Prosperity Far Distant — 2012 ·

The Journal of an American Farmer, 1933–1934

By Charles M. Wiltse
Edited by Michael J. Birkner

Fresh from receiving a doctorate from Cornell University, but unable to find work, Charles Wiltse returned to his family’s 42-acre farm in southern Ohio. There, the Wiltses scratched out a living selling eggs, wood, corn, and other farm goods at prices that were barely enough to keep the farm intact.

In wry and often affecting prose, Charles Wiltse recorded a year in the life of this quintessentially American place during the Great Depression. He describes the family’s daily routine, occasional light moments, and their ongoing frustrations, small and large­—from a neighbor’s hog that continually broke into the cornfields to the ongoing struggle with their finances. Despite repeated requests, the family could not secure loans from local banks to help them through the hard economic times, and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had little to offer small farmers. Wiltse spoke the bitter truth when he told his diary, “We are not a lucky family.” In this he represented millions of others caught in the maw of a national disaster.

The diary is introduced and edited by Michael J. Birkner, Wiltse’s former colleague at the Papers of Daniel Webster Project at Dartmouth College, and coeditor, with Wiltse, of the final volume of Webster’s correspondence.

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Charles M. Wiltse was a professor of history at Dartmouth College and the editor of the sixteen-volume Papers of Daniel Webster. He was also the author of many other books, including a three-volume collection of the papers of John C. Calhoun and The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy.

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Michael J. Birkner is a professor of history and Benjamin Franklin Professor of Liberal Arts at Gettysburg College, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including the forthcoming James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War.