FARMERS: Potato Control

When Kentucky-born John B. Hutson went to work for the Department of Agriculture a dozen years ago, he was a practical expert on tobacco and Henry Cantwell Wallace sat in the Secretary’s chair. By last month pink-cheeked, grey-haired John B. Hutson had become not only the AAAuthority on tobacco but also on rice, sugar and peanuts and his old boss’s son, Henry Agard Wallace, sat in the Secretary’s office. Last week John B. Hutson was given AAA control over a fifth crop—the common, or Irish potato—and irate farmers throughout the land had at him as never before in his quiet respectable 45 years. Among the first communications that came before him was the following: “We, the undersigned men and women, American citizens living on our own land in West Amwell Township, Hunterdon County, N. J., conscious of our American heritage and determined to preserve it, hereby solemnly resolve:

“That we protest against and declare that we will not be bound by the ‘Potato Control Law,’ an unconstitutional measure recently enacted by the United States Congress. We shall produce on our own land such potatoes as we may wish to produce and will dispose of them in such manner as we may deem proper.”

What the 35 citizens of West Amwell Township were taking a defiant stand against was a 15,000-word rider attached to the AAAmendments which became law fortnight ago, a rider which was discussed for not more than an hour in either house of Congress, was not supported by the AAA or by any national farm organization and yet was binding upon some 3,000,000 U.S. farmers who raise potatoes.

The actual sponsors of Potato Control were bushy-haired Representative Lindsay Carter Warren from the potato-growing northeastern corner of North Carolina and long-faced Senator Josiah William Bailey of the same State. Conservative Senator Bailey, who has opposed inflation, Government spendthriftiness, Huey Long and Father Coughlin, and who has been as cool as a Senator from a Cotton State could be toward the Bankhead Act for compulsory cotton control, frankly gave his reason for proposing Potato Control: “Farmers have continually been driven from cotton, tobacco and peanut production, and have gone into the production of potatoes. . . . We cannot afford to … drive them all over into the potato field.”

In other words, cotton control had put farmers into tobacco, and tobacco control had put them into peanuts, and peanut control had put them into potatoes. Potato Control was adopted as an AAA evolution to protect about 30,000 farmers who make their main living out of potatoes and do not want their crop invaded by other farmers whose land has been rendered idle by the other AAA controls. To give them that protection Mr. Hutson will have to regulate half again as many farmers as raise cotton, twice as many as raise wheat, and he will have to detect and, if necessary, fine and send to jail any others of the 6,000,000 U.S. farmers who might start raising potatoes and any of the 125,000,000 U.S. inhabitants who might buy bootleg potatoes.

According to the new law, no one may buy or offer to buy potatoes which are not packed in closed containers approved by the Secretary of Agriculture and bearing proper Government stamps. Penalty: $1,000 fine; for a second offense, a year in jail, an additional $1,000 fine or both. No farmer, under the same penalty, may sell potatoes without such containers and stamps. No farmer can get the necessary official stamps unless he 1) pays a tax of 45¢ a bushel, or 2) receives tax-exemption stamps from the Secretary of Agriculture. No farmer can get tax-exemption stamps except for a potato production quota allotted him by the Secretary of Agriculture. No farmer can get a quota unless he makes an application supported by evidence 1) proving that potatoes were raised on his farm in 1932, 1933, or 1934, and 2) showing how many potatoes he raised and sold in past years.

For the 30,000 big potato growers this official red tape may prove worthwhile if the price of potatoes is boosted. For the rest of the 3,000,000 potato raisers it means nothing but trouble & tribulation. Only exception to getting a quota or becoming a criminal is for those pipsqueak farmers who regularly sell not more than five bushels of potatoes a year.

Such was the law about which the citizens of West Amwell Township complained. To enforce it Mr. Hutson was to have had an initial appropriation of $5,000,000, no great sum in view of the fact that the number of potential potato leggers far exceeds the number of potential liquor leggers under Prohibition. But as a further handicap the appropriation for enforcement failed of enactment with the Third Deficiency Bill. One private consolation Mr. Hutson had: the Supreme Court would probably declare Potato Control unconstitutional since the whole scheme depends on a confiscatory “tax” which makes no pretense of raising revenue.