FARMERS: Runt Relief

"For 20 years my business was raising and selling pure-bred Duroc Jersey hogs. I raised hogs that had so much sex appeal I sold 'em as high as $500 apiece. . . . It's not the young sow with her sex appeal that produces a litter of ten or twelve pigs. It's the old sow that's lost her sex appeal and is reckless. . . . When an old sow has produced ten or twelve pigs, in two or three weeks one or two or three of them start to go back until finally when weaning time comes, they're curly pot-bellied runts. Why? Because these runts were compelled by their larger and huskier brothers and sisters to eat at the rear end of the lunch counter. That's the trouble with American agriculture. For twelve long years this great basic industry has been sucking the hind teat of this country of ours."

Thus in the midst of last week's House debate did Ohio's Representative Charles Truax epitomize the problem which President Roosevelt's catch-as-catch-can farm relief bill is experimentally designed to solve. For two days such earthy talk as Representative Truax's was bandied back & forth on the floor amid gales of laughter and applause, but without material effect on House thought. Relief for "runty" agriculture was foreordained from the moment of Mr. Roosevelt's election.

Texas' Marvin Jones, chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, refused to sponsor the Administration's measure because he objected to some of its price-raising machinery for wheat, cotton, tobacco, corn, rice, hogs, cattle, sheep, milk and milk products. "But," said he, "while this war is on, I'm going to follow the President. I don't think the bill can make things worse. God knows we all hope it will make them better."

Facts 6 Feathers. On the floor there was little detailed discussion of the provisions of the bill, which gave the Secretary of Agriculture absolute powers to try to raise farm prices to the 1909-14 level by means of idle acreage leases, speculative cotton options, subsidized crop reductions and price agreements. It also armed him with a processing tax which may cost John Consumer & family a billion dollars a year. Opponents harped on the fact that it would require thousands and thousands of Federal agents to administer the new law and that the Democrats were feathering their political nest by putting all such extra employes outside the civil service. The bill's friends retorted that this was done to permit the President to dismiss the lot without notice and end operations overnight if his farm experiment proved a failure. Many a member flayed the measure as the worst ever, but announced his support of it on the theory that the Senate would probably revamp it.

"Horrors 6 Hellishness." Hitting at Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Guy Tugwell, onetime Columbia University professor and Roosevelt "brain trust" member, Massachusetts' hulking Treadway roared: "The earmarks of an impractical college professor are plainly apparent in the language of the processing tax. I call upon him and his associates to explain. . . ."