AGRICULTURE: Santa Claus, 1958

Running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate against Indiana’s Republican Homer Capehart two years ago, Claude R. Wickard accused the Eisenhower Administration of basely betraying the U.S. farmer. Cried President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture (1940-45): “I have before me [Candidate] Eisenhower’s promises to farmers in 1952 and [President] Eisenhower’s veto message of the first 1956 farm bill. Like the man on the flying trapeze, he has switched from one to the other with the greatest of ease.”

Last week, with farm prices rising rapidly (TIME, May 12), Claude Wickard, no longer running for public office, abandoned agricultural recession as a Democratic issue. Confiding to reporters in Kansas City that his 620-acre farm at Camden, Ind. is making money hand over fist, Wickard said: “I can’t complain about $21 hogs. My son-in-law and I sold ten Holstein cows the other day for $240 each. I didn’t believe in Santa Claus until then.”