Pickens, who pitched his renewable energy and natural gas-based Pickens Plan in Le Mars Thursday before about 700 people, had a quick response when Iowa Independent asked him about King’s view in a news conference after the event.

“I can tell you how he can get a real good lesson on that — put some money in it,” Pickens said. “We’ll see how much money he makes out of it. If he wants to go into off-shore drilling off the East Coast or the West Coast you’re not going to find much oil there. That’s not going to be any big payday for America.”

T. Boone Pickens

LE MARS — Iconic Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has thrown his billion-dollar fortune behind a renewable energy plan diminishing the very black gold that made him rich.

Pickens, the 80-year-old chairman of BP Capital Management and a man CNBC calls the “oracle of oil,” pitched his so-called Pickens Plan in Le Mars Thursday to a crowd of nearly 700 people.

The plan, which Pickens detailed using a blackboard and a healthy dose of front-porch-swing humor, seeks to break the United States’ $700 billion annual dependence on foreign oil through investment in domestic resources, primarily wind and natural gas.

He said the dependence on foreign oil is the major economic and security problem facing the United States.

“I don’t think there’s anyone there who cares one hoot about us — other than our money’s good,” Pickens said.

Pickens, who is spending $58 million on a national advertising campaign and has been pulling crowds like the one in Le Mars at town-hall style meetings around the nation, envisions private industry funding the installation of thousands of turbines in the wind belt, an area he describes as running from Texas to Canada.

He thinks wind energy can provide 20 percent of the nation’s electricity supply. He said Iowa would be a “big” player in the emerging wind-energy corridor.

As more wind power electric plants, Pickens sees the natural gas that had been used there going into transportation fuels to replace gasoline and diesel.

The Pickens Plan Web site already has had 4 million hits. Politically, Pickens’ plan is to build a grass-roots and business support base behind the energy plan so he can leverage a buy-in from Congress.

“The leadership is not in place unless you build a fire under their ass — and I’m not kidding,” Pickens told the Le Mars crowd.

Pickens said he had no interest in running for office himself, making a Ross Perot-style independent bid for the White House.

“If I was 60 years old I could beat both of these guys,” said Pickens — whose upcoming book is titled “The First Billion Is the Hardest.”

Pickens, who funded the Swift Boat ads that devastated U.S. Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, insisted under repeated questioning from Iowa Independent following the Le Mars event that he has no intention of backing either U.S. Sen. John McCain or U.S. Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race.

“I’ve said this is a totally non-partisan issue,” Pickens said. “it doesn’t have anything to do with politics. This is about America is what it is. Nothing like that would happen.”

Pickens said he hopes both candidates support his plan and he is ironing arrangements to meet with them soon.

When asked if he was 100 percent absolute on not making an endorsement Pickens said: “That’s not the deal. I want to put the pressure on both of these guys. I want them to come up with an energy plan and I think mine is the best. So, yes, I’d like for them to say ‘Boone has the best plan.’”

Pickens said he had no intention of forcing a competition between McCain and Obama for the support of his growing organization in order to get more of his plan in one of the party’s platforms.

“I don’t think so,” Pickens said. “That’s going to confuse you and everybody else.”

And, although he backed Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole and Rudy Giuliani, in addition to the campaign against Kerry, Pickens thinks conservatives who are pushing for more domestic oil drilling this year are off base.

WHO:             T. Boone Pickens, 50-year oil and gas developer

WHAT:           Mr. Pickens is pleased to visit LeMars, IA to discuss the Pickens Plan. The Pickens Plan addresses the single biggest crisis facing America today:  the growing and dangerous dependence on foreign oil.  This is the fourth Town Hall Meeting in a series of meetings that will be held across the wind belt since launching the Pickens Plan (www.pickensplan.com) on July 8.

WHEN:           Thursday, August 14 at 2:30 pm CT
(Doors open to the public at 2:00 PM)

WHERE:        LeMars Convention Center
301 12th Street SE
LeMars, IA

Seventy-five years ago, corn was fetching less than 10 cents a bushel and pork was at three cents a pound. A migrant class of American workers was being created. These were the desperate times of the 1930s known as the Great Depression.

And just like today, mortgage foreclosures were taking land and homes away from citizens.In Iowa, angry mobs violently fought judicial decisions that foreclosed their farms. Just 55 days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration, a group of farmers in northwest Iowa angrily shook the foundations of civilized law when they seized Plymouth County District Judge Charles Bradley from his courtroom, dragged him outside to the courthouse lawn and punched, kicked and slapped him.

The mob, part of the Farmer’s Holiday Association, had been organized the previous year to protest the dire financial situation that was ruining family farms throughout the nation. At their first meeting on May 3, 1932, some 3,000 farmers met to form the bloc.

The “holiday” officially called for a farmer’s strike of withholding produce for sale. They sang:

  Let’s call a Farmers’ Holiday
  A Holiday let’s hold
  We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs
  And let them eat their gold.

The association’s leader, Milo Reno, called the strike “the last stand of American agriculture in defense of their rights and their homes.” He claimed the United States had found itself in “the most amazing and confounding situation in the history of the world — people starving in a land with an abundance of food; naked, because of a surplus of clothing; people bankrupt in the richest nation in the world.”

Roads were blocked and fresh milk dumped into ditches during 1932’s infamous “Cow Wars” (also known as the “Milk Wars”) outside Sioux City and Council Bluffs.

In September of that year, the Farmer’s Holiday movement prescribed actions in Tipton to block veterinarians from diagnosing bovine tuberculosis and condemning animals.

With a foreclosure moratorium law in February 1933, the Iowa Legislature attempted to calm violence in rural Iowa by stopping banks from foreclosing on farms unable to cover their mortgages.

The constitutionality of that law was to be challenged in Judge Bradley’s court in Le Mars on that day, April 27, 1933. But before he could hear any arguments, he was charged by more than 100 men in his courtroom.

According to accounts from “A Judge and a Rope” (by George Mills, 1994), “A History of Iowa” (by Leland L. Sage, 1979) and the Chicago Tribune (in the days following the event), Bradley was dragged from the Plymouth County courthouse and refused repeated demands to ignore foreclosure edicts. He was surrounded by an angry and violent mob.

In that public square, he was struck in the face and fell to his knees. The crowd demanded that he agree to stop signing foreclosures, but he refused to disobey his office.

Roughly, the judge was hauled by the mob into the back of a truck and blindfolded. The crowd would be thinned by a change of locale, but unfortunately for the judge, the terror was multiplied.

Dumped a half-mile outside of town, he had a noose placed around his neck. The rope was tossed over an electric light pole, tightened and for an instant the judge was lifted off the ground by his neck.

Again he was asked not to sign foreclosures on farms and this time when he refused his pants were removed, smeared with grease and filled with dirt and gravel.

The 54-year-old judge was crowned with a greasy hubcap and told to get on his knees and pray. Aloud he prayed, “Oh, Lord, I pray thee, do justice to all men.”

Miraculously, this brave prayer seemed to break the will of the mob, and some of the masked men who held the rope got in a car and drove away.

While walking back to town, he was picked up by Rev. J.J. Depree who drove the judge the rest of the way back to town. Judge Charles Bradley escaped with only minor injuries and the need for a wash-up and a change of clothes.

Dr. Thomas Starzl, son of Le Mars Globe Post editor Roman Starzl, was only 7 years old at the time of the almost-lynching. His father was a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and wrote front-page accounts of the incident for the Trib.

In recalling the incident, Starzl told the Iowa Independent:

“The farmers were on a rampage because they couldn’t get properly paid for milk and for their meat from pigs they were raising, so they had gone on a rampage … They were pouring all their milk out and they had vigilantes on all the roads around Le Mars and any scabs trying to break through and sell the milk had to be roughed up.”

After the incident, Gov. Clyde Herring sent hundreds of troops to quell the farm strikes in Le Mars and Denison. Martial law was imposed in several counties until May 17, only five days after the enactment of the New Deal farm bill, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). Considered the first farm bill, the AAA paid farmers a subsidy to leave their fields empty.

Starzl again:

“There was a huge National Guard encampment and the city was put under martial law. I remember that extremely distinctly because I had toy soldiers and there were these real soldiers running around with real guns. I was 7 years old.

What was going on was mortgage closings just the same as going on today and ruthless people were coming along buying up these farms for pennies.

This was a dangerous time in this country. It was a dangerous time in Le Mars because it was the center of a real revolt … It was a real uprising.”

Today, the crossroads where Judge Bradley was brutalized is now a housing addition named in his honor by the real estate developer.

Starzl is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of organ transplantation. The University of Pittsburgh has named the Thomas Starzl Transplantation Institute in his honor and he remains one of the most cited physicians in the world. Now retired, he lives in Pittsburgh, Pa.