Tottering Table

By radio one day last week AAAdministrator Chester C. Davis warned the nation's farmers that without amendments now pending in Congress the Agricultural Adjustment Act was like a square table with three legs. Same day came the news that two Republican holdovers had dealt Administrator Davis' table two blows which left it tottering.

Last year U. S. District Judge Charles Irvin Dawson of Louisville upheld the Frazier-Lemke Farm Mortgage Act "with extreme reluctance." Then this thin-lipped Southern Republican began to bear down on the New Deal in earnest. In quick succession he declared illegal the condemnation of private property for PWA slum clearance, the NRA Bituminous Coal Code (TIME, March 11). Last week Judge Dawson struck his third blow by ruling AAA's Kerr-Smith Tobacco Control Act unconstitutional.

To force tobacco crop reduction and finance reduction benefit payments, the Kerr-Smith Act imposed a 25% processing tax on 1934 tobacco grown without AAA contracts, a 33% tax on the 1935 noncontract crop. Unable to sign contracts because their land was rented, the Penn Brothers of Kentucky's Fayette County were assessed $7,000. They appealed to Judge Dawson for a protective injunction. Last week he declared tobacco-growing an intrastate business over which Congress had no power, ordered the Penns' $7,000 refunded, denounced the Act's "naked unconstitutionality."

On the heels of Judge Dawson's ruling came a revelation that Comptroller General John R. McCarl had put AAA in the worst hole of its career. When drought began to shrivel Midwestern wheat fields AAA relieved spring wheat growers of their pledge to cut their 1935 acreage by 10%, promised they would still get some $30,000,000 in benefit payments for acreage reduction. Ruled Comptroller McCarl: No reduction, no bounties.

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