Monday, Jul. 13, 1936
"Worse Than 1934"
In southern Texas last week pelting rains flooded creeks and rivers, drowned 28 citizens, destroyed some $2,000,000 worth of crops, livestock and other property. Almost everywhere else in the vast U. S. granary between the Appalachians and the Rockies farmers tramped sun-baked soil, watched their crops wither and their parched livestock totter, prayed for rain.
After an abnormally dry spring throughout all the 24 leading agricultural States, with week after week of drying wind and blazing sun, everyone was talking of 1934, the year of the Great Drought. In both 1930 and 1934, reported the U. S. Weather Bureau, "the situation was not nearly so critical at the end of June. . . . Pasture lands, hay, oats, spring wheat and truck crops have been hardest hit. Very little pasture is now available between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains. . . . Livestock shipments are becoming heavy because there is no pasture or water."
Secretary of Agriculture Wallace predicted that the drought would be worse than that of 1934 unless rain came before July 20. "I would say," said he, starting West on a tour of inspection, "that the situation today looks as bad as it did in 1934, when Congress voted us $500,000,000 to meet the emergency."
In Washington President Roosevelt called a conference, appointed a committee to survey the situation, decide what was to be done and how much it would cost. Things looked, he gloomed at his next press conference, "awfully serious."*
In western North and South Dakota, east ern Montana and Wyoming, it looked as if there would be no crops at all. And the drought was getting steadily worse in Oklahoma, western Arkansas, northern Tennessee, southern Kentucky. The Government, declared the President, was ready to pour out unlimited amounts of WPA, AAA, Resettlement Administration and Surplus Commodities Corporation money to relieve stricken farmers.
In 1934 the Government bought some 7,000,000 starving cattle, turned most of them into beef for the unemployed. Last week Secretary Wallace ordered the process begun again, allotted $5,000,000 as a starter, planned to buy up to 1,000,000 head. Meantime, the Interstate Commerce Commission authorized sharp cuts in freight rates on live stock shipped out of famine areas.
Swinging through the Northwest, WPAdministrator Harry Hopkins declared the drought in some areas to be "much worse" than in 1934. WPAdministrators in the five worst-hit States -- Minnesota, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas -- were ordered to begin Relief jobs for up to 50,000 destitute farmers at once.
Most of the work would be water conservation -- dams, reservoirs and terraces to hold the rains if & when they did come. But the only permanent solution, declared Administrator Hopkins, was to turn much of the West's cropland into pasture, run the enormous political and sociological risk of moving families wholesale off their ruined acres. By week's end rain had revived the cot ton, tobacco and spirits of the South, but for most of the West there was no relief, no prospect of relief. With some 100,000,000 bushels of wheat burned away, crop statisticians last fortnight gave up all hope that the U. S. would this year get back to exporting a large wheat surplus for the first time since 1931. The Department of Agriculture last week reported the smallest world wheat surplus in nine years. Modifying its crop reduction-soil conservation program in the emergency, AAA announced that farmers in the East Central States who had planted land to unprofitable soil-building crops could sow enough food and feed crops to bring their production up to normal, get their Government bounties just the same.
In Evanston, Ill., that prime New Deal prophet of Federal paternalism, Secretary Wallace, who had promised to make no political speeches on his rescue tour, worried aloud over the possibility of a "weather change" which might be turning the U. S. into a desert. "Of course," he declared, "it is premature to say that our weather has definitely changed, but if we have during the next seven years, weather as freakish as that which we have had during the last seven, it may well be that the people of the U. S. will call on the Federal Government in no unmistakable terms to aid them in making certain profound adjustments."
*Said Otis Moore, manager of the President's 2,500-acre farm near Warm Springs, Ga. last week: "It's bad on the farm. The way it looks now we'll be lucky to make one-fifth of a crop. We're going to lose a lot of money."
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