A New Home, Who'll Follow? by Caroline Kirkland
A short paragraph at the top of page 125, the fifth paragraph of Chapter XXXII caught my attention and I began to think of my Grandfather and Grandmother on my mother's side of the family and how they worked for no less than 16 hours per day every day from dawn until dusk for thirty years to pay off the bills and debt of some of the farmers in the area that owed my Great Grandfather after he had loaned them some of the necessities just before the stock market crash of 1929.
After my Grandfather had finally signed the papers which announced the final payment on the overwhelming debt, only one of the many farmers who owned a debt of gratitude to both my Grandfather and Grandmother actually came up and shook my Grandfather's hand in church that same week. Stunningly real as a sketch isn't it?.
But all was not a complete waste of time and effort. My Grandparents had become tireless laborers and continued, with a slight easing of their work customs, to build and build onto their small rooming house, bought out several neighbor's buildings, and turned The Thompson House into a ten-million dollar resort sitting next to a golf course and one of the finest places for city people or anyone else to go in the Catskill Mountains of New York to vacation or just relax.
The thing that truly irked me about "the old sly farmer" in the paragraph who was making a profit, as was Mr. Skinner, by selling and buying wheat and corn with the rotten bank notes, is that the wily farmers that were, here, outwitting the rotten men from the government and the bank, were, in my Grandfather's case, using their wits just like the bankers and the government people. They were leaving their debt to others and profitting off of other's foolishness, foolhardiness, or strictly selfish and evil motives. In this paragraph, Kirkland turns them into heroes. But just how ethical are their actions in reality?? Aren't they, too, profiting, in the same way, off of the same organization that is stealing from the poor and the innocent?? There is choice in this situation, as anyone might be able to decipher.
Other things that made me think poorly of the people here are the actions or inactions of the banking commissioners and, particularly, the government and president who were all supposed to govern their behavior and protect the public. The President at that time was Andrew Jackson, the Democratic, Southern hero of the War of 1812 and the battle of New Orleans. The interesting thing here is that he was the last Revolutionary President and the first Southerner to be given the Presidency. I capitalize president and presidency because I think the small letter must be some kind of political ploy to diminish the office, diminish people's fears of power, make the president seem humble and non-threatening and is just another political prank.
It seems to me that the forefathers of our country would have been ashamed of the conducting of our government's business during this period of time. I believe it had also occurred to Caroline Kirkland because she went back to the East and then to Washington, D.C. to do a detailed analysis of George Washington after what she had experienced of the utter lawlessness beyond the law maintained by the people themselves in the new country being populated by and stolen from the poor settlers and their families by the banks, the government, and the evil land speculators. Perhaps good government fell after the last Revolutionary President??