before you get more than five cents for it.” Hot under the collar is no way to describe the condition of the farmer by this time. A thermometer at the back of his neck would probably have reg- istered about 220 by this time. He was a fighting sort of a farmer. Harry E. Holmes was his name. What he said to the tobacco buyer the writer doesn’t ‘pretend to know. Probably Postmaster General Burleson wouldn't let the Leader go through the mails if we printed it. ¢ WISCONSIN RAISES BIG TOBACCO CROP But what hap- pened is more im- portant than what Holmes said. What happened was that he got in touch with a lot of other tobacco growers, who had been giv- en a good deal the same kind of talk by the trust to- bacco buyers. And they all made up their minds - to show the tobacco trust that the farmers, after all, might be able to say something ~ about fixing prices. o The tobacco growers of Ken- tucky, who were up against the same kind of a game with the trust, only worse, had already or- ganized a National Tobacco Greowers' association. The Wisconsin tobacco growers sent Holmes down to Kentucky to meet with the growers there and plan a campaign. Right now is the place to tell a little something about tchacco growing. About $9,000,000 worth of tobacco is raised in Wisconsin every year. It is a crop that takes lots of hand work— more than sugar beets, according to men who have raised both. It takes a lot of expert knowledge, too. It is mighty easy to ruin tobacco after it has been harvested. Iven an expert can't save all of it. This year nearly half of the Wisconsin crop has heen “lost by freezing. They used to figure that it cost around $85 to raise each acre of to- bacco. The cost is considerably over $100 now. The average yield will be about 1100 pounds to the acre and the average price has bcen around 10 cents a pound, though the short crop this vear will bring as high as 1§ cents a pound. METHOD OF HANDLING THE TOBACCO LEAF The tobacco is harvested by cutting the whole plant at one time. The plants are hung on laths suspended in a frame on a wagon bed and are hung up, still on the laths, in the farmer’'s drying shed, in the fall, and left to dry out. During the winter when there is a spell of foggy weather (they eall it “casing weather’”) the farmers strip the tobacco leaves from the plant, pack them in bales a foot square and as long as the leaves are, and they are ready for the buyers. The stripping must be done in moist, fairly warm weather, or the leaves would crack and break to pieces. The tobacco manufacturers generally get the tobacco the spring after it is harvested. It still has to be cured. They pack it in big warehouses: It goes through a further sorting and the stems are separated from the leaves. Tobacco growers fought for the principle of having something to say about fixing the price upon their own produects. milk producers recently tried to do the same thing, the attorney general brought injunction proceedings against them. The attorney gen- eral probably would do the same thing if the tobacco growers had their fight today. It makes a lot of difference whether public offi- cials are fair or with the anti-farmer gang. When Wisconsin The curing process is called “sweat- ing.” The tobacco leaves are packed closely together. The small amount of sap or moisture that has gathered in the stems gradually spreads through the entire leaf under heat. A “natural sweat” takes nearly a year. Of late years, however, the warehouses have been using what is called a “forced sweat,” which gives the tobacco a sort of Turkish bath. Heat is maintained by artificial means and the process is considerably shortened. At the best, though, it is a year after the tobacco is harvested before it is ready to be made up for commercial use. The hest leaves are taken for cigars. Others are pressed together into plug tobacco and the smaller bits of leaves are used for filler for cigars and are_chopped up for cigarette and pipe tobacco. Every bit of tobacco is used, even to the swecpings from the floors. The stems are generally the only portion of the plant that is considered waste, and these have been used for fertilizer. Recently, however, one tobacco manu- facturer has been using stems for a new brand of chewing tobacco—a tobacco which has an extremely salty taste, accounted for by the fact that the stems are chock full of saltpeter. There are as many tricks in the to- bacco trade as in-any other. Not all *‘tobacco”_is real tobacco. The writer, who went through a hig Madison ware- house the other day, was told by the superintendent that two largely sold brands of sack “tobacco” contained only 10 per cent real tobacco, the re- mainder being chopped up paper and alfalfa. HOLMES TELLS STORY OF GROWERS'’ FIGHT It can be seen easily enough that there is considerable to be done to the tobacco before it is ready for final manufacture. The tobacco buyers, in their arrogant attitude toward the How tobacco is harvested. The plants are hung on laths whi:h are held by the two men and the laths are hung on a frame on the wagon bed and later transferred to the drying shed. PAGE FOUR " pendent buyers raised back on growers, . took the position that the farmers wouldn't have sense enough to do any more than just raise the to- bacco. But the growers felt differently about it. Their plan was to go through * with the other work too. From this point on Harry Holmes, who had as much to do with the to- bacco growers' fight as any other man, is going to tell the story. “By the time we were organized in 1904 it was too late to do anything much that year,” said Mr. Holmes. “The tobacco trust had things pretty much their own way and five cents was about the average price that was paid. “In 1905, though, a group of inde- pendent buyers, who hadn’t been gob- bled up yet by the trust, got into the field early. That resulted in raising prices some, They bought most of the tobacco at seven to eight cents. When the trust got around later they found most of it gone, and prices advancing. They had to buy a lot from independ- ent huyers. One independent buyer cleaned up $70,000 by turning his to- bacco over to the trust. INDEPENDENT BUYERS HIT ON 1906 CROP “In 1906 the independent buyers started out again, running prices up to 11 or 12 cents at the start. The trust sent its buyers out later and talked about offering bigger prices yet. It looked like 1905 over again. The inde- the trust and prices finally went up to 16 cents. “As a matter of fact, though, the trust wasn’t buying any tobacco to speak of in Wisconsin. They had suc- ceeded in rounding up a lot of old to- bacco in the South, enough to run them for a year, and when the independent buyers came to them with their 16- cent tobacco the trust said they didn’t want it, That left the independents holding the sack. A lot of them went broke, and others, who managed to save their hides, saw they weren't strong enough to fight the trust and quit. “In 1907 the trust had things all its own way, or thought it had, and start- ed out offering three and one-half cents and four cents a pound. Yes, and they tried to get it for even less than that.” And Holmes reached in a pile of correspondence and pulled out a letter from one Wisconsin grower who had been offered only two and one-half cents for.a crop that cost him seven to eight cents a pound to grow. “That was when we_got busy. Farm- ers all over the tobacco district organ- ized warehouse associations. They bought warehouses, built them and rented them. These warehouse asso- ciations were joint stock companies., They took the tobacco from the farm- er, billed him for sorting and then gave him a ware- house receipt showing the kind and amount of tobacco he had stored. The banks loaned money on these receéipts. “The tobacco growers’ associa- tion was distinct from the ware- house associa- tions. I worked as their selling agent. Each farm- er made out a contract giving the tobacco grow-. ers’ association the sole agency to dispose of his to- bacco. That gave the association control of practi- cally the whole - crop of Wisconsin. “Some of the to- bacco buyers laughed © at the