It Happened One Day

Unlike the embattled National Recovery Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration has no limited term of life, is continuable at the will of the President. But AAA is seeking from Congress additional powers: 1) to license the handlers of sugar beets, fruit, vegetables, milk, milk products, wool and 2) to pry into the records of all handlers and manufacturers of all AAA products (TIME, May 13). Contrariwise, handlers who hate the AAA have launched a determined counter-drive to make Congress reduce instead of extend AAA's sway. Peak of this agitation came last month when a delegation of New England Governors went to Washington wailing that unless the cotton processing tax was withdrawn, their states' textile industry would be ruined (TIME, April 22). At that time AAAdministrator Chester Davis told a friend: "Well, there's one lobby you haven't heard from. That's the farmers. And when they come, you'll sit up and take notice."

Last week the farmers came. Washington sat up, took excited notice.

At Constitution Hall. Clifford Hood ("At home they call me Cliff") Day of

Plainview, Tex. was credited with evolving the whole thing beneath his pearl grey ten-gallon hat. A tall, loose-jointed, deep-drawling farmer of 46, Cliff Day has a wife, six children and a 320-acre farm which has been judged "best-balanced" in the State. When AAA came along, Cliff Day was made Chairman of the State Cotton Advisory Board and Hale County

Cotton Committeeman. And when processors began sniping at the cotton tax, Chairman Day and some of his public-spirited neighbors decided to invite representatives of the nation's farmers to rendezvous with them in Washington to "demand continuance of AAA and to point out the benefits already accrued them." The benefits were realistic. Hundreds of thousands of farmers like Cliff Day had dipped into

AAA's $742,000,000 benefit bag, thousands more, also like Cliff Day, were receiving small but welcome salaries as AAA field executives. So enthusiastic rural meetings took place all over the South and West, collections were raised to send delegates to Washington.

By bus, car and rail the farmers suddenly began pouring into Washington one day last week. Special trains arrived by night, parked near the Department of Agriculture Building. Shortly after sunrise a column of men with horny hands, brown faces and shaved necks climbed down from the Pullmans, filed into the Department to wait for Secretary Wallace, the Great White Father of Agriculture, to come to work. Soon the capital was swarming with cotton planters from Texas, wheat growers from Kansas, North Carolina tobacco men, Iowa corn-hoggers. For with their benefit checks in jeopardy, the farmers had rallied to Cliff Day's convention with a will.

The AAA and Department of Agriculture, if they knew of the impending "march," had made no mention of it to the Press. The descent on the marble halls of Government by 4,000 farmers from 25 states--a lobby unparalleled for size and sudden "spontaneity" -- caught newshawks flatfooted.

The main meeting was called for 10 a. m. in Constitution Hall, scene of many a socialite Washington musicale. But their early rising had made the farmers early for all appointments, so it was not much after nine when they began squeezing out of Washington's tiny taxicabs, deploying awkwardly into the huge building. *Inside, their embarrassment quickly wore off (see cut opposite, below). Constricting "store clothes" coats were peeled, exuberant cries of "Yip-pee!" went up and in an atmosphere part camp-meeting and part Saturday-night-at-the-county-fair, sectional lines began to appear.

"Come over here, you Razorbacks!" invited a lusty Arkansan.

"We want Bil-1-l-bo!" cried the united Mississippi delegation.

"Come up here, you Georgia Crackers!" 75-year-old W. A. Shiver shouted through his snowy, walrus mustache. This tieless cotton farmer from Cairo, Ga. also launched a running tirade against his fellow-Georgian, anti-New Dealer Governor Eugene Talmadge, crying: "We ain't got no Governor, but we're here anyhow!"

Cliff Day had gaveled for order; a collection of $600 in nickels and dimes had been taken up in a tin wastepaper basket to pay for the hall; an Alabaman had made it clear that "this trip is of our own planning" and a South Carolinian had pledged "we have come to praise and not to condemn" when the nation's No. 1 Farmer stood up to address "the finest farm meeting I ever attended." Amid a storm of happy hog-calls, that agricultural editor and corn-raising expert, Henry Agard Wallace, began by proposing the "reelection of Theodore Roosevelt." Recovering the fumble, the Secretary of Agriculture blushingly explained that "in 1912 I was a Bull Mooser myself." Any forensic slip the Secretary might have made was forgotten when he began assailing "the big boys who want to take away our processing tax." Some, he admitted, were "upstanding individuals" but "they have allowed their minds to be prostituted by middlemen."

Old Mr. Shiver expressed the convention's sentiments when he interrupted by shouting: "Brother, we just knocked 'em loose from the teat a little bit. We're gonna knock 'em all the way loose and suck a little ourselves!"

On the South Lawn, Having listened to the biggest professional farmer in the land, in the afternoon the convention had a talk from the biggest amateur farmer in the land. Standing on the south lawn of the White House, where Washington moppets traditionally roll Easter eggs, they heard Secretary Wallace introduce from the South Portico "the heart of America"--Franklin D. Roosevelt. When the joyous roaring ceased, the President complimented his audience on being "a pretty good-looking crowd" and, motioning behind him at members of the House Agriculture Committee, remarked that he had "a few members of Congress in captivity with me today." He thought of the occasion, said the President, "as a kind of surprise birthday party, for it was just two years and two days ago that the Agricultural Adjustment Act became law.

"It is high time for you and for me to carry, by education, knowledge of the fact that not a single program of the AAA contemplated the destruction of an acre of food crops in the United States in spite of what you may read or be told by people who have special axes to grind. It is high time for you and me to make clear that we are not plowing under cotton this year, that we did not plow it under in 1934, and that we only plowed some of it under in 1933 because the Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed after a huge crop of cotton was in the ground."

Most things to most men, the President occasionally dropped into the forthright, homespun language of his forthright, homespun audience. Thus four times did he allude to AAA's foes as "the high and mighty," cracking out with: "A great many of the high and mighty . . . have been deliberately trying to mislead people who know nothing of farming by misrepresenting--no, why use a pussyfoot word? --by lying about the kind of a farm program under which this nation is operating today."

By the time he came to the point at which he bade them "good luck" with the wish that they would "come back and see us again some day," the "heart of America" had indelibly pressed his smiling image into 4,000 rustic bosoms for a generation. "I was kinda on the fence before I came here," confessed one Drought-beset Minnesotan, "but, oh boy, he's got me now!"*

That evening the jubilant Texans had dinner at trie Mayflower with their Congressmen. Capitalizing a Democratic spree, shrewd Republican Senator Arthur Capper dined his fellow Kansans at the Burlington. The other delegates either left town, went back to the parked Pullmans or cheap hotels for the night or repaired to the Gayety Burlesque Theatre where their "Yip-pees!" annoyed the excitement-seeking young diplomatic crowd which patronizes the place.

Surprise? Surprise? "Because your cause is so just," the President had told the farmers, "no one has had the temerity to question the motives of your 'march on Washington.' " But by the following morning plenty of the President's enemies were curious about the origins of the "march." At best, Administration critics felt that AAA had behaved disingenuously in remaining silent about the "surprise birthday party" until the celebrants were dramatically within the Capital gates. At worst, AAA was suspected of having organized and financed the whole affair as a demonstration to scare Congress into giving it the additional powers it wanted. Vainly AAAdministrator Davis declared that all he knew about the "march" was that he had instructed county agents not to accompany it. Vainly Secretary Wallace protested that the first he had heard about it was "in the Press from Texas."

The "march" was an amazing piece of Administration demagoguery to New York's Representative Hamilton Fish Jr. Sententiously remarked he: "Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad."

Dispassionately observed Political Pundit Frank R. Kent: "Probably the facts will never be fully known. To a detached observer, however, two things seem clear. One is that, without in the least doubting the veracity of Mr. Wallace or Mr. Davis, somebody connected with the AAA knew a lot more about this movement than they. They would, of course, welcome an investigation and it would establish their complete ignorance and innocence. Nonetheless, somewhere down the line, if all were known, there worked the hidden hand of a really skillful 'public relations counsel.' "

*No extravagance was the farmers' choice of transport. Washington is divided into three taxicab zones. A ride anywhere in Zone 1 costs 20<<4 and Zone i covers practically all the business and government building section. Since five can ride as cheaply as one, a two-mile trip can be made for less money in one of Washington's taxis (mostly Chevrolets) than on one of Washington's street cars (fare 10?) whose routes are so confused by the city's intricate plan as to be practically unintelligible to a stranger. Rich visitors sometimes tip as much as the fare; less affluent visitors tip 10$; old Washingtonians, newshawks, Senators tip 5^; government clerks, rustics and Congressmen often tip nothing. However, if last week's farmers did not tip they paid well, for many a taxi driver took advantage of their ignorance to make them pay 20? apiece instead of 20 a trip. *On their side, the enthusiastic rustics had so intoxicated the President that at his press conference, shortly after the speech, he addressed the correspondents with good-natured deprecation as "city slickers."

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