Legge &. Job

When President Hoover took Alexander Legge from his $100,000-per-year job as head of International Harvester Co. to make him the $12,000-per-year chairman of the brand new Federal Farm Board, Mr. Legge asked for and got the minimum appointment of one year (TIME, July 15). To Businessman Legge that seemed ample time to set up the $500,000,000 relief machinery authorized by Congress. The year passed. Chairman Legge found that "relieving agriculture" was not the simple direct thing he had anticipated. Husbandmen would not "cooperate" on mere orders from the Board. Commission men fought back desperately when their business was squeezed by cooperatives. Foreign countries could not be forced to buy U. S. crop surpluses. Wheat prices refused to rise when the Board tried to bull the market by direct buying. Business men flayed the Board for its "socialistic program" of government-in-business (TIME, April 28).

Stung by these attacks and challenged by the knottiness of his unfinished assignment, Chairman Legge asked President Hoover to reappoint him to office "until the shooting is over and this thing is safely on its feet." Last week President Hoover gladly complied with this request, renominated Mr. Legge as head of the Farm Board for six years--long enough to make or break the current farm experiment and Mr. Hoover's maximum expectancy for White House residence. Although many a Senator violently criticized Mr. Legge's policies, the Senate last week recognized his sportsmanship, confirmed his nomination.

Wheat. Immediately confronting Chairman Legge as he began his second year in office was the 1930 wheat crop. Last week from Grandfield, Okla., moved the first carload of this year's harvest "all the way from farm to final buyer through cooperative marketing agencies," according to the boast of Farmers National Grain Corp.

But all the efforts of Chairman Legge, his Farm Board and its network of cooperatives could not hold up wheat prices. The July figure in Chicago slumped to $1 per bu.--7-c- below last year's mark. Traders in the pit spoke of a "panicky feeling." Growers out in the country wondered when, if ever, the Farm Board would get them better prices. Meanwhile the National Grain Corp. braced itself to handle 300 million bushels of wheat (about one-third of the crop total) through its elevators and co-operative agencies. From Hall-Baker Co. in Kansas City it hired Paul Bartlett to operate its export business.

Looming over the whole wheat market was an economic situation more potent than the Farm Board as a price-fixer. The visible world supply of wheat in May was 470 million bu., of which almost half (225,000,000 bu.) was held in the U. S. The Farm Board had advocated this holdover-from-1929 policy which now hung like an incubus over 1930 prices. The U. S. Department of Agriculture last week estimated the 1930 winter wheat crop at 532 million bu.--46 million bu. below last year's harvest of the same grain. But even this apparent cut did not materially aid prices. The spring wheat crop remained as yet unestimated. The Farm Board, according to grain experts, is bucking the same world-wide economic depression that has retarded U. S. business, reduced U. S. exports and imports, crashed stockmarket prices to new lows.

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