National Affairs: Water & Waste

“The drought has changed the situation materially and the quarterback will call for a new play,” announced Rural Electrification Administrator Morris Llewellyn Cooke last week. The quarterback was again Franklin Roosevelt, and he had just called a new play by appointing Administrator Cooke to be chairman of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee of six, including Works Progress Administrator Harry Hopkins and Resettlement Administrator Rexford G. Tugwell. What play the President would call next for the drought areas depended last week on what this little brain trust hatched out before his trip to the West this month.

Meanwhile Administrator Hopkins and Resettler Tugwell acted as their own quarterbacks. By last week’s end WPA had placed some 30,000 farmers on relief projects, was adding about 2,000 a day, mostly in the Dakotas, Georgia, Missouri. Resettler Tugwell made a quick tour of the Northwest, chatted with farmers, gloomily announced that half the population of the cattle-grazing Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming would require government aid to get through next winter. Of the cost, he said, he had not the faintest idea. His Resettlement Administration last week received $3,000,000 monthly for development of lands already being purchased by the Government.

Last week rains broke the drought in the South, gave hope of moderate crops. Still in critical shape were the corn states which, heat or no heat, could produce no more than 74% of their normal crop. Added to the list of emergency drought states was Governor Landon’s Kansas, where Soprano Marion Talley’s 1,600 acres of wheat were scorched brown by the sun.

Hard on the heels of Governor Landon’s notification party in Topeka, WPA men met in Topeka to plan a relief program for Kansas’ 27 drought counties. This week the Department of Agriculture upped its drought estimates to include 607 counties in 17 states. In Washington the Crop Reporting Board gloomed that the Great Drought of 1936 was about as severe as the Great Drought of 1934, that pasture land was only 44.7% of normal.

In answer to these grim forebodings, rain fell on South Dakota this week and the Department of Agriculture pointed out that farmers’ cash income for the first six months of 1936 was $335,000,000 higher than for the same period in 1935. Cheerily declared five Midwest farm journals in The Agricultural Outlook: “Past experience shows that drought does not necessarily curtail farm income when consumer buying power and general economic conditions are improving.”

A hint of what play or plays Franklin Roosevelt might call came from Secretary of Agriculture Wallace. Before the International Baby Chick Association in Kansas City, this earnest, pious lowan canceled his prepared address on poultry genetics, told his audience of poulterers, “I studied the genetics of poultry rather closely at one time and would like to talk shop with you but the national agricultural situation at this time does not permit. There is too much of an interest on the part of both farmers and consumers in both the short and long-time aspects of the drought problem.” Secretary Wallace laid down, instead, four possible courses to guard against future drought: 1) commodity loans to enable farmers to keep their crops off the market until they can obtain a satisfactory price; 2) granaries to hold these crops; 3) crop insurance; 4) government purchase of land unfit for plowing. Declared Secretary Wallace: “Let me point out that in 1934 supplies of foods were not at any time down to scarcity levels and they are not at scarcitylevels today. . . . The real scarcity even in years of terrible drought like 1934 and 1936 is city jobs, not farm goods. Even in … 1934 agriculture produced more nearly at the 1929 level than did industry, and offered its products at lower prices.”

Aside from these possible remedies, Administration officials centred attention on the decline of the water level, which in North Dakota has fallen 16 ft. in 25 years, in Missouri 9 ft. To dam up little streams, to foster strip farming seemed last week two links in the Administration’santi-drought chain. Declared Administrator Cooke: “If the water table starts to leave you, you will have deserts on the march. We must have higher regard for handling water.”