The New Company Store
Dad was a tenant farmer, never satisfied him, longed for land of his own. Mom was a farm wife, more by fate than choice. A homemaker, more by default than desire. Did far more than cook, clean and tend the kids. Helped in the barn every day and in the fields when needed, kept the books, juggled the finances, without complaint. Her life was not the stuff of her dreams. Suffered from depression she hid as best she could, to little avail.
Dad had reached his 50s by the time he became the owner of a 200-acre, 40-cow dairy operation. He’d pinched pennies for decades, doing farm labor before and after shifts in a factory and on weekends, at one point going more than three decades without a day off. Finally, he could work land and milk cows full time on a farm titled in his name, with a bank lien, of course.
He splurged, paying to have a customized magnetic sign made, one he proudly slapped on the driver’s side door of his truck. Big black letters against a white background, “C.J. ‘Chuck’ McCabe & Sons” with the farm’s address below.
Even before reaching adolescence, I saw injustice in Dad’s sign. Mom got no billing, no recognition of her many contributions to the family business and our household. Neither did my three sisters. That was wrong, but also very much in keeping with the times.
Upon gaining statehood in 1848, original Wisconsin law treated women as appendages of their husbands, giving men absolute control over their wives’ property. Early efforts to change that were fiercely resisted, with one debater wondering “will her welfare, and feelings and thoughts, and interests be all wrapped up in her husband’s happiness, as they now are?”
Women did not gain the right to have their own credit cards and bank accounts without a male co-signer until 1974. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that Wisconsin law was changed to presume spouses equally share marital property. That was the first significant piece of legislation I worked on as a state assembly aide.
Fresh out of school, little more than a lowly clerk, I got to be in the room where it happened, the office of one of the most prolific lawmakers my homeland has ever known, as she plotted strategy for driving her handiwork down the field and across the goal line. I imagine seeing this measure of equality written into state law made Mom happy, though she never said so.
I reflect back on all this as I consider the mess our society is in today. Dad and Mom passed years ago, but I can’t help but think the angst and anger eating at us nowadays traces to the same powerful impulse they felt in their time, the desire to have something they could call their own. Titled in their name, with a legal deed to hold on to, there’s something real solid about that.
It’s commonly and cynically said that everything is for sale. Except that’s not quite true. Most things are for rent. Nothing’s built to last anymore, everything’s made to wear out fast. Since few things we buy can be repaired because they are no longer designed to be fixable, it’s hard to say we really own them, they’re not really ours. We pay to use a home appliance, it stops working and is discarded, we pay to use another until the time comes to dispose of it. Same goes for the smaller stuff, too. Record collections have gone the way of the dinosaur; we pay subscription fees to stream music. We rent this, subscribe to that. No titles, no deeds, no ability to keep things working, fix what’s broken, just an app to manage all the subscriptions.
It was once in fashion among our nation’s elites to talk of creating an ownership society. It was just talk. The forces driving the economy—profit, preoccupation with the acquisition and accumulation of consumer goods—have steadily driven us in the opposite direction, toward a new feudalism with a few owner-lender lords and masses of renter-borrower serfs.
Buy-now-pay-later is deeply engrained in the nation’s psyche. Credit card debt and overall household debt continue to spiral upward and are at all-time highs. To keep consumers buying, corporate America carefully nurtures a throwaway culture, fights the right-to-repair movement tooth and nail. To lower costs as well as their own accountability, companies are killing off customer service, using AI bots to perform that function.
Dad wanted to run his own business, be his own boss. Mom deserved recognition of what she contributed economically. They both wanted to feel justly rewarded for all their work, to have something to show for it. If they were still alive, they’d be swimming against powerful currents pushing them away from ownership and toward being renters and subscribers. They’d be treated as we all are now, as faceless consumers, as numbers, rather than living, breathing customers. As subjects, not citizens. They’d be diminished, as we all are now.
We’ve been in a place like this before. History never truly repeats itself, but it often rhymes.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store“Sixteen Tons”
Tennessee Ernie Ford