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"Remembering" Merle Hansen

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

“Merle Hansen is dead and buried.” Hard words.

I last saw Merle at a recent Nebraskans for Peace Annual Conference as he struggled down the hall to the dining room with his lifelong friend, Dutch Hoppe. As we shook hands, he said — his voice rough with age, “Thank you for what you do.” He was in his mid-80s, afflicted with Parkinsonianism, feeble, but his still purposeful eyes spoke volumes. Merle wanted me to be up and doing.

The Lincoln Journal Star published an article about Merle’s death — all about the AAM, the NFO, the tractorcade and the Farmer’s Union. Not one word of Merle’s quest for peace and justice.

When we celebrated 40 years of NFP, we recalled ACT I, scene 2, of the play of its beginning: Arlo and Merle with Tom Rehorn, the preacher fired for opposing the war in Vietnam, gathered around Tom’s kitchen table. A fired preacher and two farmers about to change the world. But as Margaret Mead said about little purpose-filled groups, they can.

Merle’s first talk to me at UNL, to students, to anyone who would listen, concerned the fate of Vietnam’s landmined farmers and of the poor in our country. He told of our agreements at Geneva. He told how, for his opinions, he had been threatened with the poisoning of his beloved Charolais cattle, a breed relatively new to Nebraska but almost as old as Charlemagne in France.

Merle rode horseback in Omaha’s African American community to celebrate Ernie Chambers and his commitment to civil rights. He brought along a pony for the kids to ride, and even earlier in the ’50s worked with Des Moines civil rights leader, Edna Griffin, to integrate the Katz Drugstore in Des Moines. He pushed NFP to support divestment-from-South Africa legislation in the Nebraska Legislature and retrocession for the Winnebago so they could enforce their own law. The most moving remarks at his funeral came from Frank LaMere, a Winnebago man who had known and loved Merle. He had received $5.00 from Merle as a beginning down payment on his daughter’s education, a daughter now well into her successful advanced education. Frank, because of Merle’s encouragement, has become the senior Native American spokesperson on the Democratic National Committee.

We often put signs on the doors of the temple of peacemaking. “Enter here, ye students, college professors, yuppies, members of the ‘smart set.’” Merle could not enter such a temple. He believed simply that where justice and peace prevail, family farms exist, farmers are free, and food can abound sufficiently so that everyone can be fed. Last year I found one of Merle’s first essays for NFP, not a defense of farmers, but of the failure of federal welfare programs to provide good nutrition to mothers and children.

Former NFP staffer Suzy Prenger remembers Merle’s concern for feeding the hungry in Central America during the Contra War period, for protecting the rights of those peasants to grow good food and keep it home to feed hungry people.

The Hansen family had always worked for change going back to their involvement in the 1930s “Farmers Holiday” movement and the ‘penny auctions’ they organized to protect farmers facing foreclosure. During the 1980s, Merle organized and headed the North American Farm Alliance and its “Farms not Arms” efforts, organized and served on the Executive Committee of the National Family Farm Coalition and Jessie Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. Merle knew that if we want lasting peace, we must work for economic and social justice for everyone, people of all ethnic and social backgrounds, including family farmers around the world.

Merle called early and often for Nixon’s impeachment — not for Watergate, but for fighting an undeclared war. He supported “Women in Farm Economics” (WIFE) long before farm women were supposed to protest. He ran for Nebraska University regent on a program of proper medical care for rural areas long before rural medicine issues prevailed. His almost winning effort made a difference in how the University of Nebraska’s Med School acted toward rural folks.

Amid all of this, Merle ran a successful farm, often farming with his family far into the night. When Ronald Reagan came to Omaha, he pulled a manure spreader through the streets to say what he thought of Reagan’s philosophy. When people were saying that country music folk and jazz people could never work together, he rode horses in North Omaha. Jim Hoppe, Dutch’s son, remembers when he and the Hansen kids went together on peace trips, how good Merle was to the kids and how smartly he wore a suit while bearing witness to the ‘real American way’ of democracy and equality.

The dead bear witness. In this case the witness is that all of us can change things — all of us, whatever our vocation, can make justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Though the Journal Star failed to mention Merle’s peace and justice work, his funeral did and his family designated the Nebraska Peace Foundation as one recipient of memorials for him. Merle’s temple of peace had doors open for all human beings.