HUSBANDRY: Cotton Crisis

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The South stood aghast at this proposal. The cotton-raising President in the White House immediately disclaimed all responsibility for the Farm Board's suggestion. Chairman Stone soon began backing away from his own proposal by declaring it was now up to the States to solve the problem. No consideration had been given to how 2.000,000 cotton planters could be united in such an enterprise, how the stubborn individualists among them could be coerced. Also the Farm Board had forgotten to arrange for the mortgages held by Government and private banks and plastered on almost every stalk of growing cotton.

Governor Sterling of Texas, the No. 1 cotton State, declared vaguely that he would be glad to "co-operate." When Chairman Stone construed this as an acceptance of his "one-out-of-three" program, the Texas Governor hastened to explain that he favored no specific plan, that it would be "just as reasonable to ask the Farm Board to burn its cotton up as to ask farmers to destroy their crop."

Governor Miller of Alabama flayed the Farm Board's plan as "unsound, unwise and impractical." Declared Governor Gardner of North Carolina: "I'm opposed to making the Southern cotton farmer the goat. In this State we didn't plant any third row of cotton this year." Governor Blackwood of South Carolina found the plan "utterly impractical" as each planter would want to let the others do the plowing under. Mused Governor Long of Louisiana noncommittally: "Sounds pretty good—but damned if I know." Governor Murray of Oklahoma turned the plan down with the suggestion that a four-inch ruffle added to the dress of every Chinese woman would solve the cotton problem. Governor Carlton of Florida counterproposed that the full crop be harvested and one-third of it stored by the States.

The only Governor who championed the Farm Board's proposal was the one from whom the Board had borrowed it— Mississippi's Bilbo. Cried he: "The greatest thing the Farm Board has done for the cotton farmers since saving our market in 1930!" But Governor Bilbo opposed plowing under one row out of three as a "waste of $1,000,000 in time and labor." He would leave the third row standing unpicked.