Merle Hansen (November 11, 1919 – March 27, 2009) was the founding president of the North American Farm Alliance and a spokesman for the plight of family farmers.
Hansen viewed farm policy as an issue of social justice and often urged farmers to align themselves with minorities, environmentalists, the urban poor, labor unions, and other constituencies often regarded as marginalized in American culture.
[citation needed] The Holiday's plan for increasing prices never proved feasible, but the "penny auctions" were occasionally successful in preventing banks from foreclosing on individual farmers.
Local law enforcement officials often discovered they were powerless to stop these tactics, and individuals at the auction who made earnest bids on the items in the sale were often intimidated into silence by Association members[citation needed].
Often meeting in an auto-repair garage owned by Hansen's family, the "Madison County" chapter of the Association gained national attention for several successful actions, including the orchestration of a "penny auction" in Elgin, NE and the reacquisition of farmer-owned property that had been seized by banks.
Stover was a close ally of former Vice President Henry C. Wallace and one of the policy authors of the New Deal's innovative but controversial agricultural reforms.
[citation needed] During his time in Iowa with Farmers Union, Hansen became a close friend and supporter of the prominent African American activist Edna Griffin, the organizer of one of the nation's first desegregation campaigns.
He also served as a state officer in the American Agriculture Movement, the militant farm organization responsible for orchestrating the "tractorcades," a public relations spectacle in which hundreds of farmers drove their tractors through the city streets of Washington DC.
[citation needed] He was a strong and consistent advocate of parity price indexing of agricultural commodities, and often encouraged family farmers to align themselves with other marginalized constituencies in American life.
An oral history of Hansen's involvement in farm protest movements is available in Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It by Studs Terkel.
The manuscript collection available at ISU in Ames includes his speeches and writings, the organizational archives of the many organizations he was involved with, and exchanges of letters with dozens of correspondents.