FARMERS: Parting

John Nance Garner looked down from his rostrum, his keen eyes seeing everything taking place on the Senate floor. Deliberately blind to half-a-dozen Senators on their feet clamoring to be heard, he put an end to four weeks of haggling, took a final roll call on the Pope-McGill Farm Bill. It was passed 59-to-29. His act was a defiance of the sacred tradition of free speech in the Senate, and an eminently sensible thing to do because 1) the bill was going to be passed anyhow, 2) its form was immaterial—it and the far different House bill will be combined and rewritten in conference—and 3) the important theatre of action in farm legislation was last week far from the Senate chamber.

The scene had shifted from Washington to Chicago's bustling Hotel Sherman, to the 19th convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation. There two men who have written most of the farm legislation of the New Deal finally saw the parting of their ways at hand.

In New Deal Washington few partnerships have been so enduring as that between Henry Agard Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, and Edward Asbury O'Neal III, president of the Farm Bureau Federation. Homespun Henry Wallace and the tall, grey, calloused Alabama cotton grower were bound together not only by common interest, but power. As head of a farm organization whose 408,000 members in 40 States are a more united force than the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, 62-year-old Ed O'Neal has been since 1931 the most influential farm leader in the land. When Henry Wallace projected AAA which required a nation-wide executive setup to estimate crop acreages, the Farm Bureau's 1,800 functioning county organizations stepped into the breach and Ed O'Neal stepped into the Administration. Although the New Deal's lavish benefit payments helped all farm organizations, they helped big Farm Bureau Federation most. When the Supreme Court intervened to break up AAA, Ed O'Neal stayed on to help Henry Wallace salvage what he could with the Soil Conservation Act. So this year when Franklin Roosevelt, in the face of mounting agricultural production, asked Congress to amplify the slender powers the Government possessed to control it, Henry Wallace and Ed O'Neal seemed destined to work on another farm bill together.

Two chief types of legislation were possible: "voluntary" crop control—giving benefit payments to cooperate in crop reduction programs and giving loans on amounts withheld from the market: and compulsory control—levying penalties on excess production. Secretary Wallace observed in his annual report last month that although voluntary methods were preferable, compulsory methods should be invoked when crop reserves on hand grew too large. So Ed O'Neal and his Federation helped draft the Pope-McGill Bill accepting the compulsory principle wholeheartedly, setting permissible crop reserves at the low levels they considered necessary to maintain prices.