Belonging and Betrayal: Dissecting the Intellectual History of Anti-Semitism as Antifederal Rhetoric in the Farm Crisis, 1978–88

In the late seventies and early eighties, financial crisis tore across rural America as thousands of farms faced foreclosure, local banks collapsed, and outmigration decimated small towns. Desperate farmers initially organized through grassroots groups like the American Agriculture Movement (AAM) to advocate for changes to federal farm policy, but a string of legislative failures soured many of these activists against traditional strategies and explanations. “Belonging and Betrayal” describes how, unlike in previous periods of agrarian activism, the federal government increasingly became the target of farmers’ criticism. Encouraged by anti-federal radicals outside of the farm movement who opportunistically saw farmers’ frustration as ripe for the picking, grassroots agrarian activists – and the AAM itself – increasingly rejected political protest in favor of violent anti-federal activity. This modern anti-federal turn converged with a dark tradition of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that had circulated in rural political discourse since at least the heady days of the Populist movement. This paper argues that anti-Semitism is central to the anti-federal and anti-globalization narrative that emerged during this period among radicalized farm activists. While surprising outsiders with their virulent anti-Semitism, these conspiracy theories allowed farmers to deny that bankruptcy was a failure on their part to survive in an economic model that they had previously supported. Anti-Semitism provided a human face and intent to the market forces that had driven down farm profits and a compelling explanation for how a government could ignore the appeals of its model citizens. Using a wide variety of primary sources including AAM documents, conspiracist publications, interviews with activists, and briefings delivered by organizations combatting anti-Semitism in the farm movement, this paper contrasts the role of anti-Semitism in agrarian conspiracist thought during the Farm Crisis with earlier manifestations of agrarian anti-Semitism to highlight its specific role in the rise of anti-federal radicalism.