National Affairs: Potato Party

"Everyone cannot raise hogs, cotton, corn or wheat." Many a socialite Philadelphia matron at her breakfast table goggled as she read these words addressed to her. Then, reading on, she found she was being invited by Mrs. Walter M. Newkirk to join the "Potato Protest Planters."

"Let every conscientious objector to the AAA program and to its un-American and apparently unconstitutional measures, plant a potato patch," exhorted Clubwoman Newkirk. "Let every such potato patch bear a sign in large letters to proclaim the protest far & wide.

"Just as tea dumped in Boston harbor by our sturdy ancestors proclaimed the revolt against unjust taxes, so pluck can free the present generation from unfair taxation of one group of citizens for the benefit of another." In Washington Mrs. Robert Low Bacon, wife of the socialite Representative from swank Long Island, declared she would plant potatoes on the lawn in front of her house at 1801 F Street, where "Secretary Wallace will be sure to see them."

Mrs. George Horace Lorimer, wife of the New Deal-hating publisher of Saturday Evening Post proudly announced: "I and my friends in Philadelphia are going to give over our grounds to planting the protest potatoes."

Two days after Mrs. Newkirk's letter went out, John B. Hutson, AAA's potato director, announced that the automatic tax-free potato quota would not be 5 bu. (as fixed by law) but 50 bu. (as fixed by executive discretion). Republican ladies could still infringe the law by selling a few bushels of potatoes without applying for a quota but to do a good job of law defiance they would have to tear up considerable shrubbery around their homes and do some sizeable potato landscaping.