Cotton & Bread

Raising its ugly head last week, avarice threw a bad scare into the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. The South reported to Washington that cotton planters, hungrily watching their product go to 10-c- per Ib. for the first time in two years, had agreed to destroy less than 6,000,000 acres of their current crop under the Domestic Allotment Plan. The Administration wanted 10,000,000 acres (estimated at 25% of the total yield) plowed under or left unplucked, for which it was prepared to pay "benefits" to be collected from a cotton processing tax as yet officially unannounced.

For the second time in a week, a publicized message from the President to somebody else was counted on to save the day (see p. 13). Up to an NBC microphone marched young, hard-driving Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace to read a letter President Roosevelt had written him "to make it very clear" that he "attached the greatest possible importance to the cotton adjustment campaign."

"I myself am one of those who as a planter of cotton has suffered from the absurdly low prices of the past few years," said Farmer Roosevelt, referring to small tenant plantings in past years on his farm near Warm Springs, Ga. (The President has no cotton this year.) "What I am concerned about, and what every other cotton grower ought to think about, is the price of cotton next year if cotton acreage is not reduced.

'"There are two reasons why every cotton grower should go along with the Government's national responsibility. The first is the patriotic duty of making the plan a success for the benefit of the whole country; and the second is the personal advantage of every cotton grower in helping as an individual to reduce an oversupply of cotton and thereby obtaining a better price for what he grows."

"Much of the recent increase in the price," warned Secretary Wallace, "has come as the speculators' anticipation of this acreage reduction. . . . If a grower refuses to face those facts . . . it is his funeral."

Cotton was not the only agricultural product which was on the minds of the President and his Secretary. A basic credo of the New Deal is that you can raise the price of raw materials a lot without raising much the cost of the products they go into. The 30-c- per bu. processing tax on wheat, just effective, was passed on in toto to bread consumers. In Chicago and downstate Illinois, a 1-lb. loaf rose from 5-c- to 6-c-. The 24 oz. loaf, price 10-c-, was reduced to 20 oz. New York City was hit in the breadbasket when a 1-c- and 2-c- increase was indicated. North Dakota bakers set the minimum price for a "standard" loaf of bread at 12-c-, a 1-c- rise. In Rome and Syracuse, N. Y. a 1-lb. loaf of bread rose 1-c-. "You can't have your cake and eat it," observed President Henry Stude of the American Bakers Association, denying the 3-c- bread price upping in Iowa which horrified Secretary Wallace week before (TIME. July 10).

Again the slangy lowan, procurator of food prices under the Industrial Recovery Act, lashed out, this time in his Hearst Universal Service colyum: "If any group tries to chisel, we have the power and intention to come down on them hard!"

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