Patton is Willing
Franklin Roosevelt, who likes a good scrap, refereed a David-&-Goliath fight between two farm leaders last week. At stake was a basic issue in the fight to control inflation (see p. 17).
The defending champion was aging (66), opportunistic Edward Asbury O'Neal III, president of the big American Farm Bureau Federation (500,000 higher-income families) and an old-line professional farm leader who believes in inflation for farmers only, 110% of parity, scarcity farming (TIME, July 20).
The challenger was young (39), idealistic, hard-working James G. Patton, president of the up-&-coming but small Farmers Union (125,000 low-income farm families). He stands foursquare for 100% (not 110%) parity farm prices, family farming as against big-scale commercial agriculture, cooperation with labor.
The fight occurred in the President's study. Franklin Roosevelt had called in five farm spokesmen to get their views on farm prices, wages and inflation.
O'Neal, who knows that Patton has the respect and support of A.F. of L., C.I.O. and the Railway Brotherhoods, romped & stomped over Patton's promise that the farmer and organized labor can be brought to agree to wage and fair-price ceilings. O'Neal, on no such good terms with labor, swore it could not be so. If O'Neal was right, any effective inflation-control program was a political impossibility. His big head bobbing in emphasis, Patton drove home his answers. Patton remained calm, sure of his ground. O'Neal was mad enough to burst. For once the President let others talk, sat back enjoying Challenger Patton's able performance.
It was Jim Patton's second White House visit within a fortnight. The first time, in his rumbling organ voice, he promised Farmers Union's support for the President's anti-inflation program. He insisted that necessary wartime food production can come only from the individual farmer, with emphasis away from wheat and one-crop products--to hell, he said, with bigger AAA payments for farmers who do not produce.
The one farm leader who was willing to take this stand has played his cards shrewdly, honestly; once a migrant farm hand, he has put himself well within the New Deal's inner fold.
James George Patton came up the hard way. He was born in Bazar, Kans. in 1902, the year the Farmers Union (full name: Farmers Educational & Cooperative Union of America) was founded by a liberal, farm-minded printer and ten farmers in a barn near Point, Tex. When his miner-engineer-farmer father died in Colorado, young Jim had to support his mother, three sisters, a wife and child, and a mortgaged farm. He worked his way through college, managed a co-op insurance company, taught school, finally became secretary of the Colorado Farmers Union in 1934. In 1940 he became the national president, first on trial basis because he was so young. Big, loose-jointed, boyish-looking Jim was elected to a three-year term this year. Union members in 26 States own cooperatives with assets of $100 million that handle oil, insurance, crops, farm supplies on the Rochdale plan --one stockholder, one vote.
Smiling Jim Patton's main job now is building membership. He does it in his own way. A local Southern leader offered to deliver him 30,000 farmers en bloc for appropriate considerations; Jim turned the politico down. In 1940 John L. Lewis approached Jim with a plan for C.I.O. financing of an intensive membership drive; Patton refused the offer, fearing he would lose control of his union to Lewis.
With rumblings among the farmer rank & file over their reactionary leadership, there may well be a realignment in farmer organizations. And if a workable form of inflation control is developed, Jim Patton, the only farm leader who was willing to play ball, may well turn up as a much bigger figure against the background of plowed fields.
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