"If They Take Oscar..."

To meet the manpower pinch, local draft boards were already calling up deferred farm workers aged 18 to 25 and sending them off to the services. To most farmers it meant that work would be harder, crops inevitably shorter. Some wrote their Congressmen. One of them, North Dakota's hawk-nosed Senator William Langer, collected his farmers' mail, laid some of it before Congress as it considered the May-Bailey bill to draft 4-Fs. Samples, from Dakota farming towns:

Rogers. "We have 430 acres. . . . Our only boy 23 years of age, has done practically all the work, as I am 70 years of age and physically unable . . . to do anything except the lightest work. If this boy is taken, our farm would lie idle. . . ."

Ashley. "So other young boys can play football, basketball and boxing matches! I heard a boxing match on the radio this evening again. . . . Are we farmers recognized in Washington as on essential jobs or not? It don't look like it here at home. It looks very bad for us right now."

Sykeston. ". . . There will be hundreds of acres not put in and you can look for a shortage of everything. And all the boohoo about the labor shortage in the war plants is not labor. . . . They work from six and a half to eight hours, but on the farm it's twelve to 18 hours a day. I think the best the War Labor Board can do is investigate the war plants and let the workers work twelve hours a day."

Lemmon. "If they take our son Vernon, we will have to move to town. As I wrote you, Mister's health is none too good and I am diabetic, so where would we be?"

Hatton. "I'm 54 and my son is 23. Last fall my son went to the draft board to find out if it was all right to rent some land on his own so he rented 240 acres more, and has bought tractor and machinery, and we plan to do all this together, but if they're going to draft him I will never be able to farm my own land, saying nothing about his. . . ."

Bisbee. "I want to say right now that it means the end to family-type farming. . . . If General Hershey wants to see the farmer out of business, all he has to do is go ahead and draft these boys and he will see a farm panic."

Zap. "I am writing concerning my son, the only boy that I have that can help me on the farm. I am unable to see, as I have only one good eye. . . I am farming 250 acres and milk 24 cows. If they take Oscar. . . ."

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