FARMERS: Cotton Cut & Canvass

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt moved into the White House, the U. S. price of cotton has more than doubled—up from 6¢ per lb. to above 12¢. As a result some enthusiastic Southerners believe that, comparatively, their section of the country has not been better off since 1861. Yet in and out of the South today are many thoughtful citizens who contend that the Cotton States are unwittingly paying a dreadful future price for their prosperity of the moment. The gist of this contention is that by arbitrarily cutting its cotton production the South is inviting a permanent loss of its foreign market, without which its whole economic structure will collapse. Fact is, foreign cotton production has been going up by leaps and bounds while U. S. production has been going down. Fact is, the South once supplied 60% of the world’s cotton, whereas its quota this year was only about 50%. Fact is, this year’s cotton exports for the first nine months were some 1,400,000 bales below those of 1933. Only unrestricted production, it is fervently argued, can reverse the trend of these facts, restore foreign markets and save large sections of U. S. cotton growers from being wiped out.

Last week Secretary of Agriculture Wallace, who takes little stock in this dark picture of the South’s future, presented the case for more restriction in his announcement of AAA’s cotton control program for 1935. Acreage to be left idle is 25% of the 1928-32 average, against this year’s 40%. Though Secretary Wallace has always been a middle-of-the-roader about restriction, this decrease did not necessarily mean a similar easing off in his mind. Twenty-five per cent was the second-year limit of reduction set in the two-year contracts which 1,004,000 planters signed early this year. The planters of some 6,000,000 acres who refused to sign will be urged to join the new program on a one-year basis. Aim is to hold next year’s crop down to about 12,000,000 bales, or some 3,000,000 bales above this year’s. Continued will be payments of 3½per lb. rental on past average yield of acres left unplanted, with extra “parity” benefits upped from 1¢ to 1¼¢ per lb. for total payments of $94,230,000.

Vigorously Secretary Wallace denied that restriction was alone responsible for loss of foreign markets, that increased production would restore them. More to blame, he maintained, are “the increasing nationalistic trend of some of our foreign cotton consumers, the decline in imports received in this country and the continued low level of foreign purchasing power. . . . Those who advocate unrestricted production . . . have apparently not considered that a situation could easily develop which might result in producing a surplus amount of American cotton that could not be sold abroad at any price.”

In mid-December cotton growers will vote on whether to continue under the Bankhead Act—the compulsory feature of the restriction program which requires them to pay a tax on all cotton ginned over quotas allotted to individual farmers. Soon after the vote was ordered critics raised a hue & cry with the charge that AAAgents, having ingratiated themselves with planters by handing out benefit checks, were propagandizing for continuance of the Act. Secretary Wallace promptly called his agents to order, declared that farmers were to be allowed to make up their own minds. Not only was he determined to make the canvass of cotton sentiment unique in that there would be no campaign orators, but he further ordered AAA officials to see to it that Negro farmers are allowed equal opportunity to vote with white farmers—an equality which the “niggers” of the South have rarely had since Reconstruction Days.