The Cosmos Within

I was sorry to hear Dr Hopkins became embittered in his later years (1973-1975), as I remember him as a genial and well mannered person, but such a turnabout is almost inevitable when assaulted by the combined forces of government agencies and tax collectors.  I believe, but am not certain, he began running in to financial woe when the college lost accreditation, as that likely meant the property taxes were then recomputed at a much higher residential rate, which I am certain even then would have been horrific to consider. 

I can infer some of his anti-government attitude may have been shaped when he as a well educated young man (Phi Beta Kappa, Drake University) most likely read newspaper accounts of the day's current events, which undoubtedly included articles of dire news like we read daily today, these endless reports of devastating economic collapse that only threatens to grow worse.  Certainly the Great War.  The Dust Storms that could seem cataclysmic.

Then, that more historic economic downturn, The Great Depression and, for him, witnessing the endless foreclosures on thousands of farmers in Iowa, who lost family farms built up through generations of family labors likely did not go unnoticed.  Such Iowa foreclosures were viewed as the compounded result of an early government economic interference in elevating crop prices during the Great War (WW I) to feed the soldiers overseas.  That economic move encouraged expansion of property holdings to provide more production.  With the government then removing those price protections farmers who had borrowed on their land and crops to buy more land for growing more crops spiraled into foreclosure in a big broken shoelace kind of thing.  And the depression in Iowa started early, in the early 20s with a staggering number of bank failures in the state, all the direct result of farmers not being able to pay money to the banks on their loans and mortgages because they couldn't sell the crops .

The government gave and then the government took away ... and people suffered.  A similar thing happened in New Mexico, when the bean field farmers at the onset of WWI were awarded great and lucrative contracts which they gladly signed, but then somewhat mysteriously the bean fields were hit by a blight before the first acres could be harvested and they've not been able to grow beans a day since in the Albuquerque environs at least.  As a result, locals still look on the government as a curse and some claim they see the blight as a form of punishment or divine instruction.  But you've likely heard that story already. 

Dr Hopkins obviously benefited from and enjoyed some of the tax benefits of running an educational institution through the decades.  He perhaps even claimed more tax-deductible benefits as he early (1960) understood the importance of ordination (and I am trying to find where his "Dr" was awarded, as I suspect his was a doctor of divinity).

I understand he had mortgaged his father's farm (Rocklyn) in Iowa by the time I had encountered him again (1969), but I don't know whether specifically just to help keep the estate afloat, satisfy creditors and keep them at bay, or if he had (just guessing) been lured or enticed into some investment scheme.  That farm, which was the family farm for over a century, was simultaneously foreclosed upon when the estate went into the hands of bankers in California (Viking Mortgage, which then foreclosed on a sum of $70,000 on a near priceless property and sold the estate for a tidy profit to a handful of real estate investors who in turn sold to Larry Leon).