Abundance v. Scarcity

More than two months ago Secretary Wallace mobilized his Agricultural Adjustment Administration to fight Drought. Gallantly AAA waged its battle, paying farmers rent for dust-dry fields, allowing them to use Government-rented acreage to grow forage, buying more than 1,500,000 head of starving cattle.

Last week Secretary Wallace mobilized his followers for another battle, not against nature this time but against public opinion hostile to the New Deal's treatment of the agricultural crisis. As the great defensive system of the Germans during the War was the Hindenburg Line, so AAA last week relied on its own chief defense:

The Tugwell Line. Over a national radio hook-up Undersecretary Rexford Guy Tugwell turned the flammenwerjer of his wrath on those who use Drought as an argument against crop reduction:

". . . There is something both infantile, obscene and wicked in the eagerness with which the reactionary obscurantists have seized on the great natural calamity of a drought in the entire Northern Hemisphere as a means of destroying or discrediting the will of the American people, as expressed in Congress, for the betterment of agriculture.

"These people would like to abandon the farms, not to the laws of nature, but to the general unfriendliness of speculators. . . . Under their rule they would let the farmer starve; they would let the drought ravage the prairies, and they would tell the farmer that it was just too bad that he was being destroyed. ... By the Agricultural Adjustment Administration there has been established a democratic discipline in agriculture and a co-operative field organization which is on the spot and which, like the Marines, has landed and has the situation in hand. . . .

''Due to the previous acreage control measures, we were immediately able to plant feed crops . . . and purchase . . . the herds of drought-stricken cattle. . . . Since there are 7,000,000 head of cattle in the country in excess of the number needed to maintain an adequate meat and milk supply, even this disaster is not unmanageable. . . .

"That is why the Tory outcry is so infantile and so inconsistent, where it is not the indecent expression of joy that thousands of farmers have been hurt by freak weather. . . ."

Grand Mobilization. Not on the Tugwell Line alone however did AAA depend. It organized every available man for counterattack on "Tory" critics. Over the radio, Assistant AAAdministrator Victor A. Christgau declared that without AAA "farmers would be driven from the land." George E. Farrell, chief of AAA's wheat section, claimed that the coincidence of the drought and AAA's crop reduction program had saved farmers $22,500,000: "When drought comes it doesn't make any difference how many acres you plant. It gets 'em all. It costs about $3 an acre to plant wheat. Farmers left 7,500,000 acres idle to comply with AAA contracts."

While the rhetorical defenses were booming like long-range guns from Washington, other defenders were down on the actual battleline. At Fayetteville, Ark., AAAssistant Director for Production D. P. Trent was telling farmers that AAA is not regimentation at all, that "the most regimental form of regimentation" was cheap grain prices, foreclosed mortgages. At Reno, AAAdministrator Chester C. Davis cried that opponents of AAA had but one idea, the same idea which led to the Depression: to keep the Government from helping farmers. And, most indefatigable of all, was the generalissimo himself, Secretary Wallace. At Ruston, La., at Paducah and at Hopkinsville, Ky., he got up on the stump at farmers' meetings to exclaim :

"The Old Dealers are trying this fall to elect a Congress of men who are unfriendly to the AAA and unfriendly to the farmers except in superficial lip service. They hope to do away with the processing tax. They recently have been pointing out the fact of the most extraordinary drought in 40 years as an argument for abandoning the entire agricultural adjustment program. This effort to use the fact of the drought as an attack on the Agricultural Adjustment program is typical of the shortsighted leadership of the Republican Party from 1931 to 1932."

Critics. Although AAA defenders concentrated their fire of words on "Tories," "Old Dealers" and "Speculators," these same "Tories," "Old Dealers" and "Speculators" had surprisingly little to say last week. Fortnight ago Henry P. Fletcher. Republican National Chairman, charged that Democrats had deliberately held up AAA's benefit payments to farmers to use them later as election bait. With a great display of political righteousness, Secretary Wallace loudly reproved him: "It is a contemptible thing, indeed, for a man of Mr. Fletcher's intelligence and standing in the Republican Party to make, deliberately for partisan purposes, a completely unfounded statement designed to stir up ill will."

Real opposition to AAA was of long standing but had not been taken seriously by Democratic politicians until Drought painfully sharpened arguments against their whole program. Prime criticism :

1) Crop restriction is bad because weather can make a farce or a tragedy out of it.

2) Processing taxes do not promote healthy prosperity. They take money out of the consumers' pockets and put it into the farmers' pockets, but the country as a whole is no better off.

Nobody of consequence has yet accused the American Federation of Labor of being Old Deal Tories. Yet that organization last week in its monthly survey of business, had this to say on 1934 U. S. economics:

"We are living through the results of a long period when balance was not kept between producing and consuming power. . . . We have attempted to restore the balance by stopping production and reducing the living standards of all. . . ."

Economy of Scarcity. The New Deal is based upon the idea that the U.S. is struggling with an "economy of abundance." According to this theory, the country some time during the 1920's solved the problem of how to produce enough goods cheaply. Soon a new problem was encountered: how not to produce too much. Just as Industry, able to produce far more than the U.S. had the money to buy, could be saved only by NRA from cut-throat competition, so farmers producing too much wheat and cotton could be saved only by AAA's crop reductions. But hardly had Dr. Tugwell last week finished telling his radio audience about the "economy of abundance" when up popped a government-paid economist to deny its existence. According to this latest New Deal critic, the "economy of abundance" is the product of "mental astigmatism" and distorted statistics, incapable of standing examination in the light of facts.

Robert R. Doane, onetime expert employed by the National Industrial Conference Board, was hired five months ago as Director of Research for a National Survey of Potential Product Capacity undertaken with PWA funds. Its purpose was to find out how much of every kind of goods the U. S. can produce. Last week Researcher Doane wrote an article in the New Outlook interpreting some of the facts he found.

To calculate how much food the 125,000,000 residents of the U. S. need to keep in normally good health Mr. Doane used a table of per capita food requirements prepared by the Department of Agriculture. In the course of a year this diet would, among other things, provide every citizen with 100 lb. of flour and cereals, 155 lb. of potatoes, 310 qt. of milk, 135 lb. of leafy and other green vegetables, 165 lb. of meat and fish, an egg for breakfast every day. Researcher Doane discovered that with 1929's good crops every citizen could have been provided with all the grain, potatoes, beans, peas, nuts, fats, bacon and lard called for by the diet--and the U. S. would still have had a surplus of 267,000,000 bu. of grain, of a billion pounds of potatoes, etc. But when it came to milk the U. S. would have been 13 billion quarts short; citizens could have got only about 55% of the leafy green vegetables due them. The nation would have had a shortage of 1,144,000,000 doz. eggs, of nearly 2 billion pounds of meat. And instead of getting if oz. of butter a day every citizen would have had to put up with half that, not to mention considerable shortages of tomatoes, oranges and various other vegetables and fruits.

Researcher Doane's conclusion: "Our so-called 'economy of plenty' with its 527 million acres and its six million farmers has failed ... to meet the adequate food requirements of its people to the astonishing extent of nearly 100 billions of pounds of foodstuffs!"

He went on to recite that in 1929 the U. S. production of men's suits was barely one-third suit per male resident. If every suit factory had been run at top. speed day and night, they could not have turned out together enough suits for every man in the country to buy one during the year. The production of women's outer garments was barely one-half garment per female.

"Yet in 1929," wrote Mr. Doane, "in order to supply our population with barely one-half a new garment each, we were forced to import more than one-half billion pounds of wool and cotton, to say nothing of other fibres. And had we then had the mechanical capacity to supply two full garments each we would have been forced to increase our supply of cotton, either by additional importation or cultivation, by a full five billion pounds; and our wool by more than one billion pounds, which means an increase of six times our present number of sheep, and an additional 17 million acres in cotton cultivation. . . ."

Present sponsor of the survey for which Mr. Doane worked is Langdon W. Post, Tenement House Commissioner of New York City's own New Deal Administration. When Commissioner Post heard of Mr. Doane's assault on the "economy of abundance," he said: "I suppose I'll have to take the responsibility for firing him." Out next day went Mr. Doane and 26 others. One of Mr. Doane's coworkers on the survey promptly pointed out that even in 1929 46,000,000 U. S. citizens had incomes of less than $426. hence could not be expected to buy two suits of clothes a year, an egg for breakfast, half a pound of meat and a pint and a half of milk every day.

Presumably the standard of living used by Researcher Doane in his calculations should have been the same standard at which the New Deal was aiming. Yet such an assumption was contradicted by Dr. Tugwell's statement that the U. S. has a surplus of 7,000,000 cattle. Likewise the reduction of the cotton crop by 10 million acres removed all chance that the New Deal would this year be able to supply every U. S. citizen with two outer garments.

Dr. Charles William Burkett. onetime professor of agriculture at New Hampshire College of Agriculture and director of the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station who resigned from the survey when he heard of Mr. Doane's discharge, declared:

"We are going to have a shortage of food in this country, with deplorable conditions, in a year to 18 months. . . . Crop reduction is ridiculous. At the present time we have an undersupply of milk, fruit, vegetables and meats. And prices of food are going to go so high that I don't know how the poor are going to pay for what they eat."

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