Both parties are also having trouble getting in touch with the Farmers Holidpay Association, a powerful farmers' union that is trying to get the government to maintain agricultural prices by stockpiling crops and other actions leading to their removal from sale in the market. In the corn-growing regions of Iowa and Nebraska, in 1932, these measures led to violence:trucks were overturned; milk is spilled; protesting farmers are threatened. The time seems ripe for the Communists to exploit the anger and desperation of the farmers. They form an action committee and send one of their best delegates, Ella Reeve Bloor, to the area.
Her influence is quite strong among some farmers who have left the Farmers Holiday Association. And it will succeed in stopping mortgage foreclosures thanks to penny auctions (auctions in which no object must go up to more than a few cents). The first penny auction takes place in Nebraska. The total of the sale will reach only 5.35 dollars - an amount that the local bank, very reluctantly, will be forced to accept.
The presence, at these sales, of a mobs of angry farmers usually succeed in preventing the overbidding and convincing the mortgagee to agree to these terms. , the most miserable of farmers in the Middle West. As much as they are fine with adopting revolutionary methods when it comes to defending their possessions, they are wary of taking action with leftist movements.