 Dear Adolf, a letter to Hitler, the national broadcasting company in cooperation with the Council for Democracy presents Dear Adolf, a series of six narrative letters written each week by Stephen Vincent Benet, one of the nation's greatest poet writers. These broadcasts are based upon actual letters written to Hitler by Americans. Our first program presents Raymond Massie, distinguished actor of stage, screen and radio, relating the views of an American farmer, as he addresses a letter to Hitler. Will you get me the pen and ink, mother? I want to write a letter. Got time enough for once. Weather looks if it would hold. No, I'm not going to write you the boy and wrote him last week to the camp and told him how things were going. He knows how it is. He was brought up on a farm, but there's lots of folks don't know. Got it on my mind ever since the boy went away. Kinda boiling and steaming up on me to say a few things to that fellow over in Germany that started all this trouble. Want to tell him just who I am and what I'm thinking. Maybe it's time I did. Got the pen, mother? Thank you. Now, you just let me think it out. Dear Adolf, this is me. This is me, one American farmer. Six million farms and over in this country, last census, six million places where we can raise food for freedom, food for the men on the ships and the men in the plane, food for the boys like my boy in his soldier's clothes, food for Ed Summer's boy on his destroyer and Gus Tov's boy over in his tank plant, food for all kinds of folks I'll never see in my life who are fighting on our side. My farms just want a six million, but I want to say this. We're all against you, Adolf. Every bushel of wheat in this country is against you. Every furrow we plowed this spring, we plowed against you. Every time a hen lays an egg, that egg's against you. Every time an IOE hog puts on another pound, that pound's against you. Against you and all your works because we don't like you and can't stand you and we're bound and determined to get rid of you, whatever it costs at all. Ever think what it means to rouse up a free people, Adolf? Guess not. You see, we farmers don't talk much, never have. You can read in the papers about us, parody prices and such, but that's politics. That isn't our story. Our story is weather in the land and the things that stay, the wind around the corner of the barn and the lambs and marks, the look of a well-lined field, and the reason a man likes to grow things, the reason it's a satisfaction, the reason a man will put up with hail and droughts and blights and blizzard and corn borers, put up with them and cuss them out and fight them all his life and get through somehow. Just because he's got a fool idea in his head that that's what he was born to do. You hitched up the wrong horse when you thought that farmers can't fight, Adolf. Farmers are used to fighting. They fight every day in the year. You can call us tankers and slow to change. You can call us independent too, because that's what we are. Our own government's found that out, and you're going to find it out too. We're labor and capital, both. We got everything to lose if you win and we know it. We didn't pay undue attention to your goings on across the water at first, though we didn't like the way you took on about races and such. We don't ask if our neighbors are Aryans. We just ask if they're good neighbors. And when you started spreading all over Europe like a mass of tent caterpillars, well, well, it looked for a while as if other folks could do the spraying, but Pearl Harbor and the way those Japanese beetles acted just touched us off. Now we're mad. We're mad and we're out to get you, Adolf. Get you and your pals, every one of us. And when we say you and your pals, we mean just that. We mean this mussolini that you get cooped up in Italy like a broody hen. That's a way for a man to act, isn't it? And those smart little sons of heaven that took their farms away from the Chinese. We don't like that sort of thing. We don't mean to stand it. And most of all, we'll be a mortally damned if we have it here. Sorry, mother, I just lost my temper a minute. Want to know what we're saying all over the country, us farmers? This is it. There's a woman up in New Hampshire and she said, I can't fire a gun, but bless you, I can keep firing this sausage out of here for the folks that need it to fight on. There's a fellow over in Maryland. He's had hard luck, as you can tell, but he said the orchard's worthless. He suffered from drought. Potatoes suffered from drought. Sow has no pigs. Three cows culled. Pipeline rusted and busted, but I'm keeping on. I read about how our soldiers need more food for us farmers, and they'll get it from me if I have to bust myself wide open. There's an acre in the south, one of many acres in the south, and a sign on it says, I hereby dedicate this acre of my cropland to James Wall, my soldier in the service of the United States. There's a fellow who writes into the FSA and he says, I have a brother and brother-in-law already in service and many close friends. Some of them have already been killed, and I'm willing to work for small profits, so those boys will have everything they need and the best we can give them. I want to show these dirty backstabbers what a country of God-loving and free people can do for the last one of us die trying. And this is a lady down in Alabama. I know that kind of lady, and we got a lot of her. I'd like you to pay attention to this one, Adolf. My husband's been ill, but I'll tell you what I and two girls did in 41. We made a hundred bushels of corn and a ton of peanuts, 20 bushels of peas, 20 bushels of Irish potatoes and 40 bushels of sweet potatoes, a good garden, one bale of cotton, raised about 200 chickens and have plenty of eggs, and 11 months ago a friend gave us a little pig. I fed him with a spoon and last December I butchered this pig. He weighed around 400 pounds. If I could get the hogs and where to fix a hog pasture, I could do more, because this is the ladies war, same as the men, and I pledge myself in 42, I'll double the amount of 41. I will raise two hogs for the boys in service, one for myself. I have Pearl Harbor wrote down on my hog. That's it, Adolf. That's our answer, the answer of our part of the home front. They won't be flying e-penance from the siloed, and we won't be getting medals or decorations, but we've got Pearl Harbor written down on our hogs, Pearl Harbor in Wake Island, and the names of the dead. We'll work for them and fight the earth for them. We'll produce as we've never produced before. The government's asking for milk, 125 billion pounds of milk, 8 billion and a half more pounds than last year. They'll get it. How's the milk in Germany, Adolf? How much are your people getting? You promised them guns and butter. How many guns would they swap for some of our butter? How much milk are your soldiers getting on the Russian front? How much milk are their families getting, the families they left behind? Do you even know? All over America, we're raising the food for freedom. Oh, it isn't an easy job. I'll be frank about that. You see, we can afford to be frank. We don't have to lie to our own folks to get things done. We've got to work harder, every farmer, because with the army and the war industries, there'll be less and less help we can hire. We've got to patch up the fire machinery and make it do, because it's more important right now to make bombs that drop on you than it is to make fire machinery. We'll get prices that may sound high, but we'll make less on the year, feeds up and labors up. There won't be $23 hogs in this war, but we won't be slave labor afterwards. We'll fill the pinch like the rest and go through like the rest. My hands are getting stiff, but I can still milk. My store's still getting old, but I won't be needing it much. Take good care of my car, but I'd rather have freedom than new tires. Why are we doing it, Adolf? Well, that's something you wouldn't understand. We like freedom. Our government's not telling us to do this with machine guns. Our government's saying, can you do it? And we're saying 12 hours a day, seven days a week. My boy wrote me from his campus spring, and he said, Of course I am lonesome sometimes, because I miss the folks and home on the farm in the hills. I know our soil is none too rich after use and misuse by many generations of farmers, and some of it is stony. But I know our hills are green now. I don't know why, but I love the most when the snow drifts deep under the hemlocks and shakes down from the trees when I walk through with my gun and my dog. No time's too long to fight to keep our home in the hills safe and free. And I feel just the way my boy does. That's the way I feel about this country. It's too big for puny affairs and small potatoes. It's too big for grumbling and name-calling and holding back in the pinch. And it's too immortally big for you or folks like you to meddle with or put your brand on. We'll choke you with wheat and corn, Adolf. We'll drown you in York State milk. We'll smother you with cotton and soybeans and roll you up in the middle of a big Wisconsin cheese. The earth roused up against you, Adolf. The prairies in the plains. The blackers down in the delta and the little hillside farms where you have to plow between the stones. There's six million farms against you, Adolf. Six million farms and their farmers. The men with the slow talk and the sun burned back to their necks. The women who know that a farm woman's day never ends. And we're not a special class or a special interest. We're part of something and working for something that's bigger than any of it. Something big as the sky above us and fertile as the earth under foot. It's called the United States, Adolf. And she was born in freedom. That right, mother? You have just heard Dear Adolf starring Raymond Massey, the first of a series of six narrative letters written each week by Stephen Vincent Benet and presented by the National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the Council for Democracy. The program was directed by Lester O'Keefe with original music composed by Tom Bennett and conducted by Joseph Stopak. These broadcasts are based upon actual letters written to Hitler by Americans. Won't you send in your own letter to Dear Adolf? Listen next week to an American businessman's letter to Hitler with Melvin Douglas as narrator. Copies of today's Dear Adolf letter from a farmer may be secured without cost by writing directly to the Council for Democracy 11 West 42nd Street, New York City. This program came to you from New York.