THE NATION: Ezra Benson’s Harvest

The winter’s first freezing storms blew eastward last week down the Rocky Mountain slopes, whipped snow flurries across the Great Plains wheatlands, swirled into the Midwest’s corn-hog belt. Farmers, their 1959 row crops in, and a little leisure time at hand, began to talk among themselves, on street corners, in grange halls, in bunking rooms, in the circles around the stockyard stoves. As always, the talk was about how hard it is to make a dollar. But this year the talk had the extra heat and urgency that come with falling farm prices. Farm-belt politicians tested the warning winds, decided that a fair-sized political storm was blowing up. And more fate-packed still was the widespread belief that, as Farmer Donald Mahlberg of Worthington, Minn, said, “It’s going to show up worse next year”—at presidential election time.

The overall measure of farmer unrest was totted up in dollars and cents last week by the U.S. Agriculture Department: primarily because of a drop in hog and chicken prices, total farm income fell much faster in 1959 than predicted only a month ago, will fall 15% below 1958 to about $11.2 billion, and will probably slide another 7% or more in 1960.

Swamped. Chief target of farmer anger was still Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, who for seven years fought the scandalous farm subsidy program by urging Congress to reduce Government acreage controls and price props. Unhappy result: the U.S. farm program will cost a record $6.6 billion in fiscal 1960.

Benson succeeded in winning approval of his basic idea in the 1958 farm bill, which set subsidy rules for the 1959 corn crop. It abolished acreage controls, lowered price props toward the level set by the market (support price: $1.12 per bu.). But instead of cutting surplus production, as Benson unswervingly predicted, the no-control formula encouraged farmers to raise a bumper crop. And, as Benson’s own department admitted last week, it swamped by 600 million bushels the previous all-time corn record set in 1958. Reason: farmers boosted production to make up for lower prices. Result: more corn to add to the $9 billion Government-stored crop surplus. In 1960 the taxpayers of the U.S. will pay out $1 billion for storage and interest alone.

Professing to be unshaken by the surplus corn, ailing (gall bladder) Ezra Benson last week got President Eisenhower’s approval for the legislative proposals he will make to Congress early next year. Chief aim: to extend to wheat the same program that failed in corn, abolish acreage controls while lowering price supports from $1.77 to $1.40 per bu. Because the plan links support prices to the average market prices for the preceding three years (abandoning the old parity ratio based on 1910-14 figures), the Benson program will admittedly lead to a gradual downstep of prices each year. Benson believes that dropping prices will ultimately cut down the amount of wheat raised; U.S. farmers, past masters of food production, bet that they can keep their incomes from falling too fast by increasing their crop yields. Congress rejected Benson’s wheat proposal last session, but this time Benson counts on a powerful new weapon: Ike’s promise to go on TV next year and urge public backing for Benson’s wheat program.

Disowned. Among hard-pressed Republican politicians, Benson’s proposals landed with a dismal thud. “It is serious. It is fantastic,” said one top G.O.P. campaign boss in Washington, and noted that Benson’s efforts have raised both subsidies and surplus, bringing nothing but blame for the Republicans. “Our men are going to have to disown it.” Benson’s plan was long since disowned by such party stalwarts as Ben Franklin Jensen, eleven-term G.O.P. Congressman from southwestern Iowa’s Seventh District. By last week Ben Jensen, already fighting desperately to hold the seat that was once rock-ribbed Republican, was running mainly on an anti-Benson platform, called his own Administration’s farm plan “almost a complete failure … I just don’t agree with Benson. I’ve urged him to change his course. But it’s been in vain.”

Democrats were delighted at the prospect of beefing up their new political strength in Republican farm strongholds. Presidential Aspirant Stuart Symington proclaimed a program to aid the small farmer, Jack Kennedy called for some original Democratic thinking, and Hubert Humphrey (who has never delivered on the new farm program he promised at the last session of Congress) predicted that the Benson wheat program would bring “lower prices and the largest crop in the history of the world.” Iowa’s Governor Herschel Loveless, vice-presidential hopeful recently picked to be a farm expert by the Democratic Advisory Council, worked away in Des Moines on a Brannan-style farm plan that will call for direct production payments to farmers and tightened controls.

The sobering fact is that the $6.6 billion farm program has become a disaster of such magnitude that it deserves far better than partisan exploitation. So twisted and distorted is the normal farm economy because of subsidies that no honest candidate can propose an overnight solution. But by the same token, no honest candidate can pretend to be serving the national interest unless he makes solution of the farm scandal his urgent business. It is no answer to stand on the here-and-now, and it is no answer to go back to older remedies that also failed. The farmer, along with the rest of the taxpayers, needs a new deal in agriculture. And the prize next November may well go to the candidate who frames it and articulates it.