Area farmer won landmark case

This column is about an ordinary Jay County farmer who became a hero to many American farmers with marginal operations prior to World War II.

Among the hardest hit by the Great Depression were farmers, particularly those with mortgages to pay. That certainly was the case with my maternal grandfather, an immigrant from Poland, who from 1919 on sold milk from Jersey cows on his rural New York State 80 acres.

The Great Depression hit in 1929, and prices for farm products skidded. Worse, farmers continued to pay mortgage payments on land collapsed in value.

Because times were hard, many farmers also overextended by purchasing farm machinery that sometimes went kaput even while payments remained.

Alternatively, rather than take on more debt, farmers like my grandfather plowed the land with horses and mules while I trudged alongside him to keep him company. I was 7 years old before he bought his first tractor in 1952.

During the 72nd Congress in 1932, some amendments and resolutions to the Bankruptcy Law were introduced to give farmers protection of the courts. 

Nonetheless, by 1938, aged pioneer farmer and widower James Madison Wright of Jay County was tapped out after years of filing lawsuits. 

Union Central Life Insurance foreclosed on Wright’s mortgage notes. The court of appeals sided with the mortgage company in two court cases. 

Wright’s farm was seized and sold in a sheriff’s sale. 

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the foreclosure sale of Wright’s 280-acre spread. It looked like his case was closed and lost forever.

Entering the picture now was Hoosier attorney Samuel Ellis Cook of Huntington. He argued that the seizure was unconstitutional because Wright had not been allowed to keep his land and to restructure his debt under legislation known as the Frazier-Lemke Farm Moratorium Law.

Cook, himself elderly now with longish white hair and beard, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to take the case. A son of a farmer and home schooled, he graduated with a law degree from Valparaiso University in 1888. He also labored some years as a schoolteacher, newspaper editorial writer, judge and, in 1923, an elected Democrat to the 68th Congress.

All told, Wright fought United Central Life insurance for eight years before Cook prevailed, and the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision in 1938.

The Supreme Court during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal era was made up of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Associate Justices Louis Brandeis, Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland, Owen Roberts, Pierce Butler, Harlan Fiske Stone and Benjamin Cardozo. 

Cardozo did not vote because he had suffered a heart attack and stroke that ended his life on July 9, 1938.

The case attracted national headlines, law journal articles and much praise from farmers across the country who now benefitted by restructuring their debt instead of losing all they worked for at sheriff bargain sales. 

Sadly, Wright himself was unable to get back his forfeited land, but he did have the satisfaction of knowing his attorney had won a landmark court case. 

Wright died on Dec. 19, 1942. He was interred alongside his late wife Emma G. Wright at the I,O.O.F. Cemetery at Pennville following services at Walnut Corner Friends Church.

His attorney, Samuel Ellis Cook, 85, died after a week’s illness in Huntington on Feb. 22, 1946. 

Just before the 83-year-old Wright died of bronchial pneumonia in 1942, the Muncie Star-Press offered this praise: “While Mr. Wright did not succeed in redeeming his farm, his two cases which he won in the U.S. Supreme Court, established the rights of farmers beyond question and fixed the law so that thousands of farmers in the United States were able to redeem and save their farm homes.”

Incidentally, my grandfather squeezed by on his farm and eventually paid off the mortgage.