Agents from the Federal Government Destroy Crops and Equipment!

http://www.atlantic-times.com/archive_detail.php?recordID=762

On January 16, 1920 Prohibition became the law of the land. Immediately federal agents swooped down on the village of Hermann, Missouri, a town of hard-working vintners of German descent. Federal agents rooted out and burned their vines, destroyed their equipment and left the town desolate and poor a decade before the Great Depression. All of this, without one cent of compensation from the government for the taking of their property.

Talk to the descendants of those farmers today, and just below the surface you will sense what can be described as an inherited ancestral pain and institutional memory of federal power run amuck. They’ll tell stories of their families being forced to sell, for pennies on the dollar, pieces of their homesteads just to survive. They tell of equipment from their wineries and vineyards being shipped ahead of the federal agents to friendly farmers who, against the law the land, lowered such equipment into their wells.

They tell the story of one manually operated grape press, still on display in Hermann, that escaped the agents’ grasp by filling it with apples and telling the agents that it was an apple press. Today it is on display, I suppose, as a symbol of resistance against oppression and illegal takings. The owner is justifiably proud of it.

Ninety years later the town folk, many of whom are descendants of the people who suffered at the hands of the Prohibition, are eager to retell the stories. Some of those descendants have rebuilt their forefathers’ vineyards, and some have succeeded, but they wonder how vineyards in New York were allowed to remain while those in Missouri were systematically destroyed.

And ever since the victims and their descendants have remained wary of power run amuck.

Read the Atlantic Times article at the head of this article. I would not have believed it had I not visited Hermann myself.