Strong Milk

U. S. citizens understand that if people set out to sell dope or whiskey or women, somebody is going to get jailed, hurt or killed. In some cities even such a homely thing as the family wash may cause cracked skulls, bombings. Last week saw the continuation of a new kind of peacetime war. The Nation's milk, product of patient kine, beverage of babies, churned up in violence.* Near Plainfield, Ill. The Guernsey herd of Isaac Lentz, an independent dairyman who had withdrawn from a local milk distributing association and cut his price, lay in their stalls placidly swishing their tails and chewing their nocturnal cuds. Suddenly Farmer Lentz heard a mighty roar. Running outside he discovered that his barn had been bombed, was afire. Before he and his hands could untangle the wire with which the bombers had sealed the door, Farmer Lentz's barn, three horses and 43 cows were a blazing pyre in the night. Two weeks before, the barns of two other dairymen, independents like Farmer Lentz, had been bombed near Joliet.

Few citizens realize that milk wars as bitter as that of northern Illinois have been and are still raging in many another U. S. community. Every large city has its dairymen's cooperative, some subsidized by the Federal Farm Board. Since the farmer is usually unable to market his own milk, these sales agencies become extremely potent, sometimes to the farmers' misfortune. Chief sources of trouble: independent dairymen refusing to abide by the cooperative's price dictates as did Farmer Lentz; cooperatives trying to enter the retail distribution field and thereby running afoul of large retail distributors.

From the second of these causes, milk sold last week in Buffalo, N. Y. for 6-c- a quart. Housewives enjoyed the lowest milk prices in the State, the lowest in Buffalo for 25 years. In Cleveland a price-cutting war between the local cooperatives and a retail subsidiary of far-flung National Dairy Products, which had cut the cost 2-c- a quart, last week ended, with prices up to 12-c- a quart. Similar strife between Pevely Dairy Co. and the Sanitary

Milk Producers Association accounted for burnt barns, dynamited trucks around St. Louis. In Portland, Ore. last August, dairymen demanding higher prices seized distributors' trucks, poured the milk into ditches. At the same time in San Francisco a price war robbed milk of all value, when the product was given away free. In New York City last week, where Mrs. William Randolph Hearst was enjoying her annual Milk Fund celebration to supply milk to poor people's babies, the Health Department commission recommended a ban on all unbottled milk sales at retail.

* Dairy income exceeds that of the motor industry (1929: 3.5 billion dollars). Milk alone produces a national income of 1.4 billion dollars, greater than that of the coal industry (see above).

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