“Early in January at Le Mars, in northwestern Iowa, a mob of a thousand farmers seized the attorney for an insurance company, dangled a rope before his eyes, and threatened him with immediate lynching.” So begins an article by the journalist Charlotte Prescott, published in The Nation in February of 1933. In the first paragraph, Prescott informs her readers that the protesters then “held the judge of the district court a prisoner in his chambers and defied the county sheriff.” She also notes that the farmers won: Soon after, local officials withdrew foreclosure proceedings against one farmer and tossed out a judgment against another. A “social revolution in the cornfields of Iowa,” a wholesale revolt of the rural population against the authorities, was under way.
The Iowa rebellion was no isolated skirmish. In the 1930s, indebted farmers fought foreclosure across the heartland. They organized to protect one another’s homes and livelihoods and campaigned for politicians who vowed to represent their interests, preventing land seizures through direct action and at the ballot box. Yet as impressive as this surge of populist fervor was, it represented only one chapter in a much longer conflict between debtors and creditors in the United States—a conflict that is foundational to American politics and yet, for some reason, is mostly forgotten.
The Political Development of American Debt Relief, a fascinating new book by Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston, seeks to recover this history. It is not a full account of how we got into the overleveraged bind that now sees Americans carrying a collective $17 trillion in household debt. Nor does it document every movement seeking to give the indebted relief. But it does provide some critical episodes in the story of both. As Zackin and Thurston show, the ongoing battle between the owing and owning classes has deep roots in American history—from Shays’s Rebellion in the 1700s, to Dust Bowl farmers radicalized by predatory mortgages, to the more recent campaigns against student loans, back rent, and carceral fines and fees. Ordinary people have struggled under the burden of personal debt since the founding of the country in 1776, and they have struggled against that burden for just as long.