Merle Hansen (November 11, 1919 – March 27, 2009) was the founding president of the North American Farm Alliance and a spokesman for the plight of family farmers.
Background
Merle Elwin Hansen was born on his family's farmstead north of Newman Grove, Nebraska. After graduating from Newman Grove High School in 1938, Merle attended a business college in Chillicothe, Missouri.
Hansen viewed farm policy as an issue of social justice and often urged farmers to align themselves with minorities, environmentalists, the urban poor, labor unions, and other constituencies often regarded as marginalized in American culture. During the Great Depression, Hansen's father was active in the Farmers' Holiday Association, a farm protest organization that advocated the withholding of farm commodities from markets as a means of raising farm prices, and the use of penny auctions as a means of stopping farm foreclosures. The Holiday's plan for increasing prices never proved feasible, but the "penny auctions" were occasionally successful in preventing banks from foreclosing on individual farmers.
In many well-publicized cases, Association members would attend a farm sale regarded by Association members as morally or legally questionable. After bidding no more than a few pennies on each item put up by the auctioneer, they would return everything to the original owners immediately following the auction. Local law enforcement officials often discovered they were powerless to stop these tactics, and individuals at the auction who made earnest bids on the items in the sale were often intimidated into silence by Association members.
Hansen's town of Newman Grove was home to one of the movement's most successful locals. Often meeting in an auto-repair garage owned by Hansen's family, the "Madison County" chapter of the Association gained national attention for several successful actions, including the orchestration of a "penny auction" in Elgin, NE and the reacquisition of farmer-owned property that had been seized by banks. Deeply affected by these early experiences of direct action and radical populism, Hansen referenced the Association throughout his career.
World War II
On December 8, 1941, Hansen enlisted in the US Navy as a petty officer. He served mostly in the Pacific theatre and was awarded six battle stars. Following the war, he worked out of Omaha as a multi-state field organizer for the American Veterans Committee, a progressive veterans organization formed to oppose the more conservative American Legion.
Farmers Union
In the late 1940s, Hansen also worked as a field organizer for the South Dakota Farmers Union, and later for the Iowa Farmers Union, where he worked under IFU President Frederick William Stover (1898–1990), the former liaison between the USDA and the Roosevelt White House. Stover was a close ally of former Vice President Henry C. Wallace and one of the policy authors of the New Deal's innovative but controversial agricultural reforms. Stover would become Hansen's mentor, teaching him many of the Byzantine intricacies of federal farm policy and remaining a close ally and partner of Hansen's from the 1950s to the 1980s.
During his time in Iowa with Farmers Union, Hansen became a close friend and supporter of the prominent African American activist Edna Griffin, the organizer of one of the nation's first desegregation campaigns. While working with Griffin in her efforts to integrate Katz Drug Store in Des Moines, Hansen developed a friendship with the Griffin family and became an early and enthusiastic supporter of the civil rights movement. Griffin's husband, an African-American doctor, was the attending physician at the birth of two of Hansen's children.
At the outbreak of the Korean War, a conflict erupted between Stover and the National Farmers Union, with Stover opposing American intervention and NFU President James Patton supporting President Truman, with whom he had a close working relationship. This conflict caused the Iowa Farmers Union to splinter into bitterly opposed factions and eventually would cause Stover's removal as state president. In the midst of the controversy, Hansen returned to his family's farm in Madison County, Nebraska. Throughout the 1950s, he continued his involvement in farm politics, serving as a vice president of the U.S. Farmers Association which as newly formed by Fred Stover and working with the local chapter of the burgeoning National Farmers Organization.