Farm First

Ohio's Vic Donahey has lately boasted that he will vote against the Pope-McGill Farm Bill pending in the Senate on the ground that he cannot understand it. This was practically the only complaint not offered by various rebellious members in the House last week, as Chairman Marvin Jones of the Agriculture Committee maneuvered his 86-page Farm Bill toward the first vote taken in either House on a part of the President's program for the special session.

Relentlessly sidetracking members who tried to introduce unwanted amendments, the House leadership apparently had matters in hand when Wisconsin's Progressive Gerald Boileau managed to introduce an amendment outlawing benefit payments to farmers who, among other things, used converted cotton fields to graze cattle. Dairy farmers rose in strength against cotton farmers and the Boileau amendment was adopted 202-to-188. Then Minnesota's August Andresen moved to send the bill back to committee, and so many infuriated Southerners joined the revolt that for a moment the bill seemed likely to be scrapped. After the motion to recount had carried on the first count, the leaders were barely able to collect enough votes from the cloakrooms to beat it on a roll call, 206-to-197. A moment later the House, settling back into something nearer its accustomed docility, passed the bill, complete with Boileau amendment, 267-to-130.

Since the House bill is destined to be rewritten in Conference after the Senate passes the Pope-McGill Bill, Administration leaders completed the first month of the special session with the hardest part of their No. 1 job still ahead. Both House and Senate bills aim to give Secretary Wallace more power to deal with mounting farm production than he possesses under last year's makeshift Soil Conservation Act. Both authorize him to draw up annual marketing quotas in advance for wheat, corn, cotton, rice and tobacco, to obtain observance of them by means of benefit-paying voluntary contracts. Both bills agree in principle that when reserves on hand grow too large and two-thirds of the producers involved consent through a referendum, compulsory marketing control can be invoked and penalty taxes levied on further sales. Beyond that the House and Senate bills have so little in common that it was hard to find anyone in or out of Congress last week who supported both.

A dilemma facing all farm Congressmen who hope to be re-elected next year is that whereas invoking compulsory control too soon can be counted on to infuriate their farming constituents, allowing voluntary control to stretch too far will cost so much in benefit payments that it will smash New Deal plans for a balanced budget. Considerably the vaguer of the two, the House bill leans heavily on voluntary control, authorizes moderate penalties only after reserves on hand have grown to 1,050,000,000 bushels of wheat, 2,859,000 bushels of corn, 20,900,000 bales of cotton, 13,300,00 barrels of rice, 1,640,000 pounds of flue-cured tobacco and correspondingly large supplies of other types. The Pope-McGill Bill, embodying Secretary Wallace's personal program and supported at his behest by President Ed O'Neal of the potent Farm Bureau Federation, leans equally heavily on compulsory control, authorizes the levy of practically confiscatory penalty taxes when reserves have reached much lower levels. Chief certainties in the situation were that: 1) the eventual compromise would cost more than the appropriations of $500,000,000 already made under the Soil Conservation Act, 2) no new farm bill would be ready soon enough for any 1938 crop.

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