On December 1, 1959, the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello handed part of its "Buzz of the Burg" column, which ran under the name Ing, to a letter from Arbon. With a presidential election a year away and the nation's farm surplus a running quarrel in Washington, Lamond J. Bailey wrote to say that subsidies should end and the government should leave farming, and business in general, to the people doing it. He signed himself "A Surplus Farmer." The columnist answered in one line of agreement. The full letter is reported in our own words below.
Who wrote it
The letter gives only a name and a town. Its writer was almost certainly Lamond Johnston "Buck" Bailey (1922–2013), a son of Melvin and Stella Johnston Bailey, who appears on the site's Bailey family page. No other Lamond Bailey is known at Arbon, and a 1970 Journal profile of "Lamond J. 'Buck' Bailey" ties the name to the family ranch in the valley. Through his father he was a grandson of J. R. Bailey, and through his mother, the family research shows, a great-grandson of George Arbon.
He grew up on his father's homestead on the west side of the north Arbon floor, and he is the Buck Bailey who remembered tipping the valley's schoolhouse outhouses at Halloween in the 1930s. The 1970 profile adds that he finished Pocatello High School in 1940 and served in the Second World War as a bombardier-navigator on B-17s in Europe. After the war he worked as a radio announcer at two stations, KSEI and KEIO, and was about to take a job at a station in Reno when his father talked him into coming home to the ranch. Melvin Bailey had bought J. R.'s Arbon farm in 1941, as told in the story of the J. R. Baileys. Melvin died in May 1952, and his obituary in the Idaho Sunday Journal called him an Arbon farmer and stockman and named Lamond among his three sons. In 1959 Lamond was writing from Arbon. The 1970 account describes the family's Arbon Valley place as a livestock and wheat operation before he changed it over, but gives no date for the change.
The argument of 1959
Federal wheat programs reached into the valley. By the mid-1950s each wheat farm had a federal allotment, the acreage it could plant without penalty, and by mid-decade Arbon Valley farms were being advertised for sale with their allotments as a selling point. The Benson of the letter's opening line was Ezra Taft Benson, the secretary of agriculture. In January 1958 the Logan Herald Journal reported him saying the administration would ask Congress to end the acreage reserve, the part of the soil bank that paid farmers to take crop land out of production.
Bailey's letter went further than any single program: it objected to farm subsidies as such. It did not set out his own acreage, prices or allotment; it argued from principle, and the columnist's one-line reply did the same. The papers do not say who Ing was, and no answer from other readers has been found.
What came after
The 1970 profile says Bailey changed the Arbon Valley place over to summer range for a small herd of registered Angus and for Holstein heifers, and in 1960 he bought land on Michaud Flats, on the west side of the Pocatello airport, for winter range and hay. It does not say when the wheat stopped, or whether the surplus had anything to do with it.
Ten years later he wrote to the paper again. In May 1969, signing himself Lamond "Buck" Bailey, he objected when the state moved a planned Interstate 15 interchange from Bannock Creek to Gasline Road, leaving the valley's paved road from Snowville and Malad with no direct way onto the freeway. At the state's hearing that June, where the Journal called him a Michaud Flats rancher who still held Arbon Valley land, he was among the ranchers and farmers who asked to have the interchange put back, citing the irrigated acreage it would serve on the reservation and in the north end of the valley. In December 1970 Idaho Bank & Trust named him its agricultural representative and an officer of the bank, after about ten months on its staff.
On this site: the Bailey family and Arbon.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, December 1, 1959, page 4. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
An Arbon farmer used a Pocatello newspaper column on December 1, 1959, to call for an end to farm subsidies and to federal controls over business.
Lamond J. Bailey's letter ran in "Buzz of the Burg," the column signed Ing on the Idaho State Journal's editorial page. He gave Arbon as his home and called himself a surplus farmer. Below the letter came a one-sentence reply from the columnist, who wished Bailey's outlook were more widespread among Americans.
At the heart of Bailey's case was a belief that the economy should be left to supply and demand. Washington's meddling in private business, he argued, had been done to win votes, and it had brought socialism in by degrees. As for the Department of Agriculture, its energy had gone into holding farm output down when, in his view, it belonged in feeding the world's hungry with what American farms raised.
He compared the farmer with the town merchant. If unsold goods earned a payment, he reasoned, every merchant in Pocatello would have a claim, since all of them carried some. Anyone paying income tax, he added, already knew from the bill that Washington was no great hand at running a business.
The letter had opened on a headline in which Benson brushed off his Democratic critics in one word. Bailey warned that 1960, an election year, would bring a flood of name-calling and accusations over the farm surplus, which he called enormous and a weight on the whole country. Next he listed three dictionary meanings of subsidy; the third described the government paying a private business on the theory that the public would come out ahead.
What he wanted was a clean break between government and private business. He hoped the 1960 race would produce a candidate who would round up the federal government's controls and agencies, lead them home to Washington, and keep it to the job of carrying out the Constitution and the nation's laws. Business, in his view, should be free to succeed or fail on its own, with no subsidy at all. He ended: "Let every man think for himself."