Hay Down

(See Cover)

In drowsy, cupolaed courthouses, behind the flyspecked fronts of general stores, in thousands of voting booths in a belt stretching through 19 States of the South and West and jumping over the Pacific to Hawaii, Election Day dawned last week. The voters were the nation's growers of cotton, rice, and flue-cured tobacco, 2,500,000 strong. They were asked to give a straight Yes or No on the strictest controls possible under the Agricultural Adjustment Act: The imposition of prohibitive taxes on any producer who markets more than a fixed crop quota in 1939. To the question of how the farmers of the U. S. feel about the most ambitious farm program ever undertaken on their behalf, the Election might spell out a huge Yes, No, or Maybe.

When day was done, it had spelled out a Maybe. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace called the outcome "a clear cut example of economic democracy." Of cotton farmers 82% voted their confidence in a quota--but 92% had been willing to try it for this year, when neither the U. S. surplus had piled up to the 10,000,000 bales, nor the world supply to the 51,000,000 bales reached last week. Only 56% of the tobacco farmers said Yes, less than the two-thirds necessary to invoke the quota, far less than the 86% who shouted Yes last spring. And rice farmers, whose reserves did not reach the 11,974,000 bushels quota level for this year, made their first vote a hearty 64% No.

Concretely, the election changed the farm picture only for flue-cured tobacco.* By voting No, tobaccomen rejected Secretary Wallace's offer to fix a rigid quota for each seller, levy a penalty of one half the market price for excess sales. By voting No, they also ruled out loans on whatever portion of their 1939 crop they may keep off the market. Unaffected by the Election was the "voluntary" half of the farm program--acreage restriction which growers of all three crops make in return for soil conservation payments and other cash benefits.

For the future, the Maybe might mean a great deal. It might not mean opposition to the whole farm program, but merely that farmers are not feeling bad enough just now to be willing to take castor oil. But one thing it did not mean was the wholehearted vote of confidence AAA was looking for, and that last week it needed as never before.

The Farm Problem has been a major political issue for 20 years. For the last six Congress has followed the gyrations of farm income more closely than the Supreme Court is supposed to follow the election returns.

In 1932, with farm income at $4,328,000,000, a post-War low, Herbert Hoover lost every State in the Farm Belt.

In 1933, AAA handed out its first big farm subsidy, $162,000,000 in benefit payments: to plow under 10,500,000 acres of cotton, kill 222,149 brood sows, 6,188,717 little pigs. Farm income rose to $5,117,000,000.

In 1934, Congress extended benefits to more crops, farm subsidies rose to $556,000,000, farm income to $6,348,000,000.

In 1935, the program was consolidated with subsidies at $583,000,000, income up to $7,090,000,000.

In 1936, the Supreme Court invalidated AAA's processing taxes, which had been paying most of the subsidy bill, and a worried Congress hastily patched up the old soil conservation law to deliver as "soil conservation payments" the checks the farmers wanted. With subsidies at $287,000,000 and income at $7,920,000,000, Franklin Roosevelt carried 46 States.

In 1937 subsidies amounted to $367,000,000, and Congress, deciding to make a good thing permanent, wrote a new AAA providing compulsory controls as well as voluntary (i.e., subsidized) crop reductions. Farm income hit $8,521,000,000.

In 1938, the first year under AAA II which was designed to keep five major crops up to "parity prices." only one crop (at average farm prices), tobacco, is selling above parity. Corn, at 41-c- rice at 58-c-, cotton at .08-c-, all stand just above half. Wheat, at 52-c-, is less than half. For the first time in five years farm income has backslid--10%--to $7,625,000,000. Over Franklin Roosevelt's budgetary wails, Congress voted a $212,000,000 appropriation for direct parity payments plus the $500,000,000 earmarked for soil conservation payments; but in the election farm States elected many an anti-New Dealer.

A fortnight hence the Farm Problem will be in the hands of the 76th Congress. Since a good part of the 76th is made up of men who got their jobs from discontented farmers, Administration farm policies face their first real test. Last week's farm referenda confirmed the indications of last month's political elections. Secretary Wallace has no reason to look forward hopefully to the 76th Congress.

Henry III. One autumn evening in 1932 when Candidate Franklin Roosevelt was scheduled to make his ''farm speech" in Topeka, Kans., one of Des Moines, Iowa's leading citizens had dinner with a group of friends. At the dinner Henry Wallace, the shockheaded editor of Wallace's Farmer and Iowa Homestead, raised his fingers, ticked off one by one the things he would say if he were making a farm speech. When guests and host repaired to hear the candidate. Franklin Roosevelt raised his hand, ticked off practically the same things. Henry Wallace broke out in one of his engaging smiles. From that day there has been a Wallace-Roosevelt farm program, with accent on Wallace. Never in the same sense has there been a Morgenthau-Roosevelt fiscal program or a Roper-Roosevelt policy toward business.

In Des Moines the Henry Wallaces were either renowned for their independence, or cussed for their stubbornness. Henry Wallace I, a Presbyterian preacher, launched Wallace's Farmer ("Good Farming. Clear Thinking. Right Living.") at the age of 60 despite the best professional opinion that it would fold in six months. In his 70s he told off Roosevelt I about Agriculture. Into his 80s, to half of Iowa, he was beloved "Uncle Henry." His son Henry Cantwell Wallace was a big, frail man who wore himself out as Harding's Secretary of Agriculture in jurisdictional disputes with Herbert Hoover's Department of Commerce. He left his son with a distrust of politics and a dislike of Herbert Hoover so strong that in 1928 Henry III deserted his traditional Republicanism to support Al Smith.

Though the Roosevelt-Wallace farm philosophies meshed, in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt did not get the ideas in question direct from Philosopher Wallace. Candidate Roosevelt took advice on the farm problem from others who shared the Wallace idea that farmers needed something more than price rigging. Among them was Professor Rexford Guy Tugwell of Columbia University, who in 1928 had tried to sell Al Smith a farm program which that salty sidewalk philosopher somehow couldn't swallow. Among them was red-faced, downright George Peek, who had grown interested in export subsidies while he and his partner Hugh Johnson were trying to sell Moline plows. One piece of advice that seemed to crop up wherever Mr. Roosevelt turned was that as Secretary of Agriculture he should get Henry Agard Wallace.

The Secretary. "The most Christlike man of his generation," New Dealers gushed when the new Secretary appeared, a simple, heavy man with slept-in looking clothes and a way of saying exactly what he thought. Dressed to the nines for the Inauguration, Henry Wallace plaintively asked his colored houseman. Edward, whether he had to wear clothes like that for every Cabinet meeting. It was told that as a child he loved his dog so deeply that he learned to bark and bury bones; that as an idealistic experimenter he had lost twelve pounds trying to live on a diet of corn; that he so disliked his big mahogany desk when he went to the Department of Agriculture that he worked on only one end of it.

Gradually Washington came to recognize that the Secretary of Agriculture was something more than a rural curiosity. He was a man of ideas which he liked to ponder long and deeply. At first a number of braintrusters were enrolled among his aides --Rex Tugwell and Jerome Frank among them. But their idealistic social dreaming was not in the same key as Henry Wallace's slow digestion of ideas.

Henry Wallace got involved in few rumpuses. After five years his tempo is little changed. And gradually he has surrounded himself with men who share his own homely background. As Harry Hopkins' WPA is filled with social workers and reminds visitors of a settlement house, so Henry Wallace's Agriculture looks like the agricultural extension bureau of a midwestern university.

This year when Wallace revamped Agriculture (primarily to lessen the conspicuousness and vulnerability of AAA by splitting its functions among other divisions), he upped four trusted men to the chief jobs around him. Bald Howard R. Tolley, a thinker like his boss, was relieved of his tasks as Administrator to head the revamped Bureau of Agriculture Economics. Economist Albert G. Black, an energetic, 42-year-old idea man, was given Marketing & Regulation. Promoted to head new divisions were Soil Conserver H. H. Bennett (Physical Land Use) and Chemist Henry G. Knight (Research & Technology). Closer than any of these to the Secretary is lean, loyal, Lincolnesque Under Secretary Milburn Lincoln Wilson, a fellow alumnus of Iowa State College whose father used to read him Wallace's Farmer by kerosene lamp, with special emphasis on Uncle Henry's Sabbath School lessons.

"Hay Down." In the days before George Peek, the first Administrator, infringed on the solid departmental autonomy of Agriculture and, after a battle with Idealist Tugwell & Co., was cast into the cold, he used to worry when the Wallace enthusiasm for new ideas outran the Peek caution. "Henry," Peek would warn, "we've got more hay down now than we can get in before it rains." Last week Henry Wallace had plenty of hay down and it was raining hard. But as he believes his Hi-Bred Corn* is the best seed on the market, so he believes his agricultural program is the best U. S. farmers can find. As he believed in 1933, so he believes now that his twin policies, controlled production and stabilized purchasing power, are the best compromise farmers can make with the present U. S. economy. Believing him. Congress has given the Department of Agriculture over $6,554,656,163 to carry them out and Henry Wallace still thinks they are worth the price.

In previous years when Congress assembled, Mr. Wallace generally had a new program to offer and the political forces of farm discontent could be induced to sit down at the piano and try the new composition. Now he has no such program and the same forces will go gunning for his past policies. He wishes the gunmen would try the piano. Although farm income is down, he argues that farmers should leave well enough alone, asks Congress to believe that the farm laws are good as they stand. He and the New Deal will, it appears, play an unaccustomed defensive role.

This year, urged on by Congress, he tried his hand at subsidizing export of wheat, 100,000,000 bushels of it. Some 30,000,000 bushels have been exported under the subsidy. But with other nations practicing self-sufficiency and opposed to dumping, he has little hope of expanding this policy. The only new idea, which he might have offered Congress, was a proposal by Planner Black and others of Agriculture's thinkers to establish a two-price system within the U. S. To sell farm products cheap to the poor. This raised no hosannas when Mr. Wallace suggested it publicly two months ago, and farm belt Senators spoke slightingly of it. So Mr. Wallace is ready to stand pat on AAA as it is.

The strength of this defensive position is that critics are almost equally short of new plans. The only seriously agitated alternative to his farm policy, now being pushed in the Cotton Belt, is the scheme sometimes called "domestic allotment," for guaranteeing the cost of production on all crops consumed in the U. S., dumping the balance at world prices. Henry Wallace insists that to try this or any other form of price rigging without production control would be Agriculture's quickest road to disaster.

Now all Henry Wallace's hay is down. He now hopes that it won't take too bad a wetting before the barometer of farm income turns up again. Already the rain has made his Presidential boom soggy. Jim Farley's assertion that the Democrats could not pick an ex-Republican as their candidate in 1940 and the Janizariat's anger at Wallace's refusal to help purge Iowa's Senator Gillette did not do the Wallace boom so much damage as the defeat last month of his Iowa political ally, Governor Kraschel. As a boy, however, at the age when most moppets hope to grow up to be President, Henry Wallace once answered a kindly visitor who asked what his ambition was: "To make the world safe for corn breeders."

*Burley and dark tobacco vote this week.

*His strain of thoroughbred seed corn, sold through the corn belt by Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Co. in which Wallace is now a small stockholder. He holds no stock in Wallace's Farmer which after an expensive 1929 merger with its competitor, Iowa Homestead, passed out of the family's hands in 1932..

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