Walther: Phooey! on Farmers in Labor Unions, Communism, Socialism

      A small blurb appeared in the 1886 Der Lutheraner that caused me to burst out laughing… at the blunt truth of C. F. W. Walther. From Der Lutheraner, vol 42 (1886), p. 93: 

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Seal of the Knights of Labor

Farmers and the Knights of Labor. From the report of the Convention of the Knights of Labor, held last month in Cleveland, it appears that farmers have recently joined the Society of the Knights of Labor. This is a most sad thing. The farmers should thank God that they are in a position where they are urged by nothing to participate in the present revolutionary labor movement. The farmer class is the freest and most independent in our country. The farmers can virtually be called the princes of the country. They have no cause to beg their customers or to refuse one to another in order to exist. Their commodity is the dear bread, which all men need daily and for which all Christians ask in every Lord's Prayer. The farmers have therefore hardly to fear that they will be boycotted. They can therefore act no more foolishly than by banding together with the Knights of Labor, thus selling their freedom and independence for nothing and voluntarily and wantonly submitting to the most shameful tyranny. That godless farmers do this, who are filled with the communist and socialist spirit of our time, cannot be otherwise, of course. But phooey [pfui] on those who want to be Christians and join, even without any need, the subversives of our time, and thus make themselves partakers of all the atrocities they commit! W. [Walther]

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      I know what Walther is talking about having grown up on a farm.  My father was a member of the Farm Bureau, but not the NFO, which a neighbor farmer had joined. — How refreshing it is to read from the greatest enemy of Communism and Socialism in the last 200 years: C. F. W. Walther.