"Keep That in Mind"

"Henry is just home folks," said the chairman, introducing Henry Agard Wallace. The onetime Secretary of Agriculture and U.S. Vice President took time off last week from the quiet life on his South Salem, N.Y. farm to attend a Des Moines farm meeting. The introduction done, Wallace arose to make "my most important speech in several years." Those who remembered him as the avant-garde New Dealer and author of Government corn and cotton loans in 1933 were in for a surprise: Henry Wallace urged a U.S. farm program almost the same as that put forth by the Republican Eisenhower Administration. Wallace's key point: "In the long run, the ever-normal granary program can be sustained only by a flexible price-support system."

Said Iowa-born Henry Wallace: "My greatest fear is that farmers themselves may destroy the farm legislative machinery by asking it to do work for which it was never designed. It would be a great disaster if the ever-normal granary were converted into an abnormal granary by loans completely out of line with the weather and the market. The farmer should face the economic facts of life and not strive for the impossible in a postwar world where worldwide supply & demand forces are loaded against him for the next ten years at least."

As for Wallace, he would be both happy and surprised if the U.S. farmer averages a return of 85% of parity for the next decade.

But if Government-purchased agricultural surpluses continue to pile up, said Wallace, the time will come "when the American people will rise up in indignation. Farmers had better keep that in mind. I don't want to see the people of the U.S. rising up in their wrath and refusing to pay any support prices, as they did for potatoes."

When Wallace finished speaking, some 1,200 farmers cheered for a full minute. Then Henry Wallace headed back for South Salem, where he works with hybrid gladioli and strawberries. Said he: "I'm crossing strawberry seedlings from Macedonia, Switzerland, Canada and elsewhere." And sometimes they grow "almost as large as a golf ball."

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