THE EISENHOWER WELFARE STATE MR. DULLES SHOULD BE FIRED
The Eisenhower Welfare State THERE IS little that is new and and less that is exciting in any of the many messages that President Eisenhower has been sending to Congress during the past month. But...
...Washington columnist Thomas L. Stokes reminds us, that a Republican President, Calvin Coolidge, responded to growing farm depression with these words: "Farmers have never made money...
...The second phase of the program would provide payments to farmers for taking other acres entirely out of farm production for a longer period and planting them to forests and wood lots...
...Eisenhower still seemed bent on resisting "creeping socialism" in the abstract, but found himself accepting welfare state schemes because they provided the only solutions to concrete problems...
...I don't think there's much we can do about it...
...The Coolidge conviction that there was "nothing much we can do about it" led to a deepening of the farm crisis, which in turn contributed measurably to the collapse of 1929 and the general depression that followed...
...Nor did the President find anything worth mentioning in the long discussed food stamp plan, which would not only cut deeply into food surpluses, but would make it possible for millions of our lowest income families to enjoy a more nutritious diet...
...There is in this plan, as in so many Eisenhower Administration proposals in other fields, token awareness that a problem exists...
...Eisenhower is not especially concerned with the creative possibility of not only aiding agriculture, but promoting the general welfare at the same time...
...Some of the proposals that turn up in the President's messages to Congress are there because they make good political window-dressing in this campaign year...
...Department of Agriculture has predicted another five per cent reduction this year...
...In the first years of his stewardship in the White House Mr...
...Eisenhower has ranged even more deeply into New Deal and Welfare State territory...
...These are simple, straightforward questions Senator Capehart asks...
...Have we not sufficient intelligence in the Congress, and as a people, to give away some of these foodstuffs...
...Finally, Mr...
...Thus, despite the consistent, deliberate efforts of this Administration to drive farm prices down, and despite the imposition of the strictest controls on farm production in the nation's history, total farm output in 1955 came within a hair of setting an all-time record...
...Now, in 1956, the next Republican President but one, summed up his approach to another farm depression with these words in his message to Congress: "Our objective must be to bring production into balance with existing and new markets, at prices that yield farmers a return for their work in line with what other Americans get...
...For no one can read them, it seems to us, without coming away with the conviction that the Eisenhower Administration has traveled a long way toward acceptance of the Welfare State philosophy which has been, and still is, the target of so many scornful attacks in Republican circles...
...Farm prices have dropped as much as 25 per cent below the record levels of early 1951...
...He now gets about 39 cents of every dollar the rest of us spend for food— the lowest point since the depression-ridden 1930s...
...But there is no evidence to support this myth...
...President Eisenhower is confronted with much the same situation that faced Calvin Coolidge three decades ago: agricultural depression in the midst of high prosperity for virtually all other segments of the national economy...
...But while the principle is sound, the application is timid and for that reason potentially self-defeating...
...By the very nature of the agricultural economy, the farm production plant tends to produce at full capacity unless regulation is imposed by government action...
...In contrast, the nation's corporations showed the biggest profits in history during 1955, stock dividends reached a new high, and take-home pay for workers established a national record...
...Still, those of us who are dedicated to a program of democratic planning for the general welfare in order to achieve greater equality of opportunity find a measure of satisfaction in the growing acceptance of that basic philosophy on the part of erstwhile critics now exposed to the realities of life as lived by the great majority...
...Eisenhower seems clearly to embrace the notion of his Secretary of Agriculture that "surpluses" are the direct result of overly high price supports, and that lower farm prices will bring about a suitable downward adjustment in production...
...New subsidies would be given farmers for removing from production land now used to grow certain specified crops—those presently in surplus—and devoting that land to soil conservation cover, like grass...
...These are, too, long-run possibilities in the more permanent conservation reserve program, for it represents a rational and constructive approach to the employment of the nation's land resources along sound conservation lines...
...But the total impact is something else again...
...The gulf between these two attitudes by Republican Presidents is a measure of the advance we have made in little more than a single generation...
...The farmer's share of the consumer's food dollar continues to drop steadily...
...He was completely silent, for example, on the subject of production payments, which were the essence of the much maligned Brannan Plan, Under this kind of program the prices of perishables would be allowed to find their level in the market place— it would be a much lower level than that prevailing now—and farmers would be compensated with direct subsidies for the difference between the market price and the support price...
...Perhaps the best example of this dichotomy can be found today in the field of agricultural policy...
...It was less than three decades ago...
...Still others, if actually enacted into law, would be greatly watered down in administration and enforcement, for it has been the practice of the Eisenhower regime to hand over the management of public welfare programs to officials who are wedded to the needs of private interests and special privilege...
...All in all, the Eisenhower Administration's farm program represents a deep disappointment to those who had hoped for a clean break with the regime's bankrupt farm policies over the past three years...
...It was less than four years ago that Dwight D. Eisenhower, candidate for President, spoke wistfully of a return to those uncomplicated days of his Abilene boyhood, when the government sold stamps, raised an army, and let nature and the free market take their course—and their toll...
...But our basic quarrel with the President's farm program is its re-| curring emphasis on over-production rather than under-consumption...
...Consumers would benefit through lower food costs and farmers would benefit through subsidy payments...
...As a recent, and still begrudging convert to the philosophy of the Welfare State, Mr...
...It doesn't, for instance, hold out much if any hope for early relief to the nation's farmers, although Secretary of Agriculture Benson has publicly estimated that the results would be felt this spring or summer—or perhaps just in time to quell at least part of the farm rebellion before election day rolls around...
...Farmers today are in relatively the same position that they were in the Coolidge era...
...This is no cure-all for the farm problem, but in combination with other measures would help greatly to broaden the concept of farm relief so as to make it extend to consumers as well...
...There is satisfaction, and impatience too — impatience with men in power who have come to understand the urgent need for democratic planning, but hold back from acting boldly and imaginatively to translate that concept into action...
...II It was in the face of these" facts— and the awareness by his lieutenants that farm discontent might wreck Republican prospects for victory this year—that President Eisenhower submitted a program of government action that might have seemed like galloping socialism to Calvin Coolidge but strikes many of our generation as not more than a mild sedative designed to keep farmers quiet during this campaign year...
...The program comes in two parts...
...The answers could be as simple and straightforward if men in power, including Senator Capehart, would shed the last remnants of their concern that the Welfare State is something alien and un-American, and recall that there is a positive mandate in the Preamble to our Constitution that the government promote the general welfare...
...Others are pitifully thin in content and represent little more than token acceptance of the fact that critical problems exist...
...Ten per cent of the decline came in 1955, and the U.S...
...None of this quite makes the Eisenhower Administration a New Deal regime or a flaming advocate of the Welfare State...
...Eisenhower made no recommendation for utilizing surplus commodities for worldwide economic development through the United Nations, which has developed and demonstrated effective techniques for achieving such a goal on terms acceptable to virtually all the countries concerned and without upsetting normal trade relations...
...The heart of the Eisenhower program is the soil bank plan which has been kicking around in Congress, under one name or another, for a long time...
...Now, in the fourth—and perhaps final—year of his Presidency, Mr...
...Mindful of the fact that we have nearly nine billion dollars worth of food and fiber piled up in warehouses around the country, for which the government is paying a million dollars a day in storage costs, the Indiana Republican, who faces a reelection campaign this year, dropped his bitter opposition to "creeping socialism" long enough to exclaim: "Why should we have all these surpluses and see them deteriorate when there are hungry people in the United States and the rest of the world...
...Even so relentless a reactionary as Senator Homer Capehart, Indiana Republican, has now proposed that we dispose of surplus agricultural commodities by feeding and clothing hungry and poverty-stricken people at home and abroad...
...There is hardly a significant sector of our national life for which he does not now propose government action...
...Health, housing, social security, civil rights, relief for economically distressed areas, construction of schools, industrial relations, minimum wages, flood relief, farm relief, and the planning of a long-range program of foreign economic aid—these are but some of the major fields in which the President is prepared to accept, in varying degree, the "creeping socialism" he once professed to scorn...
Vol. 20 • February 1956 • No. 2
