Rumblings about debt servitude could certainly still be heard. Foreclosed farmers during the Great Depression mobilized, held “penny auctions” to restore farms to families, hanged judges in effigy, and forced the Prudential Insurance Company, the largest land creditor in Iowa, to suspend foreclosures on 37,000 farms (which persuaded the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to do likewise). A Kansas City realtor was shot in the act of foreclosing on a family farm; a country sheriff was kidnapped while trying to evict a farm widow and dumped ten miles out of town. Urban renters and homeowners facing eviction formed neighborhood groups to stop local sheriffs or police from throwing families out of their houses or apartments. Furniture tossed into the street in eviction proceedings would be restored by neighbors, who would also turn the gas and electricity back on. New Deal farm and housing-finance legislation bailed out banks and homeowners alike. Right-wing populists, like the Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin, carried on the war against the gold standard in tirades tinged with anti-Semitism. Signs like one in Nebraska that said “The Jew System of Banking,” illustrated with a giant rattlesnake, showed up too often. But the age of primitive accumulation, in which debt and the financial sector had played such a strategic role, was drawing to a close.