AGRICULTURE: Bawls & Bellows

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In St. Paul, Minn, last week, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson rose before a farm audience of 3,000 to repeat two points he had been expounding in Washington: 1) price supports should be used only as "insurance against disaster," 2) farmers "should not be placed in the position of working for Government bounty rather than producing for a free market." Back in Washington the next day, Benson let it be known that he does not intend to shove Government supports under sagging cattle prices, because there is no "feasible method" for doing so.

Suddenly the fervent price-support Democrats woke up to the fact that Benson was carrying a modified free-economy philosophy right into their own back pastures. Said Minnesota's Representative Eugene J. McCarthy, "[Benson] is like a man standing on the bank of the river telling a drowning man that all he needs to do is take a deep breath of air." Alabama's Senator John Sparkman said that Benson had "in effect repudiated the price-support program." (One notable exception: New Mexico's Clinton Anderson, Harry Truman's ex-Secretary of Agriculture, who agreed "with most of" what Benson said.)

Actually, Benson had said repeatedly that he will enforce the present price-support program as long as it is the law; he has begun studies to determine what policy should be adopted when the law expires at the end of 1954. He has not announced specific policy on present supports not fixed by law. And despite all political bawls and bellows about cattle prices, spokesmen for the cattlemen themselves stood solidly behind Benson. Their attitude: we've never had cattle price supports, and we don't want them now.