COOLIDGE VETOES FARM RELIEF
Coolidge Vetoes Farm Relief SENATOR McNary's article on the Farm Relief Bill which bears his name was written for this issue of the Magazine before President Coolidge vetoed the measure. The...
...Labor, like Lazarus, during the Coolidge administration has been suffered to eat of the crumbs that fell from the rich man's overloaded table...
...President Coolidge did not balk at the dangerous consequences that might follow this act, fostering the most powerful banking monopoly ever created...
...There was crying need that Congress should at least repeal the extraordinary powers granted the Federal Reserve system in the war emergency and restore the restrictions of the original law, creating the system...
...In the Senate a rider was put on the-Uill, which was one of the most reprehensible pieces of sneak legislation ever enacted...
...You cannot find another similar period that will show such a disastrous record of commercial bankruptcy...
...Wilford I. King, of the University of Wisconsin, a conservative authority, estimated on a basis similar to that used by the Federal Trade commission that 2 per cent of the people then owned 60 per cent of the nation's wealth...
...It is true that the great trusts and corporations have made greater profits than during even, the wildest years of wartime profiteering...
...The "Department of Agriculture since 1920 has made three separate inquiries extending over the nation as to the movement of population from farms to the cities, and the reverse...
...in 1920, 79 billion dollars, in 1925, 59 billion dollars...
...The market was glutted and the bottom fell out of prices...
...In this short period of less than four years more banks have failed than in the entire 20 preceding years...
...The Commerce Year Book for 1924, published by Secretary Hoover, showed that in 1920, there were 430,000 more tenant farmers than in 1910, and that the percentage of farms operated by tenants increased from 35% to 38...
...B,ack of all this commercial and financial wreckage that has characterized the Coolidge regime lies the agricultural disaster that has ruined farmers by the millions in every part of the country, I would not be understood as holding President Coolidge responsible for the occurrence of this disaster...
...finally, that the amount of mortgages on fully-owned farms increased from $1,126,000,-000 in 1910, to $4,000,000,000 in 1920...
...Moving pictures were first presented at Kos» ter and Bial's music hall in New York City, when Edison's vitascope was used to throif uictures on a screen...
...Only twelve years of its lifetime have expired—eight years remain...
...The Flanhery brothers, of Pittsburgh, heard of the influence of vanadium on steel, sought the world over for the most marketable source of the metal, and hired scientists to investigate the possibilities of its use...
...It passed the Senate by 47 Yeas and 39 Nays...
...Senator Owen, of Oklahoma, formerly Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, stood upon the floor of the Senate at that time and warned the Federal Reserve Board that the country would not submit to its tyranny and injustice...
...But President Coolidge can and should be held strictly responsible*"for the failure to relieve the farm situation...
...It seems impossible to get a perfect headlight—one giving ample light but no glare...
...Mortgages were foreclosed...
...And that it "would establish bureaucracy on such a scale as to dominatenot only the economic life but the moral, social, and political future of our country...
...The framers of the law recognized that it was an experiment that must be carefully wrought out with greatest possible regard to a sound economic basis...
...The reason is largely due to the fact that all roads are more or less hilly and drivers see approaching cars from varying angles...
...The record of bank failures has been even more disastrous...
...All high-speed tool steel now contains vanadium and our every day safety has been enhanced by its introduction into the automobile and railroad industries...
...President Coolidge in his veto message of the McNary-Haugen Bill asserts that: "The chief objection to the bill is that it would not benefit the farmers...
...Vanadium FOR MORE than a century after its discovery, vanadium, the silver white metal now used, in all the finest tool steel, was considered practically useless to science...
...The administration has sought to conceal the depressed condition of agriculture as wTell as all other shortcomings and misdeeds under the cloak of "prosperity...
...Twenty-six or 27 per cent of our total population is engaged in agriculture but it receives only about 7.5% of the total national income...
...If the President had said the word at any time since he assumed office, a genuine farm relief bill would have been passed without delay and untold loss and suffering would have been avoided...
...As soon as congress meets next December, the fight for farm relief will be renewed and one need not be a prophet to predict that farm relief will be a foremost issue in the 1928 election...
...The McFadden Law committed the • Government, as Senator Howell pointed out in his speech in the Senate, to the triumph of branch banking, which ultimately means the disintegration of all independent banks as certainly as if decreed by Congress...
...The glare of approaching headlights i» -frequently most disagreeable to the driver of a car, but thus far efforts to do away with the evil have been futile...
...These failures have been largely made up of the small banks that were dependent primarily on the prosperity of agriculture...
...The National Industrial Conference Board of New York, cited by Senator McNary in his report from the Committee on Agriculture as an "authoritative research organization," points out that in 1900 each person engaged in agriculture received $46, in 1910 $40, in 1920, $39 for each $100 received by persons engaged in other branches of production...
...But the Federal Reserve Board ruthlessly pursued its highhanded course...
...for, you will be safer, according to the Society of Automotive Engineers...
...On that very same clay, President Coolidge approved what is known as the McFadden Banking Bill, which purposes forever to perpetuate the strangle hold of the Federal Reserve Banking system, with all its extreme war-time powers, upon the people of the United States...
...It is true that some of these exorbitant profits have teen suffered to seep down to the wage and salary earners of these corporations...
...Then, they sold their idea to steel manufacturers and, incidentally, sold the product of their Peruvian vanadium mines...
...at the same time he put on the statutes of the nation a law greatly increasing the powers of the Federal Reserve Banking System, which in its greed had used its monopolistic control of credit mercilessly to strike down agriculture...
...It is under the administration of Calvin Coolidge that this process of wealth concentration has moved faster than during any other previous period...
...The McNary-Haugeu Bill was the outcome of widespread, urgent need for farm relief to meet the menace of continued agricultural depression...
...On February 25th, President Coolidge vetoed the bill...
...When in spite of the President's opposition nearly seven years after agriculture had been given a knock-out blow, the McNary-Haugen measure, which promised a degree of relief to the farming population, was passed by Congress, President Coolidge vetoed it...
...Now we are told officially that 59 per cent has become concentrated in the hands of only one per cent...
...It may be presumed there is no marked decrease in the tendency to move from the country to the city...
...Since President Coolidge assumed office in 1923 there have been 72,000 failures of merchants and manufacturers...
...They withdrew credit from agriculture and insisted that the farmers pay their loans...
...The charter of this Federal Reserve Bank system under the law creating it was for twenty years...
...The subject of Farm Relief has been thoroughly debated in Congress -and outside of Congress over a period of years...
...It is true that there has never been such wild speculation on the stock exchange with such extravagant inflation of security values as since the election of Calvin Coolidge...
...The small bankers, who delivered the farmers' votes to Coolidge in 1924 under threats of foreclosure, are now to be sacrificed to promote the expansion of the big banks and their - innumerable branches...
...Instead every honest effort to secure farm relief has met with most determined opposition by President Coolidge and his cabinet...
...In other words, all farm property in the United States in 1925 had only 84.4% of its purchasing power in 1913...
...that the percentage of farm land, which had been improved, has decreased from 54.4% in 1910 to 52.6% in 1920...
...It was this Federal Reserve Banking system that iir 1920 put over the wicked conspiracy of deflation, which cost the 'farmers of the United States almost, if not quite as much as the war itself...
...of 901,000 in 1925...
...Since the beginning of President Coolidge's term more than 1,800 banks have gone to the wall...
...The ihsue of whether the Government of the United States shall do all that is rightly within its power to improve the condition of stricken agriculture was never more alive and pressing than since President Coolidge issued his long* scolding veto message...
...The story of-its growth to popularity is a great reflection on the foresight of American business men...
...The McFadden Banking Bill, which President Coolidge approved on the same day he vetoed the McNary-Haugen Bill, was forced through Congress under pressure of the administration and gag rule imposed on the Senate by the Old Guard...
...It is true that there has been prosperity, but the real question is prosperity for whom ? The Federal Trade Commission has recently reported officially after an extensive investigation that one per cent of the American people now own 59 per cent of the nation's wealth...
...The McNary-Haugen Bill was not in any way an extreme measure...
...I bespeak for our readers the careful thought which Senator McNary's presentation merits...
...These were almost exclusively concerns of small or moderate size, except for a few corporations that were supplying the farmers and were carried down by the agricultural disaster...
...The possibilities of vanadium are manifold—production is only in its infancy...
...The total value of farm property in 1913 was in round numbers 45 billion dollars...
...Estimates for 1926 are not available...
...There was frightful suffering and losses from which the farmers of the country have not recovered to this day...
...Evidently fearful that whenever the life of their charter expired, it might bring a day of just retribution, this scheme of a perpetual charter was slipped over in the Senate...
...If each year there is a net loss to the farmers of one million or even of a half million persons, it is a menace to the prosperity and general welfare of the United States...
...The President's veto adds greater value and importance to a thorough understanding of the proposed legislation...
...The farm population of the United States is only about 31,000,000...
...This means that during the last decade the degree of wealth concentration has practically doubled...
...It is true that there has been such a flood of cash and stock dividends as no nation has ever known...
...Does not this indicate clearly who is reaping the rewards of this flood of profits and stock dividends that go with the ownership of property ? About ten years ago Prof...
...This has beeg due not only to the immense profits of the large trusts and corporations but to the wiping out of the smaller business men and property owners, particularly the farmers, at an unprecedented rate...
...Instead, the McFadden law enlarges even the war powers and leaves the people of the United States still moi-e at the mercy of the banking monopoly in the future than in the past...
...A light, perfect on the level road, may throw considerable glare going up or down a slight grade...
...of 679,000 in 1924...
...Its worst phases had occurred before he became President...
...Results show, not including births or deaths, a net movement from farm to city of 1,120,000 in 1922...
...The McNary-Haugen Bill passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 214 Yeas to 178 Nays...
...Meanwhile, ba sure you have plenty of light...
...It was this same Federal Reserve Banking system that during the war adopted the policy of giving almost unlimited credit to the farmers in order that they might buy Liberty Bonds and increase their acreage and their crops to support and carry on the war...
...Headlights AMilDST all the complaint anent automobile headlights, the Society of Automotive Engineers announces that more accidents are caused by lack of sufficient light than by glare, however disconcerting the latter may be to other drivers...
...Comparing the purchasing value of all farm property in 1913 with its purchasing value in 1925, the relative value of all farm property in 1925 is equal to only 38 billion dollars in 1913...
...Tilting devices may remedy the difficulty, before long...
...Thus our greatest basic industry, which should have had at least a healthy normal growth, which should at least have kept pace with the other most important activities of the nation, has fallen far behind, under the monopolistic control of organized wealth and a Government subservient to the favored special interests...
...The farmers were compelled all at once to sell their crops to meet the bankers' demand...
...Accident statistics back up the assertion...
Vol. 19 • March 1927 • No. 3
