Cotton Crisis

Last week cotton took wheat's place in the press headlines of the land and in the worried mind of the Federal Farm Board. Good growing weather began bringing in the 1931 crop ahead of schedule. On the Shafter, Calif, farm in which President Hoover has a financial stake, the first bale of long staple was produced three weeks earlier than last year. Ginning the South Carolina crop started at Allendale seven days ahead of time. In Washington, Department of Agriculture officials hotly defended as "reasonably accurate" their 15,584,000 bale crop estimate.* Prices sank to the lowest level since 1899. If they went any lower William Wrigley Jr., who has taken a heavy loss on his bargain to buy cotton with the proceeds of his gum sales in the South (TIME, April 13), threatened to use cotton instead of excelsior to pack his product.

Into the chaos that is cotton the Federal Farm Board, driven to desperation by the failure of its other relief schemes, tossed a startling proposal. It was: Let the South plow under one-third of its cotton crop. The idea was not new. It had been suggested and summarily dismissed at a cotton conference at Austin, Tex. fortnight ago. Stocky little Governor Theodore Gilmore Bilbo of Mississippi had revamped it into a suggestion that planters simply abandon one out of every three rows in the fields. Within 24 hours the Farm Board had filched the Bilbo idea (without credit) and offered it to the Governors of the 14 cotton-growing States as a solution to the cotton problem. Chairman Stone of the Board signed telegrams that went to Montgomery, Phoenix, Little Rock, Sacramento, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Jackson, Santa Fe, Raleigh, Oklahoma City, Columbia, Nashville, Austin. Excerpts:

"Government cotton report . . . provides total crop and carryover supply of more than 24,500,000 bales against probable world consumption of American cotton of 13,000,000 or possibly 14,000,000 bales. . . . This condition has already resulted in drastic declines in cotton prices which if allowed to continue may bring direct disaster to cotton-producing States and indirect distress to the nation. . . . Time has now come when cotton producers themselves must be called upon for immediate and drastic action. . . . Board suggests you immediately mobilize every interested and available agency including farmers, bankers, merchants, landowners and all agricultural educational forces to induce immediate plowing under of every third row of cotton now growing. Problem is to secure abandonment which will give farmers better return on remainder. . . . Board recognizes that this suggestion calls for drastic remedy for serious emergency but major operation of this kind now needed."

The South was being asked to destroy about 5,000,000 bales of its cotton on the chance the other 10,000,000 would bring in more money. At $30 per bale this was equivalent to plowing $150,000,000 in good money back into the ground. As an inducement Chairman Stone promised that, if ten major cotton States agreed to the plan, the Board would withhold from the market its own 1.300,000 bales and get its co-operatives to withhold their 2,000,000 bales, making a total reduction of 8,000,000 bales in the 1931 market. To be effective, Mr. Stone warned, the plow-under must be complete by Sept. 15.

The South stood aghast at this proposal. The cotton-raising President in the White House immediately disclaimed all responsibility for the Farm Board's suggestion. Chairman Stone soon began backing away from his own proposal by declaring it was now up to the States to solve the problem. No consideration had been given to how 2.000,000 cotton planters could be united in such an enterprise, how the stubborn individualists among them could be coerced. Also the Farm Board had forgotten to arrange for the mortgages held by Government and private banks and plastered on almost every stalk of growing cotton.

Governor Sterling of Texas, the No. 1 cotton State, declared vaguely that he would be glad to "co-operate." When Chairman Stone construed this as an acceptance of his "one-out-of-three" program, the Texas Governor hastened to explain that he favored no specific plan, that it would be "just as reasonable to ask the Farm Board to burn its cotton up as to ask farmers to destroy their crop."

Governor Miller of Alabama flayed the Farm Board's plan as "unsound, unwise and impractical." Declared Governor Gardner of North Carolina: "I'm opposed to making the Southern cotton farmer the goat. In this State we didn't plant any third row of cotton this year." Governor Blackwood of South Carolina found the plan "utterly impractical" as each planter would want to let the others do the plowing under. Mused Governor Long of Louisiana noncommittally: "Sounds pretty good--but damned if I know." Governor Murray of Oklahoma turned the plan down with the suggestion that a four-inch ruffle added to the dress of every Chinese woman would solve the cotton problem. Governor Carlton of Florida counterproposed that the full crop be harvested and one-third of it stored by the States.

The only Governor who championed the Farm Board's proposal was the one from whom the Board had borrowed it-- Mississippi's Bilbo. Cried he: "The greatest thing the Farm Board has done for the cotton farmers since saving our market in 1930!" But Governor Bilbo opposed plowing under one row out of three as a "waste of $1,000,000 in time and labor." He would leave the third row standing unpicked.

"Absurd . . . just damn nonsense . . . preposterous ... a bluff . . . midsummer madness . . . damn foolishness . . . just so much bunk," were typical of the epithets which Southern newspapers, cotton planters and agricultural officials heaped on the Board's proposal. Most economists figured that crop destruction might help the cotton merchant but not the planter himself. One Georgia legislator proposed that "we plow under every third member of the Farm Board." Counter proposals deluged the Board. Congressman Patman of Texas suggested that it destroy its own 1,300,000-bale holdings first as an example to the South. Senator Caraway of Arkansas advised the Board to buy up half of the 1931 crop in return for a pledge that the South will plant no cotton in 1932. Within 48 hours the Board's "one-out-of-three" scheme was dead on its hands and the Board lapsed into a troubled silence. Meanwhile came two develop ments which boded ill for the Board's existence after the opening of Congress. Pennsylvania's Senator Reed drafted a bill, supposedly with some form of Ad ministration backing, to abolish the Board altogether. The potent American Farm Bureau Federation announced that, in its opinion, the Farm Board after two years had failed to control surplus production; that therefore the Farm Bureau would resume its fight for the equalization fee.

*Errors in the Government's past cotton crop estimates: 546,000 bales too high in 1927; 187,000 bales too low in 1928; 715,000 bales too high in 1929; 119,000 bales too high in 1930.

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