Milo Reno

• Milo Reno
• Born: January 5, 1866
• Died: May 5, 1936

Farm-holiday movement leader and agrarian spokesman, was born near Agency, Iowa, to John Reno and Elizabeth (Barrice) Reno, the twelfth of thirteen children and the seventh son. The family was of predominantly French and German ancestry. The paternal surname was shortened from Renault.

Reno’s parents were farmers, and his early upbringing was not unlike that of many other rural midwesterners during the post-Civil War era. He attended country schools and a Quaker academy and labored on the family farm in Jefferson County, where the family settled in about 1880. An energetic youth, Reno was known as a scrapper who would take on any boy who was looking for a fight. Such an attitude seems to have been something of a Reno family tradition.

In 1884 Reno married Christina M. Good, an Illinois native; they had at least four children, only one of whom, their daughter Susan Ann, lived to maturity. Shortly after his marriage, Reno—an omnivorous reader—became interested in the ministry and took about a year of study at Oskaloosa College in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Although he never held a formal ministerial position, Reno’s religious convictions were a potent force throughout his life, and he occasionally preached from rural pulpits. He became a “born-again” Christian when he was about forty.

The decades of the 1880s and 1890s introduced many of the struggles Reno was to be engaged in until his death. Restless with the limited opportunities available for many farmers, the family briefly roamed to the Black Hills of South Dakota and to California. Upon their return to Iowa, Reno became involved in radical political efforts—an area in which, again, there was something of a family tradition, as his mother had been a greenbacker and his father a Granger. In 1888 Reno campaigned for Alson J. Streeter, the presidential candidate of the Union Labor party. Four years later, as a veteran of Farmers’ Alliance activities, he labored long and hard for fellow Iowan James B. Weaver in the latter’s abortive campaign for the presidency on the Populist ticket.

Upon the demise of the Populist crusade, Reno became alienated from politics for a number of years, concentrating instead upon family life and the family’s economic fortunes. The latter improved as he progressed from farm laborer to farmer, later selling machinery and insurance in the town of Batavia, Iowa. He also became quite a popular figure in southern Iowa, noted for his practical jokes and his skill as a fiddler.

Fifteen years after the turn of the century, the farmers’ movement—which had languished in Iowa after the defeat of the People’s party in 1896—was revived with the establishment of the state’s first Farmers’ Union local. Three years later Reno joined the organization, and his subsequent rise within both Iowa and national Farmers’ Union politics was meteoric. In 1920, at fifty-four, he served as the president of his county local and was elected secretary-treasurer of the state organization. The next year, after an energetic campaign against the incumbent, he was elevated to the presidency of the Iowa Farmers’ Union.

Reno held that position for a decade and did much to help make Iowa a stronghold of the organization. An eloquent speaker, he championed cost-of-production legislation, the establishment of farmers’ cooperatives, antiusury laws, and the McNary-Haugen farm-relief program. The political philosophy guiding his actions was drawn from an amalgam of sources, including Populist thought, the writings of American and French revolutionaries, the Christian gospel, and the Christian socialism of Edward Bellamy.

When Reno retired from the leadership of the Iowa Farmers’ Union in 1930, his career as an agrarian crusader appeared to be at its end. As it turned out, his most celebrated battle lay ahead. The economic situation faced by American farmers, which had steadily eroded during the 1920s, turned desperate in the early 1930s. Prices for farm produce plummeted, and foreclosure threatened many farmers.

One response of midwestern and western farmers to the crisis was the farm-holiday movement—named after the New Deal bank holidays—which directed its efforts toward raising the prices for agricultural products and obtaining legislation designed to protect the embattled family farm. This was to be done through periodic farm strikes, or “holidays.” Reno was both a founder and the single most important leader of this movement. Early in 1932 he was elected president of the official arm of the movement, the National Farmers’ Holiday Association, at its first meeting in Des Moines. In 1933 the association boasted a membership of over a million farmers in some twenty-eight states. While such exorbitant claims have been challenged by historians, they underline an important point: Outside of the National Farmers’ Holiday Association there was a much larger farm-holiday movement, of which Reno was also the most visible leader, attaining national prominence in the early 1930s.

Events surrounding the movement made it one of the most militant in American agricultural history. In August 1932 Reno called the movement’s first farm strike for better agricultural prices. This “holiday,” which involved picketing by farmers on highways outside mid-western agricultural marketing centers, also led to scattered incidents of violence, with milk being dumped onto highways and armed farmers preventing trucks from carrying farm produce to market.

Two months later, the association called for a moratorium on farmers’ tax and mortgage payments—a demand that soon developed into a general movement against farm foreclosures. Holiday-movement members would descend upon foreclosure auctions and, with threats of violence, ensure that no more than a pittance was bid for the farm (sometimes a dollar), which would then automatically be resold to its former owners. In Le Mars, Iowa, farmers dragged a judge from his courtroom, threw a noose around his neck, and threatened him with further harm should he continue to sign foreclosure decrees.

Although the farm-holiday movement gained the attention of state and national legislators, who passed some remedial legislation, Reno was far from satisfied. After supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, he soon came to consider the agricultural policies of the new president and of Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace as traitorous to the nation’s family farmers—a view that he often expressed on his popular radio broadcasts. There was considerable speculation that he might be involved in a third-party effort in time for the 1936 election. Any such possibilities were cut short when Reno, America’s last truly colorful agrarian leader, died at seventy of a heart attack in Excelsior Springs, Missouri.

A collection of Reno’s papers primarily relating to his years with the holiday movement is housed at the University of Iowa. The best overall source on Reno’s life remains R. A. White, ed., Milo Reno: Farmers’ Union Pioneer (1941), a memorial volume issued by the Iowa Farmers’ Union. A wealth of information about Reno’s involvement with the farm holiday movement is to be found in J. Shover, Cornbelt Rebellion: The Farmers’ Holiday Association (1965). On that movement as a whole, see also L. K. Dyson, “The Farm Holiday Movement,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University (1968). A sketch of Reno’s life is in the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958). An obituary appeared in The Dubuque Telegraph-Herald of Dubuque, Iowa, May 5, 1936.