Farming the Farmer

Shoulder to shoulder in Denver's Shirley Savoy Hotel last week sat 1,200 farmers, farm wives, farm economists and farm politicians, gathered in biennial convention to 1) urge federal farm subsidies ever onward and upward, 2) call for the scalp of Republican Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson-and 3) elect onetime Typewriter Salesman James G. Patton, 55, to his 13th consecutive term as president of the liberal National Farmers Union. Cried Jim Patton, sounding the N.F.U.'s anti-Administration theme: "Our patience has been imposed upon by those in power chiseling away at nearly every program farmers worked so hard to build."

In private, rawboned, wavy-haired Jim Patton scarcely ever raises his voice above persuasive conversational tones. But in public, his is the loudest if not the wisest Democratic voice in U.S. agriculture. He speaks through the National Farmers Union, with its 750,000 members (see map), and a network of N.F.U.--run magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and radio programs. Patton's upper councils are a Democratic Farm Cabinet-in-exile: Harry Truman's Agriculture Secretary Charles Brannan is the N.F.U.'s general counsel; Wesley McCune, onetime Democratic National Committee farm specialist, is the public-relations director; Leon Keyserling, chairman of President Truman's Council of Economic Advisers, is a consulting economist for the N.F.U.

Big Business. But if Jim Patton's N.F.U. is big political business, it is also big money business, with a vested interest in high farm subsidies-the higher the better. The N.F.U.-founded Farmers Union Grain Terminal Association is worth $33 million, reaps about a $3.5 million cash harvest each year in Government payments for storing grain surpluses stimulated by N.F.U. high-subsidy policies. Among other N.F.U. interests:

P:The National Farmers Union Life Insurance Co., with $100 million of insurance in force.

P: The National Farmers Union Property & Casualty Co., which last year took in $10 million in premiums.

P: A half-interest in a 15,000-acre, $175 million potash deposit in New Mexico. The other half-interest belongs to Kerr-McGee Oil Industries and Phillips Petroleum Co. Oklahoma Democrat Robert Kerr, chairman of Kerr-McGee, is among the staunchest N.F.U.sliners in the U.S. Senate.

P: Close financial ties with the Farmers Union Central Exchange, whose 900 outlets grossed $75 million selling petroleum, machinery and other farm supplies.

The Blessed Are the Rich. Although the National Farmers Union is the champion of the "poor" and the "small" farmer, the man who built the N.F.U. is by no means embarrassed by its wealth. Says N.F.U. President Patton: "I do not think it is blessed to be poor, at least not in the U.S. I've been poor, and I didn't see anything blessed about it."

Kansas-born Patton is the son of an engineer who helped found a short-lived cooperative farm at Nucla, Colo. Jim worked on farms, took odd jobs to earn extra money, paid his way through Western State College of Colorado, wound up with a Depression-days job selling typewriters. "Jim was a terrific salesman," says a longtime acquaintance. "He has always had a tendency for main-chancing."

Patton's main chance came through adversity. When his typewriter job be'came a Depression casualty, he started a life insurance company, persuaded the Colorado Farmers Union to back him. Through sheer bounce, bustle and brains, he shot up through the ranks. Within six years Jim Patton was President of the state N.F.U., and two years later, in 1940, he was elected President of the National Farmers Union, a job he has held ever since.

The Welfare Clause. The N.F.U. was then a moribund outfit filled with crackpots and Communist-liners. It took years, but Jim Patton cleared them out, and today's N.F.U. empire is his creation.

Patton's own fortunes have risen with the N.F.U.'s. Although his salary is a close-kept N.F.U. secret, his days of poverty are obviously far behind him. Jim Patton rises at 7 o'clock each morning in his stylish brick-and-stucco ranch house near Denver, wheels his blue-and-white 1957 Lincoln sedan past his kidney-shaped swimming pool, takes a multilane highway into Denver and the $3.7 million headquarters of the National Farmers Union. There, behind a self-designed, L-shaped desk in a spacious monochromatic green office, Jim Patton talks of his guiding philosophy: "My philosophy is fundamental and it is all found in the general welfare clause in the Constitution. That clause was put there by men who were interested in people. I am interested in people and their welfare."

He is also interested in the Democratic Party and its welfare-and so were nearly all the N.F.U. followers meeting in Denver last week. Guest Speaker Harry S. Truman, on hand to receive an N.F.U. service award, said it best: "I am going to talk to you about agriculture and politics. And if you think those two things don't go together, you are decidedly off the beam." Jim Patton, who has made a highly successful thing out of mixing agriculture and politics, could only agree.

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