FARMERS: Hay Down

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In drowsy, cupolaed courthouses, behind the flyspecked fronts of general stores, in thousands of voting booths in a belt stretching through 19 States of the South and West and jumping over the Pacific to Hawaii, Election Day dawned last week. The voters were the nation's growers of cotton, rice, and flue-cured tobacco, 2,500,000 strong. They were asked to give a straight Yes or No on the strictest controls possible under the Agricultural Adjustment Act: The imposition of prohibitive taxes on any producer who markets more than a fixed crop quota in 1939. To the question of how the farmers of the U. S. feel about the most ambitious farm program ever undertaken on their behalf, the Election might spell out a huge Yes, No, or Maybe.

When day was done, it had spelled out a Maybe. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace called the outcome "a clear cut example of economic democracy." Of cotton farmers 82% voted their confidence in a quota—but 92% had been willing to try it for this year, when neither the U. S. surplus had piled up to the 10,000,000 bales, nor the world supply to the 51,000,000 bales reached last week. Only 56% of the tobacco farmers said Yes, less than the two-thirds necessary to invoke the quota, far less than the 86% who shouted Yes last spring. And rice farmers, whose reserves did not reach the 11,974,000 bushels quota level for this year, made their first vote a hearty 64% No.

Concretely, the election changed the farm picture only for flue-cured tobacco.* By voting No, tobaccomen rejected Secretary Wallace's offer to fix a rigid quota for each seller, levy a penalty of one half the market price for excess sales. By voting No, they also ruled out loans on whatever portion of their 1939 crop they may keep off the market. Unaffected by the Election was the "voluntary" half of the farm program—acreage restriction which growers of all three crops make in return for soil conservation payments and other cash benefits.

For the future, the Maybe might mean a great deal. It might not mean opposition to the whole farm program, but merely that farmers are not feeling bad enough just now to be willing to take castor oil. But one thing it did not mean was the wholehearted vote of confidence AAA was looking for, and that last week it needed as never before.

The Farm Problem has been a major political issue for 20 years. For the last six Congress has followed the gyrations of farm income more closely than the Supreme Court is supposed to follow the election returns.

In 1932, with farm income at $4,328,000,000, a post-War low, Herbert Hoover lost every State in the Farm Belt.

In 1933, AAA handed out its first big farm subsidy, $162,000,000 in benefit payments: to plow under 10,500,000 acres of cotton, kill 222,149 brood sows, 6,188,717 little pigs. Farm income rose to $5,117,000,000.

In 1934, Congress extended benefits to more crops, farm subsidies rose to $556,000,000, farm income to $6,348,000,000.

In 1935, the program was consolidated with subsidies at $583,000,000, income up to $7,090,000,000.