FARMERS: Hot Potatoes

STRICTLY ILLEGAL POTATOES FOR SALE, flaunted the heading of a three-column, bold-face advertisement in two Genesee Valley, N. Y. newspapers last week. Therein one Porter Ralph Chandler offered to sell, “when, as and if grown,” six bushels of potatoes, promised that he would not ask the Secretary of Agriculture for permission to grow them, would not pay a 45¢ per bushel penalty tax for neglecting to secure such permission. Prospective buyers were warned that they would be equally liable with the seller to a $1.000 fine.

Advertiser Chandler, a pious, scholarly young Manhattan lawyer and gentleman , farmer, was simply following the lead of his cousin. Representative James W. Wadsworth Jr., stanch Old Guardsman, who had already threatened to grow & sell illegal potatoes on his own ancestral acres in the Genesee Valley. Well did Republican Wadsworth know that New Dealers had had no hand in attaching the drastic, punitive Potato Control Act of 1935 as a rider to the AAAmendments (TIME, Sept. 9). But he also knew that the Act was a natural evolution of their crop restriction program, that whatever indignation could be stirred up against it would fall on their heads. By last week Republican efforts to hang responsibility for the unpopular Act on President Roosevelt had become so vehement that New Dealers felt obliged to have Democratic Press-agent Charles Michelson observe in his weekly propaganda letter: “It just happens that the day the potato program was tacked on the AAAmendments, Despot Roosevelt was not despoting. . . . Fortunately, or unfortunately, the President cannot veto part of a bill. He has got to accept or reject the whole thing and they [potato sponsors] reasoned logically that he would rather take the potato than destroy the whole measure asked by the AAA.”

Plenty of other candidates for popular martyrdom popped up to bid for Gentleman Farmer Chandler’s potatoes. Declared Manhattan Jeweler Norman C. Norman, a plaintiff in the Supreme Court gold-clause cases: “I am particularly anxious to serve time in the penitentiary. . . .”

In Washington, meantime, Secretary of Agriculture Wallace, privately grateful to the late Senator Huey Long and Comptroller General John R. McCarl, was preparing to drop his hot potatoes as fast as he could. Senator Long had filibustered to death the Third Deficiency Bill containing an appropriation for enforcement of potato control (TIME, Sept. 2). Last week Secretary Wallace announced without apparent regret that Comptroller McCarl was unwilling to let AAA draw enforcementfunds from other sources. “I found,” smiled the Secretary, “that funds just didn’t seem to be there. That may not sound very logical but that’s the way life is. … There’s nothing much to be done if we haven’t got the money to enforce it.”