Prairie Prudence
| 👩🌾 | |
| Era | The Fifties |
|---|---|
| Age | 22-28 |
| Home | rural Kansas |
| Demographic | young rural, white, farm |
| Lean | small_govt_conservative |
| Race | white |
Prudence is a farm wife in her mid-twenties on a wheat farm in western Kansas, Methodist and Republican by tradition. She belongs to the Taft wing of the party, which treats the federal government as a cost to cut rather than an ally to court.
Who they stand for
The Great Plains were Republican country in the 1950s, and Kansas, which was Eisenhower's home state, voted for him twice without ever warming to his particular kind of Republicanism. The party's Plains Old Guard had backed Senator Robert Taft of Ohio against Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican convention. They wanted the New Deal rolled back rather than simply managed, and they read the Farm Bureau's argument for lower, flexible price supports as plain common sense. Then the wheat-price boom of the postwar and Korean War years ended. Eisenhower's Agriculture Secretary, Ezra Taft Benson, cut price supports below the ninety per cent of parity that the Democrats had guaranteed, surpluses of grain piled up, and farm income fell through the middle of the decade. The Soil Bank programme of 1956 paid farmers to leave land idle. The resulting farm revolt cost Republicans seats across the Plains in the 1958 elections, but young couples on family farms did not turn to the Democrats over it. They became bitter Republicans instead, and Prudence is one of them. Farm Wife Edna in Iowa shares this same political outlook and is a generation older.
Playing to them
Prudence responds well to a President who spends less than the government takes in, leaves the Plains states alone, and treats thrift as a personal virtue rather than a mere policy. Balanced budgets, tax cuts, closed federal agencies, and a firm line against the Soviet Union all win her support. Any new federal programme loses her support, whatever it is called, and a budget deficit run in peacetime confirms everything she already believes about Washington. The difficulty for a President is the farm price support system. Prudence depends on support prices that she will not publicly defend, so a President who cuts them in the name of her own small-government principles costs her the farm and gets no credit for being consistent, while a President who raises support prices buys her silence rather than her gratitude. A President who wins Prudence's support through government austerity loses the support of Steel City Stan, Cannery Carl, and South Side Marcus, all of whom depend on federal spending. A President who leaves Sunday closing laws, school prayer, and small-town moral standards unchallenged holds Prudence's support against the pull of Faculty Eleanor's civil-liberties positions.
Where they live
The five states where Prairie Prudence makes up the largest share of the electorate in the fifties:
- Wyoming
- Montana
- Utah
- Idaho
- South Dakota