TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/32elect/32elect.014

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                +-                                                            ╚April 10, 1933

FARMERS

Senate v. Sun



     Spring, marching swiftly north across the land last week,
found teams hitched to harrows and fields being broken, plow
horses streaking the countryside with new furrows, tractors
barking and chattering with lusty strength. Corn was about to go
into the fat black acres of Illinois and Iowa. South Carolinians
had their cotton planted; their February oats already sprouting.
Seed beds for tobacco were being prepared as far north as
Connecticut. Spring wheat was being sowed in Kansas now that the
thaw had come & gone. Sows had littered in Iowa. John Farmer was
starting his 1933 crops on the same haphazard plan of the past
because President Roosevelt's bill to control his production and
get him better prices was not yet on the statute books.

     From the moment he took office President Roosevelt realized
that he was in a relentless race against the sun on farm relief.
His purpose was to outsprint nature to planting time. In his
special farm message last month he warned Congress that "if we
wait for another month or six weeks the effect on the prices of
this year's crops will be wholly lost." Infected with his
sporting spirit, the House passed his bill with blind speed. But
the Senate sets itself above sun and seasons. Its refusal to
compete with nature last week threatened to wreck the whole
Roosevelt farm relief plan before it could get fairly started.

     Meanwhile millions of puzzled farmers felt the imperious
stirring of spring and wondered whether to let this or that field
stand fallow on the chance the Government would pay them cash for
reducing their crop, or to go ahead and plant their acres to the
limit on the theory that the Senate's delay blotted out all hope
of effective Federal aid in 1933.

     Outdone by the Senate committee's dalliance, President
Roosevelt summoned its entire membership to the White House for a
heart-to-heart. He would consent to a few minor amendments but
not to any tampering of the bill's fundamentals. He pointed to
the calendar. He harped on the necessity for speedy action. He
came closer to cracking the Party whip than at any time since he
entered the White House. The Senators trudged glumly back to the
Capital and three days later reported the bill to the Senate.
Typical of the opposition there awaiting it was Senator Reed's:
"It'll be ripped to pieces! I can't permit the passage of such
legislation! If the people of Pennsylvania knew what its passage
would mean, they'd riot in the streets. . . ." And the sun
marched on.

     Most interested spectator at President Roosevelt's
conference with Senators was a lean-faced, youngish man of 44
with a mop of dark brown hair just turning grey and deep
thoughtful eyes-an economic idealist. Taciturn, he sat and
listened most of the time. He was Henry Agard Wallace, Secretary
of Agriculture and the official upon whose none-too-husky
shoulders falls the job of administering the enormous powers
buried deep in the Roosevelt farm bill. In his diffident way he
had already given the Senate committee his views on this measure,
designed to restore farm purchasing power by artificially raising
the prices of cotton, corn, wheat, tobacco, rice, hogs, sheep,
cattle and dairy products to pre-War parity with industry. (Last
week the Department of Agriculture announced that, in mid-March,
farm prices were exactly 50% of the pre-War average whereas
things the farmer buys were 3 1/2 % above that level.) Nothing
short of the broadest and most flexible authority, he had
testified, would suffice to solve the farm problem. After such a
sweeping grant it was up to Congress and the country to trust him
to use it with discretion.

     Into Secretary Wallace's hands the farm bill puts a three-
pronged pitchfork with instructions to try to toss farm prices
high up on to the wagon of better days. No doltish hired man, the
Secretary is expected to start his price-pitching slowly and
easily, watching his aim, studying his effects, conserving his
power. Farmers who expect to see a sharp overnight rise in
commodity values are ill-informed.

     Prong No. 1 of the Wallace pitchfork authorizes the
Secretary to reduce production by contracting with farmers to
rent the land they leave idle. What that rental will be has yet
to be determined but estimates have ranged around $3 per acre. In
theory the farmer who last year harvested 1,000 acres of wheat
will get more by raising only 700 this year and collecting
Government rent of 150. Declares Secretary Wallace: "The taking
out of acreage on a wide scale is one necessary line of attack. I
don't contemplate such reduction of acreage as meaning that we
permanently forsake our foreign markets. . . . In reducing the
production of hogs, the best method may be for the Government to
pay the hog producer rent on a specified amount of his corn land,
provided he retires that acreage from corn production and also
restricts the tonnage of hogs marketed." The farmer who already
had his 1933 acreage planted and fertilized will not be able to
avail himself of the benefits of Prong No. 1.

     Prong No. 2 is the Domestic Allotment Plan refurbished. It
permits the Secretary to pay a farmer who reduces his 1933 crop
what the law euphemistically calls a "benefit." How this crop cut
is to be effected is left to the Secretary. The 1931 proposal to
plow up every third row of cotton might be one method. Another
might involve allowing a percentage of a crop to go unharvested.
The farmer agreeing to cut his 1933 production would get a
Government certificate on which he could borrow at the bank, the
loan being repaid after the harvest when the Secretary is sure
that he kept his reduction agreement.

     Pron No. 3 was welded on to the pitchfork by South
Carolina's cotton-minded Smith who devised a price-upping scheme
especially for cotton planters. Under it Secretary Wallace takes
control of 2,144,937 bales of stabilization cotton from the old
Farm Board, John Planter, who normally raises 90 bales of cotton,
steps up and promises to raise only 60 this year. Secretary
Wallace gives him an option on 30 bales of Government cotton at
$.06 per lb., the current market price. When hundreds of
thousands of John Planters repeat this process, cotton demand
starts to exceed cotton supply and prices (in theory) spurt up to
$.08 or $.10 or $.12 per lb. Next autumn John Planter orders
Secretary Wallace to sell his option cotton, makes a tidy profit
to compensate him for the 30 bales he never raised. If the cotton
market fails to rise, John Planter stands to lose nothing on his
free option.

     The Handle of the Wallace pitchfork is the Secretary's power
to tax. To raise money to pay land rents and Domestic Allotment
"benefits" he may levy on every bushel of wheat the miller turns
to flour, on every pound of pork and beef the packer turns to ham
and steak, on every quart of milk and cream that go into butter
and cheese, on every pound of cotton the spinner makes into
cloth. This processing tax, heart of the Roosevelt relief scheme,
is a variable quantity which the Secretary of Agriculture adjusts
to bring farm prices up to the desired level. Once they are at
pre-War parity, the tax scales off and disappears. Processors
pass the tax on to consumers in increased food prices. In effect,
it is a sales tax on basic necessities -- the kind of levy
President Roosevelt and the Democratic party view with horror
if formally applied to manufactured commodities. What it will
cost the consumer no one who can has yet dared to estimate.
Explains Secretary Wallace:

     "The processing tax will not necessarily become operative
with respect to all commodities. If a satisfactory price could be
reached and maintained by trade agreements no tax would be
imposed. . . . The chances are that the tax would start at a
relatively low figure so as not to restrict retail sales and thus
reduce consumption. . . . I would feel that the policy of the
bill were being defeated should as a result of a $03 processing
tax on cotton an excessive increase in price be passed on to the
consumer. The cotton farmer obtains approximately $05 for the
cotton in a shirt which costs $1 or $1.50. A $.03 tax should not
increase that cost more than another $.05."

     Gamble. What every farmer wants to know: Can Secretary
Wallace and his two bowers succeed under the Roosevelt plan in
substantially raising commodity prices and thereby purring more
cash in John Farmer's pocket with which to pay his galling debts?
Secretary Wallace thinks he can, is ready to make a desperate
try." Detached observers come to this conclusion: Success or
failure of the relief plan will not turn on Secretary Wallace's
personal efforts but on natural and economic factors far beyond
even his dictatorial control.

     The weather of 1933 will make or break the relief plan. A
short cold summer with excessive rainfall or a long blistering
drought can reduce crops to such a point that President Roosevelt
might have an acute food shortage on his hands. On the other hand
an ideal combination of sun & rain can produce such bumper crops
as to wipe out all trace of acreage cuts and send prices slumping
to even lower levels. One year an acre will produce 12 bu. of
wheat, the next 24 bu. Such is the gamble Secretary Wallace must
take.

     Important though Agriculture is, it alone does not control
U.S. economy. If deflation continues through 1933 and the general
trend of all prices is downward, Secretary Wallace will be unable
to buck the economic tide and the Roosevelt plan will go down as
a failure along with the Hoover Farm Board. If all prices start
to rise on a broad front, Secretary Wallace will be able to
accelerate the advance of farm values, get credit for a shining
success. The major factors which will decide the economic fate of
the farmer, according to Pundit Walter Lippmann, are "the
monetary policy of the administration and of the Federal Reserve
System, by the policy of the Government in respect to tariffs and
trade agreements and international debts and by a whole series of
measures dealing with railroads, real estate indebtedness and
banks."

     When Henry Cantwell Wallace went to Washington as Harding's
Secretary of Agriculture in 1921, he thought he was confronted
with the worst farm crisis in U.S. history. But the agricultural
outlook that year was almost rosy compared to that which now
faces his son in the same job. Father Wallace, sandy-haired,
square-jawed, was less conservative than his Republican
colleagues in the Cabinet. He openly favored the McNary-Haugen
bill as a means of dumping farm surpluses abroad and might have
sold its principle to the White House, but for the persistent
opposition of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. A sense of
frustration clouded Secretary Wallace's last days in office. In
1924 he died of intestinal poisoning and Calvin Coolidge gave him
a White House funeral.

     Henry Agard Wallace got most of his farm relief ideas and a
personal antipathy for Herbert Hoover from his father, whom he
succeeded as editor of Wallaces' Farmer (now combined with the
Iowa Homestead). In looks Son Wallace took more after his
grandfather who founded that family publication. Like his father,
he talks little and slowly. He has long studied the farm problem
at an editorial desk. In 1928 he silently opposed Herbert Hoover;
in 1932 he was red-hot for Roosevelt. Iowa Republicans were
shocked by his political heresy, set it down to a family grudge
dating back to the Wallace-Hoover Cabinet feud. The Secretaryship
of Agriculture came to him unsolicited. President Roosevelt
wanted and got a farm relief enthusiast.

     On his 400-acre farm in Polk County, Iowa, Secretary Wallace
has given much time and thought to developing prize seed corn. As
a boy he was impressed by the fact that judges always seemed to
pick the best looking ear rather than the one that promised the
biggest yield. By crossbreeding he perfected a seed corn which
now sells far & wide throughout Iowa. Wrote he: "Show corn ideals
deal too much with beauty and too little with utility. Whether
corn has smooth or rough kernels means very little more than the
presence or absence of a dimple on a pretty girl." He is the
author of Corn and Corn Growing, What Is in a Corn Judge's Mind
and A Mathematical Inquiry into the Effect of Weather on Corn
Yields.

     Because his Farmer office was always littered with samples
of seed corn, that publication's new Des Moines building was made
mouse-proof throughout. On its roof Henry Wallace plays badminton
with managing Editor Donald Murphy. In Washington he walks three
miles to his office before 8 a.m., lunches at his desk, goes home
after 6 p.m. Summers he climbs Pikes Peak in a bee line.

     A chronic experimenter, he has tried cross-breeding flowers,
chickens, cattle, with no definite results. He thinks weather
forecasting is on a wrong scientific basis. He bought a 6-ft.
telescope, set it up on the lawn of his Des Moines home, spent
nights star-gazing. When he started to work out his own weather
theory he was stumped on calculus.

     Henry Wallace is a good Episcopalian. Through the Farmer
("Good Farming-Clear Thinking-Right Living") runs a pious note in
reverence of the God who makes things grow. He is an ardent
believer in currency inflation by cutting the gold content of the
dollar. He spends his happiest hours singing old-fashioned songs
to his wife's piano accompaniment.