FARMERS: Cart Behind the Lines

Title 1, Section 2 of the late Reorganization Bill of 1938 would have empowered the President to regroup, coordinate, consolidate, reorganize, or segregate any Government agency in the interest of efficiency. Last week Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace, on the night before his Soth birthday, announced without to-do a reorganization of his department as drastic as any Franklin Roosevelt might have made. His reason: efficiency.

Under the New Deal, Agriculture, besides being a research and service department like Commerce, has also been through Agricultural Adjustment Administration a vast agency for distributing Government funds, like WPA. Which the cart and which the horse has been hard for any one to say.

Last week’s major Wallace maneuver amounted to dismantling AAA and moving it behind the lines. Although the name and a skeleton organization remain, AAA’s major functions were parcelled out among four new Department divisions: 1) Plan-ning—headed by present AAAdministrator Howard R. Tolley, who will become head of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics; 2) Marketing & Regulation—headed by present Director Albert G. Black of the Bureau of Agricultural economics; 3) Physical Land Use—headed by Chief H. H. Bennettof the Soil Conservation Service; 4) Research & Technology—headed by Chief Henry G. Knight of the Bureau of Chemistry & Soils.

To these policy-making divisions and executives go AAA’s long-range soil and planning programs. AAA itself will be a strictly administrative unit, with Secretary Wallace’s Special Assistant Rudolph M. Evans as its new administrator.

“The changes . . .” said Mr. Wallace, “bring the full range of the Department’s resources to bear on … major problems.” Significant in the reshuffling of Agriculture’s personnel was the upping of Economists Tolley and Black to executive positions second only to Henry Wallace’s.

Key man in the shift, however, was Assistant AAAdministrator Jesse W. Tapp, chosen to run Federal Surplus Commodities Corp. and marketing agreements as Mr. Black’s right-hand man.

A Kentuckian of 38 who worked in Agriculture when Henry Wallace’s father was Secretary in the Harding Administration. Economist Tapp leads that Department wing which favors subsidizing home instead of foreign consumption of U. S. farm surpluses. Since August, FSCC has dumped 11,500,000 bushels of wheat abroad at an average loss of 12.6¢ a bushel. The tip from Tappis that FSCC may soon shift its dumping ground to the U. S., specifically to the 20,400,000 users of farm products now on Relief.

Cheerless was the Department when its Crop Reporting Board, which month ago forecast an uncomfortably large 1938 cotton crop of 11,825,000 bales, had to revise its estimate upward to 12,212,000 bales, based on a per-acre yield higher than any save 1937’s. Cheering was news from Macon, Ga. that a three-judge Federal court had upheld the constitutionality of AAA’s tobacco-marketing agreements, ruled that AAA could collect penalty taxes from a group of South Georgia growers who had marketed tobacco in excess of their quotas.