So Long, Ed

Edward Asbury O'Neal III is no dirt farmer. A jovial man with a Southern planter's courtliness, he likes good clothes, good living and glittery functions. He habitually has two bourbon toddies before dinner and is equally at ease wielding a salad fork or a gavel ("Let's us folks give that gennaman from Miss'ippi a chance to say what's botherin' 'im").

Yet Ed O'Neal, tough and profane as well as courtly, has been the most powerful spokesman U.S. farmers have ever had. All during the Roosevelt years, he--more than any other man--shaped U.S. farm policy. In his heyday as president of the rich American Farm Bureau Federation (membership: 1,275,000), he had no peer as a Washington lobbyist. He knew when to cajole, when to burst into anger, when to be imperious, when to recite statistics, when to tell a droll story. The Agricultural Adjustment Act was the result of Ed O'Neal's ideas. He "nominated" Henry Wallace for Secretary of Agriculture, backed his crop-control program ("Plow the little pigs under"), persistently pushed parity payments onward & upward.

That Red Soil. But lately Ed O'Neal has slowed down. At 72, his hands and his head shake with palsy. He has difficulty lighting his Dunhill pipe. Last week, at the Farm Bureau's 29th meeting in Chicago, Ed O'Neal finally stepped down from the $15,000-a-year office he had held since 1931.

Soon, Ed will return to his 1,800-acre cotton and wheat farm near Florence, Ala., where he was born. "I shore'n hell love that red soil," said Ed. "I'm too old to handle a team of mules the way I used to. But I been fixin' up the little old house, and I guess I'll just go there and kind of take it easy."

Right Bower. As Ed's successor, the convention picked shaggy-browed Allan Kline, 52, of Iowa, who has long been Ed's right bower and the Farm Bureau's vice president for two years. An enthusiastic student of philosophy, economics and history, Kline is a hog farmer with a distaste for colloquialisms. He has a town house in Des Moines and a farm in Benton County which boasts a swimming pool, tennis court, and gaited horses. He is an independent Republican. Deliberate and shrewd, Kline believes in a relatively low level of parity and a thriving foreign trade as the basis for continued farm prosperity.

As the delegates sang "Ioway, that's where the tall corn grows," Allan Kline climbed the platform and slung an arm around old Ed O'Neal. Ed's eyes were slightly moist. To photographers, he said: "You all be careful not to catch mah false teeth!" Far back in the crowded ballroom, one of the delegates yelled: "So long, Ed!" Ed crackled, and waved.

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