National Affairs: Half Hog

Only under the despotism of a dictatorship does everybody or nobody vote. Normally, a shade more than 50% of the U. S. citizenry exercises its suffrage privilege. Even in the presidential landslide years of 1928 and 1932, just over 60% of qualified voters went to the polls. But lean, Lincolnesque Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace is seldom satisfied with any result short of the ideal. He did not hide his disappointment over the result of AAA’s corn-hog vote, first substantial figures on which were released in Washington last week.

To 1,200,000 farmers in 16 states who had already received $119,000,000 and would receive some $200,000,000 more for reducing corn-hog production, AAA sent ballots asking if they favored continuance of the plan. Five hundred thousand, or just over 40% of them, answered. Nebraska and Kansas turned thumbs down. But Iowa was 3-to-1 in favor of more control and more Federal money. Mighty Texas, recipient of more agricultural benefits than any other state, voted 9-to-1 for continuance. Total vote was favorable 2-to-1.”But if we are going to have a real economic democracy,” lamented Secretary Wallace, “I think we should have a higher percentage vote.”

Drought and AAA slashed the 1934 corn crop to 56% its normal volume, with a relative decrease in pork production. According to Dr. Mordecai Ezekiel, Department of Agriculture economist, pork prices have risen so high that a national “consumers’ strike” is now on. The Bureau of Agricultural Economics foresees still higher prices for chickens, eggs.

The question of prices furrowed Secretary Wallace’s brow as deeply as his concern over the half-a-hog vote among farmers. “There cannot be further increases in the percentage of the consumer’s dollar that goes to the farmer as a result of reduction in supply,” he significantly admitted.What he did not reveal was the fact that farm prices, as a result of drought and reduction, had risen to such a point that the whole Federal adjustment plan was being jeopardized.

As of Sept. 15 the farm price for cotton was 13.1¢, but the “parity” price, based on the equation between what the farmer sells and what he buys from industry, was 15.6¢. Farm price for wheat was 92.2¢, parity price 111.4¢.Theoretically, the processing tax for cotton should have been 2.5¢, for wheat 19.2¢. Actually they were respectively 4.2¢ and 30¢. In other words, consumers were more than bridging the gap between farm and parity prices. If farm prices continued to rise, or industrial prices began to fall, or both, parity would be reached and processing taxes would by law become inoperative. Without processing taxes to control production, the agricultural adjustment program would lapse, and the spectre of agricultural oversupply would again stalk the land.

It was with this problem in mind that Secretary Wallace went to Manhattan to address a Columbia University audience. To them he unburdened some measure of his anxiety for his program’s future when he said: “I’d be delighted to be an old-fashioned Secretary of Agriculture and concern myself with scientific matters. It is a calm and peaceful kind of existence, but I don’t think we are going to be living in the kind of world in the next two or three years where we can drop our agricultural adjustment program. We are going to ease off gradually. . . .”