Lean and Hungry Years
LEAN AND HUNGRY YEARS jCVERYBODY agrees that the political climate is ¦*""' changing. Business is none too well satisfied with conditions, realizing that lack of adroitness in dealing with the...
...Suppose farmers accept Mr...
...Legge believes that wheat is now grown with so much skill in numerous parts of the globe as to make even the farmers of Timbuctoo sufficient unto themselves...
...The political effect has been alarming...
...The Board was accordingly trounced quite roundly, not merely by those who—chambers of commerce, traders in grain—objected to it on principle, but also by those who learned to their sorrow that even a stabilization fund could not stave off a decline...
...And if enough farmers can be induced to accept this advice cooperatively, the fifth of a billion bushels Mr...
...The second started out to be chiefly the administrator of a $500,000,000 stabilization fund, a good deal of which was actually expended in an effort to restrain wheat from becoming the kind of commodity no one can give away...
...By balancing the concessions to agriculture under the present law against increased concessions to industry...
...That means a yield of eighteen dollars on a pretty fair acre, worth at least two hundred dollars...
...Legge's suggestions...
...Finally, there is Senator Capper who thinks that the Board ought to buy 100,000,000 bushels just to tide over a bad spell...
...Replying, Mr...
...Almost immediately, however, the joker in this bundle of percentages was unearthed...
...One doubts, however, that either the government or the nation will go that far...
...The fact is, they cannot afford the most careful tilled acres under present circumstances...
...Mastick's reasoning was based upon counting in the tariff of 42 cents a bushel on wheat levied by Congress...
...It follows, therefore, that help must be sought in the fundamental economic measure of restricting production, which means cutting the acreage given over to wheat by 25 percent...
...It is a bad, almost desperate situation which chases itself into social and economic corners from which no exit is in sight...
...Then he returned to Washington for the purpose of turning it over definitively to the press...
...Somewhat hectically the administration decided upon two agencies of relief—a new tariff law designed to "carry the benefits of protection" right into the barnyard, and the establishment of the Farm Board...
...But so much is certain: the United States cannot face the prospect of limiting agricultural production in one of the basic food commodities of the world without profound misgivings...
...But even more distinctly he has been hot under the collar...
...The Secretary appeared with an analysis of the new tariff, in many respects a genuinely skilful performance...
...Viewed by itself, the first has been diagnosed rather critically by so many economists that even its most widely flaunted virtues have grown inconspicuous...
...And of course wheat is only part of the story...
...Mastick was stumped by would automatically disappear and the tariff would work...
...But in spite of everything the afflicted will grumble and the hungry complain...
...But it is primarily the farmer who has been on a rampage...
...He relayed it first of all to the farmers themselves, during the course of a picturesque barn-storming tour which has been uniformly racy and Daweslike...
...today his expenses will be $1,048 and his income $2,150, provided the new schedules are effective...
...And how does one arrive at these figures...
...Business is none too well satisfied with conditions, realizing that lack of adroitness in dealing with the world situation may lead to a variety of mercantile setbacks...
...You can put this land into grass for the benefit of your children...
...In a sense, what we are facing is land unemployment occasioned by disturbed conditions...
...Chairman Alexander Legge and Secretary Arthur Mastick therefore put their heads together and emerged with something like a new merger...
...Legge said at Hastings, Nebraska, "without regard to what is done with the land thus released...
...Here are the conclusions in the well-known nutshell: under conditions and tariff schedules prevailing in 1928, the farmer's expenseswere (let us say) $1,000 and his income $2,000...
...Controlling prices socially —that is, keeping them high as a government policy— is a method having a nucleus of artificiality one profoundly distrusts...
...Reduce the acreage of wheat," Mr...
...In the face of campaign announcements, the price of wheat has tumbled faster than water off the edge of Niagara, going as low as sixty cents a bushel at Chicago...
...People have begun to talk of the futility of all farm relief...
...The answer has a preamble: stabilization is at best an emergency measure, useful only in helping agriculture to market the difference between a bumper and an average crop...
...And will that not mean an economic loss of serious proportions...
...Is the United States to discontinue exporting wheat...
...It began to look as if the most cherished products of American agriculture were going the sad route taken by Brazilian coffee and British coal—a route which must eventually undermine the basic valuations of farm property in the most flourishing sections of the country...
...Mindful of the care which the Supreme Court has exercised to guarantee to the utilities an income of 6 percent on step-up valuations, the rural economist might well look about to see where the road was leading...
...What if some disturbance prevented the harvest from maturing...
...He has been hot this season, under a smoking sun which regarded ioo degrees in the shade as no achievement to boast of...
...But since the United States annually produces a fifth of a billion bushels of the potential staff of life in excess of domestic requirements, how and when can this tariff be presumed to prove efficacious ? At this point Chairman Legge appeared with the answer...
...In the background are those as yet unfathomed mysteries of mass distribution and consumption which work themselves out in industrial society but which constantly emerge freakish and prankish as the very weather...
...Suppose that the wheat crop were reduced in advance...
...And can American growers afford so much idle acreage...
...Do anything with it but don't raise wheat on it...
Vol. 12 • August 1930 • No. 14
