Pride Before a Fall?

The Dairymen's League Co-operative Association, representing some 50% of the 44,000 milk producers in the six-state New York milkshed, thought it had done such a smart piece of work that it bragged of it. The league proudly admitted that it had rigged New York's butter market (TIME, Jan. 6) in December to keep milk prices up. (Under a federal-state marketing formula, this milkshed's January prices would largely be determined by the prices of butter for the 30 days ending Dec. 24.)

But last week the league did not feel so smart. In Manhattan's Federal District Court, the U.S. Government filed a criminal information under the Commodities Exchange Act, charging the league and four of its topmost officers with illegally manipulating a commodity in interstate commerce. Maximum penalty: a $10,000 fine and one year in jail. To boot, the Department of Justice was making an antitrust investigation of the butter collapse, and the Department of Agriculture was considering a move to cut the January milk prices.